#there's a reason that most of the push for unionization and labor protections have come from pro wrestlers who became actors

[dragonomatopoeia]

seeing a pro wrestling gifset + explainer reblog and having to try so so so so so hard not to go into the long and complex history of labor in professional wrestling

#there's a reason that most of the push for unionization and labor protections have come from pro wrestlers who became actors #because they experience the benefits of being in a union and they're like Holy Fucking Shit. Oh My God? What the fuck. #however hulk hogan is a massive fucking narc and vince mcmahon is the embodiment of evil. so it's been a Rough Time #esp with the WWE/WWF crowding out local promotions and becoming a sprawling wretched monopoly #ANYWAY all that to say yes the adult men causing physical damage to each other are doing so consensually but they're doing it for a pittanc #and they will not be given near enough compensation to handle their lifelong medical bills #and the amount of input they have regarding their own storylines and fights is ummmm negligible! depending on the promotion. #but mostly it's you do whatever you're told or you're going to get beat up even worse and get storylines that make the crowd Hate you #that's all without going into the additional exploitation of image and implicit encouragement to go on steroids forever. so. #ANYWAY. PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES ARE ALSO LABORERS. AND DESERVE LABOR PROTECTIONS.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Housing is a labor issue

There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.

Take the 2019 LA teachers' strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it's still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/uaw-general-strike-no-class

The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the "union avoidance" playbook. She's banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:

https://onlabor.org/gc-abruzzo-just-asked-the-nlrb-to-overturn-ex-cell-o-heres-why-that-matters/

She's also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

(As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-unions-should-join-the-housing-fight/

She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1669088899769987079

UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won't give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand.

As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics

So it was only natural that Kazaryan's tenants walked the picket line with the Equity Stripper Noho workers:

https://twitter.com/glendaletenants/status/1733290276599570736?s=46

While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.

Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":

https://unitedtohousela.com/app/uploads/2022/05/LA_City_Affordable_Housing_Petition_H.pdf

LA unions are fighting for rules to limit Airbnbs and other platforms that transform the city's rental stock into illegal, unlicensed hotels:

https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/strs-in-los-angeles-2022/Wachsmuth_LA_2022.pdf

And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-28/airbnb-operators-would-need-police-permit-in-l-a-under-proposed-law

UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.

Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it:

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Labors-Love-Lost.pdf

It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"

Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It's the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:

https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/

Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

In her interview with Capital & Main's Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-12-13-labor-leader-ai-jen-poo-interview/

Care work is a "triple dignity investment": first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: "It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."

The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/7/voters-support-investing-in-the-care-economy

Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/04/18/executive-order-on-increasing-access-to-high-quality-care-and-supporting-caregivers/

States are also filling the void. Washington just created a long-term care benefit:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-long-term-care-tax-disability-cb54b04b025223dbdba7199db1d254e4

New Mexicans passed a ballot initiative that establishes permanent funding for child care:

https://www.cwla.org/new-mexico-votes-for-child-care/

New York care workers won a $3/hour across the board raise:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-york-budget-fair-pay-home-care/

The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass – and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

#pluralistic #labor #hot labor summer #eternal labor september #jane mcalevey #los angeles #weaponized shelter #housing #airbnb #equity strip noho #tenants unions #red vienna #jennifer abruzzo #nlrb #the rent's too damned high

[astriiformes]

Minnesota is surprisingly left for a red state are they akso pro choice too

I definitely wouldn't describe Minnesota as a red state! I know people make the assumption sometimes given what much of the rest of the Midwest is like (including many of our immediate neighbors -- although I'd be remiss not to point out the many people striving to make it otherwise in all of them, particularly some of the hard-fought battles being slowly won in Wisconsin -- you go guys, and I know you can do it). But MN has other cultural influences like a long solid labor history and a large immigrant population that mean it's actually been a Democratic stronghold for a long time. We have the longest streak of voting blue in presidential elections of any state in the US!

Things do get much redder as you leave the Twin Cities metro area, though that's really the trend in any state. But for perspective, over half the state's population lives in the metro, so when you take into account that there are at least a few other blue clusters in the state (Duluth, a Great Lakes shipping town on Lake Superior with a long labor union history and that currently has a nonbinary representative in the MN House comes to mind!), we really are more of a blue state, or at least a very blueish-purple one. Right now our state Democrats (the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party) control the House, Senate, and Governor's office, which is the reason they've been getting so much good legislation passed. And while our national House reps are split half and half (though some of our Democratic reps are particularly progressive) both our Senators are Democrats.

I wouldn't oversell how blue we are, there are certain parts of state politics that are narrower and go back and forth a bit more than in some of the really "safe" blue states. But at the same time, after living here for a while, I really do think the flip side of that is that our Democratic politicians are somewhat more genuine about what they do, which ends up balancing certain things out. Hence the current legislative session where they're pushing through everything they can in remarkably quick succession!

To answer your question though -- yes, Minnesota is also a pretty pro-choice state. Our state House recently passed a bill that would limit the release of reproductive healthcare information, essentially protecting people from other states who come here for reproductive care. The bill is expected to pass in the Senate and be signed by the governor as well. Our governor and lieutenant governor have both been fairly outspoken about protecting reproductive and abortion rights in the state. Earlier this year the governer also signed into law the Protecting Reproductive Options (PRO) Act to explicitly protect and codify abortion rights here.

I hope some of that's useful information! Minnesota politics are definitely not what I expected when I moved here -- in my time living in the state I've had the opportunity to vote for one of the most progressive reps in the US Congress (Ilhan Omar) and been consistently impressed by how seriously our state takes things like voting rights and state welfare programs. There's a lot of really incredible political activism happening here and it's moving to be a part of -- especially since I know we're becoming even more of an important sanctuary state for people from other places in the Midwest. The northern Great Lakes states (thinking about MN, WI, and MI in particular) are all sort of interesting beasts politically and I'm grateful to have learned more about some of the strong Democratic and labor history in the region in my time here.

Ending with a terrible joke, but -- we have over 10,000 lakes, of course we're blue!

#the 'minnesota has 10000 lakes is actually an understatement. minnesota has over 10000 lakes' thing really gets me #living here has made me far more pro-minnesota than i ever expected to be though #i definitely also had an incorrect perception of the political complexity of the midwest before i moved here #i'm glad to have had it remedied -- it gives me a lot of hope! #land of eldritch lakes

[black-paraphernalia]

Why did the Emancipation Proclamation not free slaves?

As early as 1849, Abraham Lincoln believed that slaves should be emancipated, advocating a program in which they would be freed gradually. ... The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the United States. Rather, it declared free only those slaves living in states not under Union control.

Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. ... Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.

Why were there exceptions in the Emancipation Proclamation?

The Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves who lived in areas that were in a state of rebellion against the United States. This limited its impact because any slave in an area that was not rebelling was not freed by the Proclamation.

Why would Lincoln only free the slaves in the states that were in rebellion and not all of the slaves throughout the country?  The president did not have the power to end slavery within the United States; this would have been a matter of changing the Constitution, which cannot be done by the president alone.

When were the last slaves set free? 

Confederate soldiers surrendered in April 1865, but word didn't reach the last enslaved black people until June 19, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to Galveston, Texas. Excerpt from google 

JUNETEENTH: ON THE FREEING OF THE LAST SLAVES IN TEXAS

Then, on June 19th, 1865, General Gordon Granger read General Order No.3, a simple proclamation, from the balcony of the Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas.

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. 

The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

Thus, the Juneteenth proclamation said that slaves were free from bondage, but were not going to be allowed to leave their masters or to seek military protection — hardly a resounding proclamation of unbridled freedom. General Granger had arrived with 2,000 Union troops just the day before, to enforce the order.  

In the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had exempted those slave states not involved in the Confederate rebellion: Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and the territory which is now West Virginia. He also exempted the captured territories of Tennessee, Louisiana and Southeast Virginia.  The Emancipation Proclamation was meant to disrupt the institution of slavery only in those states that were in rebellion and fighting the Union in the Civil War.

Until the day that Lincoln was assassinated, he worked on several different fronts, not always in line with the high ideal that once the slaves were freed they would be welcomed into the post-war society. In his book, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President, historian Michael Lind explains that, in 1862, Lincoln appointed James Mitchell, former director of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in Indiana, to “oversee the government’s colonization programs.” The ACS was an organization dedicated to solving the “race problem” by moving free Blacks to a government-established colony in Africa. Lincoln “allegedly asked Attorney General Edward Bates if the Reverend James Mitchell could stay on as ‘your assistant or aid in the matter of executing the several acts of Congress relating to the emigration or colonizing of the freed Blacks.’“

In 1858 during his fourth debate with Steven Douglas, Lincoln made a statement that helps us understand his actions in support of the ACS and its mission in 1865.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and Black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.

 And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”

A cynical person might say that the Proclamation was more the work of a military strategist and avowed segregationist than a great emancipator.

Source: Afropunk.com JUNETEENTH: ON THE FREEING OF THE LAST SLAVES IN TEXAS

Black paraphernalia Disclaimer - images from Google images

Lincoln and Congress did pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in April of 1864. But the Amendment was not ratified by the required number of states until December of 1865, months after Lincoln’s death. Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner from Massachusetts and Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania were the legislators largely responsible for pushing the Amendment through the U.S. Congress.

They were part of the group of Northern legislators who tried to ensure that the freed slaves would be put on equal footing with the white population. During Reconstruction, some progress was made towards realizing this dream. But in 1876, Reconstruction ended and the South plunged back into inequality, embracing white supremacy, Jim Crow and segregation.

Texas was annexed into the Union in 1845 as a slave state. Northern legislators opposed the annexation of Texas as a ruse by Southerners to spread slavery into new territories. They could not have been more correct. Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, but Anglos coming into Texas worked around this law by forcing slaves to sign contracts saying they had debts to be worked off or were indentured servants — with life-long terms. 

In 1836 (during the Texas Revolution) there were 5,000 slaves. In 1845 (at the U.S. annexation of Texas) there were 30,000 slaves. By 1860, there were 180,000 slaves; and by the end of the Civil War, more than 250,000.  The reason for the large growth in the number of slaves between 1860 and 1865 was a diabolical one. Slave owners from the Southeast moved themselves and their slaves to Texas to avoid having their slaves taken in states like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War.

Emancipation was proclaimed by Lincoln. But it was the slaves, free people of color, and whites of goodwill who were largely responsible for ending slavery, by making the institution untenable. In 1850 alone, an estimated 3,000 slaves from Texas escaped into Mexico. During the Civil War, an estimated 75% of the slaves in Kentucky escaped behind Union lines. In border-slave-states, there were daily pitched battles between slave owners and slave catchers, and slaves, free Blacks, anti-slavery sympathizers and heroic abolitionists like John Brown, who were helping slaves escape, or inciting them to revolt. 

 The Underground Railroad was also active in border-slave-states helping runaway slaves. Even in the heart of the Confederacy, it is estimated that more than 11,000 escaped slaves lived in and around the Great Dismal Swamp, between Virginia and North Carolina.

So, as we celebrate that fateful day of June 19th, 1865, and pay homage to the last slaves who heard the news about slavery’s end in Galveston, let’s also take a new and larger view and celebrate the true great emancipators — the people of color and goodwill whose heroic resistance helped topple the vile institution.

Source: Afropunk.com JUNETEENTH: ON THE FREEING OF THE LAST SLAVES IN TEXAS

#black paraphernalia #juneteenth #black freedom #did you know

[eelhound]

"The cost of the subsistence and reproduction of workers is both socially and historically determined. It reflects the changing cost of producing food or acquiring skills; as well as differences — based, for instance, on the balance of class forces — in what is deemed a socially acceptable requirement for subsistence. For both of these reasons, the cost of labor differs, too, between countries or regions with disparate levels of productivity and histories of class struggle. This is why US based companies chase cheaper wages to other countries like China or Mexico, or to the closer distance of the 'right-to-work' states within the US.

The cost of labor also reflects the injustice of oppression. As of 2019, women in the United States were still paid 79 cents to a man's dollar. (Or in the case of the country's most talented and famous soccer team, the United States women's national soccer team earns 38 cents to their male counterparts, despite generating greater revenue.) Black men are paid 70 cents and Black women 61 cents in comparison to their white counterparts. Latina women earn 53 cents to a white man's dollar. Increased education does little to change this ratio for women or people of color. Blacks, Latinxs, and women at all education levels earn less than white men. Women of color occupy the bottom of the totem pole. American capitalism relies upon women and people of color to populate permanent, low-wage sectors of the labor force.

The disparities in racial and gender wage gaps point to the fact that 'socially determined' is not only dependent on public perception of what is acceptable, but is also based on historic and systemic institutions of oppression. People of color, for example, have less inherited familial wealth on average to draw from, and therefore disproportionately suffer from the accumulation of considerable amounts of debt in order to go to college or earn an advanced degree. Combined with the reality of severely underfunded, under-resourced, segregated public schools, this ensures that they never enter a level playing field. Then come long-documented discriminatory practices, which ensure that they are the last to get hired and the first to be fired, contributing to higher rates of unemployment and a more desperate workforce, forced to accept lower wages for equal work.

Capitalism also depends on the superexploitation of immigrants — and particularly those who are not protected by legal documentation. Disenfranchised and disempowered by the threat of deportation, undocumented workers are subject to draconian conditions and wages, and fired if they protest or attempt to unionize. As author Justin Akers Chacón has written, the criminalization of immigration has been 'used widely by employers to structure lower-wage tiers within and across whole industries, setting the low-wage standard of immigrant labor by the early 1990s. The declining wage benchmarks for undocumented labor had the further effect of holding all wages down within those same industries.'

Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting Black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages. But the cursory sketch laid out here does not even begin to discuss the very many oppressions of people with disabilities, of gay people, of transgender people, of Native peoples, of elders, and more that play an integral role in upholding the profitability of US capitalism. In fact, any place where bosses can hold down the wages of one section of the workforce not only ensures a cheaper labor pool among the oppressed demographic, but also, in the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, divides both in order to conquer each, so that everyone's wages are pushed down.

Lastly, the value of labor will also vary among industries and skills. One reason is the cost of education and training required for different jobs, and another is the expectation of how stable of a workforce bosses are looking to buy. Fast food workers, home health aides, farm workers, and other low-wage workers are consistently paid wages far short of the cost of living (and therefore their true value). The capitalists bank on getting away with it because they expect, in fact depend on, a high turnover rate and unemployment rate, which will ensure that those positions will fill easily. Bosses see low-wage workers as quickly replaceable commodities, bought and employed as easily as one would buy other cheap 'inputs.'

Meanwhile, higher paid workers don't suffer the crushing weight of poverty, but this does not mean that they are not exploited. In fact, they often face even greater rates of exploitation if the value of the goods that they produce are significantly higher. A Boeing engineer may earn over a hundred thousand dollars a year, but she contributes to products that sell for millions or billions of dollars. More importantly, varying rates of exploitation make up an integrated web of labor. The extraction of value does not happen on a case-by case basis, but is a collective process. Google's high-paid programmers work in buildings cleaned by low-paid janitors. The one's work is, in fact, dependent on the other's, and therefore so is the extraction of its value."

- Hadas Thier, from A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, 2020.

#hadas thier #quote #quotations #economics #democratic socialism #marxism #work #labor #immigration #bipoc #worker exploitation #american culture #capitalism

[bopinion]

2021 / 17

Aperçu of the Week:

"Problems can never be solved by the same way of thinking that created them."

Albert Einstein

Bad News of the Week:

Unawareness, ignorance, hubris, bad luck.... there are many factors for India currently collapsing under the Corona pandemic like no other country before. The images are staggering: people with makeshift care lying in the dirt on the floor in front of overcrowded hospitals. People whose bodies are being burned in the middle of a park in New Delhi because the crematoria are overloaded. People who are simply suffocating and by the look in their eyes you can tell they know what is in store for them. People who are experiencing unimaginable suffering - and we have already seen so much of it in this pandemic.

One of the things that upsets me most about this is the fact that the shortage of vaccine in India - actually a major producer - is largely due to the fact that the U.S. had banned exports of an essential raw material. "America first" thus lives on even with a more sympathetic poster boy. It almost seems like a mockery when the USA now also brings aid supplies to India in order to "stand by our Indian friends in these difficult times".

Good News of the Week:

The German government has passed a law. With all democratic steps. With good will. With the agreement in principle even of the opposition. Then there is only one possibility in our constitutional system to stop such a law: one has to sue in our supreme court, the Federal Constitutional Court. This is rather limited, since the court "only" monitors whether this law is in conformity with the constitution. Last week, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled a brand new law unconstitutional. Although it is the "climate protection law". So about something actually positive. And very many citizens and parliamentarians are happy about the rejection, even parts of the government are satisfied. What's going on?

Our current Chancellor Angela Merkel was Minister for the Environment and Nature Conservation in the 1990s. In the face of considerable resistance, she pushed through the end of coal and nuclear energy, roughly at the same time. Backs the European Union in its ecological reorientation. So she has well earned her reputation as "climate chancellor". And now, of all things, her government's climate protection law has been overturned. Among other things, this was supposed to be the basis for achieving the goals of the Paris climate protection agreement. Is that supposed to be good news?

The decisive aspect of the Federal Constitutional Court's rejection of the Climate Protection Act is the reasoning behind the ruling. The law is dismissed as "not ambitious enough". For example, it does not tackle CO2 reduction "resolutely enough". This would not sufficiently take into account the interests of younger generations, and the law is therefore unconstitutional. It is no coincidence that the lawsuit was brought by, among others, the young climate activists of Fridays for Future. "We are here, we are loud - because you are stealing our future!" ("Wir sind hier, wir sind laut - weil Ihr uns die Zukunft klaut!") I also shouted with the children at our first environmental protection demonstration. Even though I'm one of the thieves.

The first reaction from the cabinet came from Economics Minister Peter Altmaier: "The decision gives us the chance to ensure more intergenerational justice." He, too, has been environment minister. As was his boss. So you might well wonder why they didn't come up with this idea in the first place. But I'd still rather see a second, more decisive attempt that goes in the right direction than a hypocritical "just keep it going".

Personal happy Moment of the Week:

And the Oscar goes to... Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross - and Jon Batiste! Just in time for 12/25/2020, we had subscribed to Disney+. To see on a cozy holiday with the kids "Soul". Whereas every Pixar film is a must-see for us anyway, this one was a highlight. Unlike its predecessor "Onward", which was just a nice movie, this animated film shined with a really new story with surprising twists, outstanding visuals and a great soundtrack with - oh, yeah! - a lot of jazz. Responsible for this is my personal new musical discovery of the last time, namely that very Jon Batiste (see Album of the Month in April 2021). Although I consider myself objectively style-sure - although my daughter regularly points out to me that this is narcissistic, since there is no such thing as objectivity - I am nevertheless happy that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences proved me right and awarded not only the Oscar to the film itself, but also to its soundtrack.

As I write this...

...the month of May begins. It has the nickname "Wonnemonat" (wonderful month) and it is rainy-cold. It starts with the "Labor Day" and nobody works because it is a holiday. And because of the pandemic, the tradition of setting up the maypole is cancelled this year as well. Weird, all this...

#aperçu #thoughts #bad news #good news #happy moments #news of the week #albert einstein #india #pandemic #suffering #america first #angela merkel #climate protection #paris climate agreement #fridays for future #supreme court #jon batiste #oscar #academy awards #pixar soul #may #labor day

[exigencelost]

I just finished writing up my voter slate for my family and here is the full text of my analysis of California Prop 25. This includes an explanation of some of the history behind Prop 25, which wasn’t included in my previous post. You can click the read-more (and scroll past the numbered list) to get to that part. 

Prop 25 (replace money bail with a racist algorithm from hell): VOTE NO.

Okay. This one is a big deal. Part of the reason my slate is so late this year is because I would not release it until I had finished researching Prop 25. I was also waiting for a couple prison abolition groups whose opinions I value to take a position on this prop. Most of them never did. The Ella Baker Center, who has done extraordinary work this year in the Stop San Quentin Outbreak Coalition and whose opinion I particularly wanted, has just released their slate and they are neutral on 25. 

The sources I ultimately based my decision on were the League’s reasoning and—even more so—Justice LA’s position paper. 

(Also worth checking out: this Op-Ed by Bobby Stein in the SF Chronicle.) 

This is a summary of the points from both sources that I consider the most significant.

Prop 25:

Is likely to drastically increase the number of total people in jail at any time; LA county estimates their pretrial detainee population will double if it is passed.

Puts money into the prison-industrial complex rather than taking money out. 

Offers no way to appeal a judge’s algorithm-based decision on keeping you in jail, no transparency into how the judge comes to that decision, and no way to get out of jail before trial once it’s been made. Like, it replaces bail, which is of course corrupt and awful, with unilateral pretrial detention with no recourse. Which is worse. 

Uses inputs for its flight-risk algorithm that are abjectly racist and which include—this makes me lose my mind—residential stability. 

Co-opts the increasingly powerful movement to end money bail. Basically, if we don’t pass 25 I truly believe we have the momentum to demand something better. If we do pass 25, I worry that repealing it will be much harder. 

Full disclosure: Prop 25 is on the ballot because the bail bond industry put it there. It’s a referendum on legislature that—without that push from bail bond companies—would already be law. Putting Prop 25 on the ballot and getting you to vote no on it is a last-ditch effort by bail bond companies to keep their industry from dying. Believe me—That doesn’t sit any easier with me than it does with you. 

But. SB 10, the law that Prop 25 gives us a referendum on, is a hellish nightmare. It’s masquerading as bail reform, but it’s an expansion of the prison-industrial complex. It capitalizes on the movement to end money bail but it does not serve the interests of that movement (i.e., justice, liberty, basic common sense.) 

According to Justice LA, “In 2018, led by Black and Latinx communities, Californians demanded reform of the bail system that held people in jail pretrial and worked to pass a bill that would advance freedom. Just days before the vote on the law, Senator Hertzberg, with opportunistic “reform” organizations at his side, substituted a completely different bill that he created with judges and law enforcement. That bill was SB10.” 

SB 10 passed. And then the bail bond industry poured millions of dollars into putting a referendum onto the ballot, in the form of Prop 25, giving us a chance to strike it down (by voting NO on 25.) Every part of this story sucks; and neither of our options are good. 

The SF League of Pissed-Off Voters wrote a sentence that sealed the deal for me, which was: “We can't support any bail reform policy that doesn't protect the constitutional guarantees of due process and presumption of innocence for people caught up in the criminal justice system.” 

I agree. A law that writes away the right to due process is unacceptable. I hate money bail with a passion, but please vote NO on Prop 25. 

Sources I care about that said Yes on 25: Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, SEIU Local 1021, The Bay Guardian, SPUR, Cal Nurses union, San Francisco Tenants Union, SF Labor Council, California Federation of Labor, California Federation of Teachers, PICO California.

Sources I care about that said No on 25: The San Francisco League of Pissed-Off Voters, No Justice Under Capitalism, California NAACP, various individual human people whose advice on criminal justice policy I deeply trust, and the Justice LA Coalition, which includes: 

Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network, Bend the Arc, Color of Change, Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, Dignity and Power Now, Encode Justice, From Gangs to Glory Opportunities Foundation, Frontline Wellness Network, Human Rights Watch, La Defensa, Local 148 - Los Angeles County Public Defenders Union, Los Angeles Community Action Network, Prevention at the Intersections, Project Rebound, San Bernardino Free Them All, Silicon Valley DeBug, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, The Coalition for Engaged Education, University of California Cops Off Campus Coalition Faculty Committee, Youth Justice Coalition, White People 4 Black Lives, Riverside All Of Us Or None.

Neutral: Chesa Boudin (San Francisco’s super-progressive D.A., who ran primarily on an abolish-money-bail platform but said he cannot endorse Prop 25 or SB 10 in their current form); the Ella Baker Center.

People whose positions I wanted to consult but could not find, probably neutral: CURB Prisons; Legal Services for Prisoners With Children (although the fact that Riverside All Of Us Or None, which I understand to be a local branch of the grassroots arm of LSPC, says No on 25 may speak to their position); Survived and Punished. If I find positions from any of these groups before Nov 3 I will update this post. 

Addition:

Here is a position statement by Silicon Valley DeBug explaining that they helped co-sponsor the original bail reform bill that got mangled into SB 10, and they now refuse to support it. Relevant quote: 

“This letter is to inform you that Silicon Valley De-Bug will no longer be a cosponsor of SB10, and are opposing the bill...the final version of SB10 is a complete departure from the original, and is antithetical to the principles of freedom and equal treatment that originally brought us into the legislative discussion.”

#prop 25 #pretrial detainment #jail #prisons #prison abolition #abolition

[newstfionline]

Sunday, September 12, 2021

Americans less positive about civil liberties: AP-NORC poll (AP) Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, Americans were reasonably positive about the state of their rights and liberties. Today, after 20 years, not as much. Far fewer people now say the government is doing a good job protecting rights including the freedom of speech, the right to vote, the right to bear arms and others. For example, the poll finds that 45% of Americans now say they think the U.S. government is doing a good job defending freedom of speech, compared with 32% who say it’s doing a poor job and 23% who say neither. The share saying the government is doing a good job is down from 71% in 2011 and from 59% in 2015. Dee Geddes, 73, a retiree in Chamberlain, South Dakota, said she was frustrated at the government’s apparent lack of ability to safeguard the amount of private information available, especially online. “It bothers me when I can go on the internet and find pretty much anything about anybody. It makes me feel sort of naked,” said Geddes. About half now say the government is doing a good job protecting freedom of religion, compared with three-quarters who said the same in 2011.

20 years later, fallout from toxic WTC dust cloud grows (AP) The dust cloud caught Carl Sadler near the East River, turning his clothes and hair white as he looked for a way out of Manhattan after escaping from his office at the World Trade Center. Gray powder billowed through the open windows and terrace door of Mariama James’ downtown apartment, settling, inches thick in places, into her rugs and children’s bedroom furniture. Barbara Burnette, a police detective, spat the soot from her mouth and throat for weeks as she worked on the burning rubble pile without a protective mask. Today, all three are among more than 111,000 people enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which gives free medical care to people with health problems potentially linked to the dust. Two decades after the twin towers’ collapse, people are still coming forward to report illnesses that might be related to the attacks.

US producer prices jump an unprecedented 8.3% in August (AP) Inflation at the wholesale level climbed 8.3% last month from August 2020, the biggest annual gain since the Labor Department started calculating the 12-month number in 2010. Inflation has been stirring as the economy recovers from last year’s brief but intense coronavirus recession. Supply chain bottlenecks and a shortage of workers have pushed prices higher. Food prices were up 2.9% last month after falling in July. Over the past year, wholesale food prices have climbed 12.7%, including surges of 59.2% for beef and 43.5% for shortening and cooking oil. Energy prices rose 0.4% from July and are up 32.3% over the past year.

Wigged out: A Venezuelan spymaster’s life on the lam (AP) Wigs, a fake moustache, plastic surgery and a new safe house every three months—these are just some of the tools of deception authorities in Spain believe a former Venezuelan spymaster relied on to evade capture on a U.S. warrant for narcoterrorism. The two-year manhunt for Gen. Hugo Carvajal ended Thursday night when police raided a rundown apartment in a quiet Madrid neighborhood where they found the fugitive in a back room holding a sharp knife in what they described as a last desperate attempt to evade arrest. Nicknamed “El Pollo” (“The Chicken”), Carvajal has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration since 2014, when he was arrested in Aruba on a U.S. warrant only to go free after President Nicolás Maduro’s government pressured the small Dutch Caribbean island to release him. While on the lam, he was rumored to be in Portugal, then a hideout in the Caribbean. The reality was much simpler: The 61-year-old had never left Madrid. His last hideout was a mere 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the headquarters of the National Police.

Denmark lifts all coronavirus restrictions and celebrates ‘a whole new era’ (Washington Post) Some countries are setting records for daily covid-19 infections. Others are pursuing sweeping rules to mandate vaccination. But in Denmark, something like normal life has resumed. After nearly 550 days, the Scandinavian country has lifted the last of its domestic pandemic-era restrictions, declaring that the coronavirus is no longer a “critical threat to society.” Denmark appears to be the first European Union member to issue such a declaration, potentially providing a glimpse into the future of the bloc’s recovery—or serving as a cautionary tale of a nation that moved too quickly. The country’s leaders have pointed to its high vaccination rates—among the best in the world, with nearly 75 percent of residents fully immunized—as evidence that the step is justified.

Russia begins major military drills with Belarus after moves toward closer integration (Washington Post) Russia and Belarus began a massive week-long military exercise on NATO’s borders Friday after President Vladimir Putin and Belarus’s leader agreed on a new effort toward integrating the nations, including creating a “single defense space.” The Zapad 2021 exercise, involving 200,000 personnel, has NATO members and other neighboring countries on edge, echoing worries this spring over an unannounced Russian military buildup near Ukraine. The Zapad (meaning West) exercise is held regularly, but this iteration comes as Russian relations with NATO are increasingly fraught.

Pope Francis to visit impoverished Roma quarter in Slovakia (AP) Pope Francis is paying a visit next week to a neighborhood in Slovakia most Slovaks would not even think about going, which until recently even the police would avoid after dark. Francis will make the visit to the Roma community in the Lunik IX quarter of Slovakia’s second largest city of Kosice one of the highlights of his pilgrimage to “the heart of Europe.” Francis will be the first pontiff to meet the most socially excluded minority group in Slovakia. A fitting place to go for the “pope of the peripheries,” Lunik XI is the biggest of about 600 shabby, segregated settlements where the poorest 20% of the country’s 400,000 Roma live. Most lack basics such as running water or sewage systems, gas or electricity. “It’s a huge honor for us,” said Lunik IX mayor Marcel Sana, who has been a local resident since he was 2. “Even if he says just a few words, his presence will be a big boost for all those living here, the socially disadvantaged and poor people who need such support.”

Fleeing China, Hong Kongers flock to Britain (Los Angeles Times) He has no job, he’s still grappling with English and the climate is often cold and wet, but Dennis Chan is still grateful to be setting up his life in Britain. The 34-year-old arrived in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, alone in April after quitting his job as a cargo officer for Cathay Pacific airlines in Hong Kong. He had never set foot in Britain before. But he also felt he didn’t recognize his own homeland any longer amid China’s relentless crackdown on political dissent and civic freedoms. After Beijing imposed a sweeping new national security law on Hong Kong in July of last year, he felt an urgency to leave. Within two months of making the British National Overseas visa available in January, the British government received 34,000 applications. It estimates that about 300,000 people could take up the offer within five years; others say the figure could wind up being closer to 500,000. For many new arrivals like Chan, who is still living in a rented room and finding his bearings, the transition has not been easy. Although Britain boasts a well-established Chinese community, many of the Hong Kongers who have immigrated in recent months have found it difficult to land a job and make connections, especially in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. They miss—or even fear for—loved ones left behind, and they sometimes feel the sting of racism here in the land that ruled Hong Kong for 156 years as part of its globe-straddling empire.

Lebanon gets a new government after 13 months of collapse (Washington Post) Lebanon finally got a new government Friday, after 13 months of tortuous negotiations that left the country leaderless and paralyzed during the worst economic and financial collapse in its history. The formation of the new cabinet, headed by billionaire tycoon Najib Mikati and seemingly supported by almost all factions, means the country will be able to get down to the business of steering its way out of the crisis, which has wiped billions of dollars from the banking system and impoverished millions. Mikati, the new prime minister and one of the country’s wealthiest men, seemed to fight back tears as he delivered his inaugural speech, describing the problems of parents who cannot afford to feed their children, send them to school or find medicine to treat them when they are sick. But given the country’s kleptocratic system of government, there are few reasons to believe that Mikati’s administration will be capable of undertaking the radical reforms that are essential if Lebanon is to climb out of its depression, analysts say.

#headlines #news

[ourloveisforthelovely]

5 Years. Part 3

Harry Potter AU

Pairings: Sirius Black x Reader 

Link to Chapter 2

Rating: M- smut

______

“I forgot how beautiful you were.”

Sirius said with a smirk as he ran a hand down your shoulder. You lay sprawled across his chest. Poking your head up, you smiled down at him. You wanted to spend the next, however long you could, just looking at Sirius’ face. All of the years apart was enough to make you want to memorize everything, in case the two of you were separated again.

“You’re such a tease.”

You said with a smile. Sirius took your hand in his to press a series of kisses to the inside of your wrist. He stopped the moment that he saw a huge scar.

“What happened here?”

You quickly pulled your hand away and shoved it under the pillow.

“Let's not talk about it.”

Sirius frowned. He had a feeling about what happened and he was not about to let it go.

“Did my mother do that?”

You pressed your lips together and nodded. Sirius rolled his eyes before automatically sitting up. He pulled you along with him as he looked down the expanse of your body.

“What else did she do to you?”

You sighed. This wasn’t the conversation that you really wanted to be having after making love for the first time in years.

“Sirius, can we not talk about this right now?”

He shook his head.

“No, we are talking about it. What did that vile toad of a woman do to you.”

“Sirius, she only got violent when she drank. Your mother is a raging alcoholic, did you know that?”

Sirius wanted to laugh. Everyone in his fucking family was an alcoholic...for good reason.

“Y/n, my family consists of functioning alcoholics. You aren’t answering my questions.”

“Fine, Sirius, I didn’t want to tell you because I don’t want you going back to Grimmauld Place to fight your mother or family. Yes, your mother was abusive. I was a week late giving birth to Juliet. She thought that it was a good idea to use the cruciatus curse on me until I went into labor. When I was in labor, there wasn’t any pain medicine allowed because I earned this by sleeping with you. The psycho wouldn’t even let me go to a hospital. She made me have the baby there. If it wasn’t for your aunt Druella showing up to help deliver Juliet, I probably would have died.”

Sirius didn’t say anything for a moment. He sat with his mouth open. He couldn’t talk due to shock. His mother actually used the cruciatus curse to make you go into labor. What kind of shit was that? What if she hurt Juliet in the process? Neither of you deserved that kind of pain!

“I’m going to kill her.”

He snapped. You shook your head.

“No, you are going to stay home and be a good father. You aren’t going to get yourself taken away from Juliet and me again. We need you. That is in the past. Before you go blaming yourself, it wasn’t your fault. I don’t blame you.”

Sirius put his face in his hands. This was the most heartbreaking news that could have possibly received. All that Sirius could think about was you on the floor of Grimmauld Place screaming for him and he had no idea.

“Your family was decent to me though. They have all been really good to Juliet. In fact, they adore her. Druella babies her senseless. Andromeda is the same way...of course, that is outside of the family. She has helped me more than anyone.”

Sirius smiled at that. Of all people, he knew that he could count on Andromeda. Druella was a bit of a surprise. Sirius didn’t expect much out of his aunt.

“Regulus adores her too.”

You said, softly. Sirius looked up at his brother’s name.

“Idiot.”

“You would actually be proud of your brother. Regulus protected me from your mother a lot.”

Sirius sighed.

“I’m surprised that he actually did anything to step out against my mother.”

You quickly crawled on Sirius’ lap. At the moment, you wanted to get off of the topic of his family.

“We can be happy now.”

You said before pressing a kiss to his lips. Sirius’ eyes fluttered open as he wrapped his arms around you.

“We can be very happy.”

“Make love to me again?”

You requested. Sirius smiled. He could go for that request any time that you wanted.

“Lay on your side.”

He said, gently wiggling out from underneath you. You quickly lay on your side as Sirius’ hard body pressed against you from behind. He slipped his hand around your thigh and lifted your leg over his hip.

“I like this position. I can whisper things in your ear that makes you come without me touching you.”

You smiled, wrapping your arm around his as Sirius pushed back inside of you. The bad seemed to vanish as soon as his hips started moving.

“I’m never letting you go, love. My goddess…”

Sirius grunted in your ear as he increased his pace enough to cause your eyes to snap closed in ecstasy. He slowly let go of the breast that you were holding and brought his index finger to his mouth. You whimpered watching as Sirius sucked his finger for a moment before reaching between your legs to play with your clit.

“So tight, baby.”

Sirius moaned, letting his finger fall to your union. Feeling how wet his cock was from being inside of you was more than a turn on.

“Sirius quit playing around and come already.”

Sirius smirked and returned his mouth to your ear. He nibbled down on your earlobe earning a moan.

“Our quickies have always been quality. Come on, sugar.”

It took a final shove before you were falling apart in his arms. The sound of the door closing made the two of you freeze.

“Mummy! Daddy! I’m back! Uncle Remus where are they?”

The two of you froze like guilty children before Sirius’ eyes rolled to you.

“I guess sex anytime is postponed for a bit?”

You nodded as he pulled out of you with a wince.

“Unfortunately. We have a needy four-year-old who is about to be the no sex police. I’ll take care of you later.”

Sirius was quickly pulling his pants up and gave you a wink.

“She has to go to sleep sometime.”

(2 weeks later)

“Mummy! It's my birthday!”

Both Sirius and yourself groaned as the sound of little feet running down the hall woke the two of you up. Sirius looked down at his watch.

“She’s your kid. It's too early.”

You shook your head.

“Nope. She’s yours too, daddy.”

Sirius yawned, waiting for the bedroom door to fling open and Juliet to pounce on the bed. That had been the routine for the past few weeks and he wasn’t complaining. Even though he wasn’t a morning person, getting to see his daughter (even if it was 6 am when normal people should be sleeping) every day.

Keeping his hands off of you when Juliet was around was turning out to be harder than Sirius expected. It seemed like the moment that the two of you started to kiss Juliet would pop up. The night before, for example, Sirius had you in his arms for a quick snog session.

“When you kiss, where do you put your noses?”

Sirius had never dropped his hold on you so fast.

As soon as the door opened, you winced as Juliet landed on top of your feet.

“I know you are both awake. I heard talking.”

Juliet quickly crawled in between Sirius and yourself and laid down. She was quiet for a few moments giving the two of you the idea that she was going back to sleep.

“I’m still here and it's still my birthday.”

Sirius chuckled as Juliet turned and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Did you go tell your uncle Remus? I bet he would love to know.”

Juliet’s head popped up as she threw her leg over her father to slide out of the bed and run out of the room.

You slowly sat up with a rested yawn.

“Good idea. I might as well get up. I have a cake to fix.”

Sirius nodded, realizing any hope of sleeping in was now over. His mind went automatically to his mother. Sirius had been worried for the past two days about Walburga showing up on Juliet’s birthday.

Meanwhile, you had turned your attention back to Sirius. He was frowning as he pulled a shirt over his head.

“Are you worried about what I think that you are worried about?”

Sirius glanced in your direction.

“You know me well.”

You took a breath before turning and wrapping your arms around his waist. Sirius pressed a kiss to the top of your head before speaking again.

“She won’t show. She knows that I won’t play nice with her but my family is a bunch of idiots so...you never know.”

(A few hours later)

“Mummy, doorbell!”

Juliet yelled from the living room. Sirius’ eyes rolled up to yours. You hadn’t mentioned visitors. He had been just fine with the idea of spending Juliet’s birthday with just the two of you (and Remus).

“I don’t think you have to be ready to fight yet.”

You said, gently. The only people that you planned on dropping by were Andromeda, Druella, and maybe (if he was back in town) Regulus. That was going to be awkward enough if he did show up. You knew that Sirius still hadn’t really accepted the fact that his brother may actually be a good guy.

Putting down the spatula that you were holding, you tried to ignore Sirius’ scowl. You were trying to ignore the nagging feeling that you had about Sirius changing. He was still as funny as he was before but you could see subtle differences. Prison changes people...you thought sadly. Sirius would be no exception to that rule.

Opening the door, you smiled seeing Andromeda and Druella on the other side. Both women smiled before Andromeda wrapped her arms around you.

“Y/n! Sweetheart, you look so good!”

“Aunty!”

Juliet squealed, you turned as Sirius stepped in with the little girl in his arms. You knew without saying it that he was worried about the person on the other side of the door being Walburga.

Sirius sat the squirming child down as Andromeda knelt down to scoop Juliet up.

“Happy birthday, darling! Look at you! I think you have grown two wee little inches.”

“I did! Mummy measured me. Daddy got me a puppy..”

Andromeda smirked at the scowl that you were giving Sirius. Clearly, the two of you were not on the same page about that particular present.

“What did you name it?”

“Muffin!”

Juliet squeaked.

“Shall I go get him?”

Druella stepped in.

“Not until you give aunty her kiss.”

Andromeda held the little girl over to her mother so Juliet could press a kiss to the older woman’s cheek before sitting her down. Juliet took off up the stairs as Druella closed the door behind her.

“Such a darling little girl. Looks so much like her father and there he is.”

Sirius tensed up a bit as his aunt awkwardly kissed his cheek.

“Five years in that hell pit and you are still as handsome as you were before you were thrown in there. I’m glad that miserable little bastard that got you locked up is in there now.”

Sirius was busy looking at his aunt making sure that this actually was Druella.

“Uh, yeah...um...how are you?”

Druella smirked. She knew how uncomfortable Sirius had to be.

“Don’t worry, dear. Your dingbat mother isn’t with me. Walburga is a lot of things and a mother isn’t one of them. Y/n, I smell tea.”

“Come with me.”

When you had escorted the older woman into the kitchen, Andromeda met Sirius’ confused gaze.

“What the hell is going on around here?”

He asked as Andromeda hugged him.

“Mum is starting to see how crazy our family really is. She is out of the family like we are now. How are you?”

Sirius shrugged.

“I’m making it. I’m still getting used to everything again.”

Andromeda’s smile faded. This was what she worried about. She had been worried about how Azkaban would affect her favorite cousin. Andromeda pulled Sirius into another hug.

“At least you’re out and where you should be. Juliet is an adorable little girl. She reminds me a lot of you at that age just with Regulus’ curly hair.”

Andromeda was relieved when Sirius smiled. Sirius had to agree on that one. Juliet had her uncle’s wild curls.

“I just feel guilty that I have missed as much time as I did.”

Andromeda patted his shoulder.

“You’re here now. That’s what matters. So what’s the deal with this puppy?”

Sirius smirked. He knew that you weren’t thrilled about the puppy and that's what made the whole thing even more amusing.

“He’s less of a dog and more of a throw pillow. Its little white poof that’s small enough for Juliet to carry around. Poor thing is sexually confused because it's named Muffin.”

Druella stepped back into the room with her fourth cup of tea for the day.

“Handsome get in here. We need to catch up.”

(20 minutes later)

You sat beside Sirius as Druella held Juliet and her new puppy. The doorbell ringing again got your attention. Sirius leaned over to you with a frown.

“Here we go.”

The two of you stood up and went back into the living room with Juliet on your hills. Sirius quickly turned and picked her up before reaching for the door handle. If it was his mother, he was ready to hex her back to hell where she belonged.

When the door opened, he froze as he came eye to eye with Regulus. Sirius didn’t move for a moment as he stared at his brother for the first time in almost 6 years. Regulus was clearly as shocked to see Sirius.

“Sirius…”

He stuttered as Juliet started reaching out with a wide smile on her little face.

“Uncle Reggie!”

Sirius reluctantly let regulus take the little girl from him before backing up to where you stood. You sighed at the expression on his face. That wasn’t a Sirius Black happy face. That was more of a Sirius Black ready to fight face.

Andromeda motioned you back to her.

“Here we go.”

_________

@brokencasbutt67-writer

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@hankypranky

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@knight-of-gleefulness

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@sprnaturallover

#Sirius Black #Regulus Black #Sirius x Reader #Harry Potter AU #Remus #James Potter #Lily Evans Potter #sirius black au #walburga black #orion black #sirius orion black #the noble and most ancient house of black #ben barnes as sirius black #andrew garfield as remus lupin #5 Years #5 Years Update

[arcticdementor]

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. “Don’t do that, love,” I say. Then, to the camera: “Does he seem like he’s in pain to you?”

It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal—longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound—though I thank God every day that we figured it out.

The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son’s injury (and to understand why we couldn’t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the “experts” we had seen). It’s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do—and why.

A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.

After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I’d been wanting to ask—and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.

How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me—both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country—years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it's now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was ... Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

…

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

…

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

…

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

…

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people’s views about anything—even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

…

I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

Like them, our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And not just to save ourselves, but to save each other. The vast majority of Americans are not ideologues. They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, raising families, being entertained, and fulfilling their American right to adventure and self-invention. They are also the consumer base for movies, TV, books, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the #1 bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies and supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for studios and publishing houses that would rather sink into debt than face a social-justice firing squad on Twitter.

#tablet magazine #alana newhouse #read the whole thing

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How unions de-risk work

Yesterday, I published an essay about how monopolies beget monopolies: when deregulation kicked off a wave of pharma mergers, the new pharma oligopoly gained the power to raise prices on hospitals.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

The hospitals weren't able to form a cartel to insist on better prices: the US antitrust law created by Ronald Reagan's court sorcerer Robert Bork is incredibly tolerant of monopolist price-rigging, but violently opposed to cartels that price-rig.

Rather than forming a cartel, the hospitals gobbled each other up to create monopolies. If the CEOs of six hospitals insist on better drug prices, it's illegal. If the presidents of six hospitals (all owned by the same monopolist) do the same thing, it's fine.

Big Hospital wasn't merely better positioned to demand better drug prices from Big Pharma, they were also able to charge more to the fragmented, decentralized health insurance industry.

Predictably, this kicked off a wave of mergers that produced Big Insurance, a monopolized world that gives most Americans between zero and two insurers who'll take their business.

Freed from the risk of losing customers and bulked up to meet hospital monopolies on even footings, insurance companies could both insist on lower payouts to hospitals and *higher* premiums from patients. And at last we had some sort of equilibrium.

Pharma companies could charge more for drugs, but not too much more. Hospitals could lower the standard of care, raise prices, and squeeze workers' wages and working conditions. Insurance companies could cut payments to hospitals, raise prices and hike co-pays.

Everyone got what they wanted, except for two groups that can't form monopolies that push back against this monopoly-dominated industry:

* Patients, and

* Workers

Historically, the "monopolist" safeguarding patients' interests was the state: democratically elected lawmakers who relied on voters for re-election. The massive increase in corporate campaign finance was attended by steady erosion of political loyalty to the public interest.

And so the public lost its champion, and prices went up and quality went down and redress was whittled away to performative apologies after crises of too great a magnitude to be ignored, accompanied by fines that were mere fractions of the profits from corruption.

Meanwhile, workers' champions were their unions: solidarity organizations that corrected the negotiating imbalance between employers and employees by presenting a united front.

That unity extended beyond the gates of a single employer. Picket-line crossing was a grave sin, so if your hotel's maids went out on strike, the Teamsters wouldn't deliver your groceries and the taxi cabs wouldn't pick up at your entrance.

And related trades were able to bargain together: in Hollywood, the writers and actors and tradespeople would start each contract season by visiting the weakest studio as a body and demand the best deal, then require parity from other studios in turn.

Since the Reagan years, union power has been drained off. For example, the way Hollywood unions negotiate has been flipped on its head. Now, the *studios* visit the weakest union as a body and demand the most labor concessions, then take those to the other unions in turn.

It's been generations since union power was a given, and we haven't just lost our power, we've lost our imaginations - the sense of what is possible, what we are owed, how the system could work. We've learned to take precarity and low wages as a given.

That's why Reina Sultan's "8 People Describe How Unions Changed Their Lives" for Vice is so important: not because it is heartwarming (though it is) but because it is ripe with possibility, the recovered wisdom of a fallen civilization.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxqvm/why-unions-are-good-first-hand-accounts-of-how-unions-change-lives

These eight workers describe how joining a union turned precarity into certainty. How the hotels they worked for had to promise to hire them back after the pandemic lifted. How they were promised ten hours of uninterrupted sleep between shifts.

How their employers had to accommodate their disabilities. How they were guaranteed health insurance that covered their whole families. How they were protected from being arbitrarily fired, and guaranteed severance pay when they were laid off.

These guarantees have a common theme: they de-risk being a worker and make it riskier to be an employer. Much of our day-to-day life is a series of negotiations over who should bear the risk that things will turn out bad.

Think of all the corporate bailouts, how these are "socialism for shareholders, capitalism for workers." When the fed bails out banks and employers but not mortgage holders and workers, they move risk off the finance-sector's balance sheet and stick it on our balance sheet.

When you run a business, you assume risks. Maybe you have a slow Saturday and end up paying workers to hang around with nothing to do. If you can book a worker's Sat, but unilaterally send them home two hours into their shift because it's slow, you shift your risk onto them.

The worker has to be available for you, but you don't have to use that availability. Likewise disability accommodations: when you hire and train a worker, you face the risk that they will become disabled, permanently or temporarily, on or off the job.

When that happens, you might have to pay to change the physical environment so they can do their job, or give them disability pay. If you can just fire them, you shift the risk onto the worker, and off your own books.

Every benefit described by workers in Way's article is risk being shifted from workers back onto employers. The right not to be summarily fired means workers aren't at risk from vindictive, bad bosses. It also means employers may struggle to shed "low-performing" workers.

It's a good reminder of the "struggle" in "class struggle." These risks are, by their nature, zero-sum. To decrease the risk of being stuck with a bad employee, you have to *increase* the risk of an employee being targeted by a bad manager. There's no win-win here.

Sure, employers will say that they share the workers' interest in rooting out bad managers, but there is an inescapable contradiction between reserving the right to fire anyone, for any reason, and making sure workers aren't unjustly fired.

The same goes for every benefit articulated by union members. If you're an electrician who wants to be able to get home, sleep and go back to work without being interrupted for ten straight hours, you push risk onto your employer.

Meanwhile, if you *don't* have that right, your employer gets to shove risk onto you. For example, they could underinvest in upgrades and preventative maintenance, knowing that when things break down, they can summon you to get them working again, without paying any overtime.

The project of worker solidarity comes down to this foundational question: who should bear which risks? Would you rather have bad bosses firing people over personal vendettas, or co-workers who are hard to fire even though they're not great at their jobs?

We don't need to pretend that moving risk onto employers' side of the ledger always produces better outcomes. It doesn't. Workers can be jerks, too. But an individual bad boss has the power to do enormous harm to their entire workforce over a long term.

Think of all the people maimed, killed and sickened in Amazon's warehouses because of one individual's willingness and ability to shift risk off his balance sheet and onto theirs.

It's true that an especially toxic unionized worker could make life miserable for many, many other workers - but that's still a better outcome than an especially toxic CEO, not least because unions give workers the power to address bad workers even when management won't.

Is it possible for things to be overbalanced, for too much risk to be shifted off of worker's balance sheets and onto employers' side of the ledger? Sure, theoretically. But that is a situation so far removed from workplace reality today that it's practically a fairy-tale.

And if we're really worried about too much risk landing on employers, then we can go back to the peoples' source of power: democratic governance. Unions represent a power-bloc that can (but don't always) hold politicians to account.

It's hard to imagine any political path to checking corporate power that doesn't include organized groups of workers *and* organized groups of citizens, working for political change.

If health insurance, disability accommodations, retirement pay, parental leave and other sources of workplace risk are moved onto the public's balance sheet, they cease to be things that workers or employers need to argue about. They're just a given.

Think of it this way: bosses and workers don't fight over who will pay to pave the roads to the business. They don't fight over who will fight fires, or allocate RF frequency for the office wireless network. These risks are moved to the public ledger, where they belong.

This kind of political change is also hard to imagine, after 40 years of Reaganomics. But unionization makes it more achievable, because another word for "risk" is "profit." Shifting risk from workers onto bosses shifts money from bosses to workers.

Monopolized employers extract monopoly rents from their customers and gouge monopoly concessions from their workers. This isn't just extra money to send to shareholders - it's also extra money to spend in the political realm, blocking reforms that benefit everyone.

That's how we get wage stagnation and ghouls like Manchin and Sinema tanking the $15 minimum wage. The money extracted from workers was sent to these politicians so they would vote to make it possible to keep extracting money from workers.

Unionization - workplace justice - doesn't win the war for political justice. But it *does* cut the enemy's supply lines, deprive them of the ammo they're using to fight us.

Image: still from "Union Maids" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74gvcvXlgnM

[buzzdixonwriter]

The Love Of Money As The Root Of All Evil

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” -- Dwight David Eisenhower

People love their money.

They love their bargains.

They’ll rush to Wal-Mart to buy a plastic bowl for $1 rather than one at a local mom & pop shop for $1.50.

Of course, very little of that $1 they spent at Wal-Mart stays in their community -- a few pennies in the form of low wages, but then we have to add our tax money going for SNAP cards because Wal-Mart’s employees often don’t make enough to live on.

Not like the mom & pop shop, where the 50-cents extra they charged pretty much stayed in the community:  They paid for their house, they bought their kids clothes, put food on their table…

Mom & pop?  Working for Wal-Mart now.

Living in a cramped apartment, not that nice house they dreamed of retiring in.

The stores and businesses that depended on them spending their income in town?

Most of them have gone under, absorbed by Wal-Mart and other big box multi-national conglomerations.

As much as the moral scolds like to tell us Rome fell because they were decadent, the truth is Rome at its gladiatorial / orgy worse was Rome at the peak of its power and influence.

It fell after it split apart.

And it split apart because the Western half didn’t want to pay for the upkeep of the Eastern half, i.e., the business end of the empire.

The Eastern half needed roads and infrastructure and sound political government and armies (oh, lordie, how they needed armies) and the fat cat landed gentry in the Western -- protected by thousands of miles of terrain and sea from those who would do them harm -- refused to pay their fair share.

So Diocletian split the empire in twain, letting the greedy bastards to the west fend for themselves while he established a new empire that would eventually become known as Byzantium to the east.

The Western empire, what we think of when we refer to the Roman Empire, fell a little less than two centuries after that, overrun by Germanic tribes (we call them “barbarians” but the kneeslapper is they were Christians.

Byzantium stayed a going concern for about a millennia after that, but eventually it fell for the same reason:  The people taking the most out of the society refused to pay anything into it, and a younger / tougher empire (the Ottomans) came a’knockin’.

Without Pax Romana the Mediterranean world became a far more violent / perilous place.  Europe split up into a plethora of kingdoms / principalities / duchies constantly jostling with one another to take more money.

Oh, sometimes there were inventions and technological breakthroughs that added coins to the coffers, but mostly it was finding a neighbor who had something you wanted, figuring out their weakness, and taking it from them.

The Enlightenment strove for a better world, but it took money to be a philosopher in those days and since that wealth typically came from peasants / serfs / slaves doing all the grunt work while the philosophers sat around thinking noble thoughts, it didn’t take long for racism -- the belief that there are different races and some are inherently superior to others (and those deemed inferior were good for nothing but common labor in order to keep the philosophers philosophizing).

Mind you, there had been prejudice and bigotry and chauvinism before, but while Hebrews and Philistines may have hated one another, they at least recognized their common humanity.

They didn’t decree the other to be doomed to perpetual servitude due to their so-called race.

The Enlightenment and Christianity did much to poison the well in Europe and later in America, but they did have some positive points.

Both, despite the cruelties their practitioners ladled out on others, held high ideals of universal rights.

Those ideals would live on, and foster generations of thinkers and ethicists and moralists to come.

But the cruel side had its fans, too.

The colonies that would eventually become the various nations of the American continents (and let’s not forget Australia and New Zealand while we’re at it) all responded with varying degrees of success to those ideals.

They also offered plenty of opportunities for those who loved wealth above all else to flourish, inevitably at the expense of huge segments of their respective populations.

As faulty and as flawed as the American Revolution was, it ended up sowing the seeds for similar movements in other countries.

In France they took root just as the clock ran out for the aristocracy.

Just as in Rome and Byzantium, the French rulers realized they were heading towards disaster.  For a century and a half before the French Revolution, the various Louis would establish a royal commission made up of the best and the brightest in the kingdom, and had them examine the problem and offer a solution.

The solution was always the same:  The ones with the wealth needed to take less and put some of what they had back.

Nobody wanted to hear that (well, nobody with money) and that’s why the guillotines were dropping day and night.

Various trade and crafts guilds had sprung up at that time; al were hammered down.

Socialist movements and parties were started; they were hammered down.

Trade unions were formed; they were hammered down.

But the thing was each movement that got hammered down created a more brilliant and far tougher phoenix to replace it.

By the late 19th / early 20th century communism looked mighty good to a lot of people.

Again, the intransigence of the greedy (call them financiers or industrialists or robber barons or whatever) pushed the world into war yet again, this time bankrupting Germany, Austria, and Hungary (as well as finishing off the Ottomans, last seen sacking Constantinople).  

Around the world people clamored for more input, more control in their daily lives.

Czarist Russia -- brutal, heavy handed, autocratic czarist Russia -- fell to the Bolsheviks (who proved to be no less brutal, heavy handed, and autocratic than the czars).

Germany threatened to go down the same path and the industrialists and financiers -- who sure as hell weren’t missing any meals -- backed a crazy little ex-corporal who promised to keep the labor unions and the socialists and the communists under control.

We know how well that worked out.

In the United States, the wealth made their money directly or indirectly off the back of slave and immigrant labor, and when much to their great dismay the legal form of slavery disappeared, they found new methods of enforcing the old ways, which we now refer to as jim crow.

Poor whites weren’t much better off than their African-American neighbors, but as Lyndon Johnson observed:   ”If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

The United States was not that much better than German when it came to race hatred.

Indeed, the Nazis -- even while condemning US segregation for propaganda purposes -- studied jim crow carefully and applied its lesson to non-Germans in their territories.

The wealthy 1% nearly destroyed the United States with the Great Depression, but the gratitude they showed to Roosevelt for saving capitalism was to undercut and fight him every step of the way.

Because, hey, if it wasn’t making money right now for them!!! then it had to be evil, right?

Right?

And just as the plantation owners in the antebellum South used propaganda to argue slavery was actually a good thing for those enslaved (because both the Bible and Darwin -- at least according to their readings -- said so), so did their spiritual / philosophical / and too damn often direct biological heirs with their anti-communist rants via the John Birch Society and other front groups.

Fred Koch, founder of the Koch family fortune, also founded the John Birch Society.

And let the record show that when the Koch family businesses operate within the law, they do nothing illegal.  They anticipate the ebb and flow of supply and demand and invest accordingly.  Nothing wrong with that -- but there’s a lot wrong with what they use the money for.

For generations Americans have been told that socialism is bad, that Marxism is a failure.

And the truth is socialism works when it’s used wisely, to put the brakes on the worst excesses of capitalism.

And Marx gets a bad rap for what he didn’t do; i.e., the spurious claim that he created the blueprints for world domination.

Marx was a brilliant diagnostician but woefully lacking as a hands on practitioner.

The thing is…Marx knew this and recognized it.

Das Kapital analyzed the problem of capitalism in the 19th century.

Marx never intended it to be the final word on the matter.

He wanted those who came after him to be constantly examining and critiquing the way politics and finance work, so that both systems could be constantly tweaked and modified.

His posthumous work, Grundrisse (short for “Fundamentals of Political Economy Criticism”) were not intended for publication but rather Marx’ own personal resource / reference notebooks for his other work.

He was never satisfied with it and put it aside, possibly because he felt the topic was too great for just one writer to expound on.

Of course, once he was dead nobody cared, and it was promoted as literally the last word on the topic when in reality it was filled with what Marx himself would acknowledge as half-baked ideas, concepts he was spitballing in an attempt to find the real, underlying truth.

Imagine somebody finds some wistful half-completed bucket list you leave behind when you die and tries to live their lives according to that.

Gives you an idea of the problem, no?

But just as the hard line communists in Russia embraced Grundrisse for their purposes, so did Fred Koch and the John Birch Society for their own purposes.

Koch was a businessman who dealt with Russia in the days before WWII.

(Most international money people are whores and will go wherever they can find a buck.)

He didn’t like what he saw -- a fair enough assessment -- but what scared him was that there was something in the underlying structure of Russian society that might be appealing to non-communists.

Remember what I said about the Enlightenment and Christianity?

Add Marxism to that.

It ain’t the solution to all the world’s ills, but damn, it ain’t wrong about the causes.

Now the way the Koch clan tells it, when Fred saw Red, he realized it was a brutal, unworkable economic system and to stop it from spreading, he needed to form the John Birch Society to keep it from taking root in America.

Hold that thought.

If a system is unworkable, just let it collapse.

In fact, as a capitalist you should be interested in propping it up as long as possible both in order to rake in as much cash off them as you can in the time they have left and to make its ultimate collapse an even bigger warning to future workers.

The Koch propaganda machine has been working for literally generations to keep Americans from examining what’s wrong with our system.

They embrace racism because it enables them to keep labor costs down by pitting one group against another.

They fund the evangelical fringe, not necessarily because they believe them, but because they can deliver large swaths of the voting population.

(And of course, many white evangelicals prove themselves to be bigots, so promising to get rid of their taxes and keep “those” kids out of their schools and neighborhoods goes hand-in-hand).

They made a couple of runs at getting their agenda pushed through -- notably with Goldwater (who failed) and Reagan (who didn’t) -- but their desire to take more money by rendering all form of socially just government regulations impotent has produced an unintended consequence.

Donald Trump.

Just as the mad little corporal tapped in on simmer racial and religious resentment in Germany, Trump has done the same here.

A lot of white people are scared that their day is O.V.E.R.

At current demographic projections, come 2048 white people will drop to only 49% of the population.

The largest minority in a nation of minorities.

That means they’ve going to have to learn to cut deals with other groups.

And those groups, because they were marginalized for literally centuries, have learned to be much more self-reliant, much more imaginative, much more focused, much more innovative.

African-American culture is going to dominate the United States in the second half of the 21st century and well into the 22nd.

I want us to walk away from the precipice.

I want us to recognize there is literally no future in burning down the house to make sure the black folks don’t get in.

I want us to recognize reasonable precautions and controls on capitalism do not make people poor but rather prevent poverty from ruining lives.

But I fear for this country.

A few other empires, as they started splintering, recognized their peril and took steps to minimize the chaos and impact.

It took ‘em a while, but England managed to learn to let go of its vast empire in peaceful / democratic / diplomatic ways that enabled them to maintain good relations with former colonies around the globe.

The Koch mentality can’t do that, I’m afraid.

It can’t abide the thought that somebody else has a say in how they do business for the simple reason that those people’s lives are adversely affected by choices the Koch empire makes.

But we as a nation need to also recognize we slit our own throats every time we place price first and foremost in our shopping.

The Trump supporters who bemoan the demise of their single industry towns never seem to realize the decline started when they began saving a few pennies by shopping at big box stores and franchise fast food restaurants.

In their desire to save a few pennies, they threw away family fortunes.

History offers some grim warnings about empires that slide into this level of oligarchy.

Rome fell.

So did Constantinople.

The guillotine blade fell again and again and again until finally people were willing to accept Napoleon in order to regain stability.

And Napoleon started wars that led to World War One…

…and World War One allowed Hitler to rise thanks to the industrialists and the financiers.

The 1% of their generation.

We have to be more informed and more insightful in our daily choices.

What profit a person if they save a few pennies, yet lose their soul?

  © Buzz Dixon

#capitalism #Marxism #socialism #morals #ethics #politics

[candy--heart]

If we nominate a candidate plagued by a litany of disqualifying issues, Trump will win. We can’t make that mistake again.

---- ---- ----

JOE BIDEN

has been personally involved in nearly every bad policy decision of the last 50 years. Currently coasting on name recognition and association with Obama, he can only go down from here as people realize he is more comparable to Trump than he is to anyone else. With all the negatives of Hillary’s failed campaign but none of the positives, he would almost surely see us lose the general election again. If you love your grandchildren at all please do not vote for Biden.

TOP 5 HIGHLIGHTS:

Led the fight against desegregating schools even years after it had been proven a success and defended by Republicans [Expanded 7/6]

Voted for the disastrous Iraq War, then escalated it, then lied about it, still says he’d “do it again,” and just hired a foreign policy advisor who helped Bush orchestrate the war before joining a lobbying firm for the military-industrial complex [Expanded 8/13, 8/29, 9/6]

Wrote the racist Crime Bill that intentionally led to record-breaking mass incarceration, positioning himself to the right of even Reagan and Bush

Opposed Roe v Wade and voted to allow states to overturn it like they are now, worked to undermine the ACA’s coverage of birth control, does “not view abortion as a choice and a right” and still opposed federal funding for it multiple times including during this election

Long history of creepily/patronizingly groping/sniffing/kissing/grabbing/condescending women and young girls just so many times, even including intimidation and continuing even now after his non-apology [Expanded 10/14, 10/29, 11/9]

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL:

Racist comments like this and this, and fondness towards if not impassioned support for so many of the worst racists and segregationists like this whom he chose to work with, as well as Republicans like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Mike Pence, and Jeb Bush. Generally has no understanding of racism in America [Expanded 7/27, 8/8, 9/13]

As part of his crusade against desegregating schools he was the only member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to block two black appointees to the Department of Justice

Has lied about marching in the Civil Rights movement multiple times, and seems to lie about attending an HBCU [Expanded 8/31, 10/29]

Horrible treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas hearing

Supports cutting Social Security and Medicare and raising the retirement age on multiple occasions, backing Paul Ryan’s efforts to do so, while voting to gut welfare

Led the disastrous War on Drugs, and somehow still opposes cannabis legalization (while simultaneously trying to destroy the growing industry by handing it over to the Big Pharma), yet two of his children escaped consequences for drug use [Expanded 8/31]

Pushed to expand death penalty, even to those on drug charges

Opposes Medicare for All while he and his campaign lie about it what it would entail, and wants to bring back penalizing those who can’t afford to pay for private insurance. He continues to praise Big Pharma to his ultra-wealthy donors and is the only candidate to refuse to meet with disabled healthcare activist Ady Barkan [Expanded 7/6, 7/27, 9/21, 10/14]

Originally claimed he “doesn’t have time” to propose his own healthcare plan, then proposed one that would kill 125,000 Americans and leave over 10 million uninsured (which he’s lied about) in a rollout sponsored by Big Pharma (even his own wife admits he’s not good on healthcare, and he’s let slip the true reality of his proposal) [Expanded 7/6, 7/27, 8/19, 8/26, 10/14]

Personally fought to make cancer medication unaffordable for patients in developing nations [Added 10/14]

Opposed equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community even very recently, only eventually coming around just 7 short years ago, and is still awkward at best on the issue [Expanded 9/22, 10/14]

Supported the NRA in passing massive anti-gun control legislation, and has blamed videos games for mass shootings multiple times [Expanded 8/5]

Opposes meaningful action on the climate crisis like the Green New Deal, instead pursuing the “middle ground” while his campaign attacks publications for accurately reporting this

He’s rated D- by Greenpeace in part because he supports fracking, oil and gas exportation, and the building of new fossil fuel infrastructure, and his campaign shot down the proposed climate debate and skipped MSNBC’s climate forum [Added 8/23, Expanded 9/6, 9/16]

Plagiarized fossil fuel groups’ language in his woefully inadequate climate crisis plan after his climate advisor made $1 million from one natural gas company alone. He then made uncomfortable physical contact with and rudely dismissed a young woman who asked him about this [Expanded 10/14]

Broke his own pledge to not accept fossil fuel money by attending a fundraiser hosted by his former advisor and current oil corporation co-founder/owner Andrew Goldman, and lied about it twice [Added 9/6, Clarified/Expanded 9/7, 10/14]

Voted to expand deportations and indefinite detention for immigrants multiple times and opposed amnesty for immigrants and supports requiring them to learn English

As VP his administration deported more people than any other in American history, deporting people at a higher rate than Trump’s administration even according to ICE themselves, and expanding the anti-immigrant system Trump now uses by 3,600%. He still refuses to answer for this and has gone as far as calling the police on immigration activists for passing out flyers [Expanded 7/9, 10/14]

As VP his administration built the inhumane concentration camps in which children separated from their families are still illegally caged, beginning the practice which Trump has now continued and resulting in the ongoing lawsuit claiming that ICE is violating the Flores Agreement by not providing basics like toothpaste and soap [Added 7/9]

Voted to build border walls and supported sending military to the border long before Trump

Voted to ban immigrants with HIV, locking Haitian refugees up in Guantanamo Bay

Spearheaded the Alliance for Prosperity which increased deportations, border militarization, privatization, and oil pipelines for American exploitation while worsening the refugee crisis

Architected Plan Colombia, internationalizing the War On Drugs resulting in mass death, displacement, and destruction of food crops, while opening the country to US business interests

Sides with Trump in backing right-wing coup in Venezuela

Voted to authorize invasion of the Netherlands if an American is tried for war crimes by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, refusal to participate in UN peacekeeping unless the US obtains immunity, and withdrawal of aid to countries that ratify ICC treaty

Supports Israel’s right-wing regime and apartheid in Palestine purely to protect US interests. A self-described Zionist, he blames Palestinians for multiple US-backed Israeli massacres, including an attack that killed 9 peace activists. Calls BDS “anti-semitic” and has a 100% rating from AIPAC [Expanded 7/4]

Recklessly threatens nuclear war with North Korea

Sided with banks to overturn Glass-Steagall and deregulate, leading to financial crisis, and has dishonestly tried to take credit for the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau despite actually helping strip state consumer protection [Expanded 10/18]

Defends billionaires hoarding wealth and promises to ensure it keeps happening at the expense of everyone else while voting to slash the top income tax rate and cripple the estate tax, resulting in $83 billion lost annually

Led the disastrous Bankruptcy Bill resulting in increased debt and specifically fought to make student loan debt more difficult to live with before dismissing the plight of Millennials who are now the most indebted generation ever [Expanded 8/26]

Lied about his own student debt multiple times, his own scholarship, and his own academic achievements, and has not proposed any plans to make public college tuition free or to abolish student debt [Added 8/26]

Voted against abolishing the electoral college that undemocratically elected Bush and Trump

Took $200,000 to help a Republican beat a Democrat to Congress despite being anti-abortion

Voted against enhancing labor protection enforcements

Voted for NAFTA, supports TPP, is generally to the right of Trump on trade, and argued against the prediction that China would become an economic competitor [Expanded 9/13]

Works with union-busters, voted to cut union pensions, continues to snub unions, and is generally bad for workers [Expanded 10/14]

Consistently sides with special interests and corporations against antitrust regulation and voted for the first antitrust exemption since 1922

Opposes net neutrality

Driving force behind the Patriot Act, supports warrantless wiretaps / mass surveillance while his son partially owns the Chinese government’s Islamophobic mass surveillance system [Edited 9/13]

Personally tried to prevent Ecuador from providing asylum for Edward Snowden

Says the CIA torture report is not a “black stain on this country” but a “badge of honor”

Worsened the opioid epidemic and made it harder to treat

Wants to make up reasons to jail anyone associated with a rave and literally bulldoze it down while his RAVE legislation lets kids die from preventable drug overdoses

Was the only senator to vote against expanding a child care tax credit [Added 7/29]

Has questionable electability based on receiving less than 0.22% in 3 previous Democratic primary elections. He has a history of insulting voters and is currently skipping major party events, hiding from the press, and holding only between a quarter and half as many public events as his rivals

Has questionable electability based on his infamous propensity for awkward “gaffes,” including many, many, many, many, many, many, many in this election cycle alone, to the point where he is literally unable to campaign [Added 8/9, Expanded 8/11, 8/13, 8/15, 8/23, 8/24, 9/2, 9/17, 10/14]

Plagiarized law school papers and campaign speeches (in which he lied about having coal miner roots), which ended his 1988 presidential run

His anti-progressive campaign surrogate Ed Rendell is a sexist, pro-fracking, pro-AIPAC Fox News supporter who approved bombing a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, killing 5 children and 6 adults [Added 6/26]

Used Charlottesville as a prop in his campaign video despite never even visiting once

Lied about getting shot down in Iraq and experiences in Afghanistan [Added 8/31]

Has no plan to reform the court system or counter its Republican takeover, has proposed re-nominating the failed Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, a nearly 70 year-old “moderate” who has opposed voting rights and human rights for Guantanamo detainees, and is fine with Kavanaugh remaining on the Supreme Court for life [Added 7/6, Expanded 9/16]

Is still openly courting Republican billionaires for donations, including John Catsimatidis, who’s compared taxing the wealthy to Nazi persecution of Jews

Endorsed by Alan Dershowitz, the millionaire Trump supporter accused of taking part in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring, after Biden’s son ensured a similar billionaire pedophile avoided prison after raping his own toddler

Voted to deregulate the credit card industry while a credit card company was his top donor from 1989–2000 and then hired his son

His administration awarded a $1.5 billion contract to his brother’s construction firm despite his brother having no prior residential construction experience

Has a long history of generally Trump-esque nepotism that he refuses to address [Added 10/14]

Broke his own pledge to take over 2x more money than Trump from lobbyists and special interests, including at least 13 billionaires, has the same general donor base as Trump, and very openly partakes in general corruption [Expanded 8/5, 8/11, 8/23, 10/14]

Flip-flopped on his initial opposition to using Super PACs and established one with military industrial complex and private healthcare lobbyists, even after admitting, “You shouldn’t accept any money from a Super PAC, because people can’t possibly trust you” just one year prior [Added 10/25]

His Senate chief of staff is now running Fox News’ lobbying operation [Added 10/14]

Hasn’t released any tax returns since 2015, which people seem to care about now [On 7/9 he released them to no media attention, revealing an $11 million increase in income in his first year out of office alone]

Seems to have found a loophole to avoid paying his interns [Added 7/12]

Unconvincingly co-opted Bernie’s education plan and slogan, and a Biden PAC plagiarized Kamala Harris’ slogan for its name

Despite his supposed frontrunner status he is a distant 5th in individual donors, raising questions of electability [Added 10/14]

“A lot of us sit around thinking up ways to vote conservative just so we don’t come out with a liberal rating. I’m really quite conservative…”

Meghan and the McCain family and Strom Thurmond have endorsed him, and Trump has donated to him

The worst part? He’s still not sorry for any of this (but wants a black man to apologize to him)

#bidrn #joe biden

[quakerjoe]

JOE BIDEN:

has been personally involved in nearly every bad policy decision of the last 50 years. Currently coasting on name recognition and association with Obama, he can only go down from here as people realize he is more comparable to Trump than he is to anyone else. With all the negatives of Hillary’s failed campaign but none of the positives, he would almost surely see us lose the general election again. If you love your grandchildren at all please do not vote for Biden.

TOP 5 HIGHLIGHTS:

Led the fight against desegregating schools

Voted for the disastrous Iraq War and still says he’d “do it again”

Wrote the racist Crime Bill that intentionally led to record-breaking mass incarceration, positioning himself to the right of even Reagan and Bush

Opposed Roe v Wade and voted to allow states to overturn it like they are now, worked to undermine the ACA’s coverage of birth control, does “not view abortion as a choice and a right” and still opposed federal funding for it multiple times including during this election

Long history of creepily groping/sniffing/kissing women and young girlsjust so many times, even including intimidation and continuing even now after his non-apology

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL:

Racist comments like this and fondness towards if not impassioned support for so many of the worst racists and segregationists like this whom he chose to work with, as well as Republicans like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Mike Pence, and Jeb Bush

As part of his crusade against desegregating schools he was the only member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to block two black appointees to the Department of Justice

Lies about marching in the Civil Rights movement

Horrible treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas hearing

Supports cutting Social Security and Medicare and raising the retirement age on multiple occasions, backing Paul Ryan’s efforts to do so, while voting to gut welfare

Led the disastrous War on Drugs, and somehow still opposes cannabis legalization, yet two of his children escaped consequences for drug use

Pushed to expand death penalty, even to those on drug charges

Sided with banks to overturn Glass-Steagall and deregulate, leading to financial crisis

Led the disastrous Bankruptcy Bill resulting in increased debt and dismisses the plight of Millennials who are now the most indebted generation ever

Defends billionaires hoarding wealth and promises to ensure it keeps happening at the expense of everyone else while voting to slash the top income tax rate and cripple the estate tax, resulting in $83 billion lost annually

Opposes Medicare for All, says he “doesn’t have time” to propose another healthcare plan, and wants to bring back penalizing those who can’t afford to pay for insurance [Expanded 7/6]

Opposed equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community until very recently

Supported NRA in passing massive anti-gun control legislation

Opposes meaningful action on the climate crisis like the Green New Deal, instead pursuing the “middle ground” while his campaign attacks publications for accurately reporting this. He’s rated D- by Greenpeace

Plagiarized fossil fuel groups’ language in his woefully inadequate climate crisis plan after his climate advisor made $1 million from one natural gas company alone

Voted to expand deportations and indefinite detention for immigrants multiple times, has opposed amnesty for immigrants and supports requiring them to learn English, and helped expand the system Trump now uses to commit human rights violations by 3,600%

Voted to build border walls and supported sending military to the border long before Trump

Voted to ban immigrants with HIV, locking Haitian refugees up in Guantanamo Bay

Spearheaded the Alliance for Prosperity which increased deportations, border militarization, privatization, and oil pipelines for American exploitation while worsening the refugee crisis

Architected Plan Colombia, internationalizing the War On Drugs resulting in mass death, displacement, and destruction of food crops, while opening the country to US business interests

Voted to authorize invasion of the Netherlands if an American is tried for war crimes by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, refusal to participate in UN peacekeeping unless the US obtains immunity, and withdrawal of aid to countries that ratify ICC treaty

Supports Israel’s right-wing regime and apartheid in Palestine purely to protect US interests. A self-described Zionist, he blames Palestinians for multiple US-backed Israeli massacres, including an attack that killed 9 peace activists. Calls BDS “anti-semitic” and has a 100% rating from AIPAC [Expanded 7/4]

Sides with Trump in backing right-wing coup in Venezuela

Recklessly threatens nuclear war with North Korea

Voted against abolishing the electoral college that undemocratically elected Bush and Trump

Took $200,000 to help a Republican beat a Democrat to Congressdespite being anti-abortion

Voted against enhancing labor protection enforcements

Voted for NAFTA, supports TPP, is generally to the right of Trump on trade

Works with union-busters and voted to cut union pensions and is generally bad for workers

Consistently sides with special interests and corporations against antitrust regulation and voted for the first antitrust exemption since 1922

Opposes net neutrality

Driving force behind the Patriot Act, supports warrantless wiretaps / mass surveillance while his son partially owns the Chinese government’s mass surveillance system

Personally tried to prevent Ecuador from providing asylum for Edward Snowden

Says the CIA torture report is not a “black stain on this country” but a “badge of honor”

Worsened the opioid epidemic and made it harder to treat

Wants to make up reasons to jail anyone associated with a rave and literally bulldoze it down while his RAVE legislation lets kids die from preventable drug overdoses

Has questionable electability based on receiving less than 0.22% in 3 previous Democratic primary elections. He has a history of insulting voters and is currently skipping major party events, hiding from the press, and holding only between a quarter and half as many public events as his rivals

Plagiarized law school papers and campaign speeches (in which he lied about having coal miner roots), which ended his 1988 presidential run

His anti-progressive campaign surrogate Ed Rendell is a sexist, pro-fracking, pro-AIPAC Fox News supporter who approved bombing a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, killing 5 children and 6 adults [Added 6/26]

Used Charlottesville as a prop in his campaign video despite never even visiting once

Is still openly courting Republican billionaires for donations, including John Catsimatidis, who’s compared taxing the wealthy to Nazi persecution of Jews

Endorsed by Alan Dershowitz, the millionaire Trump supporter accused of taking part in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring, after Biden’s son ensured a similar billionaire pedophile avoided prison after raping his own toddler

Voted to deregulate the credit card industry while a credit card company was his top donor from 1989–2000 and then hired his son

His administration awarded a $1.5 billion contract to his brother’s construction firm despite his brother having no prior residential construction experience

Funded by lobbyists and special interests, and very openly partakes in general corruption

Hasn’t released any tax returns since 2015, which people seem to care about now

Unconvincingly co-opted Bernie’s education plan and slogan, and a Biden PAC plagiarized Kamala Harris’ slogan for its name

“A lot of us sit around thinking up ways to vote conservative just so we don’t come out with a liberal rating. I’m really quite conservative…”

Meghan and the McCain family and Strom Thurmond have endorsed him, and Trump has donated to him

The worst part? He’s still not sorry for any of this (but wants a black man to apologize to him)

(READ MORE)

[foreverlogical]

The election season of 2015 and 2016 was defined by chaos, infighting and a pool of deep resentment that came boiling over when votes were cast. But this election was barely noticed. It happened on February 17, 2016, in a rundown labor union hall in Portland, Oregon. Union members were voting on a new contract with their employer, Koch Industries. The union members felt powerless, cornered, and betrayed by their own leaders. The things that enraged them were probably recognizable to anyone who earns a paycheck in America today. Their jobs making wood and paper products for a division called Georgia Pacific had become downright dangerous, with spikes in injuries and even deaths. They were being paid less, after adjusting for inflation, than they were paid in the 1980s. Maybe most enraging, they had no leverage to bargain for a better deal. Steve Hammond, one of the labor union’s top negotiators, had fought for years to get higher pay and better working conditions. And for years, he was outgunned and beaten down by Koch’s negotiators. So even as the presidential election was dominating public attention in late 2015, Hammond was presenting the union members with a dispiriting contract defined by surrender on virtually everything the union had been fighting for. He knew the union members were furious with his efforts. When he stood on stage to present the contract terms, he lost control and berated them. “This is it guys!” his colleagues recall him yelling. “This is your best offer. You’re not going to strike anyway.”

I thought of the free-floating anger in that union hall often as I travelled the country over the last eight years, reporting for a book about Koch Industries. The anger seemed to infect every corner of American economic life. We are supposedly living in the best economy the United States has seen in modern memory, with a decade of solid growth behind us and the unemployment rate at its lowest level since the 1960s. Why, then, does everything feel so wrong? In April, a Washington-Post/ABC Poll found that 60% of political independents feel that America’s economic system is essentially rigged against them, to the advantage to those already in power. Roughly 33% of Republicans feel that way; 80% of Democrats feel the same.

What reporting the Koch story taught me is that these voters are right— the economy truly is rigged against them. But it isn’t rigged in the way most people seem to think. There isn’t some cabal of conservative or liberal politicians who are controlling the system for the benefit of one side or the other. The economy is rigged because the American political system is dysfunctional and paralyzed—with no consensus on what the government ought to do when it comes to the economy. As a result, we live under a system that’s broken, propelled forward by inertia alone. In this environment, there is only one clear winner: the big, entrenched players who can master the dysfunction and profit from it. In America, that’s the largest of the large corporations. Roughly a century after the biggest ones were broken up or more tightly regulated, they are back, stronger than ever.

I saw this reality clearly when I went to Wichita, Kansas to visit Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, a company with annual revenue larger than that of Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined. Charles Koch isn’t just the CEO of America’s biggest private company. He also inhabits one extreme end of the political debate about our nation’s economy. A close examination of his writing and speeches over the last 40 years reveals the thinking of someone who believes that government programs, no matter how well-intended, almost always do more harm than good. In this view, most government regulations simply distort the market and create big costs down the road. Taxing the wealthy only shifts money from productive uses to mostly wasteful programs. Charles Koch has been on a mission, for at least 40 years, to reshape the American political system into one where government intervention into markets does not exist.

But for all the free-market purity of Charles Koch’s ideology, there is not much of a free market in the corporate reality he inhabits. Koch Industries specializes in the kinds of businesses that underpin modern civilization but that most consumers never see—oil refining, nitrogen fertilizer production, commodities trading, the industrial production of building materials, and almost everything we touch, from paper towels and Lycra to the sensors hidden inside our cellphones. This is the paradox of Charles Koch’s word – he is a high-minded, anti-government free-marketeer whose fortune is made almost exclusively from industries that face virtually no real competition. Koch Industries is built, in fact, on a series of near-monopolies. And it is these kinds of companies that do best in our modern dysfunctional political environment. They know how to manipulate the rules when no one is looking.

Consider the oil refining business, which has been a cash cow for Koch Industries since 1969, just two years after Charles Koch took over the family company following his father’s death. Charles Koch was just in his early 30s at the time, but he made a brilliant and bold move, purchasing an oil refinery outside Saint Paul, Minnesota. The refinery was super-profitable thanks to a bottleneck in the U.S. energy system: the refinery used crude oil from the tar sands of Canada to be refined into gasoline later sold to the upper Midwest. The crude oil was extraordinarily cheap because it contained a lot of sulfur and not many refineries could process it. But Koch sold its refined gas into markets where gasoline supplies were very tight and prices were high.

Why didn’t some competitor open up a refinery next to Koch’s to seize this opportunity? It turns out that no one has built a new oil refinery anywhere in the United States since 1977. The reason is surprising: the Clean Air Act regulations. When the law was drastically expanded in 1970, it imposed pollution standards on new refineries. But it “grandfathered” in the existing refineries with the idea that they would eventually break down and be replaced with new facilities. That never happened. The legacy oil refiners, including Koch, exploited arcane sections of the law that allowed them to expand their old facilities while avoiding the newer clean-air standards. This gave them an insurmountable advantage over any potential new competitor. The absence of new refineries to stoke competition and drive down prices meant that Americans paid higher prices for gasoline. Today the industry is dominated by entrenched players who run aged facilities at near-full capacity, reaping profits that are among the highest in the world. In this industry and others, the big gains go to companies that can hire lawyers and lobbyists to help game the rules, and then hire even more lawyers when the government tries to punish them for breaking the law (as happened to Koch and other refiners in the late 1990s when it became clear they were manipulating Clean Air regulations).

The oil refining business is just one example of how Koch has benefited from complex regulatory dysfunction while public attention was turned elsewhere. In the 1990s, for example, a Koch-funded public policy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pressured states to deregulate their electricity systems. California was a pioneer in this effort, and the results were disastrous. Lawmakers in Sacramento created a sprawling, hyper-complicated system that surgically grafted a free-market trading exchange onto an aged electricity grid. Virtually no one paid attention to the 1,000-page law as it was being written. Almost immediately after the markets went online in the early 2000s, electricity traders at Koch Industries and Enron began gaming the system. They earned millions of dollars doing so, even as prices skyrocketed and the state’s grid collapsed in rolling blackouts. Lawmakers were blamed when the lights went out, and then Governor Gray Davis was recalled. The role that traders played in the crisis was hard to understand and hidden from view. Federal regulators filed a case against Koch for manipulating markets in California, but the legal proceedings dragged on for more than a decade. Koch ended up settling the charges and paying a fine of $4.1 million, long after the damage was done.

To take another example: In 2017, Koch helped kill part of the Republican tax reform plan to impose a “border adjusted” income tax that almost certainly would have hurt Koch’s oil refining business. The plan was being pushed by none other than Paul Ryan, a onetime Koch ally who was then Speaker of the House. Ryan wanted to include the border adjustment in President Trump’s tax overhaul because it would have benefited domestic manufacturing and would have allowed the government to cut corporate taxes without exploding the deficit. But former Koch oil traders told me that the border adjustment tax would have hurt profits at the Kochs’ Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota. Koch played a vital role in killing the border adjustment tax before a vigorous public debate about it could even begin (A Koch Industries spokesman insisted that the Koch political network opposed the border-adjustment measure only on ideological grounds, because it was basically a tax, and not to protect profits at Koch’s oil refineries) . By the time most people started paying attention, Paul Ryan admitted defeat and jettisoned the border adjustment.

Charles Koch doesn’t talk about issues like this when he talks about free markets. When I met him, Charles Koch was giving interviews for his new book that described his highly detailed business philosophy, called Market-Based Management. I had heard a lot about this philosophy, but what surprised me most when I interviewed the people who worked with him, some for decades, is how much they admire him. They said he was brilliant, but also unpretentious. He was uncompromising, but fair. I felt this way too, the minute I met the billionaire. I remember him telling me something along the lines of: “Hello, Chris! You didn’t need to put on a tie just to see me,” when I walked in the door (my audio recorder wasn’t even running yet, so the quote might be inexact).

Charles Koch’s avuncular, aw-shucks persona masks his true nature. I think of him instead as an uncompromising warrior. He has been fighting since he was a young man. He fought his own brothers, Bill and Freddie, for control of the family company (and won). He fought a militant labor union at the Pine Bend refinery (and won). Most of all, he fought against the idea that the federal government has an important role to play in making the economy function properly—even while taking advantage of government laws to maintain his company’s advantages.

When Charles Koch became CEO in 1967, the U.S. economy operated under a political system that is almost unimaginable today. The government intervened dramatically in almost every corner of the economy, and it did so to the explicit benefit of middle-class workers. This happened under a broad set of laws called the New Deal, which was put in place in the late 1930s. The New Deal broke up monopolies, kept banks on a tight regulatory leash, and even controlled energy prices, down to the penny in some cases. It greatly empowered labor unions and boosted wages and bargaining power for workers. Charles Koch dislikes every element of the New Deal. He has formed think tanks to attack the ideas behind it, donated money to politicians who sought to dismantle it, and built a company that was hostile to it.

As it turned out, the American public joined Charles Koch, to a certain extent, during the 1970s. Vietnam, Watergate, rampant inflation and multiple recessions shattered Americans’ confidence in the government’s ability to solve problems for ordinary people. Passage of the Civil Rights Act shattered the political coalition behind the New Deal, which had relied on Southern segregationists for support. Ronald Reagan rode the tide of antigovernment sentiment to the White House. But even Reagan wasn’t able to repeal the New Deal. He failed miserably when he tried to repeal Social Security, for example. He cut taxes, but never could restrain spending. What emerged during the 1980s and 1990s was an incoherent governing system, one that is deregulated in some key areas, like banking and derivatives trading, but hyper-regulated in others like the small business sector.

If the American political system is confused, Charles Koch is not. He rules over his company with undisputed authority, and he uses that authority to spread his Market-Based Management doctrine. This philosophy inspires the rank-and-file employees at Koch Industries—the company cafeteria is full of young, entrepreneurial workers who thrive in a system that heaps promotions and bonuses on top performers, while unsentimentally weeding out employees considered weak. But the unbending nature of Market-Based Management, and how it applies to the factory floor, played a big role in building the rage that swept through that union hall in Oregon.

When Steve Hammond, the union boss, tried to bargain with Koch, he found himself fighting over ideology, not benefits. In one case, the Koch negotiators wanted to strip down workers’ health care benefits, requiring employees to pay more money out of pocket for their benefits. The Koch team framed their request not as a way to make more money for Koch, but to create a system that better reflected the ideals of Market-Based Management. “It’s a matter of principle,” recalled union negotiator Gary Bucknum. “The principle is that an employee should be paying something toward their healthcare, or otherwise they’ll abuse their health care.” It was hard to bargain against principle. And the unions didn’t have the leverage to fight. The policies that once supported labor unions have been steadily undermined since the 1970s, dragging union participation in the private sector down from about 33% of the workforce to less than 10%. The union took the cut in health care benefits.

The current American political debate is focused on the shiny objects, the high-profile contests between Team Red and Team Blue. But companies like Koch Industries have the capacity to focus on the much deeper system, the highly complicated plumbing that makes the American economy work. This is where Charles Koch’s attention has been patiently trained for decades, as administrations have come and gone in Washington.

Thanks to this focus, Koch wins every time.

VISIT WEBSITE

[ckerouac]

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

With everything going on in the US right now, I know I’ve pointed out this book in the past, but it’s high time to do it again.  If you’ve never read it, I highly recommend Timothy Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century’.  It’s a small book, maybe 100 pages, that was published in response to the 2016 election about lessons we should take to heart about holding on to democracy.

Snyder is a historian and Holocaust scholar and really knows his shit (I highly recommend his ‘Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning’).  And I recommend that everyone read through a copy of ‘On Tyranny’, but if you haven’t, here are the 20 lessons for safe mental keeping.

DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE: Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.  In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

DEFEND INSTITUTIONS: It is institutions that help up defend decency.  They need our help as well.  Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf.  Institutions do not protect themselves.  They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.  So choose an institution you care about - a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union - and take its side.

BEWARE THE ONE-PARTY STATE: The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start.  They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents.  So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections.  Vote in local and state elections while you can.  Consider running for office.

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE FACE OF THE WORLD: The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow.  Notice the swastikas and signs of hate.  Do not look away, and do not get used to them.  Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.  

REMEMBER PROFESSIONAL ETHICS: When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.  It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges.  Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. 

BE WARY OF PARAMILITARIES: When the men with guns who have always claimed to be again the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh.  When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

BE REFLECTIVE IF YOU MUST BE ARMED: If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you.  But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things.  Be ready to say no.

STAND OUT: Someone has to.  It is easy to follow along.  It can feel strange to say or do something different.  But without that unease, there is no freedom.  Remember Rosa Parks.  The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken and others will follow.

BE KIND TO OUR LANGUAGE: Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does.  Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying.  Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet.  Read books.

BELIEVE IN TRUTH: To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.  The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

INVESTIGATE: Figure things out for yourself.  Spend more time with long articles.  Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media.  Realize that some of what’s on the internet is there to harm you.  Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad).  Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

MAKE EYE CONTACT AND SMALL TALK: This is not just polite.  It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society.  It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and shouldn’t trust.  If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life. 

PRACTICE CORPOREAL POLITICS: Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen.  Get outside.  Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.  Make new friends and march with them.

ESTABLISH A PRIVATE LIFE: Nastier rulers will use what the know about you to push you around.  Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis.  Remember that email is skywriting.  Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person.  For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble.  Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you.  Try not to have hooks.

CONTRIBUTE TO GOOD CAUSES: Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life.  Pick a charity or two and set up autopay.  Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others do good.

LEARN FROM PEERS IN OTHER COUNTRIES: Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries.  The present difficulties in the United States are an element of a larger trend.  And no country is going to find a solution by itself.  Make sure you and your family have passports.

LISTEN FOR DANGEROUS WORDS: Be alert to the use of the words extremism and terrorism.  Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception.  Be angry about treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

BE CALM WHEN THE UNTHINKABLE ARRIVES: Modern tyranny is terror management.  When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.  The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.  DO NOT FALL FOR IT.

BE A PATRIOT: Set a good example of what America means for the generation to come.  They will need it.

BE AS COURAGEOUS AS YOU CAN: If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, the all of us will die under tyranny.

#us politics #timothy snyder #on tyranny #i feel like everyone should have these pinned to their mirror #if only to help when you look at yourself in the morning and declare 'not today satan' #or that may just be me #but i know that i've changed a few things for myself since the first time i read this book last year #and i encourage you to do so as well