Monthly Archives: January 2021
Always the victim
THE MADNESS OF KING G(op)EORGE
suddenly pro-union
Some may see it as a chicken and egg thing, but it is not so.
There is no question as to which came first when it involves the union or the company?
During the Industrial Revolution, the owners of factories needed workers, and as society changed and private property ownership displaced them, needing work, the peasants were there to be brought into those factories and the factory owners knew that these people were desperate, uneducated, and, therefore, easy to mislead and unwillingly willing to accept the conditions as they were in the workplace.
With many workers coming from foreign countries for the promise of America who were easy to dupe because of language differences and the fantasy idea they had of the American dream, any worker could be immediately replaced by someone desperate for a job.
This allowed the owners to take any action to promote their profits even if the workers who produced those profits labored in conditions that killed them, and, although they did get paid, did not get an income that would allow the workers to live above the poverty line.
They were the working poor without any government assistance programs.
Workingmen getting together to raise wages, shorten hours or ensure employment, was illegal in the United States until the Hunt v Commonwealth (Massachusetts)decision in 1842, which ruled that labor groups were legal provided that they were organized for a legal purpose and used legal means to achieve their goals.
Prior to that, organizing and not accepting the conditions as is, was illegal.
This was a first good move, but in subsequent years the organized workers faced mass firing and, in some famous extreme cases, though not rare, death at the hands of local and national law enforcement who, favoring the rich owners who donated to the politicians in charge, shot striking workers and, in one famous case, their families at home.
From the 1920s on, the Republican Party has opposed unionizing, mainly because its members were the ones abusing the workers and getting rich off of that, and as a party it has done whatever it thought would effectively eliminate unions and return the welfare of the workers up to the largess of the factory owners.
The Republican Party has consistently supported efforts to weaken unions by eliminating or weakening legal protections for the right to organize and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.
They came up with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 because workers had had to resort to labor actions like wild-cat strikes and stoppages in order to weaken unions by prohibiting many of the legal tactics that made unions strong.
Reagan attacked unions when he fired members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, and legitimized the use of non-union “permanent replacements”, commonly referred to as “scabs”, to replace striking union members.
From 1990 to 2020, big business has given $20.1 billion in federal campaign contributions with 57% going to Republican candidates. Organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce gave 84% of their campaign contributions to Republicans, and of the top 1,500 publicly traded companies from 2000-2017, 57.7% of donations went to them as well.
During that same period, Unions invested just $1.6 billion in total campaign contributions with 91% going to Democrats.
When it comes to the way things work in the U.S., money wins out.
Unions represented 16.4 million workers (11.6% of the employed workforce) in 2019, and continue to advocate for the eight-hour day, the five-day workweek, overtime, minimum wages, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, occupational safety and health regulations, paid family leave, and the expansion of governmental programs aiding lower income workers, policies opposed by Big Business
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median weekly earnings of $1,095 in 2019, while those who were not represented by unions had median weekly earnings of $892, meaning that union workers make almost $10,600 more a year than non-union workers and have greater access to healthcare, pension (beyond Social Security), paid time off, decent working conditions, and, often, required respectful treatment from the employer.
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Unions reduce income inequality. Teachers’ unions, for example, ensure that all teachers, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. are paid the same in accordance with degrees, ongoing course work, and time on the job.
Often, to avoid having their workers organize, many employers get as close as they can to what the nearby unions make at similar work sites when it comes to hours, wages, and conditions of employment while still retaining certain individual actions and decisions a union contract would prevent as they are usually for the advantage of the employer and not in any way the employee, which often results in reduced wage inequality for those workers too.
I taught at a non-union Catholic high school, and then in school districts with teacher unions, and have seen this firsthand.
Ted Cruz, who again boorishly pontificated at a senate hearing, in attempting to play the guardian of union members when questioning Peter Buttigieg about Biden’s halting of the XL Pipeline, claimed this action would eliminate good union jobs, intoning with the appropriate shrugs and head shakes,
“It was disconcerting to see yesterday, the first day of the Biden administration, straight out of the gate, President Biden announced that he was canceling the Keystone Pipeline. That is a major infrastructure project. That is a project that right now today has 1,200 good-paying union jobs and in 2021, the Keystone Pipeline was scheduled to have more than 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 union jobs for contracts worth $1.6 billion dollars, and with the stroke of a pen, President Biden has told those 11,000 workers — those union workers — your jobs are gone.”
It might have made for good TV, but the reality is that Ted Cruz’s opposition to unions is well established, so his tactic is transparent.
From a performance point of view it was over-emoted, too didactically delivered, and transparently more of the performance it was rather than a convincing portrayal of a concern of the heart being openly and honestly expressed which should have blurred the line between acting and sincerity, so it came across as the shallow and insincere act it was..
Ted Cruz supports the cleverly misnamed “Right to Work” laws which do not guarantee good hours, wages, and conditions of employment, or even jobs, but are an attempt to prevent unions from organizing to better those things, and subjecting the workers to conditions that harken back to the days when workers were the low wage serfs of corporations, so that you have the right to a job that will remain a low wage job in spite of productivity and profit, while the employer reserves to right to pay you as little as possible and not offer benefits.
Cruz, like the Republican Party, sees unions and their supporters as enemies to be politically and economically destroyed.
In 2012 when running for the senate, Cruz wrote,
“Currently, the National Labor Relations Board is trying to force Boeing to fire thousands of workers from its factory in Charleston because South Carolina is a right-to-work state. Incredibly, the NLRB’s position is that, if Boeing closed the plant and moved all the jobs overseas, that would be fine, but it cannot employ U.S. workers in manufacturing jobs unless they are subject to union bosses and pay mandatory union dues. This makes no sense and must stop.”
A year later he co-sponsored S 204, the National Right-to-Work Act, which proposed having right-to-work at the national level, and, when running for president in 2016 Cruz said that he supported national “right-to-work” legislation because such right-to-work laws are a “fundamental right” and such laws will show that government “sides with the working men and women of this country.”
The reality is that workers, regardless of whether or not they belong to a union, lose an average of $1,500 a year in wages as a result of Right to work laws, and are less likely to have benefits with workers seeing less upward mobility than in those places without such a law.
You might have a right to get a job, but you lose any guarantee of decent hours, wages, or conditions of employment when you cannot speak in a united voice and must accept conditions as is, or its buh-bye.
Ted Cruz may want union support now as his being a cheerleader for the January 6 attempted insurrection has somewhat reduced his standing among those he already had, but his true disdain for unions was shown by his assumption they can be easily fooled by his act.
When the white supremacist-in-chief moves on
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The Bristol County Massachusetts Sheriff, Tom Hodgson, who labels all undocumented immigrants as “Criminal Illegal Aliens” regardless of their actual history, Maria working at a food processing plant who came here years ago and has been holding down a job and paying taxes with no chance of a refund each spring and getting swept up in an ICE raid is not a “Criminal”, but to tell the truth about her would make the sheriff’s tough stance a little questionable, is all upset that Joe Biden does not have the same attitude toward immigrants that the sheriff does.
He has an opinion.
Of Course, it is based on reporting from Brietbart which I guess to him is more legitimate than reading and then addressing the actual executive order. But why would someone who claims caravans of people are coming, and have already come, to take the jobs of citizens while at the same time claiming they are all on welfare and other government assistance programs. In reality, you cannot do both, but when it comes to monsters in closets and other the bed facts can make them less scary, the major fact being that there are no monsters there.
President Joe Biden moved quickly to undo the racist, white supremacist, xenophobic executive orders of the previous president and the idol of the sheriff by halting border wall construction, rescinding travel and immigration restrictions on several Muslim-majority countries, safeguarding protections for “Dreamers”, and pausing some deportations from the interior of the continental United States.
Unlike what Brietbart and the sheriff who filters it want people to believe, the executive order refers to most deportations from the interior of the U.S. not all potential deportations.
The Department of Homeland Security has announced it would implement a 100-day moratorium on deportations for immigrants in the U.S. facing removal, again neither universal nor automatic, and suspended the Trump’s policy of requiring non-Mexican asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for a U.S. court hearings
Biden ordered the Departments of Homeland Security to safeguard the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Attempts to suspend DACA under Trump had been blocked in court, but as a result of a lawsuit filed by its state’s Republican state attorneys asking for the program to be declared unlawful, things are on hold in Texas as a federal judge has yet to rule on it.
While in January 2017 Trump had broadened who immigration agents could arrest and deport, Biden wants to reset who immigration officials should prioritize for deportation.
Again, for deportation, not general release.
“The policy of my Administration is to protect national and border security, address the humanitarian challenges at the southern border, and ensure public health and safety. We must also adhere to due process of law as we safeguard the dignity and well-being of all families and communities,”
Biden wrote.
Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske issued guidelines for now and, until more detailed attention is given to the topic, having U.S. immigration officers focus on deporting immigrants found to pose a national security threat, recent border-crossers, and those who have been convicted of certain crimes would be a major consideration during future policy creation.
Again, this eliminates the sheriff’s scary “all” who he wants people to believe will be released without restriction and regardless of criminal history.
It is the difference between Maria and El Chapo.
Further, Pekoske also said the deportation freeze would not apply to migrants who arrived in the U.S. after November 1, 2020; those who pose a national security risk, those suspected of terrorism or espionage; and immigrants who agree to voluntarily leave the country.
Biden also ended the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the census figures used to award states seats in Congress.
President Biden ordered officials to pause barrier construction along the U.S.-Mexico border within seven days and ended that phony national emergency declaration Trump used to divert billions of dollars in military funding to finance his wall.
When suspending the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and this should keep the sheriff happy, DHS noted that Trump’s emergency rules that allow U.S. border authorities to rapidly expel migrants without a court hearing would remain in place until further notice.
DHS also noted that those apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border going forward would not qualify for the immigration overhaul Mr. Biden has proposed to Congress, which would allow millions of undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. to obtain legal status.
You still can’t sneak in. You have to report at entry points. Obviously those who ignore the law and sneak over the border are not the same as those who follow the law and report to entry points and should not be treated as such.
ICE has halted all deportations, regardless of the criminal convictions of an illegal alien, as a result of Biden’s executive order stopping removals for at least 100 days. This gives time to examine all cases and not just catch and deport.
Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson is alarmed by this reasonable approach, and, of course, without any evidence to back it, the sheriff is notoriously averse to facts and evidence, Hodgson, the former honorary chair of Trump’s losing Massachusetts reelection campaign, has claimed the Biden policies serve as an open invitation to potential terrorists worldwide to join caravans of migrants heading for our southern border.
I guess he has a fear that these terrorists will get to do what his white supremacist, MAGA terrorists have been doing and, being an expert on everything including gangs, the sheriff knows to importance of protecting “turf”.
That was what we were told with the last two caravans, yet, neither hid his terrorists who threatened the nation’s security and the American people.
Oh. But this time it’s true not like those past caravans that were going to do the same thing, but consistently didn’t.
Like anything that does not agree with him or support his autocratic running of the county jails, to the sheriff any positive actions concerning Immigrants is part of a radical political agenda.
The same radical agenda that resulted in the Attorney General’s report he had violated the civil and human rights of his ICE detainees, a Department of Health report containing all the violations found during a surprise inspection, an 18 month investigation that showed the A-1 evaluations he uses to justify his running of his fiefdom are done by an association which grants certifications and glowing evaluations as long as members are current with all membership fees, and the Massachusetts Senate established he had broken the law by refusing to let a state senator, who chairs the committee that oversees civil rights, from entering the ICE facility on his County Campus to assess the conditions after the May 1, 2020, riot.
Of course, he cannot have an opinion on anything he does not like without making it scary for the locals, so he further claims that this fictitious wholesale release of ICE detainees will have a tremendous financial burden on cash-strapped communities like New Bedford in Bristol County.
Again, while claiming they leach off the governmental teat he still clings to the contradictory claim that Illegal immigration and mass migration strain a tight jobs market.
Why?
According to him they are all on government assistant programs.
A supportive local conservative radio station that often gives airtime over to the sheriff to give his untruthful claims free exposure and only has opposition on if the sheriff gets time to rebut freely and without correction after the opposition has left the studio, like the sheriff, in offering no supportive facts or evidence claimed,
“Hodgson’s concerns about changes in the nation’s immigration policies are well-founded. Americans are generous in welcoming immigrants. It is who we are. But it must be handled in a controlled and sensible manner.”
That last goal is what 100 days of thought, discussion, compromise, and action will produce as opposed to a blanket, poorly thought out (family separation and kids in cages until it all goes away like Covid did when the weather got warm) immigration policy pulled from the nether regions of Stephen Millers bowels.
But when you are the co-dependent sheriff of Bristol County, Massachusetts, whose whole career has been self-promotion especially in the last four years during which the president had to check to see where Thomas Hodgson’s head was before taking a seat, needs to continue lying to the people of the county to validate himself.
curmudgeonly advice
While there are those under 40 who see dealing with Covid as a unique, no-one-else-has-had-to-deal-with-this-before thing, while bemoaning this is not the norm, those who grew up in the 50s with the Polio epidemic with friends wearing leg braces or being whisked away to iron lungs, buying Christmas cards by some artist encased in an iron lung who painted with his brush between his teeth, avoiding any still, standing water, “polio water”, and all the precautions we had to observe until we got the vaccine (It amazes me that anti-vaxxers will point to no polio as a reason vaccines are unnecessary).
Then came AIDS with all its precautions, Condoms, safe sex, celibacy. Still waiting for the vaccine and cure for that one. Loved ones open and secret died usually alone in the hospitals to which the dying person’s significant other was barred by families who long aggo through therir member out, society referring to all sorts of perversions as the Gay people deserved what we got.
And now Covid.
We went from exaggerated cleanliness, to condoms and controlled touching, now masks and distancing. Live long enough, and the unique and “only us” fades.
When our parents were starting families there was polio to deal with.
When their parents were starting families there was the “Spanish” flu.
When their parents were starting families there was Typhus.
That is one medical crisis each generation with an overlap, I.E. Typhus to the 1919 flu, the 1919 flu to polio, polio to AIDS, AIDS to Covid, with the Baby Boomers winning the lottery of getting three overlaps with one ongoing, not just two medical crises in their lifetimes.
Those same generations faced major global wars, with the Boomers facing an involuntary draft to fight a made up, old guys’ war upon high school graduations.
For each generation their trials were unique to them, its form and existence changing. Something was going to happen, but no one knew what until it hit.
Every generation has “had it rough”. What is unique to each is how they faced it.
In 1919 people cooperated with the science as known, no matter how inconvenient, without making it the object of politics.
When the wars hit, some people went to fight them while those on the home-front made whatever inconvenient sacrifices were required and found ways to deal with conditions in a positive way.
My Aunt still makes War Cakes which do not include milk, butter, or eggs as ingredients because during war you had to get used to not having those thngs as readily as at other times, and they survived without.
There is no oppression if, because of circumstances, a person must settle on a Dunkin Donut rather than that complicated multi-infused donut from down the street, and, more importantly, about which no one wants, or need, to hear the lamentations.
Suck it up.
Wear a mask.
Avoid crowds and large home gatherings.
Work to help slow and the conquer the virus and its time will run out. Don’t Follow the behavior suggested by science, and the reason you will still be complaining about it in the future is because you allowed it to stay around.
You can complain about the needs-oil light on the dashboard for as long as it makes you feel good to do so, or you can knock it off and end the car’s needing oil by putting some in it.
This may be your first rodeo, but it is not the first,for everyone nor will it be the last.
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another threat
For eight years we were told Obama was coming to take all the guns, would establish martial law, and use railroad cars to ship gun-loving Americans to FEMA camps.
Buying and owning more guns meant more money made by the manufacturers of those guns by advising people to buy more of them in order to have too many so Obama couldn’t get his hands on all of them. This was the response to seriously addressing the growing problem of mass shootings especially ones at schools, defending the Constitutionally bestowed right to bear arms even if it eliminates the Creator bestowed right to Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
When AOC joined with Ed Markey in dusting off and updating an old 1989 environmental package and, as a nod to FDR’s New Deal, named it the Green New Deal, the same people who now have a lot of guns, decided that since cows have a propensity toward flatulence, Ed and Alexandria’s addressing climate change and our need to act on that was just a socialist scheme to take away our hamburgers.
So far, as best as I can tell, the hamburger industry is doing just fine. The McDonalds on the other side of the stockade fence separating it from my place does a brisk business in spite of, apparently, working against itself with the recycle dumpster next to the general one inside the gated cinder block pen in the far corner of the parking lot.
Joe Biden steps in and lets us know that science will once again be acceptable, and based on it, steps will be taken to fix what we can and deal with what we can’t when it comes to climate and the environment. He pledged and delivered on that pledge on his first day when he signed a series of executive orders that go well beyond the Obama-Biden Administration platform.
He wants Congress to enact legislation in the first year of his presidency that establishes an enforcement mechanism that includes milestone targets, makes a historic investment in clean energy and climate research and innovation, and incentivizes the rapid deployment of clean energy innovations across the economy, especially in communities most impacted by climate change.
He reentered the Paris agreement because he is serious about dealing with climate problems, and has set 2050 as the target date by which we achieve a clean energy economy and reach net-zero emissions which calls for methane pollution limits for oil and gas operations, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles by preserving the current Clean Air Act, and requiring public companies to disclose climate risks.
He may have stopped the KeyStone Pipeline, but, and this could have already been achieved had the nation taken to Hillary’s plan to retrain workers for Embelia Ribes is another important ingredient to boost blood supply to the male reproductive organ and helps the man to attain penile erection that can last till the completion of the sexual health problems are premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, inhibited sexual desires, retrograde ejaculation, etc. are common among men all around the world. http://secretworldchronicle.com/2014/04/ online sale viagra Any kind of deficiency in love, trust or compatibility can break the relationship. low cialis cost secretworldchronicle.com Some of the generic medicines that are buy cialis made with that exact the same ingredient are branded as Kamagra, Silagra, Suhagra etc. That being said, the FDA has viagra no prescription mastercard yet to approve the medication for this purpose. developing industries as opposed pledging to be reclaiming coal while doing nothing, doing it now means temporary pipe building employment will be replaced by something lasting.
As we all remember, a year ago this coming February, when asked by a child about too much plastic in our oceans, Joe Biden told attendees at a town hall in Hudson, New Hampshire,
“I don’t think we should be using plastic straws anymore in restaurants.”
When I was a kid, straws were made of paper that was recyclable even when that wasn’t a consideration, however, according to our most recent former president,
“liberal paper straws don’t work.”
The Gun harvesting scare did not pan out. As a matter of fact, it brought unwanted attention to some, up until then, behind closed doors shenanigans, resulting in the NRA declaring bankruptcy, hoping to start over in Texas.
The sudden government created lack of hamburgers also seems to have not been bourn out, again, judging by the constantly changing, all day long music coming from the open windows of the cars in the drive-thru line.
We are now at that point where the best two out of three, not going as someone had hoped is modified to the best three out of five.
Prepare yourself for Biden coming for your straws.
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a rebirth
After four years of watching in horror as hard-won equality was slowly being whittled away to allow people to discriminate against GLBT people using religion as the excuse, removing certain rights of Transgender people and using them as scape-goats to throw before an angry bigoted crowd who loved him who fed them, things might be getting back to normal after the national Dark Night of the Soul, that prolonged period of doubt in what is supposed to be the United States as embodied in the Declaration of independence and the U.S. Constitution often settled into law by Supreme Court decisions and Congressional action, a “spiritual darkness” that lasted four years.
Among those things he did on Day One, President Joe Biden issued an executive order strengthening anti-discrimination protections for the GLBT community by requiring federal agencies to assume that laws forbidding discrimination apply to sexual orientation and gender identity, not just race, religion, sex and national origin.
Once again, enforcement agencies under Biden will pursue legitimate discrimination complaints on behalf of GLBT people.
In June, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in the Bostock Decision that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects workers from discrimination related to sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace, Biden’s executive order extends to other areas like housing and education.
I have to insert here that this is personally important to me as, after what should not have been a struggle but a no brainer, in 2009 the Oklahoma City Public Schools added “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to student policies on bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination, the students to which this could be life-saving were unprotected under Trump an Devoss, and the many years, the hours put in, and the sweat it took to get those words added were potentially to have become and remain a loss of years never to be gotten back.
To give his Executive Order weight, he pointed out that the new order will “build on” the protections cemented by the Supreme Court.
“All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation,” the White House said in a statement.
In contrast, Trump wanted the Supreme Court to rule that Gay and Transgender workers were not covered by Title VII, and when the ruling came cialis cheap generic It may be combined with both Propecia and Rogaine Foam for the most effective outcomes. 2. Kamagra for erectile dysfunction- Earlier, the tablets were tadalafil online usa used for treating different kinds of ailments. The traditional Chinese http://appalachianmagazine.com/general_lee/ discount levitra medicine generally separate chronic prostatitis into five types to dialectical treatment. One very important thing to remember is not to spread yourself thin and know when to delegate the job to generico viagra on line appalachianmagazine.com another. this past summer, Trump attempted to limit its reach.
In that vein, trump had undone the Obama era regulation that forbade discrimination against transgender people in health care settings.
Trump came up with a laser aimed version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by banning transgender people serving in the military.
In 2019, the Interior Department removed the words “sexual orientation” from its guide on workplace discrimination.
On the Sunday before the Biden/Harris inauguration, as a last insult on the way out the door, the Trump Justice Department a memo was issued by the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, John Daukas, saying that the department should not extend Title VII protections to areas where longstanding gender-based policies on bathrooms and sports teams could come into play and that employers could cite religious beliefs that would allow them to discriminate against GLBT employees saying,
“Unlike racial discrimination, the Supreme Court has never held that a religious employer’s decision not to hire homosexual or transgender persons ‘violates deeply and widely accepted views of elementary justice’ or that the government has a ‘compelling’ interest in the eradication of such conduct.”
It is obvious that Trump had attempted to find some way to narrow the ruling by not acknowledging that the United States had moved passed his (my) generation and it is time to hand the world over to those who will live longer in it now.
Biden trumped Trump.
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