 |
Hard Ball
SHORT TAKES: A Starbucks Caveat; Did Merck Cause Omnicron?; Unions Are Good For Everyone--The Data
| Jonathan Tasini | Dec 21 |
Hi, all: Happy Holidays! Be safe. Take Omicron very seriously and don’t buy the “mild” symptoms meme—which, at the very least, tells us nothing at this point about Omicron’s *long COVID* impact.
LONG TAKE
I say: Bring. It. On. If Joe Manchin—deeply corrupt, thoroughly bought off by corporate interests—has the temerity to scream “debt crisis!” (under the false notion that government doesn’t have money) and the utter audacity to deny lower-income people basic protections and, while he lives on a yacht and drives a Maserati, smear people, including his own constituents, with the slanderous accusation that poor people will use a modicum of government aid to…buy drugs…—let’s live by his credo of penny pinching…
Every single Senator, no matter the party, spends a ton of time making sure their local pet projects back home get funded with federal dollars. They do so by drawing up a laundry list of projects and tucking the projects into the appropriations bills that make their way, each year, through Congress. A lot of those projects are worthwhile, some not so much.
And every Senator uses that funding to, then, go back home, and travel to cities and towns with the message: I delivered for you…and so support me, re-elect me.
If the president, and the Senate majority leader, had balls, they would simply say—every single project Manchin put in the pending appropriations bills gets cut out.
Every. Single. One.
And every single project beneficiary should get a personal note from Biden, Schumer and the chair of the Appropriations Committee, Patrick Leahy, explaining why not a single cent is showing up.
Drum roll—and these are real examples (which were part of the list I spooled out on Twitter where you can generally follow my daily observations), and you can see more here and, especially here where Manchin has a page devoted entirely to the money he brings home:
Dear Mayor of Parson WV @TuckerCounty_WV: sorry, but the $1.6 million you thought was coming for work on Parson's sanitary sewer system is no longer available. Why? Ask @Sen_JoeManchin—signed @POTUS @SenSchumer @SenatorLeahy
Dear Mayor of @cityofwheeling : sorry, but the $5.6 million you thought was coming for your storm water drainage systems to address flooding is no longer available. Why? Ask @Sen_JoeManchin — signed @POTUS @SenSchumer @SenatorLeahy
Dear @WebsterCountyWV : sorry, but the $4.5 million you thought was coming to provide water service to new customers in Webster County is no longer available. Why? Ask @Sen_JoeManchin — signed @POTUS @SenSchumer @SenatorLeahy
Dear @LewisCoCVB : sorry, but the $3 million you thought was coming to help fund broadband deployment and mapping is no longer available. Why? Ask @Sen_JoeManchin — signed @POTUS @SenSchumer @SenatorLeahy
Dear Mayor of @ParkersburgCity: sorry, but the $398,000 you thought was coming for renovations at the Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Airport’s Main Terminal is no longer available. Why? Ask @Sen_JoeManchin — signed @POTUS @SenSchumer @SenatorLeahy
Dear Mayor of @CityofBeckley: sorry, but the $8.8 million you thought was coming to create a visitors’ center and community park is no longer available. Why? Ask @Sen_JoeManchin —signed @POTUS @SenSchumer @SenatorLeahy
Dear Mayor of Smithers WV: sorry but the $4.68 million you thought was coming to construct an integrated trail system is no longer available. Why? Ask @Sen_JoeManchin —signed @POTUS @SenSchumer @SenatorLeahy
Dear @MorganCountyWV: sorry, but the $1 million you thought was coming for the expansion of public water and wastewater services is no longer available. Why? Ask @Sen_JoeManchin —signed @POTUS @SenSchumer @SenatorLeahy
I could list scores more.
Let Manchin pay the political price at home—a far greater price that millions of people, and the planet, are paying for this fool’s nonsense.
Politically, this would certainly show some steel in the spine on the part of those who show very little spine, certainly it would mean a lot to people whose survival depends on expanding and maintaining society’s support for them like Latia Reliford:
Latia Reliford has struggled financially during the pandemic.
A divorced mother of five children aged five to 14, Reliford ran a day care centre in New York with her mother, a job that allowed her the flexibility needed to care for her children. But the Covid closures put her out of business and left her unemployed.
Though Reliford has interviewed for several roles in the past several months, she says employers are hesitant to hire her because she has to quarantine at home each time one of her children is exposed to the virus.
To stay afloat, Reliford has depleted her savings and relied on the six $1,250 advance payments from the expanded Child Tax Credit which were part of President Joe Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus package from March.
“I am the main provider and I am still out of work from last year,” she says, “so these payments were very important to my family to help us get by. And you know, taking care of five children is expensive.”
But the December 15 payment will be the last one Reliford and some 35m other families receive unless Congress moves to renew the programme. [emphasis added]
Make Manchin pay the price.
SHORT TAKES
A Starbucks Caveat
To be sure, winning any union election is a darn good thing for labor—especially for the workers! I had a special interest in watching the Starbucks union vote in Buffalo because a long-time friend, Richard Bensinger, was in the thick of it all as a mentor-organizer for the workers. And, just this week, Starbucks, grudgingly for sure, said it would negotiate with the union.
But, here’s a caveat: that the Starbucks election was touted by some folks as a “watershed” or a “big signal” for labor tells us how bad things are for the labor movement. Three stores voted—out of almost 9,000 Starbucks locations—emcompassing 71 workers; one store voted for the union, one store voted against the union and the third store results are still uncertain. The victory took months and months to accomplish—and I am not taking anything away from those workers and the success of the hard-fought campaign.
If this is a “watershed” moment, wow, we are in big trouble. It will many years—maybe a decade or two—to organize a majority of the Starbucks locations.
What should come out of the Starbucks win is a lesson that is something all together different: Union organizing at SCALE—meaning, tens of thousands of workers unionizing in a short span of time to actually empower unions to have leverage to influence any industry or sector—is impossible without massive change in labor laws including allowing sectoral bargaining and organizing (so, for example, a union could organize all Starbucks workers in one election), banning striker replacements, undercutting the multi-billion dollar, anti-union industry (jail the law breakers, not just puny fines) and, yes, general strikes.
Not to be too much of a downer—if you can’t even muscle through a significant funding bill, the chances of serious labor law reform are, in my opinion, close to zero.
Did Merck Cause Omnicron?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once mused that, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
So, here you go:
You can believe that what the COVID vaccine makers did in developing the drugs so quickly and effectively is nothing short of amazing and will likely save millions of lives… (I am fully vaccinated and boosted).
AND:
The vaccine makers are vile profiteers who have racked up billions of dollars in profits—partly thanks to taxpayer-funded research on the vaccines—and also caused plenty of death and illness in lower-income countries by controlling the patents to the vaccines.
And they also may have made a big mistake. It’s just a theory and perhaps dead wrong but, via the Financial Times (subscription):
Another theory about how Omicron emerged in southern Africa has been advanced by William Haseltine, a virologist who has speculated that mutations could have been caused by Merck’s Covid-19 antiviral pill.
He noted that South Africa was among the locations chosen for clinical trials of the drug molnupiravir, which began in October 2020. The drug disrupts the ability of the virus to replicate by causing an explosion of errors that prevent it from spreading when mutations reach a certain level.
UK and EU regulators have already authorised molnupiravir for emergency use but some scientists, including Haseltine, have warned that its mutagenic properties could, under certain circumstances, create more dangerous variants. These concerns were also raised by external experts at a US Food and Drug Administration meeting last week.
“That is a very heavily mutated virus and that is the kind of patterns you see with molnupiravir,” Haseltine told the Financial Times. “And the timing is right. I’m not saying it happened, but it could have happened.”
We should all be vaccinated. And also be keenly aware of what Big PHARMA is up to.
Unions Are Good For Everyone--The Data
I doubt this is something I have to argue with most of my readers. But, it’s good to be reminded, and have something handy to read, that “Unions are not only good for workers, they’re good for communities and for democracy”
Presto. Your wish is my command—thanks to the Economic Policy Institute which recently posted a thorough document with the above named title. The highlights:
Income and economic protections
We find that, on average, the 17 U.S. states with the highest union densities:
*have state minimum wages that are on average 19% higher than the national average and 40% higher than those in low-union-density states
*have median annual incomes $6,000 higher than the national average
*have higher-than-average unemployment insurance recipiency rates (that is, a higher share of those who are unemployed actually receive unemployment insurance)
Health and personal well-being
We find that the states with the highest union densities:
*have an uninsured (without health insurance) population 4.5 percentage points lower, on average, than that of low-union-density states
*have all elected to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, protecting their residents from falling into the “coverage gap”
*are more likely to have passed paid sick leave laws and paid family and medical leave laws than states with lower union densities
Democracy
We find that:
*Significantly fewer restrictive voting laws have been passed in the 17 highest-union-density states than in the middle 17 states (including D.C.) and the 17 lowest-union-density states.
*Over 70% of low-union-density states passed at least one voter suppression law between 2011 and 2019.
Read the rest—and share, you’all.
If you liked this post from Working Life Newsletter, why not share it?
