• 13 Posts
  • 121 Comments
Joined 1Y ago
cake
Cake day: Jun 18, 2023

help-circle
rss

Yes, and those exploitative labor relationships so popular in the South serve to reproduce an embedded social structure that favors the usual suspects. Pic stolen from an excellent piece in the NYT yesterday from Jamelle Bouie.


Such a great development. We can talk all we want, but votes like this one are where the rubber actually hits the road in terms of shifting power from capital to labor.



A viable Trump candidacy courts controversy and sells subscriptions. End of democracy? We will worry about that later.


Alternative title: “A very bad take on *The Handmaid’s Tale*”. >To join, the group demands faithfulness, virtue, and “alignment,” which it describes as “deference to and acceptance of the wisdom of our American and European Christian forebears in the political realm, a traditional understanding of patriarchal leadership in the household, and acceptance of traditional Natural Law in ethics more broadly.” More practically, members must be able to contribute either influence, capability, or wealth in helping SACR further its goals. “Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm,” a mission statement reads.
fedilink

“My husband, Wesley, and I join hands in prayer around our kitchen table. Then we worry about the Mexicans.”


I am avoiding linking to the Fox article so as to not send them traffic. Can’t make this stuff up.
fedilink

The problem as I see it is not that they have been critical of Biden, but that they are not ringing the alarm bells loudly enough over some of the batshit garbage Trump has been spewing recently. “Dictator on day one”, cutting off funding for schools that require vaccinations, etc.

It is reminiscent of the “both sides” criticism moderates get — in an effort to provide even coverage, they are functionally giving the crazy and the corrupt a free pass.


States can’t remove Trump from ballot, Supreme Court says
Have not read the separate opinion, which argues that the per curiam went too far in barring Federal courts from ruling on Section 3. Seems like that could become relevant down the road a bit.
fedilink

This inevitably happens in states and in industries with low or no union participation. Reason number 1,000 why workers have to stick together. Unionize … and strike.



Vaccines don’t work. Global warming is a lie. The United States is not a democracy. Babies are too small to be seen with the naked eye and can be frozen and thawed out. Biden is corrupt because Vladimir Putin said so. Am I missing anything?


Add the Carroll verdict and we are North of $440 million in about 3 weeks.

Edit: Also need to calculate statutory interest on top of this. Appeal bond is going to be brutal.


Yes, judging by the tenor or the questions it probably won’t even be close. They may end up ruling that Section 5 requires enabling legislatIon to be passed before state enforcement of Section 3 can proceed, but who knows. I think the fix is in on this one, regardless of the actual merits of the legal theories.

I’ll also go out on a limb and say that even though I am viscerally with Colorado here, a victory could easily turn into chaos once GOP-controlled courts in battleground states start engaging in a tit-for-tat. I can already hear the MTG-caliber arguments about humane border policy equating to insurrection.

The upcoming immunity case is going to be way more problematic for Trump, I think.


This one was always going to be a long shot. The real story here (or one real story, I guess) is why nobody had the guts to ask Thomas to recuse himself.


Rolling Stone following a rich tradition started by the late, great Hunter Thompson. His obit for Nixon is an absolute classic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/


Our distinguished House Speaker voted against expulsion.


This is frightening stuff. I feel like it should be at the top of every newscast, every conversation, but somehow we seem to be sleepwalking into the end of democracy. A “nah, can’t happen here” attitude, coupled with Trump fatigue, social media distractions, struggling to make ends meet, and good old fashioned apathy, are going to get people killed.


Too early to tell for sure, but Georgia is starting to look grim for Trump, Inc. The state RICO statute by its nature lends itself to rolling up these “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” type conspiracies that are hard to prove individually but taken together show a coordinated pattern of conduct. With every co-conspirator who rolls over and takes a plea deal in return for testimony, it gets easier to prove, and more worrisome for those left.

Open question is whether the Fulton County DA can prove the requisite RICO predicate acts. I think they are trying to pin them on false statements and an unlawful attempt to influence an official, as well as the county election office interference, but it would be interesting to see a dispassionate analysis that evaluates the likelihood of success with those allegations.

Also unclear is what impact Meadows’ testimony in the Federal case will have, if any, on the Georgia proceedings.


Former President Donald Trump's final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith's team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter. The sources said Meadows informed Smith's team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump's prolific rhetoric regarding the election.
fedilink

Since the indictment, four of the 19 co-defendants have taken plea deals with prosecutors. Scott Hall, a former bail bondsman, was the first to do so last month. In recent days, three Trump attorneys have now followed suit and agreed to testify against the former president. Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro took plea deals late last week, and Ellis joined them Tuesday. Legal experts suggest their agreements to testify could raise the other defendants’ legal jeopardy or also induce them to take a deal.
fedilink

It is one thing to hop on the internet and complain about the system (like we are doing now), but another to actually do something about it.

Unionizing - and then actually striking for better pay and conditions - are the most immediate ways to move the ball. As he says, workers have not historically improved their conditions by working harder, but by refusing to work en masse.


As pointed out time and time again, the MAGA caucus is interested in maximum chaos for social media clout, not governing. It will be interesting to see how much of the ‘mainstream’ GOP goes along with this idiocy.

I get the sense they are pretty spineless, because after all, who wants to anger the base and have to give up the fancy Washington restaurants to return to the sticks and live among the rubes once the inevitable MAGA primary challenger takes you out?


Viewers get a throw-away line about Big Three’s “record profits” but no sense of what those profits have been: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made a combined $21 billion in profits in just the first six months of this year. According to the UAW, they’ve earned a quarter trillion dollars in profit since 2013.

This right here. There is a staggering lack of understanding about just how money is circulated in the economy. The assumption is that if you let billionaires and corporations concentrate capital it will be good for the rest of us because they will create jobs. That is true at the margin when capital is at a premium, but in an era easy money, investment isn’t the problem. You can also rest assured that without unions corporations will cut every job they can to boost the bottom line.

Conversely, there is this puritanical sense among some that if you pay workers more, then they will get lazy … or something … and that is bad for the economy. This is bullshit. Billionaires hoard capital. Workers, because they have to, spend their paychecks (lower marginal propensity to save) and keep money circulating. Paying people decently is good for the economy.


Unions seek gains in hostile territory: ‘If you change the South, you change America’
>Union organizers expressed optimism that bringing in workers from the places least friendly to unions could have impacts on workers nationwide. A Treasury Department report released late last month said boosting union power benefits the middle class and the economy overall. That report, by the way, can be found [here](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1706#:~:text=The%20report%27s%20key%20findings%20are,grievance%20policies%2C%20and%20predictable%20scheduling). One of the interesting points made is that the relative diversity of union membership, coupled with the union wage premium, means that unionization can benefit the living standards of a more diverse group of citizens. So remember kids, it is great to spill pixels about fighting injustice and dismantling capitalism … by all means go for it … but if you *really* want to change the economic status quo and support economic mobility for everyone, at least in the short term, unionize.
fedilink

I am deeply suspicious of of overly simplistic answers to complex human questions, but I swear that 90% of modern U.S conservative policy can be explained either by grift or fear of the other.




Here is a perspective from within the belly of the beast in case it is interesting to someone: state legislatures starving higher ed for funding is a story that goes back over 30 years. It is responsible to a significant degree for the tuition hikes that have made a college education too costly for many students. In effect, this funding cut and resulting tuition hike has shifted costs of an educated workforce from wealthy taxpayers to young people. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/state-funding-higher-education-still-lagging

Administrative bloat is also a problem, and falls into a couple of categories. You have the university presidents and coaches, on one hand, where the appointments are themselves a political plum in some states and game day is an excuse for rich alumni to drive $300,000 RVs to sit in corporate skyboxes. (State legislatures don’t seem to have issues with that spending, for some reason).

Then there is the multiplication of various vice-provosts, directors, department heads, etc. Some of that is legitimate administrative bloat, but it tends to gets pared back fairly regularly when a recession hits or enrollment drops. In many institutions a lot of the remaining bloat is administrative infrastructure built up around competition for students, compliance with Federal mandates, and research efforts to make up for that lost state funding. You have student life. Dining services. Residence life. Disability services. Equal opportunity offices. Financial aid offices. Faculty affairs offices. Institutional research. Institutional support. HR operations. State mandated procurement and budgeting units. Huge staffing structures around the research enterprise. Units dedicated to service and outreach. And the list goes on, and on, and on.

The point is not that all of these these activities are good and have to be preserved, or that they are bad and have to be axed. The point is that a lot of university activity that at first blush looks like cancerous growth is a response to the need to compete for tuition paying students, to keep the feds and state legislatures happy, and to land that the next big grant. A good bit of THAT can in turn be traced back to the aforesaid budget cuts and rising expectations about the sort of support that institutions of higher education are expected to supply.

Wow, that ended up longer than I intended, but I’ll leave it for the 1 or 2 of you who care about this stuff.


What a colossally dishonest take. Being glad no American lives are being lost is not the same as disregarding Ukrainian lives. And it sure as hell doesn’t support the implication that withholding assistance to those struggling in the face of Russian imperialism is a superior outcome to the status quo that somehow respects Ukrainian lives to a greater degree.

(Personal opinion): It would be a better discussion by far to make a policy argument in good faith and be prepared to defend the likely outcome with logic and evidence, rather than bombarding the site with this drive-by libertarian agitprop.


That was a dig directed at those that shout “socialism “ at things that are clearly not socialism (like negotiating prescription drug prices), but you are of course correct. Thank you for correcting my rhetorical excess, internet friend!


Amazed at how the same people who defend a business model that depends on price inelasticities to extract the last dime for lifesaving meds somehow react with horror at the idea that the biggest negotiator of pharmaceutical prices in the U.S. has the gall to negotiate lower prices. The government isn’t ‘dictating’ anything. It is using its market power to drive the price down.

That is the vaunted free market at work. Anything else is just corporate socialism.


OP, we have received reports about the source of this post. Reviewing it, there is a good bit of libertarian and what could be considered pro-Russian propaganda elsewhere on the site, to the point it could be fairly considered an opinion blog pushing an agenda. The headline also deviates from the original source reporting. Other mods may ultimately take this down, but in the meantime please consider substituting the original article upon which this (opinion) piece was based:

https://archive.li/QmPGT


The Right: Political violence committed in the name of Islam is “terrorism” and all Muslims bear collective responsibility for stopping it.

Also the Right: Political violence committed in the name of white supremacy can only be attributed to mental illness. Don’t you dare hurt the feelings of white folks by suggesting their grievance-based political movements are to blame.


We have all heard the “never wrestle a pig” adage. This is the pig picking a fight. It is a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters and politicize the concept of justice. The proper response - both rhetorically and ethically, is to say “show me the evidence under penalty of perjury in a court of law and we will be the first to hold Biden, or anyone else, accountable.”


West is right in the quote above. Progressives have every right to advocate and agitate through the primaries and beyond. Arguments about electoral unity in the face of creeping fascism definitely have their place, but it is way too soon to be making them. (Edit: in other words, take a wider view and save that messaging for the general election).

Primary season is where the edges of a coalition have a chance to pull the party back from the center. West probably can’t win, but his voice and others like it are keeping the Overton window from drifting ever rightward. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to appreciate that he is out there.


Gentle reminder that this is the nice Lemmy instance.

This is a good article and the point is well made that there is a lot of troubling colonial history that the story told in the film does not include. The point has also been made that the movie is a biopic about one individual and that wasn’t the story it was trying to tell.

Feel free to explore those issues, as there are some inherently political concerns involved, but please do so without the ad hominem. If “you this” or “you that” starts creeping back into the discussion, we’ll be forced to lock the thread.


Giving off some serious 1930’s mob boss vibes with this one.



Are you equating ‘single payer’ with universal health care, which most of the world has, or true single payer in the sense that private insurance is effectively outlawed? The latter isn’t quite as ubiquitous, as you know, and is politically a heavier lift in the U.S. compared to the starting point of simply guaranteeing universal basic coverage through something like medicare (state insurance) expansion.

The latter approach, incidentally, has majority support here, if polls are to be believed. I share your astonishment that we have somehow been unable to successfully agitate for it. We could realistically get to where Germany or France are, but somehow … can’t.


Oh, you scoundrel.

Seriously, this is one of those topics that can head South quickly, since the legislation on its face is helpful to people with these plans because it expands coverage. On the other hand, the overall situation is ripe for abuse. I can already see the GOP pushing these on folks who can’t afford the deductible as a ‘solution’ and then use it as an excuse not to consider any real reform. It is understandable that Dems are split.


GOP push to get more Americans into high-deductible health is dividing Democrats
>For thrifty consumers, there’s a lot to like in high-deductible health insurance. The plans offer low monthly premiums and those fees fully cover preventive care, including annual physicals, vaccinations, mammograms and colonoscopies, with no co-payments. >The downside is that plan participants must pay the insurers’ negotiated rate for sick visits, medicines, surgeries and other treatments up to a minimum deductible of $1,500 for individuals and $3,000 for families. Sometimes deductibles are much higher. Let’s keep it civil.
fedilink

Unions were never given power in this country. They have always had to fight for it and take it. Today is no different. And one of the first fights that has to be won, one upon which most of the others rest, is to crush once and for all the pernicious belief in this country that what is good for business owners is good for workers.

No, what is good for workers is good for workers.


Controversial opinion incoming: two things can be true at once: state legislatures are woefully underfunding public higher education and need to boost support, AND, in the meantime every state institution doesn’t need a full roster of humanities departments filled with tenure track faculty when enrollment is just not justifying the cost … and other departments with lots of undergraduate and graduate students to teach have to suffer to keep them afloat.


And yet, they will turn around and blame us for “incivility” if we call them out as stupid and superstitious. For banning books and firing librarians.



Difference between most most Dems and most MAGA types is that we are perfectly willing to hold our guy accountable. Show us actual proof of Biden peddling influence illegally, and we’ll be right there calling for criminal proceedings.

Yet, somehow (a) I doubt that such evidence actually exists here, and (b) I am astounded at the lengths to which the exact same human beings will go to paint Hunter Biden’s dealings as murky and suspicious while waving away any questions around $2 Billion in Saudi investment through Trump’s son in law. It breaks your brain.



Ohio vote shows enduring power of abortion rights at ballot box, giving Democrats a path in 2024
Great example of an issue where the Dems can unite the base and win back Congressional majorities.
fedilink

Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the committee that oversees Medicaid, likened some states' attempts to stop people from losing coverage to "waving at somebody as their car goes by, and going, well, we contacted you."
fedilink

The ‘free speech absolutist’ [gleefully promoting anti-vaccine misinformation](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/06/19/musk-incites-anti-vaccine-conspiracists-by-mischaracterizing-peter-hotez/?sh=7a335a773108) is now suing a hate speech watchdog for “using flawed methodologies to advance incorrect, misleading narratives."
fedilink


In the aftermath of the Wisconsin election, former Republican Gov. Scott Walker acknowledged the important role students played in determining the outcome but viewed the problem facing the party in a cultural context. “Young voters are the issue,” he wrote on Twitter. “It comes from years of radical indoctrination — on campus, in school, with social media, & throughout culture. We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.” Heh. Edit: Axios has a related piece out this morning: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/23/trump-desantis-colleges-universities
fedilink