Tip jar for Orl! Happy T-Giving!

For those of us blessed to spend time and share a meal with loved ones (even if virtually), I ask that we give thanks to the native people whose land we live on.

Hoping everyone can take a moment to reflect, disconnect and spend time w loved ones 💜 pic.twitter.com/ta2nQGD0vC

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) November 26, 2020

From the #TeamTlaib family to yours, happy #Thanksgiving, #13thDistrictStrong. pic.twitter.com/TxhDOXxInb

— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) November 26, 2020

“… let us pray for a speedy end to strife and the establishment on earth of freedom, brotherhood, and justice for enduring time.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Thanksgiving Proclamation 1941https://t.co/ON5X03jqZF

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) November 26, 2020

Happy Thanksgiving 🦃🦃🦃

Let’s give thanks today to Amy COVID Barrett

“Amidst a pandemic that has already claimed over a quarter million American lives, the Court today enjoins one of NY’s public health measures aimed at containing the spread of #COVIDー19 in areas facing the most severe outbreaks.“ – Justice Sotomayor

— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) November 26, 2020

This #Sotomayor dissent is 🔥🔥🔥

1) Says that the #SCOTUS majority’s decision “will only exacerbate the Nation’s suffering. pic.twitter.com/DF1Qyxz8WE

— Dean Wallace 🗳🗽 (@deanofdublin) November 26, 2020

Your religious views now give you the right to withhold the services of your business from people whose “lifestyle” you disagree with, withhold healthcare from women & attend superspreader events that let you infect your neighbors with a deadly virus. https://t.co/SfDJ6tECB7

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) November 26, 2020

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/corporations-coronavirus-pandemic-hazard-pay-public-citizen-report

Imagine what would happen if every retail worker in the United States took the day off. Even during a non-pandemic year, the economic consequences would be massive and swift: millions of consumers unable to purchase basic goods and the sudden drop in sales quickly sending shockwaves through the marketplace — to say nothing of the chaos that would ensue at thousands of individual stores across America as hapless corporate managers desperately tried to keep their doors open and their lights on without any employees present to perform their usual tasks.

The current context only underscores the point further: without the approximately 4.6 million retail workers stocking shelves, bagging groceries, cleaning stores, and fulfilling warehouse orders during the pandemic, the economy as we know it would collapse and catastrophe would loom.

In a parallel reality where a person’s earnings were even remotely commensurate to their social contribution, the average employee at Target or Amazon would currently be enjoying their eighth month straight of boosted pay and enhanced benefits. That isn’t the case, of course.

In 2019, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median compensation for a retail sales worker was just $12.23 an hour. Even by the pitifully low standards of most industries, people stocking shelves and staffing counters are particularly unlikely to be union members — meaning most retail workers are disempowered as well as badly paid.

During the pandemic, many have also been at added risk of infection thanks to the very nature of their jobs. Amazon alone has twenty thousand cases of COVID-19 among its workforce, and as of September, the United Food and Commercial Workers (the largest union representing grocery store workers) reported that some 238 of its members had died from the virus. One especially alarming October study of a single store in Massachusetts found the rate of infection among employees to be a full 20 percent.

If times are particularly tough for millions of workers at large retail chains, they’ve rarely looked better for owners and shareholders.

Retail workers might be indispensable during a pandemic, but in an economy hardwired to guarantee vast profits to a small few, their contribution is finding little reward even as company balance sheets report record returns. When the virus first hit, “we’re all in this together” was the reigning sentiment expressed in press releases from America’s largest companies. In their corporate boardrooms, it was clearly business as usual.

When even Whitehouse and Meeks are issuing warnings. But Biden takes McConnell at his word.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-transition-conciliatory-tone/2020/11/25/aacd4ed6-29bf-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html?outputType=amp&utm_source=reddit.com

But while the State nomination, along with several other Cabinet picks rolled out this week, underscore Biden’s intention to govern as a conciliator and not a partisan warrior, some on the left worry that his early moves signal weakness even before he steps into the Oval Office. They say Biden, 78, naively believes the Senate still functions as it did during his 36 years there, with potential for compromise and conciliation.

“To meet Republicans where they are is to meet them in Fantasyland,” said Rebecca Katz, who worked as a top aide to Nevada Democrat Harry M. Reid when he served as Senate majority leader. “We don’t have any time to spare. Sometimes you’ve got to fight. We can’t fold before we’ve had one fight.”

On Capitol Hill, other Democrats are sounding similar warnings.

“There is still plenty of room for bipartisanship, but real bipartisanship, from a position of strength, not begging Republicans to confer bipartisanship upon us if we do things their way,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is worried that Biden’s outreach to the GOP is being met with resistance.

Already, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the liberal leader who rallied his forces on behalf of Biden during the general election, is worried that Biden’s posture to reach out to the right will leave the left wing of the party untended.

“It seems to me pretty clear that progressive views need to be expressed within a Biden administration,” Sanders said in an interview with the Associated Press. “It would be, for example, enormously insulting if Biden put together a ‘team of rivals’ — and there’s some discussion that that’s what he intends to do — which might include Republicans and conservative Democrats — but which ignored the progressive community.”

Democratic members urged Biden not to dial back any Cabinet choices.

“He should go by the person that he feels is the most qualified,” said
Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.) “Don’t worry about the political aspects of the Republicans, many of whom still have not acknowledged that he’s the president of the United States.”

Rather than gearing up for a fight, Biden has said he expects some back-and-forth with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) when it comes to Cabinet nominations.

“I take McConnell at his word,” Biden said recently when discussing his process for making selections.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2020/nov/11/bolsonaro-takes-swipe-at-biden-and-again-dismisses-covid-deaths-video

Jair Bolsonaro has said Brazil needs to ‘stop being a country of sissies’ over the Covid pandemic. Speaking at an event where few attendees wore a mask, the Brazilian president claimed he was sorry about coronavirus-related deaths, but “all of us are going to die one day”. Taking a swipe at the US president-elect, Joe Biden, who is apparently threatening Brazil with sanctions if fires in the Amazon rainforest are not dealt with, Bolsonaro said that “diplomacy is not enough […] there must be gunpowder”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/26/democracy-rigged-trump-biden

The Republican establishment, despite being unfairly advantaged by the skewed composition of the electoral college, by over-representation in the House due to partisan gerrymandering and in the Senate due to equal State suffrage, has been in no hurry to reject Donald Trump’s ludicrous allegation that the American electoral system is rigged to favor Democrats. Sweating the make-or-break Georgia runoffs, the party’s leaders are apparently frightened to cross the mad king, who owns their voters, lest he cause their ratings to plummet as he is doing with Fox News. But Republican complicity with this unprecedented attack on American democracy is not a matter of short-term expediency or fear of reprisals. It is much worse than that. Mitch McConnell and the others are not merely humoring the president until his mania subsides. Trump’s voters are the Republicans’ voters and the Republican party cannot easily cut them, and their deranged conspiracy theories, loose even after 20 January.

This has important implications for how Biden should respond to the incalculable damage Trump has inflicted on the country, including how his Department of Justice approaches the restoration of the rule of law.

The Republican party is deeply committed to the outrageously tilted playing field that allows a minority of voters to choose a majority of senators and, indirectly, a majority of supreme court justices, not to mention the occasional president as in 2000 and 2016. They are an unabashedly anti-democratic party in that sense alone, even if we set aside their brazen efforts at voter suppression and voter intimidation. This is perhaps the main reason why its leaders have proved so reluctant to dissociate themselves from Trump’s specious allegation that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. They know that the system is rigged. It is rigged to favor Republicans. And they relish not only the irony of Trump’s audacious reversal of the truth, but also the way it distracts attention from the genuinely unconscionable rigging that gives an American minority the power to impose its will on the American majority.

I sang this song in grade school