Thanks orl!

Bernie’s 2022 New Year’s resolution

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/04/bernie-sanders-labor-strikes

Our new year’s resolution for 2022: to rise up and fight back

Corporate greed and class warfare are crushing working people. No one is going to save us – we need to rise up together

As we begin the year 2022, in these unprecedented times, I know it’s easy to give in to despair.

We are facing a raging pandemic with seemingly no end in sight. We are rapidly moving toward oligarchy and while income and wealth inequality grows, millions struggle to obtain the basic necessities of life. We have a dysfunctional healthcare system with more than 84 million uninsured or underinsured and nearly one out of four unable to afford prescription drugs. Climate change is ravaging the planet and systemic racism and other forms of bigotry continue to eat away at the fabric of our society. We have a corrupt political system in which corporate money buys elections and a mainstream media that largely ignores the pain that ordinary people experience.

And, in the midst of all this, Republicans across the country are working overtime trying to undermine democracy by making it harder for people of color, young people and those who oppose them to vote in our next elections.

In other words, the challenges we face are enormous and it is easy to understand why many may fall into depression and cynicism. This is a state of mind, however, that we must resist – not only for ourselves but for our kids and future generations. The stakes are just too high. Despair is not an option. We must stand up and fight back.

Here is some good news: working people all over the country are taking on corporate greed and they are winning

And here is some very good news. While the corporate-owned media may not be actively reporting it, working people all over the country, with extraordinary courage and determination, are taking on corporate greed, and they are winning.

Workers at John Deere waged their first strike in more than three decades, stayed on the picket lines and eventually won a contract with strong wage increases, a ratification bonus and improved health insurance.

Striking nurses in Buffalo won raises that moved all workers to at least $15 an hour and a reduction in staff shortages. These nurses fought not only for themselves, but their patients – and they won.

Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers won a major victory after rejecting a contract that would have given new workers lower wages and benefits.

Nabisco workers, struggling against forced overtime, inadequate wages and pensions, a two-tier health system and the outsourcing of jobs, went on strike and won. Once again we saw workers fighting not just for themselves, but for the next generation of workers.

More than 1,400 Kellogg’s workers in Michigan, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Nebraska went on strike for months and won, fighting back against a plan to give new workers lower wages and benefits.

United Airlines promises sustainable flying – but experts aren’t convincedHold the beef: McDonald’s avoids the bold step it must take to cut emissionsFrosts, heatwaves and wildfires: the climate crisis is hitting the wine industry hard

Starbucks employees in upstate New York, for the very first time, organized a union shop in a fight against a giant corporation that did just about everything it could to stop them.

Those are just some of the inspiring efforts that took place last year. Let me tell you about what’s happening right now as workers continue to stand up to some of the most powerful corporate interests in the country.

In Huntington, West Virginia, 450 steelworkers at the Special Metals company have been engaged in a major strike for almost 100 days. Special Metals is a profitable company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett, of course, is one of the richest people in the world, with wealth of over $109bn.

While Special Metals made $1.5bn in profits last year and Mr Buffett became over $40bn richer during the pandemic, executives at this company offered workers an outrageous and insulting contract that includes a zero pay increase for this year, and a totally unacceptable 1% pay raise next year, while quadrupling healthcare premiums and reducing vacation time.

Sadly, the corporate greed that is going on in West Virginia is not an aberration. In Santa Fe Springs, California, about 100 bakery workers, who make cakes for Baskin Robbins, Safeway and Cold Stone Creamery, are on strike against the appropriately named Rich Products Corporation at the Jon Donaire Desserts production plant. About 75% of these employees are Latina women who are often forced into mandatory overtime with little to no notice and sometimes work up to 16 hours a day.

This is a company that made $4bn in revenue last year. During the pandemic, Bob Rich, the majority owner of Rich Products, increased his wealth by more than $2bn. While the workers he employs barely make more than California’s minimum wage, Mr Rich currently has a net worth of more than $7.5bn. Yet, despite his billions in wealth, the “best and final offer” Mr Rich has put on the table for his workers is an insulting $1-an-hour wage increase. That is pathetic.

But it’s also not unusual in the world of corporate greed. In Brookwood, Alabama, about 1,100 workers at Warrior Met Coal have been on strike since April. Just like the bakery workers in California and the steelworkers in West Virginia, these are workers who also have worked as many as seven days a week and up to 16 hours per day.

In 2016, under great pressure to keep the company afloat and keep jobs in their community, these coalminers agreed to a $6-an-hour pay cut – more than 20% of their average salary – and a substantial reduction in their healthcare and retirement benefits as part of a restructuring deal made by Wall Street vulture funds like Blackstone and Apollo.

Meanwhile, the executives at Warrior Met and their Wall Street investors made out like bandits. Since 2017, Warrior Met has rewarded $1.4bn in dividends to its wealthy shareholders while handing out bonuses of up to $35,000 to its executives. Yet, while the company has returned to profitability, Warrior Met has offered its workers a measly $1.50 raise over 5 years and has refused to restore the healthcare and pension benefits that were taken away.

The struggles that these workers are experiencing are not unique. There are millions of other Americans in exactly the same position – people who have to fight tooth-and-nail against wealthy and powerful corporate interests for decent wages, healthcare, pensions and safe working conditions. And let’s be clear. Class warfare in this country is intensifying. Greed is on the rise.

The greatest weapon our opponents have is their ability to create a culture that makes us feel hopeless and diminishes the strength of solidarity

What history has always taught us is that real change never takes place from the top on down. It is always occurs from the bottom on up. That is the history of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and the gay rights movement. That is the history of every effort that has brought about transformational change in our society.

And that is the struggle we must intensify today. At a time when the demagogues want to divide us up based on the color of our skin, where we were born, our religion or our sexual orientation, we must do exactly the opposite. We must bring people together around a progressive agenda. We must educate, organize and build an unstoppable grassroots movement that helps create the kind of nation we know we can become. One that is based on the principles of justice and compassion, not greed and oligarchy.

The greatest weapon our opponents have is not just their unlimited wealth and power. It is their ability to create a culture that makes us feel weak and hopeless and diminishes the strength of human solidarity.

And here is our new year’s resolution. Like the thousands of workers who stood up and fought courageously in 2021, we will do the same. No one individual is going to save us. We must rise up together.

Happy new year.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/03/enough-enough-outrage-big-pharma-hikes-prices-442-drugs

The lapse of Democrats’ expanded child tax credit program at the end of last month has progressive lawmakers and advocates vocally warning of a major spike in child poverty in the new year just as the Omicron variant wreaks havoc across the U.S., fueling a staggering rise in infections and hospitalizations.

While some research suggests the highly transmissible Omicron strain causes less severe disease than other mutations, the enormity of the current wave is driving fears of widespread and potentially sustained societal disruptions, with disproportionate impacts on families without the resources to weather more pandemic-induced economic chaos.

“Unless Build Back Better is passed, the expansion will end and we will see a huge increase in childhood poverty.”

Approved as part of the coronavirus relief package that President Joe Biden signed into law in March 2021, the enhanced child tax credit (CTC) provided eligible families with monthly payments of up to $300 per child under the age of six and $250 per child between the ages of six and 17.

Recent survey data indicates that the payments brought millions out of poverty and helped many low-income families afford food, rent, medications, and other basic necessities.

But thanks to the opposition of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and every congressional Republican, the program expired at December’s end, cutting off a key lifeline at what anti-poverty activists see as the worst possible moment. The sixth and final monthly CTC payments were distributed to the families of more than 61 million children on December 15.

“Yet another sign of the misaligned priorities of this country,” the Rhode Island Poor People’s Campaign said Monday in response to the CTC’s expiration. “Programs of social uplift are sacrificed to the war economy and militarism.”

The New York Times reported over the weekend that with Omicron surging, “economists warn that the one-two punch of expiring aid and rising cases could put a chill on the once red-hot economic recovery and cause severe hardship for millions of families already living close to the poverty line.”

Anna Lara, a mother of two young children in Huntington, West Virginia, told the Times that without the boosted CTC, “it’s going to be hard next month.”

“Just thinking about it, it really makes me want to bite my nails to the quick,” Lara said. “Honestly, it’s going to be scary. It’s going to be hard going back to not having it.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote Monday that it is “totally unacceptable” for the Senate to let the CTC lapse. In November, the House of Representatives passed a version of the Build Back Better Act that would extend the enhanced CTC payments for another year.

“The Senate must act quickly to pass the Build Back Better Act and restore the child tax credit for millions of families who are counting on it,” Jayapal wrote. “The pandemic isn’t over—the relief to withstand it shouldn’t stop.”

The American Rescue Plan reduced childhood poverty in America by over 40% through the expanded child tax credit. It helped millions of families to survive. Unless Build Back Better is passed, the expansion will end and we will see a huge increase in childhood poverty. https://t.co/on2c71b3oP

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 3, 2022

Why would any news organization choose to treat anything Trump and Bannon say about Jan. 6 as remotely newsworthy or legitimate? It's not news, it's not interesting, and it's all lies. And calling this a "counterprogramming" launders all of it. pic.twitter.com/ue43wrpXpf

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 4, 2022

When Rick Scott was governor he revamped the judicial selection process to stack state courts with ideologues. The Koch-led conservative movement of the '10s is leading us to some dark places in the '20s. https://t.co/8ZetfuMJNS

— Aaron (@BobbyBigWheel) January 4, 2022

In the wake of the Texas power grid failure

"Lawmakers created no weatherization requirements for natural gas facilities." They DID however receive three times the political donations from energy companies looking to escape costly regulations so "Yay us!"?https://t.co/UJgjvUePJ0

— Israel Jablonski (@IsrJablonski) January 4, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/opinion/capitol-riot.html

The mainstream press has also had a hand in inflating the right’s sense of itself. Habits like the misrepresentation of Republican voters and operatives as swing voters plucked off the street and the constant, reductive blather about political homogeneity on the coasts — despite the fact that there were more Trump voters in New York City in 2016 and 2020 than there were in both Dakotas combined — create distorted impressions of our political landscape. The tendency of journalists to measure the wisdom of policies and rhetoric based on their distance from the preferences of conservative voters only reinforces the idea that it’s fair for politicians, activists and voters on the left to take the reddest parts of the country into account without the right taking a reciprocal interest in what most Americans want.

That premise still dominates and constrains strategic thinking within the Democratic Party. A year after the Capitol attack and all the rent garments and tears about the right’s radicalism and the democratic process, the party has failed to deliver promised political reforms, thanks to opposition from pivotal members of its own Senate caucus — Democrats who argue that significantly changing our system would alienate Republicans.

Given demographic trends, power in Washington will likely continue accruing to Republicans even if the right doesn’t undertake further efforts to subvert our elections. And to fix the structural biases at work, Democrats would have to either attempt the impossible task of securing broad, bipartisan support for major new amendments to the Constitution — which, it should be said, essentially bars changes to the Senate’s basic design — or pass a set of system-rebalancing workarounds, such as admitting new states ⁠like the District of Columbia. It should never be forgotten that fully enfranchised voters from around the country gathered to stage a riot over their supposedly threatened political rights last January in a city of 700,000 people who don’t have a full vote in Congress.

Jan. 6 demonstrated that the choice the country now faces isn’t one between disruptive changes to our political system and a peaceable status quo. To believe otherwise is to indulge the other big lie that drew violence to the Capitol in the first place. The notion that the 18th-century American constitutional order is suited to governance in the 21st is as preposterous and dangerous as anything Mr. Trump has ever uttered. It was the supposedly stabilizing features of our vaunted system that made him president to begin with and incubated the extremism that turned his departure into a crisis.

Even though hospitalization and death rates aren’t at their highest,they are bound to go up because they lag the infection rate.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/04/us-counts-over-1-million-new-daily-covid-cases-in-global-record-.html

The U.S. has reported a record single-day number of daily Covid cases, with more than 1 million new infections.

A total of 1,082,549 new coronavirus cases were reported Monday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, as the highly infectious omicron variant continues to spread throughout the country.

About 98,000 Americans are hospitalized with Covid-19, according to a seven-day average of data from the Department of Health and Human Services as of Jan. 3, up 32% from a week ago. That figure is approaching peak delta wave levels when about 103,000 people were in hospital beds with Covid across the country in early September, but remains lower than last winter’s high mark of roughly 137,000 U.S. hospitalizations.

The U.S. is reporting an average of about 1,200 daily Covid deaths for the week ended Jan. 3, Johns Hopkins data shows, well below the record numbers seen following last year’s holiday season when the daily average held above 3,000 for about a month starting in January 2021. The death toll tends to lag rises in case counts and hospitalizations, however.

Bitcoin etc. is ludicrous

"If you buy a Bitcoin, you have nothing but the title to a piece of computer code that can do absolutely nothing for you except to the extent that someone else can be induced to pay you money for it." https://t.co/0E8NSn20nc

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) January 4, 2022

Bitcoin is ludicrous

"If you buy a Bitcoin, you have nothing but the title to a piece of computer code that can do absolutely nothing for you except to the extent that someone else can be induced to pay you money for it." https://t.co/0E8NSn20nc

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) January 4, 2022

Here is what will happen when hundreds of thousands of younger investors are smashed by the crypto crash: They will be radicalized. This will not be experienced as simply a decline in prices, because crypto represents much more than a simple investment to its most fervent adherents — it represents a way out of the American trap. It represents the existence of opportunity, the possibility of economic mobility, the validation of the idea that you, a regular, hard working person without connections, can go from the bottom to the top, thanks to nothing but your own savvy choices. When that myth is shattered, disillusionment with the American system will follow. Unfortunately, given the realities of the moment, these newly disillusioned and radicalized and angry and broke people are far more likely to turn to fascism than to socialism.

Crypto, a portfolio of inherently worthless online tokens, is already sustained almost entirely by myth. Its value proposition is so inscrutable that when it melts down, almost any narrative could be crafted to plausibly explain it. It was the Fed! The government! The leftists who hate entrepreneurialism! It was the dark and devious forces of the shadowy deep state! Anything will do. It will enforce the priors of those who placed their faith in crypto as a good substitute for the American dream — a crowd of Barstool Sports readers and tech libertarians and the types of people who used to buy silver bars from Alex Jones before they turned to Bitcoin. The crypto-evangelist population skews heavily towards a sort of New Age libertarian, anti-government right wing-ism, and when they see their financial dreams evaporate, they will likely set their sights for revenge on the things they already despise. The broad effect will lead to a large number of newly angry, bitter, disillusioned, hopeless people who are too steeped in the culture wars to turn towards working class solidarity, and instead turn towards hate.

So, if you want to amuse yourself during these end times, think about how much the timing of the crypto crash might end up affecting the basic existence of American democracy itself. If the crash strikes, say, six months before the 2024 presidential elections, it could be sufficient fuel to propel Donald Trump or one of his acolytes back into the White House and to further poison the national dialogue with rage and a spirit of vengeance. A fun thing to speculate on.

The specifics of these changes, of course, are unpredictable. But I feel safe saying that, when history looks back in hindsight, it will see crypto as a gargantuan bubble that — as capitalism always does — wiped out the finances of tons of small people who could not afford to be wiped out, and left the rich mostly intact, all because it was able to convince regular people to believe that this time was different. The delusion that salvation from capitalism can be found in new, more clever capitalism is incredibly seductive, and always wrong. Let’s hope that we snap out of it before it’s too late.