Wondering how our Postal Service is doing? Well, what do mail slowdowns and the biggest executive bonuses in a decade tell you? They tell you that putting a Trumphole boss in charge of our Postal Service was not only a big mistake, but a big middle finger to the American people. Louis DeJoy got almost twice the money in bonuses this year as a starting assistant mail carrier got in salary. I'd say that's not a sustainable business practice, but folks like Mr. DeJoy are all too adept at channeling the rage of the injured against the wrong people. Keep that in mind next time your mailman complains about Muslims and immigrants.
Joshua Cho at FAIR notices that some folks are playing up "natural immunity" of folks who've already gotten COVID as a way of slamming vaccine mandates, or vaccines generally. Naturally, we learn that the single study (not peer-reviewed, naturally!) "natural immunity" proponents constantly flog actually came up with completely different results than many, many, many other studies. Dr. Marty Makary, by the way, made his bones as a gastrointestinal surgeon; why would I trust him (or, since this is going to come up a lot over the next year, a cardiothoracic surgeon) over an epidemiologist? Just because "they're all doctors" or "they're all health care professionals" doesn't mean they're all experts in everything.
ProPublica, in describing "How Three Families Shielded Their Fortunes From Taxes for Generations," does a great public service in describing the history of taxing-the-rich in America over the last hundred years, a history that, sadly, includes the damage these families have done in cutting taxes for the rich over the last 40-plus years. Particularly the Mellons, whose name these days gets buried behind the Scaifes, the family Sarah Mellon married into in 1927, and whose most notorious member -- Sarah's son, Richard Mellon Scaife -- donated bigly to right-wing causes (and ran the right-wing rag/money-loser Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) until his death in 2014. And you no doubt noticed that even Thomas Mellon freaking married into money! So much for the rich gaining all their largesse on "merit."
Public defender Olayemi Olurin writes an article at Teen Vogue that has needed to be written for a long time, entitled "Law & Order Taught Americans to Root for the Police." Law & Order "show(s) all manner of police violence, coerced confessions, and blatant violations of the law and a suspect’s rights," which helps condition us to "root for the police and the prosecutor." That's all true, and we've all seen hundreds of cop shows and thus have all rooted for the cops more than we would in more tranquil moments, but I'd say the problem is even deeper than that: all cop shows are Dragnet -- that is, they're literally melodramas, where characters only speak dialogue to advance the plot, and thus bad art begets bad civics. And, seriously, do police officers get into 22 complex life-or-death situations a year? And would the state have left Olivia Benson at SVU for 23 years-and-counting?
The Biden Administration will mail as many as half a billion free, at-home COVID tests to any home that asks for one, which is better than making folks fill out forms so their health insurers will reimburse them for their COVID tests, but you still have to ask for one, and it's not clear yet how you'll do that. Still, you asked for better from your government, and you got it! Now cue the whining from right-wingers that they're mailing tracking devices to your home! (News flash: if you have a cellphone, you're already carrying around a tracking device.)
Finally, Sonali Kolhatkar at Counterpunch covers the successful unionization effort at a Buffalo Starbucks. You'll read about the usual union-busting tricks ahead of the election -- suddenly hiring new anti-union staff, suddenly deploying external managers to that one store, management shutting down cafés so they force workers to watch Howard Schultz tell them not to join a union -- and you'll appreciate this zinger, aimed at corporate spokeshacks who call unions "third parties": "our union is going to be made up of baristas and shift supervisors who make up Starbucks. That’s not a third party." (As an aside: why do they want you to think a "third party" is a bad thing? I just can't imagine!) You might even start to think that when Starbucks executives constantly yammer on about the health insurance and tuition assistance they deign to give to their employees, they're actually delivering veiled threats! Don't join a union, or your health insurance gets it! Alternately, join a union and you'll have the power to compel better health insurance, plus you'll work the schedule of a sane person, and for more money!
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