When I hear that truckers in Canada are "snarling traffic, disrupting business and residential neighborhoods and leading the police to compare the demonstrations to a 'siege' on the nation’s democracy," I wonder if these protestors would have responded to liberal protestors who also clog city streets, albeit just with their bodies, by demanding the "right" to run them down. Of course I don't disapprove of the truckers' tactics, but we all have a duty to protest the real wrongs in our society, and vaccine mandates ain't one of those. Anyone who protests them, when so many worse things that cause actual harm are going on, is a crybaby. That's true no matter how many hard hats they own./p>
Militia members take over a northern California county board of supervisors, after county residents spend nearly two years acting like snowflakes about the county's not-even-all-that-restrictive COVID-19 restrictions. Why Carlos Zapata isn't in jail for the threats he made in 2020 I couldn't say -- except to suggest that maybe the "Reagan Republican" recently deposed in a recall, Leonard Moty, didn't understand that he and his kind were always a gateway drug to this kind of thing. (And Patrick Jones is yet another far-right-winger who says "we want to return to a county where we grew up" without wanting the high tax rates on the rich that were once a feature of every county where folks like him grew up.)
When I hear that Bank of America is refusing to forgive certain small business PPP loans -- even blocking those businesses from getting relief from our Small Business Administration -- I'm tempted to ask how did Bank of America get the power to screw over small businesses like this? Except, of course, that I already know that Republicans controlled the Presidency and the Senate when they passed the CARES Act, which created the so-called Paycheck Protection Program. I also know that even though Democrats wouldn't have done that much better if they controlled everything, "not much better" might be the difference between being in business or being in the poorhouse for at least a few small businesses. Also too, I doubt Tom Brady had this problem.
When confronted with the news that a right-wing pastor in Tennessee actually put together a well-attended book-burning ceremony, the only advice I can offer to Democrats is 1) get video, 2) put it in every Democratic election ad, and 3) say "this is who you vote for when you vote Republican!" Seriously, we're in trouble if book-burning isn't politically toxic to those who do it. (Actually, the right-wing pastor who ran this book-burning has created a lot of drama over the last few years, not limited to 2020 election BS and COVID denialism. If you vote Republican, you're voting for all of that, too! Tolerate no "I'm voting for lower taxes and better judges" rubbish from your friends and neighbors!)
From Julie L. Holcomb at The Conversation we learn "How 18th Century Quakers Led a Boycott of Sugar to Protest Against Slavery." Yes, even good Americans in the 18th century understood that the sugar industry not only enslaved its own workers (who typically died three years after starting work in that brutal trade), but enabled the spread of slavery everywhere else. And we sure ain't the first people ever to link consumption and morals, for the Quakers did that hundreds of years ago; in this, as in so many other things, we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Finally, Larry Summers "predicts" that high inflation will keep on going throughout the year, and I say "predicts" because most of us know by now not only that much of this inflation is corporate price-gouging (when corporate profits are as high as they are, that's kind of a tell!), but that corporations are price-gouging in response to Joe Biden's rather aggressive actions against monopoly power, which makes Mr. Summers's "prediction" more of a threat delivered on behalf of his corporate cronies. But in that context, his "prediction" that inflation won't fall below 3 percent by the end of 2022 would be a rather specific threat to pass along, since if inflation falls to, say, 4 percent, I think Democrats will benefit at the ballot box in November. Perhaps the corporations are a bit afraid Mr. Biden might succeed. Perhaps they should be. But they'll only have reason to be if we fight monopoly power, too.
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