Ho hum, Disney plans to lay off 7,000 workers – right as they’re facing union workers agitating for better pay and working conditions. The layoff continues the fiction that “cutting costs” makes your operation more “efficient” and that “efficiency” should “earn” you higher stock prices. Funny how big corporations always treat labor as a “cost,” rather than, you know, as the one thing that keeps them from spiraling into oblivion. But these are, as you know, the fictions big corporations have foisted on us for the last 40 years, and the result is a hollowed-out economy that no longer rewards work. And remember this when you cheer on Disney for “fighting” Ron DeSantis; their “fight” is just as much drama to them as it is to him.
Speaking of the fiction of “cost-cutting” your way to prosperity: doctors at a Florida HCA hospital allege that they face “unsanitary” instruments, roaches in operating rooms, an overloaded Emergency Room, and “anesthesiology errors that resulted in patients waking up while in surgery,” and how’d you like to be that patient? You’ll never guess the rest of the story: management has done nothing about these concerns though they’ve known about them for over a year, and the hospital’s parent corporation is, sigh, “highly profitable” and “its stock is an investor favorite.” Used to be we didn’t expect hospitals to be big money-makers because, you know, they have a purpose higher than mammon, but when you put mammon-worshipers in charge of everything, civilizations crumble and people suffer.
Amazon deforestation fell dramatically in Brazil during the month of January, as Lula’s administration has pledged to end the rainforest destruction that his predecessor, the irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro, foisted on the world. Lula still has an uphill battle, as said asshole predecessor gutted environmental enforcement during his reign of error, and I would also imagine that enforcement is a lot more hazardous than it is here – in Brazil, I would think you’d have a lot more rage-filled developers shooting at you. Nonetheless, I hope we’re able to observe further progress in the years to come.
The Sentencing Project describes why it’s not necessarily good news that the prison population has gone down 25% since 2009. For one thing, that’s 25% over a dozen years, plus a big chunk of that drop came in 2020, as prisons let a lot of folks out so they wouldn’t die of COVID. And considering that we still put more folks in prison than any other country, and that incarceration went up 600 percent between 1980 and 2009, clearly we’ve got a lot of work to do. Decriminalizing pot and moving to a treatment model for drug addiction would sure go a long way toward erasing this stain on our nation.
Ho hum, our “liberal” media still resorts to the same tired tropes when covering Bernie Sanders, in particular his “scowl.” Read the whole thing – if you can name a sin of shallowness, our “liberal” media commits it in covering Mr. Sanders. That reminds me of all the times I had to correct Trump supporters about Bernie’s “yelling” by reminding them that their guy was the Yeller-in-Chief, and of course the problem is broader than that: our “liberal” media lets conservatives throw tantrums they’d put their own kids in time-out for, while reporting on the mildest objections of liberals as evidence of our utter lack of civilization. Maybe liberals should smile more!
Finally, the Indian government has damn near taken over control of the internet there – and big tech corporations (except to some degree Twitter, though I don’t imagine that courage continuing under their new management) have enabled them. I don’t want to hear that big tech corporations should put up with the abuse of “emergency powers” so they can sell ads to the 800 million Indians who use the internet, because the best of us don’t let money dictate every damn decision we make. Also, they said powerful corporations could be a bulwark against a government that abuses its power, and clearly they were wrong. And on purpose, I’m pretty sure.
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