Good news, everyone: Oregon Labcorp workers have overwhelmingly voted to unionize. You’ll recognize Labcorp as one of the two big biometric testing chains in America (along with Quest Diagnostics), and if you’re at all acquainted with the forces aligned against workers described in paragraph 5 (staffing shortages, absurd schedules, private equity parasites constantly demanding cost-cutting and “upcoding”), you’ll find it easy to imagine why Oregon Labcorp workers want more of a say in their work lives. Something I haven’t emphasized enough: these anti-union propaganda meetings take workers away from their work – which workers resent even more when they’re already overworked.
Karl Bode at Techdirt reminds us that thanks largely to local governments, Utahns in 21 cities now enjoy good, affordable community broadband service, upon which 18 internet service-providing corporations compete and actually offer fairly low prices. Of course the big telecom corporations tried to sue UTOPIA out of existence, but failed; they might have done better, you know, building the infrastructure themselves and providing the service at a low price, but then they’d have to stop being parasites. And this solution – governments build the network, private corporations provide services on it – is a moderate solution. I can’t help but note that Utah is one of the most Republican-dominated states in America, and yet UTOPIA has thrived here. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.
Our “liberal” media has spent way too much time trying to “figure out” why Donald Trump said he’d take our birth control away and wouldn’t take our birth control away on the same day, but Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that we don’t have to “wonder” what he’d do – we can just look at the “giant pile of receipts from Trump's four years befouling the White House.” His Administration cut funding for family planning clinics that offered birth control at low or no cost, resulting in 1,000 clinics shutting down or cutting services – mostly for poor folks, because cruelty – and they also gutted the Affordable Care Act mandate that insurers offer birth control at low or no cost. Result: more abortions, more sexually-transmitted diseases, and no confusion about whether another Trump Administration would hurt people or not. Of course they would! What fuels them, other than your pain?
Matt Stoller discusses why the Biden Administration seems to “Hate Its Own Agenda.” “Millions of people saw news about the banning of non-compete agreements by the government, actions against banks via regulation of credit card fees, bans on junk fees, antitrust actions against Google, Apple, airlines, book publishers, and meatpackers,” he writes, yet good Americans “don’t connect it to the Biden Administration,” and the reason for that, apparently, is that the Biden Administration goes out of its way not to discuss it. And well beyond simply refusing to comment on ongoing lawsuits, which is reasonable – they praise big corporations, like, a lot, and won’t even criticize them when they’re laying people off, all of which makes Americans think the Biden Administration isn’t doing anything about their problems. If it were me, I’d be wearing a cap saying I KILL MONOPOLIES everywhere I went. And the consultant class would throw tantrums about it, but regular Americans would love it.
From the “Praise the Lord someone said it exactly this way!” file: Jon Stewart explains that “Trump is the real ‘cancel culture’ – emphasis on ‘cult.’” Long story short: right-wingers constantly complain they’re being “cancelled” every time someone criticizes them, which is whiny and weak, but the only thing that really gets a right-winger cancelled is standing up to Donald Trump. Choice bit: clips show Mitt Romney and Will Hurd getting booed for criticizing “the Boy King” and Mr. Stewart says “Yes, the woke mob shouts you down.” Hey, it’s not my fault it’s so easy to turn right-wingers’ folly back on them. But it is our “liberal” media’s fault that they don’t do it anywhere near enough. We can’t rely on Jon Stewart to save us forever.
Finally, L. Brent Bozell IV, who comes from a long line of L. Brent Bozells, gets almost four years in jail for his role in the January 6 attack on our democracy. Of course his father and grandfather – Joe McCarthy speechwriter/police officer attacker L. Brent Bozell Jr. and Media Research Center founder/constant whiner about violence on TV L. Brent Bozell III – were major players in the conservative movement, in the sense that they were constantly forcing it rightward, particularly on the sort of social issues that keep energizing the feedback loop of masturbatory rage in which right-wingers have trapped about a quarter of all Americans. So the conviction and sentencing of Bozell the Fourth constitutes a sort of full circle for the conservative movement in its autumn years.
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