
You know all about Uber and Lyft, those "disruptive" and "innovative" corporations that redistribute the income of unionized taxi drivers upward to undeserving executives by helping good citizens use their own cars as a taxi service? Now ProPublica introduces you to Arise, the corporation that farms out customer service reps who work from home to other big corporations -- customer service reps who must pay thousands of dollars in "startup costs" because of course they're not employees but "independent contractors." But worse, even, than that, or all the corporate outsourcing this encourages, or the less-than-minimum-wage pay you'd get as an Arise "service partner," or the draconian rules about how long your service calls can be or how many refunds you can facilitate, is the former Arise CEO who refers to "lunch, breaks, and training" as wastage. You know, wastage, as in "every moment spent not pleasuring the executive is wasted time." Stupid workers, always needing to work on a full belly and blow off some steam every once in a while! Well, you know what they say: one person's hard-earned rights are another person's wastage. OK, people don't seriously say that, at least not in public, because if they did, they'd out themselves as evil.
Now that our President has COVID-19, Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden says he'll pause attack ads for a while, and (Rep. Omar's understandable criticism aside) that's not just a nice thing to do, it's a politically smart thing to do. Why, it might encourage Mr. Biden to say what he's for rather than merely what he's against (i.e., him losing and our President not losing). And would it be smart to extend that moratorium all the way to Election Day, though our President won't respond in kind? Especially because he won't respond in kind! The Sunday afternoon before Election Day, I watched the Eagles-Giants game and saw three hours of attack ads from both sides, and I knew right then that millions of folks wouldn't vote in two days, and who benefits when good Americans don't vote? Evil Republicans, that's who. So let our President wave his arms like a maniac about crime and protestors and foreigners in all his TV ads, and let Mr. Biden talk about creating jobs by building renewable energy infrastructure and keeping military weapons away from police officers. I know who wins that argument, even if our "liberal" media pundits don't, or pretend they don't.
Buried in paragraph six of this Gabriel Sherman report on how our President's illness has rattled his campaign is an unnamed Presidential ally saying "(i)t's weird that all these Republicans are getting it" and intoning unctuously that "when something major happens thirty days before an election, it usually has to do with the election," a lesson I bet he noted well back in 2016 when James Comey dropped that bomb on Hillary Clinton, amirite? I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but I don't enjoy bad ones at all, and I certainly don't enjoy people drunk with power suddenly pretending to be powerless. And anyway, why are "all these Republicans are getting it"? Because they're walking around without masks on and hobnobbing with sick people! Such tough guys, they are, pissing away all their unearned privilege and exposing their cowardice in the process. A real tough guy wears a mask, after all, because he cares about what happens to other people. (As an aside, I wish Sen. Grassley would get off his ass and get tested, not so much because he's about the only Republican left in the Senate who's worth a damn as because he's 87 damn years old.)
Finally, while we're still on the subject, I'll note that I don't wish COVID-19 on anybody, even someone as despicable as our President, and I want him to fight through and get better for his own sake -- while there's life, there's hope, they say, and if our President can use this adversity to transcend his own malignant narcissism, I'll be the first to applaud! But I'll still, ah, wait for the data on that transformation; after all, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had all those kind things to say about the NHS while it kept him alive, but we all still think he'll gut the NHS first chance he gets. We've seen worse, after all. And not for nothing, but our President will have access to a standard of health care ordinary Americans don't -- they tested him for COVID every day while they did their damnedest to test as few of us regular folks as they could! -- though I guess it's a species of justice that at Walter Reed he'll be getting the socialized medicine he always yells about. And you know what? I don't judge anyone for wishing the man dead. The fuck-your-feelings crowd never seemed to care about such niceties before. And maybe our President should have earned some damn goodwill, instead of using us all like toilet paper these past few years.