ancianita
ancianita's JournalWorkers who keep global supply chains moving are warning of a 'system collapse.'
By Hanna Ziady, CNN Business
Updated 10:24 AM ET, Wed September 29, 2021
"Global supply chains are beginning to buckle as two years' worth of strain on transport workers take their toll," the groups wrote. The letter has also been signed by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the International Road Transport Union (IRU) and the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF). Together they represent 65 million transport workers globally.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/29/business/supply-chain-workers/index.html?fbclid=IwAR24hgQZ37_NzlU_rYjKyrDaqFtCya3UmZOt5AcMVWtb-mmZaR6mC3IMYss
A rant from the Atlantic:
Americans Have No Idea What the Supply Chain Really Is
By Amanda Mull
...Both at home and abroad, labor is the ghost in the machine. The supply chain is really just people, running sewing machines or loading pallets or picking tomatoes or driving trucks. Sometimes, it’s people in the workforce bubbles of foreign factories, eating and sleeping where they work, so companies can keep manufacturing sneakers through a Delta outbreak. The pandemic has tied the supply chain in knots because it represents an existential threat to the lives of the humans who toil in it. The fact that Americans now can safely go on vacation does not mean that people half a world away can safely make new bathing suits for them. The normalcy sought by consumers was created by all of this hidden work, and that normalcy has always been threatened by dangerous working conditions. No one can expect things to go smoothly until everyone is protected.
INTO THE STRETCH 2022 WILL BE THE YEAR OF THE TIPPING POINT
BE READY FOR THE RUN, FELLOW SCOUTS!
Come and see
Where I witness everything
On my knees
Beat it down to get to my soul
Against my will
Anyone can tell it's you coming
Baby don't mind
Leave it on the line, leave it hanging on the rail
Come and ride away
It's easier to stick to the old
Surrounded by the night
Surrounded by the night and you don't give in
But you abuse my faith
Lose it every time, but I don't know where
You're on my side again
So ride the heat wherever it goes
I'll be the one to care
You're all I've got, wait
Don't wanna let the dark night cover my soul
Well, you can see it through the darkness coming my way
Well, we won't get lost inside it all again
Oh, my mind
No one sees me, I'm out here waiting
They don't mind that I'm here, I hear
Throw the bad away, and your mind against it
I would keep you here, but I can't
Oh, I'll talk to you when I make my way back
I don't see it over there where I come from, yeah
Lost and you're hurt again
The easy way to cover my sin
Don't want another dark time to think to myself
We won't get lost inside it all, you're on my way
Well, I can see it in the darkness combing my mind
Well, we can hear the voices war inside
Yeah, and you won't get lost inside it all
You're on my way
NICOLLE WALLACE -- HEADING INTO THE STRETCH, SUBPOENAS OF THE J5 GANG TIGHTEN THE NOOSE AROUND TFG
No matter their level of cooperation, they will be nailed by the documents.
There will likely be no optimal point for AG Garland and the DOJ to charge Trump, but charge him they must.
The attackers and killers of democracy must be imprisoned asap.
AT&T Quickly Ditches Pledge Not To Fund Congressional Insurrectionists
Going into 2022, we must go after corporate funders of coup plotters.Thu, Sep 23rd 2021 6:33am — Karl Bode
Much like the company's dedication to women, AT&T's dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they'd be ceasing all funding to politicians that supported the attack on the Capitol and the overturning of, you know, fucking democracy. Of course that promise was never worth all that much, given the the umbrella lobbying orgs companies like AT&T used never really stopped financing terrible people.
Initially, AT&T made a big stink about how it had suspended funding to all 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election. But not only did AT&T not actually suspend funding via its numerous policy and lobbying tendrils, it didn't even really ever stop funding insurrectionists directly:
"In February, however, AT&T donated $5,000 to the House Conservatives Fund. The chair of the House Conservatives Fund is Jim Banks (R-IN), who objected to the certification of the Electoral College in January. Banks also signed an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court supporting Texas' efforts to throw out the election results in several states."
Back in March, when news outlets like the Dallas News pressed AT&T on why it was still funding insurrectionists, the company offered up some convoluted gibberish about how it was more ethically policing its PAC spending:
"We have been assured that none of the employee PAC’s contributions will go toward the reelection of any of those members of Congress,” Balmoris said. “Any future contributions to multi-candidate PACs will require such consistency with the policy suspending individual contributions."
Six months later, when a reporter tries to press AT&T on the fact it continues to fund insurrectionists, it just goes radio silent...
In short, AT&T funded a bunch of politicians who filled the public's head with propaganda and bullshit, resulting in a violent if clumsy attempt to steal an election. Now AT&T doesn't want to talk about it, and hopes that if it stays quiet about it, the storm will pass. And they're probably right, given the broader press' ongoing tendency to normalize what happened earlier this year (largely because they don't want to offend leak sources and advertisers). Which, of course, all but guarantees that, sooner or later, the same bullshit is going to play out all over again, potentially with more calamitous results.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210922/08254447610/att-quickly-ditches-pledge-not-to-fund-congressional-insurrectionists.shtml
We can't ignore when the press does try to get to donor levels re Jan 6, and we should credit them when they do. Because the long corporate game brought us corporate capture of government.
This is why corporations will continue to make the Constitution, written for humans, be in crisis. Corps' capture and crisis are why their congressional and statehouse tools are the fascist threat.
Dark money corporate fascists must be outed (not just billionaire fascists), especially when they play the GOP lying game, and the Mitch McConnell stall game. Lack of corporate accountability in funding human fascists is the driver of why this nation is an election away from being corporate fascist.
Right now, MSNBC does not call out population vote nullification AS nullification, even though that is exactly what state house moves really are. Popular voter nullification.
MSNBC calls it politics, an interpretation that is blind to forces trying to undo democracy.
This is what the Capitol police reminded us is important about Jan 6: don't just find the political actors, find the funders behind them.
We must. not. let daily he-said/she-said and hype distract us about the tipping point that is 2022.
2022 is as much about fictional personhoods' money vs humans voting rights' democracy, as it is about candidates who are pro- women, pro-infrastructure, climate and immigration and pro-descendants.
Shoring Up the Constitution: At SCOTUS, a Plea To Reveal Secret Surveillance Rulings
from today's NYT front page section:“Secret law of all types causes several concrete harms that are antithetical to democratic norms,” their brief said. “Secret law prevents the public from understanding and shaping the law and thus inhibits democratic accountability; disables checks on governmental abuses of the law; and weakens the quality of the law itself.”
The surveillance court, created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, rules on government surveillance requests and programs in the context of national security. It generally hears from only one side — the government — and much its work is of necessity secret. But its interpretations of federal laws can be enormously consequential...
Mr. Toomey, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, said the case was essentially about whether the Supreme Court has any role to play. “One of the key questions here,” he said, “is whether the Supreme Court can and should exercise its powers of review over the FISA court’s decision making.”
For even more interesting arguments:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/us/supreme-court-fisa-surveillance-rulings.html
MAYA Is Key to Designing the Future Humans Will Want
Why do we like what we like? Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design, had a theory of familiar surprises, be they baby names or unifying politics.
Human inertia about the future lies not in a lack of Novelty,
but in an immersion with Data, and/or
citizen journalism that records on-the-ground events,
astroturfed "citizen journalism," that can promote ideology,
algorithm uses that can shut down trust across communications platforms, and/or
fact checking that can promote tactical as much as objective communications.
President Biden Unveils Plan to Boost Covid Vaccinations and Fight Delta variant -- 9/9/2021
Merrick Garland Announces The U.S. Lawsuit Against the State of Texas
If you're discouraged ...
I would encourage you to visit with Heather McGhee a while. If your time is tight, at least sit with her through her last two chapters of The Sum of Us. Whenever Rachel or Chris or Lawrence have endorsed a book,
-- and McGhee's was one -- they have never failed to pass on solid knowledge that helps us rebuild the body politic.
To paraphrase Dr. King and Heather McGhee, the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. But we know our progress has not been guaranteed. When the arc in America bends
-- from slavery in the 1860's and returns to convict leasing in the 1880''s;
-- when it bends from Jim Crow in the 60's and returns to mass incarceration in the 70's,
-- when it bends from indigenous genocide to an epidemic of Indigenous suicides
We finally learn that as it bends, only to sway back, we now have to come to realize, and admit, that we have not touched the root.
Because the laws, rulings and enforcements we make are expressions of a root belief.
Now it is time to face the nation's most deep-seated belief, the great lie at the root of our nation's founding -- the belief in the hierarchy of human value.
We are still there.
And so, at this moment, the process we're going through is challenging us to finally settle this question:
Who is an American, and who are we to one another?"
It is a question harder for us than for most other countries, because we are the world's most radical experiment in democracy -- we're in a nation of ancestral strangers that has to work to find connection, even as we grow more diverse every day. The hardest question has taken us the longest to answer. And so, yes, we feel discouraged right now. We want to "get there."
But everything depends on the answer. Politics offers two visions of why all the people of the world have met here:
one in which we are nothing more than competitors (the corporate vision set up by European monarchial hierarchal societies), and
another in which the proximity of so much difference forces us to admit our common humanity.
The choice has never been starker. As the nation is viscerally anxious about who belongs, many in power -- you know, the crazy class of billionaires that run Trumpublicans' message machine -- have made it their overarching goal to sow distrust about the goodness of the Other. Right now they are hair-on-fire holding to their tiny idea of We the People, denying what WE are becoming. They megaphone their warning that demographic changes are the unmaking of America, making us (as one of their mouthpieces, Tucker, says) "poorer, dirtier, and more divided."
But what we common sense Americans know, even gripped with anxiety and frustration, is that that their threat is our nation's salvation. Because when a nation founded on racial hierarchy truly rejects that root belief, then and only then will we have discovered a New World. To make that New World manifest we must live our lives in solidarity across color, gender, origin and class by demanding changes to the 'rules' that disrupt the very notion that those with wealth are worth more than us in a democracy.
Since the nation's founding we have not allowed diversity to be our official superpower, but when we have occasionally blasted past the divide and conquer messaging and structures set up by the Koch class, we have seen that America is more than the sum of its disparate parts.
Joe Biden's saving the soul of America is about emerging from these crises with new roots, a new birth rooted in the knowledge that WE are so much more than the original 'we' in the founders' "We the People," which was just some of us. Biden, and we who manifest solidarity, bring forth a whole new meaning for Building Back Better.
Our new WE will be the soul of America -- greater, richer, because it is the new sum of us.
The Ghost of Tom Joad -- Bruce Springsteen
Men walking along the railroad tracks
Going someplace, there's no going back
Highway patrol choppers coming up over the ridge
Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge
Shelter line stretching around the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleeping in the cars in the southwest
No home, no job, no peace, no rest
Well, the highway is alive tonight
But nobody's kidding nobody about where it goes
I'm sitting down here in the campfire light
Searching for the ghost of Tom Joad
He pulls a prayer book out of his sleeping bag
Preacher lights up a butt and he takes a drag
Waiting for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last
In a cardboard box beneath the underpass
You got a one-way ticket to the promised land
You got a hole in your belly and a gun in your hand
Sleeping on a pillow of solid rock
Bathing in the city's aqueduct
Well the highway is alive tonight
Where it's headed, everybody knows
I'm sitting down here in the campfire light
Waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad
Now Tom said, "Mom, wherever there's a cop beating a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight against the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me, Mom, I'll be there
Wherever somebody's fighting for a place to stand
Or a decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody's struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, Ma, and you'll see me"
Well the highway is alive tonight
But nobody's kidding nobody about where it goes
I'm sitting down here in the campfire light
With the ghost of old Tom Joad
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,053
