Workers aren’t interested in being cheap labor during a deadly pandemic

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos has a couple interesting quotes. I’ll summarize the one from Tim Miller at Bulwark: CBS News polled the public, asking how much they knew what is in the $3.5t Build Back Better plan. Only 10% replied “a lot of the specifics.” Meaning Democrats are doing a bad job of telling Americans what it is and why it is important. Dworkin also quoted Max Boot of the Washington Post:

I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats — as I have done in every election since 2016 — until the GOP ceases to pose an existential threat to our freedom.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order (with hopes of the legislature turning it into law) saying no entity in Texas can require anyone to get a COVID vaccine.

In August, when Abbott banned Texas government entities from requiring vaccination, he allowed private businesses to make their own decisions, with a spokesperson saying: “Private businesses don’t need government running their business.” With the new ban on businesses requiring vaccination, he appears to have changed his mind about that. But of course, he’s outraged—OUTRAGED, I tell you—about Biden’s pressure on companies.

Several federal contractors based in Texas are caught between the federal requirement of a vaccine mandate and the state requirement to not mandate. I hear the state requirement is being ignored. David West created (and Leah McElrath tweeted) a video showing the spread of COVID. It shows one frame per day starting with February 1, 2020 to the beginning of this month. The color is by county and shows the number of cases per capita. It seems in April 2021 Michigan had its own outbreak. And in September this year there was a time that Nebraska was close to virus free, until suddenly it wasn’t. Dartagnan of the Kos community reported that a Colorado based health system is denying organ transplants to the unvaccinated. Organs available for transplant are scarce. Why waste one on a person who has demonstrated they are less likely survive longer than another transplant candidate? Walter Einenkel of Kos reported on a study in the journal Pediatrics that more than 142,000 children in the US has lost a parent, grandparent, or caregiver to COVID. That is one out of every 515 children. The data is through the end of June, so with the delta surge the numbers are worse. In many cases a caregiver remains. But in many other cases that isn’t true. Foster care facilities have seen about a 15% increase. Of course, white supremacy skewed the numbers:

1 in 168 American Indian/Alaska Native children lost a caregiver 1 in 310 Black children lost a caregiver 1 in 412 Hispanic children lost a caregiver 1 in 612 Asian children lost a caregiver 1 in 753 White children lost a caregiver

Back in May business owners, supported by Republican governors pushed the idea (lie) that increased unemployment benefits were keeping people from returning to work. They stuck to that story even though some companies increased pay and got tons of applicants. Many of those governors cut the benefits early. The national benefits ended in early September. So, of course, workers rushed back to work. Um, no. Clawson reported even with the extra aid cut off a lot of people still chose to not look for work. They had lots of reasons not to – children at home, people with vulnerable health, or simply not feeling safe yet. Wrote Clawson:

The story that business owners—especially restaurant owners—told again and again and again, drawing a steady stream of media coverage, was that workers were lazy and demanding too much. But the reality revealed by the data is that it was the business owners trying to get themselves access to cheap labor, and many U.S. workers aren’t interested in being cheap labor during a deadly pandemic.

Clawson quoted a tweet by Natalie Shure:

The “worker shortage” is corporate PR spin for a capital strike. They’re holding off on hiring in an attempt to force workers to take lower wages. They even try to enlist customers on their side with those bulls--- “sorry we’re slow, no one wants to work right now!” signs.

Meteor Blades, staff emeritus for Kos, discussed the $3.5t infrastructure bill and the attempts of “stubbornly backward Democrats” to cut the size of the bill down to $2t or $1.5t. Since the spending is for ten years this money is only $300b (or $200b or $150b) a year. “A laughable amount far from able to accomplish the desperately needed acceleration of the green transformation already underway.” Yet, these same politicians vote for $1t a year for defense (including Veterans Administration). Wrote Blades:

Obviously, we’re not going to get anywhere near a trillion a year for climate defense. We climate hawks are told—as we have been for decades—to be realistic and patient. The problem is that the political reality of the Senate margin doesn’t mesh with the reality of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that labels our current situation as “code red for humanity.” The counsel of delay is a favorite of those in Congress who pretend they accept what climate scientists are warning us about but don’t act like it. If they really trusted the warnings, they would be demanding the president call a climate emergency and scrambling to take immediate action. They don’t. That delay is just another form of denial.

Want to defend America? Defend it against climate change. It is much more of a threat than any foreign power or rogue terrorist group. Pakaolo, writing the Climate Brief for Kos, reported that unprecedented rains (caused by climate change) have hit China and flooded the country’s coal mines. That is causing energy shortages. That is while the extreme weather is causing a surge in demand along with a fledgling effort to reduce CO2 emissions (that last bit wasn’t explained). In addition to cities going dark various industries were also shut down – including food processing plants and a computer chip maker at a time when chips were already in short supply. Republicans passing bills to keep trans folk out of school sports. Marissa Higgins of Kos reported that while that is going on LGBTQ kids in school sports are feeling supported. Outsports and the University of Winchester surveyed 800 LGBTQ high school and college athletes in the US and Canada who had come out to teammates. 95% of them reported their teammates’ reactions were “neutral” to “perfect.” Less than 5% said the experience was “bad.” Just under one third said teammates were more welcoming than the general student body. A couple lighter things: The Scotsman tweeted a few photos from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, then linked to an article showing all the winners. There is a twitter account only a few months old, titled Family photos recreation. They post pairs of photos, the first from a decade or more ago, the second more recently in which the same people, usually now grown, recreate the poses from the earlier photo. Four little boys fit in one bathtub, but four grown men don’t.