When people die because they don't have health care, I had to bury them

My Sunday movie was the documentary That Pärt Feeling, about modern Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. I’ve known about his music for quite a while and have heard several of his pieces both on the radio and live in concert. I think his most famous piece is Fratres. This documentary featured Pärt coaching Cello Octet Amsterdam. There were also several other leaders of various instrumental and choral ensembles describing what it’s like to perform his music as we heard their groups perform. This included an orchestra in Kinshasa, Congo. Pärt is quite spiritual and religious. In spite of his musical success he leads a simple life. His music is described with words like simple but hard to get right. Like thin ice, beautiful yet full of danger. It’s serene and draws people into connection. He was born in 1935 and his musical training was when Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union. His early compositions were under that influence. In the mid 1970s he saw that style and influence was not for him. He withdrew from musical life for a bit to come up with his own style. An example of that simplicity and serenity is his piece Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror) for violin and piano. This piece was not included in the movie. There are performances on YouTube, one with a score, many without. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed Republicans and the Supreme Court. The Court has been issuing a string of conservative rulings to the delight of Republicans. But at the end of the last term the Court issued a not conservative ruling – Alabama was ordered to redraw its Congressional districts to create a second black majority district. It looks like Republicans have no trouble ignoring rulings they don’t like. The Alabama legislature did redo their map and a second district has more black people, but it isn’t the majority the Voting Rights Act and the Court required. The original plaintiffs are, of course, back in a lower court. Some say Republicans may be OK if the court draws new maps – as a way of saying yeah, there’s another black district, but we didn’t create it. Others think no matter what the lower courts do the case will be back before the Supremes. Dartagnan noted Republicans also want to ignore laws that the nasty guy broke. Which means in the conservative mind the only laws that matter are the ones that coincide with conservative interests. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Ishmael Reed of El País in English:

Rather than exist in a society where members of all ethnic groups have an opportunity for success, millions of American whites would approve of a dictatorship. Ten million would restore Donald Trump to the presidency by force. Recent polls show that Biden and Trump are tied in the presidential race even though Trump said he would suspend parts of the Constitution and construct an all-powerful executive branch with him as the head.

Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos discussed Project 2025, a blueprint for whichever Republican can get into the White House. The document is over 900 pages and it is a battle plan to dismantle the nation’s regulatory framework. Among its goals: block expansion of renewable energy and close the Department of Energy renewable energy office. Cut the EPA environment justice office. Prevent other states from adopting California’s car pollution standards. In summary: stop the federal government’s climate work, block the transition to clean energy, and shift government agencies from regulating the fossil fuel industry to supporting it. Of course, this was released at the end of the hottest month in 125,000 years and when green energy projects are contributing to keeping the economy humming.

To sum up, this horrifying, planet-killing initiative would likely make climate change orders of magnitude worse while undermining the domestic economy and benefiting narrow, entrenched, obscenely wealthy interests. In other words, everything Republicans have been doing for decades—only more so.

Hunter of Kos discussed the heat and the effort of Pablo Manríquez of The New Republic who asked several Congressional Republicans about the heat their own constituents are cooking under. And Hunter heard that “the mocking contempt for the question positively drips from every mouth.” Steve Scalise dismissed the weather as “Southern Louisiana is always hot.” Ted Cruz said, “There are lots of people who have political agendas, and whatever happens with the weather they attribute to climate change. That's not science, it’s ideology.” So the phrase, “Hottest on record” is meaningless and is only a chance to mock. NPR host A Martínez talked to Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign about the federal minimum wage that hasn’t been raised in 14 years. We’re at a point where full time at $15 isn’t a living wage – $20 is. Some of the things Barber talked about: Both Republicans and Democrats could have raised the minimum wage – and haven’t. Both parties praised the pandemic essential workers and the minimum wasn’t raised. Barber mentioned four lies that have kept the minimum wage where it is: 1. Raising the minimum will increase inflation. Debunked by economists. 2. Personal immorality rather than societal immorality that doesn’t provide a living wage. 3. The current $7.25 puts one above the poverty level. 4. The culture wars – trans people, immigrants – are the problem when they’re really a distraction so we don’t notice the culture warriors are the same ones blocking living wages. Barber explained why he is a leader of this campaign:

I was a pastor for 40 years, almost - 30 years at one church. When people die because they don't have health care, I had to bury them. When people are stressed out and die, stroke out because they working so hard, I had to bury them. And I could not stand up in that pulpit and say, God called them home, and this was a natural death. This is policy murder. I've had to watch families be torn apart because they couldn't - they never were home with each other 'cause they were trying to do everything they could. And they are just living in so much anger because they would see these politicians getting all this money and all these CEOs getting this money, and all they wanted - all they wanted was a living wage, that's all. They just wanted the basics of life.

Aaron Mendelson of the Center for Public Integrity interviewed Santiago Mayer of Voters of Tomorrow that has the goal of boosting Gen Z voting. The interview was posted on Kos. Here’s one exchange:

Q. In recent months in 2023, we've seen this concerted effort from Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Ohio and Idaho to make it more difficult for young people to vote. The conservative election denier Cleta Mitchell recently said, “They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm. So they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.” Why do you think these politicians are so aggressively going after student voters? A: Because they're terrified of us. That's the simple answer. They are terrified because they know that young people are not buying what they're selling. We've seen it in 2018. We've seen it in 2020. We've seen it in 2022. Young people are turning away from the hate-filled platform that many people on the right have. I don't think that describing Gen Z as a Democratic generation is accurate. What Gen Z is really looking for is a future that works for them, and a government that works for them, and that protects them. And what we have seen from people on the right, especially over the last few years, and with people like Cleta Mitchell, is that they acknowledge what is happening, they know young people are rejecting them. But they refuse to really turn their platform around. And they are much more interested in continuing this wave of hate and harassment against LGBTQ+ rights, of turning back rights that my generation has never lived without, like abortion rights.

Mark Kreidler, writing for Capital and Main and posted on Kos wrote about the Hollywood strikes.

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” one executive told the news site Deadline. Added another, “It’s been agreed to for months, even before the WGA went out.” A third industry source called the tactic “a cruel but necessary evil.”

Kreidler then tied the Hollywood strikes to the strike by the Los Angeles hotel workers. They haven’t gone on general strike, but are targeting a few hotels at a time.

Decades of deregulated takeover and consolidation across major U.S. industries have struck a hard blow to labor power. Unions are often in the position of negotiating not with their direct employer, but rather with one facet of a much, much larger conglomerate—one with nearly limitless resources and a constant eye on stock price. These corporations, often multinationals, can wait out almost any single labor situation. They may not always want to, but they can. That tips the balance of power, creates a new layer of anxiety for those with livelihoods on the line, and potentially makes negotiating brutally difficult.

There has been a lot of consolidation on both the hotel industry and in Hollywood.

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who was formerly a labor and employment lawyer for several Hollywood studios, wrote recently that for these conglomerates, “The production of entertainment/content might be a sliver of their overall business. …If some banks are ‘too big to fail,’ these companies might be ‘too big to successfully strike.’”