#the cost of having covid in america

[7thedisasterdyke]

NGYAEHHHHHHHH

The MOTHERFUCKING FSA CRITERIA FOR APPLYING WITHOUT PARENT INFORMATION

WHA T THE FUCK ARE THEY

ALL IT TELLS ME IS "oh you can't use this this and this" and it's like MOTHERFUCKER. TELL ME WHAT FITS THE BILL

NOT TO MENTION THE SLOW-AS-GODDAMN-FUCK LOADING SPEEDS ON THE FSA WEBBED SITE, CAN'T GET SHIT DONE IF I HAV E TO WAIT 15 YEARS TO DO IT

i'm in my bed with GODDA<N COVID and i want to FUCKING DIE OF IT and this GODDAMN COLLEGE BULLFUCKERY IS NOT GODDAMN HELPING

I'm fucking sobbing in bed with a goddamn respiratory disease, blood oxygen at damn near dangerous levels, all because the fucking system is built to fuck me over because we don't have paperwork proving we were legally kicked out at 17

i'm so tired

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #24

June 21-28 2024

The US Surgeon General declared for the first time ever, firearm violence a public health crisis. The nation's top doctor recommended the banning of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, the introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons. President Trump dismissed Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in 2017 in part for his criticism of guns before his time in government, he was renominated for his post by President Biden in 2021. While the Surgeon General's reconstructions aren't binding a similar report on the risks of smoking in 1964 was the start of a national shift toward regulation of tobacco.

Vice-President Harris announced the first grants to be awarded through a ground breaking program to remove barriers to building more housing. Under President Biden more housing units are under construction than at any time in the last 50 years. Vice President Harris was announcing 85 million dollars in grants giving to communities in 21 states through the  Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing (PRO) program. The administration plans another 100 million in PRO grants at the end of the summer and has requested 100 million more for next year. The Treasury also announced it'll moved 100 million of left over Covid funds toward housing. All of this is part of plans to build 2 million affordable housing units and invest $258 billion in housing overall.

President Biden pardoned all former US service members convicted under the US Military's ban on gay sex. The pardon is believed to cover 2,000 veterans convicted of "consensual sodomy". Consensual sodomy was banned and a felony offense under the Uniform Code of Justice from 1951 till 2013. The Pardon will wipe clean those felony records and allow veterans to apply to change their discharge status.

The Department of Transportation announced $1.8 Billion in new infrastructure building across all 50 states, 4 territories and Washington DC. The program focuses on smaller, often community-oriented projects that span jurisdictions. This award saw a number of projects focused on climate and energy, like $25 million to help repair damage caused by permafrost melting amid higher temperatures in Alaska, or $23 million to help electrify the Downeast bus fleet in Maine.

The Department of Energy announced $2.7 billion to support domestic sources of nuclear fuel. The Biden administration hopes to build up America's domestic nuclear fuel to allow for greater stability and lower costs. Currently Russia is the world's top exporter of enriched uranium, supplying 24% of US nuclear fuel.

The Department of Interior awarded $127 million to 6 states to help clean up legacy pollution from orphaned oil and gas wells. The funding will help cap 600 wells in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, New York and Ohio. So far thanks to administration efforts over 7,000 orphaned wells across the country have been capped, reduced approximately 11,530 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions

HUD announced $469 million to help remove dangerous lead from older homes. This program will focus on helping homeowners particularly low income ones remove lead paint and replace lead pipes in homes built before 1978. This represents one of the largest investments by the federal government to help private homeowners deal with a health and safety hazard.

Bonus: President Biden's efforts to forgive more student debt through his administration's SAVE plan hit a snag this week when federal courts in Kansas and Missouri blocked elements the Administration also suffered a set back at the Supreme Court as its efforts to regular smog causing pollution was rejected by the conservative majority in a 5-4 ruling that saw Amy Coney Barrett join the 3 liberals against the conservatives. This week's legal setbacks underline the importance of courts and the ability to nominate judges and Justices over the next 4 years.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

[odinsblog]

When the Public Health Emergency ends "for people without insurance, there will no longer be a pathway through Medicaid for free COVID-19 testing, vaccines, or treatment."

“The costs of COVID-19 vaccines are also expected to skyrocket once the government stops buying them, with Pfizer saying it will charge as much as $130 per dose. … People with private insurance could have some out-of-pocket costs for vaccines, especially if they go to an out-of-network provider, Levitt said. Free at-home COVID tests will also come to an end.” (source)

SO so glad that Joe Biden sided with big pharma and blocked the Wellstone Act for greedy corporations like Gilead Sciences back in the year 2000. And SO happy that he was vehemently against Medicare For All. 🤬

The long and short of this is that if you are poor and/or uninsured, you are going to need to pay for your own COVID tests and vaccinations.

Now ask yourself: if an underpaid frontline worker like a food server or grocery store clerk—remember when everyone was calling them “heroes” & essential workers?—if those workers feel sick but don’t have any paid time off and can’t afford to pay for their own test and vaccines, do you think they are going to take a week off without pay, or continue working and possibly spreading the virus? Rhetorical question; this already happens.

Welcome to America. If you’re poor, you’re dead.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Andrew Perez at Rolling Stone:

It happened, again: Democrats lost a winnable election to a racist, orange-makeup-wearing carnival barker, despite his odiousness, immorality, and unbridled corruption. This time, Donald Trump campaigned on an even darker agenda — the mass deportation of migrants, calls for more violent policing, and demands of retribution against his enemies — and he didn’t have to try to steal the election in the courts or via a violent coup. In the battleground states, he appears to have run the table, and he will likely win the popular vote outright, something a Republican hasn’t done in two decades.  There are plenty of factors that could help explain why Vice President Kamala Harris lost — and why the race ultimately was not that close: Joe Biden’s crushing unpopularity; pervasive sexism, racism, and xenophobia; an American culture that stupidly valorizes the ultra-wealthy and licks their boots. There was the Harris campaign’s decision to run a safe, staid campaign, from Democrats’ favorite failed playbook, Be Like Republicans. There was her refusal to break from Biden over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza — carnage that plays out on our screens daily, and has particularly affected young people.    The most likely explanation, however, for why Harris lost is the most basic one: Americans are deeply dissatisfied with a brutal economy. 

After Washington put an end to Covid-era pandemic aid programs, Americans suffered two years of sky-high inflation, impacting the price of nearly everything, alongside higher interest rates — which drove up credit card rates, mortgage rates, the costs of car loans, and more. Amid a punishing cost-of-living crisis, voters have now punished Democrats.  Exit polls and other survey results coming out of the 2024 election are incredibly clear that this contest was, as is often the case, about the economy, stupid. Edison Research exit polls show that two thirds of voters believe the state of America’s economy is poor or not so good; 69 percent of them voted for Trump. Asked what the most important issue in their vote was, 31 percent of voters said the economy, and 79 percent of those voters supported Trump.

The world is in a punish all incumbents mood, as we saw in the UK earlier this year, and sadly, the USA wasn’t immune, as de facto incumbent Kamala Harris (D) lost to the 34x convicted felon, insurrection-inciter, adjudicated rapist, and vile bigot Donald Trump (R).

Swapping out Joe Biden for Harris may have helped save us in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Virginia, New Mexico, and New Jersey. Had Biden been the nominee, the Dems would have lost most, if not all, of these.

[communistkenobi]

actually one thing that has been very elucidating while reading academic scholarship on anti-vaxx movements post-Covid is that a lot of seemingly “apolitical” or non-fascist participation in anti-vaxx and vaccine skeptical protests/demonstrations/social media activity is the result of decades of neoliberal governance - everyone is a ‘critical consumer citizen,’ a subjectivity that produces a public who is deeply invested in ‘shopping for alternatives’ and ‘getting the best deal,’ meaning that mass vaccination programs and mandates, even when universal and socialised, are viewed with suspicion by the public. These people are then primed to listen to the fascists who lurk among these movements, even if they’re a minority. I think one of the larger, more devastating takeaways of the pandemic is that our current situation in North America - low vaccination rates, high infection rates, lots of Covid variants - is the direct result of decades-long neoliberal projects to gut public infrastructure and turn everything into a privatised consumer product. Public goods like universal vaccination programs are therefore seen not as such but as authoritarian, anti-competitive disruptions of a free and open marketplace. To call it a PR disaster would be massively underselling it, but the public appears to have disappeared, replaced instead with an infinite mass of individuals in a market who all have to come to their own decisions about every aspect of their life, even at the cost of everyone around them. what a miserable place we’re in

[uboat53]

Here we go, in no particular order, here are some of my thoughts on what we'll see in the next year or two based on the election results:

THE ECONOMY

Unless something pretty serious happens, it's very likely that Trump will make good on his promise of massive tariffs on all American imports. Given that we import a lot of stuff from the rest of the world (check any manufactured item in your house, I'll bet it doesn't say "made in America"), that means prices will likely increase substantially. The predictable result of that is probably a pullback of consumer spending and a recession. If we're really unlucky, we'll have inflation and a recession at the same time, the dreaded "stagflation".

More broadly, it's likely that the only thing Republicans will do economically in terms of legislation is pass a massive, deficit financed tax cut for the rich. Again. Honestly, this is an easy one to guess because it's what they do every time they have power. It's direct effect will probably be minimal (though any effect is likely to be inflationary) although it remains an open question how long the US can run up the credit card without any major economic consequences.

We're also likely to see a wave of deregulation. Expect the new administration to try to roll back all of the consumer protections that Biden has put in place, end the lawsuits against big corporations that are exploiting their market power, and generally tilt the playing field back in favor of big corporations and wealthy people.

Oh yes, and let's talk about the immigration thing here. Trump is promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants (by current estimates there are about 11 million of them). And, look, I'm not a professional economist, but I think it's reasonably easy to guess what happens when you remove millions of people of working age from the labor pool. Again, this is likely to be inflationary (less workers available, so pay and, thus, costs, go up) and recessionary (fewer consumers buying things) at the same time.

PUBLIC HEALTH

With a knowledgeable public health expert like RFK Jr. leading the government's public health efforts, what could possibly go wr… sorry, couldn't finish that with a straight face. Yeah, Trump's gone off the deep end public health-wise ever since the public health people kept pointing out how badly he was screwing up his last major public health emergency, so now he's only listening to quacks and nut jobs.

The odds are pretty good that vaccines are on the target list and the administration will reduce or eliminate programs that encourage them. It's a good bet that, in the next decade or so, we'll see a resurgence of diseases like measles and polio that we thought we'd eradicated. Of course, if we get another pandemic like Covid, I'd bet on a high body count and massive economic impact as well.

We're also likely to see more and more women dying due to pregnancy-related complications. Biden was pushing hard to enforce a federal law that requires hospitals to save women's lives, but it's doubtful that Trump will keep doing that. He'll also likely not enforce any other protections and allow even stronger crackdowns on abortion in states that are eager to do so.

MINORITIES

If you're not a straight, white, cisgender, Christian man, things are likely to get a lot worse for you over the next four years. Look for the administration to take every opportunity to attack gay and trans people and to promote Christianity over other beliefs. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is also likely to be neutered, as it has been under every Republican administration since at least Reagan, so many states will happily violate the rights of racial minorities without any federal pushback. The same is true of laws and regulations that protect women.

Beyond the official, though, we also have to face the societal effects of another Trump Presidency. Despite the loud protestations of his supporters, Trump is beloved among the racist far-right, and for good reason. His administration borrowed heavily from their ideas and their language and even used their personnel and there's no reason to expect a second term to be any different. There is a reason that right-wing terror surged in our country in Trump's first term and it'll probably do the same now.

Expect more shootings of black and brown people and more attacks on Jews and Jewish places of worship. The racists believe the President is on their side and he's given them no reason to think otherwise.

THE NEXT ELECTION

All right, I'm going out on a limb here and this is my longest range projection, but it's a fairly reasonable bet that Democrats will take/retake the House of Representatives in 2026. I can confidently predict this because the party that controls the presidency has lost House seats in nearly every election since the Great Depression. Based on current results (which may change as western states count more votes), the Republicans will have a 4 vote margin in the House and the average midterm loss is 27 seats. Heck, they lost 47 seats in 2018 the last time Trump was in office. Even the Democrats who had a good year in 2022 still lost 10 seats. Seems like a pretty good bet.

As for the Senate, that's a bit harder to predict. At the moment, Republicans will have anywhere from 52 to 54 seats when all the votes are counted from this election. Based on the 2020 Senate elections map (that's the class of Senators that will be up for re-election in 2026), I'd count anywhere from 2-4 seats that the Democrats might be able to flip, the rest are probably safe. So is it possible that Democrats could retake the Senate in '26? Absolutely. Is it likely? Good question. Ask me in a year or so.

CONCLUSION

It's likely that life in America is going to get worse over the next year or two, how much worse depends a lot on how we react. At best, we'll likely face further inflation (every economic policy Trump has voiced support for is inflationary), increased sickness and disease, and increased attacks on the lives and well-beings of anyone who isn't a straight, white, cisgender, Christian man. At worst, well, all of those things but much more intense.

If we're fortunate, Democrats will take the House and serve as a much-needed check on the worst impulses of President-elect Trump. If not, at least the next election will likely do it, though a good deal of damage will be done between now and then.

[tenaflyviper]

An Important Fact Check:

Trump lost the popular vote TWICE.

Trump has lost a great deal of support since 2020: It began with Jan. 6, and now many have abandoned him since becoming a convicted felon.

Republicans targeting Social Security, Medicare, and women's rights have cost them a great deal of support, especially among moderates.

More and more people are becoming aware of Project 2025, and are rightfully horrified.

Covid killed disproportionately more republicans than democrats.

Trump would need all 8 million Gen Z that are now eligible to vote, and polls show the majority of Gen Z leans left.

Trump literally cannot win if we just show up to vote against him.

Republicans cannot enact Project 2025 without political power.

The next president will be choosing 1-2 SCOTUS seats.

Voting blue will ensure a brighter future in America.

[robertreich]

Debunking “No One Wants To Work Anymore” 

I keep hearing "no one wants to work anymore."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporate America’s biggest lobbying group, claims there are over 10 million job openings right now in the US for which employers can’t find workers.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell says the U.S. is dealing with a “structural labor shortage” that won’t be resolved anytime soon.

But here’s the truth: there is no labor shortage.

There is a shortage of jobs paying sufficient wages to attract workers to fill them.

When a problem is wrongly described, the solutions posed often turn out to be equally wrong.

For most Americans, real inflation-adjusted wages continue to drop. Any pay increases workers may have earned in the past few years have actually been pay cuts, because wages have lagged behind the rising costs of basic necessities — like housing, food, childcare, and healthcare.

You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see why some workers might say the hell with it.

So, what should be done about the difficulty employers are having finding workers?

Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.

Many corporations are raking it in right now, they can clearly afford to.

Of course Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the so-called “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need without raising wages.

But the Fed increasing interest rates to slow the economy will prevent millions of people from getting desperately-needed raises and cause millions more to lose their jobs — disproportionately low-wage workers, women and people of color.

Meanwhile, Republicans and some corporate economists blame the “labor shortage” on overly generous unemployment benefits. They say the way to get more people into jobs is to make their lives outside jobs less tolerable.

Rubbish. Most unemployed people are already hard up.

Pandemic benefits are long over, and even before COVID, America’s unemployment system was already the least generous of any rich nation.

Taken to its logical extreme, the corporate Republican argument holds water only if you don’t give a damn about workers.

Sure…you could eliminate all safety nets and at some point people without jobs will hurt so much they’ll have to take any available job, at any wage, whatever it demands.

But do this, and we’ll end up with an economy that’s even crueler than today’s economy.

Look: If we want more people to take jobs — AND we wish to live in a moral society where people can maintain decent lives — the answer is to pay people more.

Instead of saying “no one wants to work anymore,” we should be saying, “no one wants to be exploited anymore.”

[rebelwheelsnycpoetry]

And The Papers Said

TW: ABLEISM & EUGENICS by Michele Sommerstein

Part One And the papers said Michael Hickson, a black disabled man. And the papers said Hospital. Texas. COVID. Infection And the papers said Killed. For his doctor did not feel And the papers said that a… quadriplegic could possibly have a quality, of life. And the papers said and thus was not worth saving And the papers said (was not saved) disabled people are not of worth message repeating and… sent.

And the papers said the doctor had the audacity to say And the papers said it's not personal, to Hickson's wife, And the papers said There are set criteria from the state And the papers said As to who will live and who they let die And the papers said Michael Hickson. a black disabled body, that did not comply

Once again, reunited Eugenics & Capitalism America's not so secret friends fucking each other furiously for the sake of mindless fucking, like machines wallowing in their own stains, covered in their own blood and filth, crimes. unclean Disgusted? You should be.

Part Two Shortages! Hospitals! Ventilators! Low! This, that was avoidable & created by the vulture capitalists who see death… elated - pandemic as an opportunity! Cha-ching! Soulless! Shortages! Created by, the powers that be Like when, Cuomo – the hero praised at times for merely being, better than Trump! (Raise the bar! This drinks on me) cut funding, healthcare. home care. hospitals (before and during the pandemic) Shortages! So the billionaires would be spared from paying their fair, share, of… taxes Shortages! While marginalized people are blamed for, “costing too much” the audacity of austerity…

Shortages created when patients, infected knowingly sent to nursing homes, locked up. death traps, unleashing COVID on the people in places where social distancing was never, even, an option.

Part Three There are those, who will hear these words, shrug and nonchalant they will say things like Well, these things happen, what can you do? Those who are complacent, able bodied, complicit, still living but numb. They will repeat, their response so casually even to the face of those visibly disabled, as if it's nothing in a tone used to discuss sweaters and their… plans for lunch as if we as a society can't do better? (We can. We must.)

Who taught you about disability? Who lied to you saying disabled people are less than, undeserving? That we are better off dead?

Part Four And the papers said… His wife implored, insisting, knowing he lived a full life. And the papers said for in her eyes, in her heart, her love's life was worth saving. And the papers said, doctors withheld treatment including hydration… nutrition read: starving him for six. days Michael Hickson. a black disabled body that did not comply. “Michael Hickson, [a black disabled man] died leaving, his wife and five children, behind.“

About the poem: I originally wrote this poem because, so often as a disabled person, you read these headlines and it’s absorbed into you, but there's not always an outlet to really express the emotional toll.

So often, I'd read the headlines and somewhat shut down because I can’t feel every time I read something like this, but it’s still in you. Michael Hickson was the first time I read an article that actually included a name when they were discussing “state criterias' and the pandemic. The conversation between the doctor and Hickson’s wife was recorded and when I heard it, it just hit me on a deeper level and I had to write something.

That said, to learn more about the intersections of ableism & racism, I suggest checking out the following peoples: @Imani_Barbarin , @VilissaThompson , @BlackDisability & @powernotpity on Twitter.

You can read more about Michael Hickson’s story here: https://notdeadyet.org/2020/06/adapt-of-texas-protests-hospital-killing-of-michael-hickson-a- black-disabled-man.html

[beardedmrbean]

Senator Bernie Sanders, progressive independent from Vermont, said he will "absolutely" be willing to work with President-elect Donald Trump, especially if the Republican "follows through" with a proposed credit card interest rate limit.

Sanders joined The New York Times' Michael Barbaro on "The Daily" podcast Friday. Barbaro asked Sanders if there are "any areas where you are prepared to work with the President-elect." Trump had suggested during his campaigning in September that he would put a cap on credit card interest rates at 10 percent.

"If Trump, for example, follows through on his proposal to limit interest rates on credit cards to 10 percent, which is what he campaigned on, absolutely I will be there," Sanders said.

"I think it's a very good idea. I think it's time we told the people on Wall Street they cannot charge the desperate working-class people who have a hard time paying their bills' 25, 30, 40 percent interest rates."

The current average for credit card interest rates is 21.5 percent, according to Federal Reserve data. This is six percentage points higher than the rates were prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Sanders called these rates "immoral."

Additionally, Americans are currently tackling $1.28 trillion in credit card debit, a $36 billion increase during the second quarter of 2024 alone.

"We're going to cap it at around 10 percent. We can't let them make 25 and 30 percent," Trump said at a Long Island, New York event in September. "While working Americans catch up, we're going to put a temporary cap on credit card interest rates."

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, told CNN in September that Trump's proposal would "provide temporary and immediate relief for hardworking Americans who are struggling to make ends meet and cannot afford hefty interest payments on top of the skyrocketing costs of mortgages, rent, groceries and gas."

Sanders and progressive Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have previously proposed similar ideas in Congress, but they were stalled. In 2019, the two proposed a Loan Shark Prevention Act to limit the annual percentage rate for an extension of consumer credit to 15 percent. This would create a ceiling, similar to what Trump suggested, for consumer credit products, which includes both loans and credit cards.

"The reality is that today's modern-day loan sharks are no longer lurking on street corners breaking kneecaps to collect their payments," Sanders said at the time. "They wear three-piece suits and work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions in total compensation and head financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and American Express."

Sanders, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, has said since Trump's election win that Vice President Kamala Harris' defeat "should come as no great surprise" because Democrats had "abandoned working-class people."

While Sanders praised Harris for her messages on abortion rights, democracy and Trump's perceived unfitness for office, he—and other progressive critics—said the campaign fell short on bold, economic policy plans that they believe would have appealed to more working-class voters.

In August, Sanders told Newsweek that "many working-class people feel that the Democratic Party has kind of abandoned them." He had hoped at the time that Harris and her campaign would reprioritize the working-class voters.

"This is a pivotal moment in American history, and the next year or two will determine what happens in this country for decades in my view," Sanders said Friday on "The Daily."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The super-rich got that way through monopolies

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Just in time for Davos, here's 'Taken, not earned: How monopolists drive the world’s power and wealth divide," a report from a coalition of international tax justice and anti-corporate activist groups:

https://www.balancedeconomy.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Davos-Taken-not-Earned-full-Report-2024-FINAL.pdf

The rise of monopolies over the past 40 years came about as the result of specific, deliberate policy choices. As the report documents, the wealthiest people in America funneled a fortune into neutering antitrust enforcement, through the "consumer welfare" doctrine.

This is an economic theory that equates monopolies with efficiency: "If everyone is buying the same things from the same store, that tells you the store is doing something right, not something criminal." 40 years ago, and ever since, the wealthy have funded think-tanks, university programs and even "continuing education" programs for federal judges to push this line:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

They didn't do this for ideological reasons – they were chasing material goals. Monopolies produce vast profits, and those profits produce vast wealth. The rise and rise of the super rich cannot be decoupled from the rise and rise of monopolies.

If you're new to this, you might think that "monopoly" only refers to a sector in which there is only one seller. But that's not what economists mean when they talk about monopolies and monopolization: for them, a monopoly is a company with power. Economists who talk about monopolies mean companies that "can act independently without needing to consider the responses of competitors, customers, workers, or even governments."

One way to measure that power is through markups ("the difference between the selling price of goods or services and their cost"). Very large companies in concentrated industries have very high markups, and they're getting higher. From 2017-22, the 20 largest companies in the world had average markups of 50%. The 100 largest companies average 43%. The smallest half of companies get average markups of 25%.

Those markups rose steeply during the covid lockdowns – and so did the wealth of the billionaires who own them. Tech billionaires – Bezos, Brin and Page, Gates and Ballmer – all made their fortunes from monopolies. Warren Buffet is a proud monopolist who says "the single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power… if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business."

We are living in the age of the monopoly. In the 1930s, the top 0.1% of US companies accounted for less than half of America's GDP. Today, it's 90%. And it's accelerating, with global mergers climbing from 2,676 in 1985 to 62,000 in 2021.

Monopoly's cheerleaders claim that these numbers vindicate them. Monopolies are so efficient that everyone wants to create them. Those efficiencies can be seen in the markups monopolies can charge, and the profits they can make. If a monopoly has a 50% markup, that's just the "efficiency of scale."

But what is the actual shape of this "efficiency?" How is it manifest? The report's authors answer this with one word: power.

Monopolists have the power "to extract wealth from, to restrict the freedoms of, and to manipulate or steer the vastly larger numbers of losers." They establish themselves as gatekeepers and create chokepoints that they can use to raise prices paid by their customers and lower the payout to their suppliers:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

These chokepoints let monopolies usurp "one of the ultimate prerogatives of state power: taxation." Amazon sellers pay a 51% tax to sell on the platform. App Store suppliers pay a 30% tax on every dollar they make with their apps. That translates into higher costs. Consider a good that costs $10 to make: the bottom 50% of companies (by size) would charge $12.50 for that product on average. The largest companies would charge $15. Thus monopolies don't just make their owners richer – they make everyone else poorer, too.

This power to set prices is behind the greedflation (or, more politely, "seller's inflation"). The CEOs of the largest companies in the world keep getting on investor calls and bragging about this:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

The food system is incredibly monopolistic. The Cargill family own the largest commodity trader in the world, which is how they built up a family fortune worth $43b. Cargill is one of the "ABCD" companies ("Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus") that control the world's food supply, and they tripled their profits during the lockdown.

Monopolies gouge everyone – even governments. Pfizer charged the NHS £18-22/shot for vaccines that cost £5/shot to make. They took the British government for £2bn – that's enough to pay last year's pay hike for NHS nurses, six times over,

But monopolies also abuse their suppliers, especially their employees. All over the world, competition authorities are uncovering "wage fixing" and "no poaching" agreements among large firms, who collude to put a cap on what workers in their sector can earn. Unions report workers having their pay determined by algorithms. Bosses lock employees in with noncompetes and huge repayment bills for "training":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Monopolies corrupt our governments. Companies with huge markups can spend some of that money on lobbying. The 20 largest companies in the world spend more than €155m/year lobbying in the US and alone, not counting the money they spend on industry associations and other cutouts that lobby on their behalf. Big Tech leads the pack on lobbying, accounting for 82% of EU lobbying spending and 58% of US lobbying.

One key monopoly lobbying priority is blocking climate action, from Apple lobbying against right-to-repair, which creates vast mountains of e-waste, to energy monopolist lobbying against renewables. And energy companies are getting more monopolistic, with Exxonmobil spending $65b to buy Pioneer and Chevron spending $60b to buy Hess. Many of the world's richest people are fossil fuel monopolists, like Charles and Julia Koch, the 18th and 19th richest people on the Forbes list. They spend fortunes on climate denial.

When people talk about the climate impact of billionaires, they tend to focus on the carbon footprints of their mansions and private jets, but the true environmental cost of the ultra rich comes from the anti-renewables, pro-emissions lobbying they buy with their monopoly winnings.

The good news is that the tide is turning on monopolies. A coalition of "businesses, workers, farmers, consumers and other civil society groups" have created a "remarkably successful anti-monopoly movement." The past three years saw more regulatory action on corporate mergers, price-gouging, predatory pricing, labor abuses and other evils of monopoly than we got in the past 40 years.

The business press – cheerleaders for monopoly – keep running editorials claiming that enforcers like Lina Khan are getting nothing done. Sure, WSJ, Khan's getting nothing done – that's why you ran 80 editorial about her:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

(Khan's winning like crazy. Just last month she killed four megamergers:)

https://www.thesling.org/the-ftc-just-blocked-four-mergers-in-a-month-heres-how-its-latest-win-fits-into-the-broader-campaign-to-revive-antitrust/

The EU and UK are taking actions that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Canada is finally set to get a real competition law, with the Trudeau government promising to add an "abuse of dominance" rule to Canada's antitrust system.

Even more exciting are the moves in the global south. In South Africa, "competition law contains some of the most progressive ideas of all":

It actively seeks to create greater economic participation, particularly for ‘historically disadvantaged persons’ as part of its public interest considerations in merger decisions.

Balzac wrote, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." Chances are, the rapsheet includes an antitrust violation. Getting rid of monopolies won't get rid of all the billionaires, but it'll certainly get rid of a hell of a lot of them.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

[qqueenofhades]

Do you have any idea where all the money in education IS going? People talk about administrators, but their percentage of the overall budget seems lowish? Facilities are expensive, but often paid for with bequests, no? Where the hell is all the money going?

The same place it's going in every other capitalistic American enterprise: to senior executives, endowments, and other places that decidedly do not "trickle down" (because you know, it never does). See my many previous posts about how college costs skyrocketed starting in the 1980s and post-secondary higher education was transformed from something in which most of the costs were governmentally subsidized to something expected to be paid (at higher and higher levels) either privately out of the consumer's pocket or from thousands of dollars in student loans. Because you guessed it, Reaganomics.

I can tell you one place it absolutely is NOT going, i.e. salaries of faculty and staff, at least in the less capitalistically sexy fields of study. The university where I work never hurts for money in the business and law schools, but because I am in the humanities/education/history, yeah, our department's budget is not in great shape. Of course, yes, COVID hit the higher-education sector like crazy (as it did everywhere else) and universities haven't figured how to recover from that, but just as with the rest of America, it's a model that is designed to funnel the vast majority of profits, i.e. from skyrocketing student tuition rates and other increased fees, to the highly compensated senior leadership and very little to the academics who do the work that makes the place, you know, RUN.

This is a bugaboo for both me and every other academic I know, because (again, just as with the rest of capitalism) it doesn't HAVE to be this way. I shouldn't be trying to manage a department that has to rely heavily on adjunct faculty every quarter and doesn't have a sustainable long-term scheduling or research model, because we're so badly understaffed with core tenure-track faculty and they won't let us hire any more, while constantly cutting our budget and giving us laughable raises (mine, after getting sterling performance reviews across the board, was a whole... 72 extra cents an hour. I wish I was joking). There is money tied up in the institution and the establishment (and as noted, I work at a well-regarded and highly-ranked private university, so it's not a matter of not having enough), but the system distributes it in a way that is inequitable and results in enforced scarcity, especially in the humanities. It's not that there isn't money to pay us fairly, it's just that they have chosen not to, because they exist in the same capitalist system as the rest of the west.

This is why there have been strikes by graduate and early-career academics in both the UK and US (I have worked/studied/taught in both places, and they're both BAD for paying lower-level academics and even established-career academics), because they simply do not pay us enough to live on or build a career on (by a long shot, ESPECIALLY if you're the only person in your household and don't have shared expenses with a partner/roommate/several roommates). This is after most of us have several advanced degrees and the debt resulting from such. We get burned out, we can't make a living in this field, we leave, and it's hollowed out even further. So. Yeah.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

By now, every pundit in America has their own 2024 election take, mostly confirming their prior opinions. Every Republican has a take, too, which is that Americans voted resoundingly for — well, for whatever policy that Republican cares about, from opposition to transgender rights to support for prayer in schools. And of course, progressives, especially younger ones, have every right to feel afraid, angry, or alienated. But the data tells a specific story, not a choose-your-own-adventure. And that is that swing voters voted mostly out of economic insecurity and discontent. They actually liked Kamala Harris more than Donald Trump (Harris’ favorability was 48 percent, compared to 44 percent for Trump). But Harris was the incumbent, and incumbents don’t win elections when people think the economy is bad. This is not just an American phenomenon. As the Financial Times reported, in every developed country in the world, the incumbents lost this year. This is unprecedented. If, like me, you’re being kept awake at night thinking about this election, this explanation helps. Yes, people were willing to put up with Trump’s criminality, coup attempts, and extreme xenophobia, and that is still terrible. Many were also on board with scapegoating immigrants for our economic woes, which is as factually preposterous as it is morally offensive.  But they didn’t vote for MAGA. They didn’t vote against women, or wokeness, or coastal elites, or climate regulation, or government regulation in general, or queer people. Not directly, anyway. They voted against the incumbent party, like every other developed country in the world this year. The shock waves from the Covid-19 pandemic — inflation, empty shelves, housing prices — are global, and this is a global trend. Everywhere in the world, voters have chosen to throw the bastards out because of the economy.  In fact, if you look closely at the Financial Times data, Trump actually did worse than most other non-incumbents. Yes, he won a clear victory. But it was not as big a victory as parties in France, Italy, or even New Zealand.  [...] So what happens when the emperor is revealed to have no clothes — or even worse, the garb of the same financial “elites” he claims to be against? Obviously, the MAGA faithful will stay with Trump no matter what — after all, his failure to bring about revolution in 2017 spawned the QAnon conspiracy theory, which said he was really about to do it, any day now. But the economic voters that gave him his victory could abandon Trump if he can’t deliver results. And he cannot. While Trump is busy trying to throw his enemies in jail, he has no plan — not even “concepts of a plan” — for the kitchen-table concerns that actually put him into office. Maybe, just maybe, voters will see they’ve been conned. That is the best we can hope for.

Jay Michaelson for Rolling Stone on Donald Trump and how he'll make America worse off (11.11.2024).

Jay Michaelson wrote in Rolling Stone that some of who voted in Donald Trump due to “muh economy” or “muh grocery costs” could be in for a shock.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

By Stephanie Soucheray, MA

Two new studies offer fresh insights into long COVID, with the first noting a greater neurological, cognitive, and fatigue impact compared with long-term symptoms after similar respiratory diseases, and the second demonstrating that a fourth of young Marines who contracted COVID-19 went on to develop long COVID.

Seven symptoms more common with long COVID

In the first study, published today in JAMA Network Open, researchers used data from the UK Biobank to compared postacute infection syndromes (PAIS) among patients with COVID-19 to other lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs). They showed that long-COVID patients have an increased risk of seven specific symptoms.

A total of 191,710 eligible participants identified since March 1, 2020, were included in the study. Of those, 1,153 were hospitalized with COVID-19, 1,304 were hospitalized with other LRTIs, and 189,253 uninfected patients were used as a reference group.

Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were much more likely to report PAIS symptoms including loss of taste (odds ratio [OR], 2.27; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.87 to 2.75) and severe fatigue (OR, 2.18; 95% CI, 1.70 to 2.81) compared to the reference group. Overall, COVID patents were more likely to report 23 of 45 symptoms compared to the controls.

Compared to patients hospitalized for other LRTIs, COVID patients were more at risk for seven particular symptoms, including loss of smell (OR, 1.80; 95% CI, 1.34 to 2.42), loss of taste (OR, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.13 to 2.03), rapid heart rate upon standing (OR, 1.60; 95% CI, 1.12 to 2.29), problems with thinking (OR, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.14 to 1.62), bone pain (OR, 1.33; 95% CI, 1.06 to 1.67), mild fatigue (OR, 1.19; 95% CI, 1.01 to 1.40), and severe fatigue (OR, 1.49; 95% CI, 1.02 to 2.17).

Patients with LRTIs were more likely to report a lingering persistent cough than were COVID patients.

"Compared with other LRTIs, COVID-19 appeared to impose an extra burden of neurological, cognitive, and fatigue symptoms,” the authors concluded.

25% of Marines developed long COVID The second study, published in The Lancet Regional Health Americas, describes how 25% of previously healthy US Marines showed signs of long COVID following even mild or asymptomatic COVID-19.

In the study, 899 Marines (91.7% male) who tested positive for COVID-19 by polymerase chain reaction testing were followed up for almost a year to determine risk factors for developing long COVID, which the authors defined as persistent symptoms at least 4 weeks after symptom onset or diagnosis. The authors found a 24.7% prevalence of long COVID.

The Marines were young (median age, 18) and healthy, having passed a number of Marine physical fitness tests prior to study enrollment. The participants were asked to complete a survey about COVID infection and symptoms. Overall, 197 Marines (24.7%) developed persistent symptoms after COVID infection.

The most prevalent symptoms reported by Marines were loss of taste and/or smell (41.6%), shortness of breath (37.6%), and cough (22.8%). When compared with a pre-COVID cohort of Marines, the authors found the Marines reporting persistent COVID symptoms had slower running times on fitness tests.

The authors said their findings are important in considering the implications of long COVID on a young and previously healthy workforce. Long COVID could "decrease work productivity and increase healthcare costs," they wrote.

A total of 307 participants (34.1%) had an asymptomatic infection. Among the 195 who described the severity of their infection, 77.4% reported a predominately mild illness, 20.0% reported moderate disease, and 2.6% reported severe illness.

"The risk of long-term sequelae secondary to acute SARS-CoV-2 infection varies across studies; however, even in young healthy populations with very mild acute illness a proportion of infected individuals develop long-lasting symptoms," the authors wrote.

Study links: 1. jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2825348 2. www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(24)00236-9/fulltext

[kickthecan-revolution]

I’ve had a beautiful day today, I saw this massive olive tree on my walk that canopied the air, it’s so beautiful. Even with pausing for a minute or so before each big hill, I shaved about two minutes off my overall walk time to radiation. Today’s appointment was a breeze, I was in and out within 15m - nine more to go.

I decided to walk hills in my way home to reduce the cost of the Uber ride back and ended up at the Fairmont Hotel at the very top of San Francisco. I haven’t been inside of it, ever I think? If so I can’t remember. It’s old and ornate, they are decorating for the holidays. It’s beautiful.

I got home and saw this bouquet of flowers had arrived from my friend Kelly in Seattle - it has little bananas in it! I think it’s one of the coolest flower deliveries I have ever received in my life, I can even eat part of it!

We ended up FaceTiming and got caught up with each other. She got married a little later in life and her husband is so great – a lot more conservative than probably I’d be comfortable with, and such a kind man at his core. They traveled last year, taking a couple of honeymoon trips they’d postponed because of Covid and spent three weeks in Uganda. They visited a school where Kelly learned that the only protein kids get is one egg a week and a quarter cup of milk a week. When Kelly asked what they could give for Christmas, the Director clapped her hands and said oh if we could get them a second egg that week to celebrate it would be so incredible. Later on that evening, Kelly and her husband were driving back to where they were staying and saw a little boy in the street and short story long they couldn’t get them out of their mind, and went to the school to see if they could sponsor him. It’s a boarding school, the school actually limits class and said they were full, but a Ugandan woman was advocating for him and they ended up calling the owner of the school who happens to be in Chicago right now jetlagged, who said yes to the exception.

I asked her to send me some information. There’s a lot of kids in America right now who need a lot of help. And, one egg a week and an education for 75 bucks a month? That just seems like a no-brainer but you can’t be emotional with these decisions, these kids need you to commit for a decade. So I’m sitting with it. I was initially leery about donating to a Christian school but it really works in this area and I trust Kelly. At minimum, it was such important perspective. One egg a week. Goddamn.

Then I chatted with a work colleague - I’m definitely sensing people at my level not wanting me to come back as a manager. We have….. a lot of managers. Too many, I get it. And I think this is just even more fuel to the motivation to leave next year, don’t go to a party where you aren’t wanted. And I don’t take it personally, or I’ll try not to, I’m kind of glad for it. I’m a great leader and could be even better but being a leader has never been my primary motivator. Creating things, explaining things, solving problems, making things - that’s what I really love.

Last call was with my sister just making plans for my trip there on Saturday where I’ll make some introductions between she and the new tenants.

It’s cloudy and cold, sunny earlier but now it feels like rain. My kittens are snuggled in and so am I. I’m making a little “thank you” video to send on Thanksgiving to those in my life who really helped me, I’m a little nervous that it will be cheesy but being vulnerable is something I’m going to practice more.