Business owners were determined to show American workers who was boss. This COVID-19 nonsense was not going to interfere with their profits any longer. It was time to take a stand.
So, Dartagnan noted at DailyKos (10/22), they called in their chits for all those campaign contributions to governors. They called their Republican reps and senators. Damn that Fauci, they complained. My business is hurting. No more lockdowns, no more of this “social distancing” crap. This state is going to open for business and I don’t want to hear another word about body counts or stressed hospitals. I need workers and I need them now. I paid for your damn campaigns, so do something!
In a matter of a few weeks, we saw state after state brimming with self-appointed medical experts in their legislatures, railing about the tyrannical mask mandates and business lockdowns. CEOs and white-collar professionals cracked their whips—many still working from the comfort of their fine homes. Thus, the support staff, retail clerks and service workers, many of whom who had once been lionized as “essential” at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, were told it was time to return to work. And for added good measure, Republican governors in those states cut off their unemployment aid. That’ll show them, they thought ...
But strangely enough, not all of those workers heeded the call. In fact, a good many of them quit. As reported by Alyssa Fowers and Eli Rosenberg, writing for the Washington Post, Kentucky, Idaho, South Dakota and Iowa reported the highest increases in the rates of workers who quit their jobs in August, according to a new glimpse of quit rates in the labor market (10/22).
The largest increase in the number of quitters happened in Georgia, with 35,000 more people leaving their jobs. Overall, the states with the highest rates of workers quitting their jobs were Georgia, Kentucky and Idaho.
As the Post points out, service-sector jobs are most highly concentrated in urban areas. So why would people be quitting their jobs at such astronomical rates in such relatively rural states as Kentucky, South Dakota, Iowa and Idaho?
As the Delta wave grew in the US, employees quit or were hired at rates matching or exceeding the national average in the 10 states with the highest rates of new infections that month: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.
So the highest rate of turnover in August—employees quitting or getting hired—was found in the states that had the highest rate of COVID-19 infection for that month. Logically, that seems to make sense. Workers who live in one of those states were also likely to have a governor or, in the case of Kentucky, a Republican-dominated legislature who opposed business closures, even while the Delta variant ravaged the state’s population. Such workers were essentially forced by these states policies to return to work if they could not work from home.
Those people forced back to work in an unsafe environment simply decided to quit—many of them likely before ever venturing back into their workspace. After all, they saw a job the other day that was offering more money. Or their next-door neighbor’s cousin got a job that pays more and allows them to work from home. The Post quotes Nick Bunker, an economist for the job search portal Indeed, who notes that the high quit rate in these red and rural states “may be a sign there’s more competition in those parts of the country than other parts.”
The other coincidence of the states having both the highest level of turnover and the highest infection rates? They are all so-called “right to work” states, where laws discourage unions. So these workers have essentially no protection, no one to turn to for help remedying unsafe conditions, and no collective bargaining power. They can, for the most part, be terminated at will. That’s what “right-to work” has always been about.
As one commenter to the Post story points out:
“So, when you have a crappy job, for crappy wages, and a crappy employer who doesn’t value you at all, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a labor market situation that actually encourages you to look for work elsewhere—what do you think is going to happen?
“The ‘Great Resignation’ is largely about working class people attempting to use what little leverage they have in order to make a moderately better wage for themselves in a mostly hostile, oppressive national work environment.”
For employers, the downside of “right to work”— one they never saw coming—was the fact that workers in those states had little, if any, incentive to stay, especially when once-in-a lifetime opportunities arose for them to leave, while competition for higher wages and better working conditions further drove that exodus.
Some employers are responding by antagonizing would-be applicants.
In Missouri, a group of businesses, still frustrated by labor shortages more than three months after the state cut off the $300-a-week federal jobless checks, paid for billboards in Springfield that said: “Get Off Your Butt!” and “Get. To. Work.”
The state has seen no growth in its workforce since ending emergency benefits.
LAWMAKERS PROBING JAN. 6 ARE FOLLOWING THE MONEY AND PUTTING PIECES TOGETHER. The House Jan. 6 Committee is digging into financial details around Stop the Steal rally organizers and other similar vendors on their radar. In particular, they are rooting out possible campaign finance or election law violations, as well as other financial crimes, Brandi Buchman noted at DailyKos (10/22).
The investigatory body has issued subpoenas to far-right activist and leader of the Stop the Steal movement, Ali Alexander, and Shelby County, Ohio, city councilman Nathan Martin, CNN reported.
According to the committee, Martin was listed as the point of contact on a permit application submitted to the US Capitol Police for a “One Nation Under God” event last December protesting the 2020 election results.
An unnamed source cited in the CNN report suggested the committee is breaking up its work into teams. Some of the committee’s teams track funds specifically tied to rally organizers and other groups connected to former President Donald Trump.
Other teams are reviewing how those groups may overlap while other teams still are zeroing in on the former president himself. Those teams are reportedly reviewing how the 45th president may have leaned on legislators to follow his lead in attempting to overturn the election results or how he “used his executive authority to pressure … former Vice President Mike Pence and the Justice Department,” the source said.
So far, 15 subpoenas have been issued by the committee publicly. The first batch was delivered by the committee to Trump administration officials like former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino. Onetime Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel was also subpoenaed for records and deposition, as was Steve Bannon, who defied the request and was found in contempt of Congress (10/21).
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signed off on the contempt referral—it sits now with the US Attorney’s Office in Washington—shortly after the vote wrapped up. Some of what the committee sought from Bannon were records and details related to the financing behind the rally in D.C. on the morning of Jan. 6. Investigators also want information Bannon might have regarding travel arrangements and hotel accommodations for rally participants.
So far, 11 other subpoenas were issued in late September to organizers, including Amy Kremer, founder and chair of Women for America First. The group coordinated the rally at the Ellipse, which overflowed with a mixed bag of Trump’s supporters, far-right extremists and white nationalists, among others. Kremer’s daughter and co-founder of Women for America First, Kylie Kremer, was also subpoenaed.
Caroline Wren and Cindy Chafian were served subpoena papers, too.
JAN. 6 RALLY ORGANIZERS ARE TALKING, AND CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS SHOULD BE NERVOUS. Several House Republicans—exactly the ones you would guess—were involved in planning meetings for protests on Jan. 6 as Trump supporters tried to block the certification of the 2020 election and with it, Donald Trump’s loss, at least two sources have detailed to Rolling Stone. Both sources are in contact with the House select committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol, and both, let’s be clear, are motivated to paint their own involvement in the most innocent and patriotic light possible. But they can still have valuable testimony, whatever the motivations, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (10/25).
The sources, identified as an organizer and a planner, say they participated in “dozens” of planning meetings, including some with the personal participation of or top staffers from the offices of Reps. Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Mo Brooks, and Louie Gohmert. (See, I told you you could guess.) “We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” the organizer told Rolling Stone. Both were in contact with Boebert and Gosar on Jan. 6 itself.
The meetings weren’t purely informational: At least one member of Congress was urging them to put on a protest. The two sources are subjects of an unrelated investigation that Gosar used as incentive to get them to plan the Ellipse protest, telling them that Trump would give them “blanket pardons.”
“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer said, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”
The sources insist that they were involved only in planning the rally at the Ellipse, with the intention of pressuring Congress from that relatively safe distance to overturn the election. They wanted to overturn the election—they just insist they didn’t think it would be violent.
”The breaking point for me [on Jan. 6 was when] Trump starts talking about walking to the Capitol,” said the organizer. “I was like, ‘Let’s get ... out of here.’”
The planner, too, pointed a finger at Trump, saying, “I do kind of feel abandoned by Trump.”
And both pointed to the role of Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, who previously bragged about planning Jan. 6 events with the help of Biggs, Brooks, and Gosar. Alexander, the sources told Rolling Stone, had agreed to not hold his “Wild Protest” at the Capitol, leaving the Ellipse event as the major draw of the day. But then he went ahead with it anyway. “We ended up escalating that to everybody we could, including [then White House chief of staff Mark] Meadows,” the organizer said. But Meadows—who they say was more broadly involved in planning Jan. 6 events—apparently didn’t intervene to stop Alexander’s event.
TRUMP HAD ‘COMMAND CENTER’ TO PLOT COUP. Allies and lawyers employed by Donald Trump set up a “command center” in a Washington D.C. hotel the week of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot from which they coordinated efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the Washington Post reported (10/23).
The center, at the Willard Hotel, a block from the White House, became home to Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and John Eastman — the attorney behind the now notorious “coup memo” — among others, Frank Yvan Walton noted at DailyKos (10/23).
According to the report, while the “Stop the Steal” rally and the ensuing riot was the most visible effort to stop the certification, “... an emerging picture of a less visible effort, mapped out in memos by a conservative pro-Trump legal scholar and pursued by a team of presidential advisers and lawyers seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate Trump for a second term,” at the hotel.
“They sought to make the case to Pence and ramp up pressure on him to take actions on Jan. 6 that Eastman suggested were within his powers, three people familiar with the operation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations,” the Post is reporting. “Their activities included finding and publicizing alleged evidence of fraud, urging members of state legislatures to challenge Biden’s victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states.”
Giuliani, Bannon and Eastman, along with others, all plotted to gin up evidence of “election fraud” with which to confront state legislatures into reversing their electoral results, then they applied pressure on Pence to get him to reject the vote from their targeted states back with a raucous crowd of rabid Trump supporters to drive the message home at the Capitol.
INVESTORS BAIL FROM TRUMP SOCIAL MEDIA STARTUP. Donald Trump is starting his own social media company—and it’s named TRUTH Social. Because, Aldous Pennyfarthing noted at DailyKos (10/23), “while irony is long dead, that doesn’t mean Trump can’t beat it in the head with a shovel a few more times just to watch its corpse jiggle.”
“Sure, some people are still eager to invest their money with Donald Trump. And some kids still stick their tongues to flagpoles every winter. But not everyone is onboard with this latest venture—including some of the well-heeled investors who thought they were underwriting something other than dark sedition and looming, certain death,” Pennyfarthing noted.
At least one investor pulled out when he learned his money was now tied to the former president. “Many investors are grappling with hard questions about how to incorporate their values into their work,” hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein told the New York Times in a statement. “For us, this was not a close call.”
Weinstein’s company had been a key investor in Digital World, which is a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that was created specifically to acquire a previously undisclosed company. While investors in SPACs typically commit their money before they know exactly what it will be used to acquire, when Weinstein found out this was a Trump joint, he bailed posthaste. And he (probably) wasn’t the only one.
One unnamed investor who held 10% of the company told the Financial Times he sold everything as soon as he could. “The idea that I would help [Trump] build out a fake news business called Truth makes me want to throw up,” he said.
Of course, if you’re wondering if this latest venture can succeed where Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump casinos, Trump: The Game, and Trump: The Presidency failed, Pennyfarthing noted, one early indication should give you pause. Online trolls and hackers are already messing with it, big-league.
Mashable noted (10/21), “Mere hours after the world learned of Trump’s social media project, a sign-up link that clearly wasn’t meant to be public was discovered taking users to the domain “tmediatech.io.” A slew of people started registering for the unreleased platform via this page and quickly discovered that pretty much every username was available for the taking. The domain has since been taken down.
“It didn’t take long before usernames that clearly would be Trump’s choice for his own personal handle — @DonaldJTrump, @DonaldTrump, and @realDonaldTrump — were registered. The proud new owner of the TRUTH Social username @DonaldJTrump also took the opportunity to bless his profile page with its first post: the ‘Pig Poop Balls’ meme image.”
“Hmm, Pig Poop Balls. That would also be a much better investment than any Trump endeavor,” Pennyfarthing noted. “Keep your eyes peeled for the big Pig Poop IPO. Should be a red-letter day in the history of the New York Stock Exchange—unlike the rollout of Trump’s sprawling sh*t lagoon of a social media company.”
WHY MEDICARE ADVANTAGE PLANS ARE BAD. You probably see dozens of commercials for zero-dollar premium Medicare Advantage plans that claim all-in-one coverage. The plans may include prescription drug coverage and care for vision, dental, hearing aids, and maybe even a free gym membership. But Advantage plans are not a good fit for everyone. Jagger Esch notes at MedicareFaq.com.
“If you ask a doctor, they’ll likely tell you they don’t accept Medicare Advantage because the private insurance companies make it a hassle for them to get paid. Ask your neighbor why Medicare Advantage plans are bad and they may say they were unhappy with how much they had to pay out-of-pocket when using the benefits. If you ask your friend why they didn’t like Medicare Advantage, they might say it’s because their plan wouldn’t travel with them. Yet, a very common answer is “because I thought the plan was free.”
Advantage plans offer health services within a provider network. Medicare pays them to take on your health risk. Advantage participants might not pay premiums to the insurance company that administers the plan, but they still pay Medicare Part B premiums, and they are charged copays for every doctor visit, test and service they receive.
Although Advantage plans come with extra coverage to lure people from Medigap plans – such as for dental, vision, and hearing care – beneficiaries find themselves paying more than they budgeted for, in situations that they previously thought their plan would cover.
Seniors who need to use their benefits often, with chronic or multiple health issues, will see their cost-sharing quickly add up and could easily exceed a year’s worth of Medigap premiums. And since services are limited to providers in the network, participants may not be able to see a specialist outside the network.
GETTING RID OF SUPER SPREADERS IS OK. Jeff Tiedrich, a noted anti-Trumper and editor of SmirkingChimp.com, spoke for many when he tweeted (10/12), “… vaccine mandates are causing teachers who don’t believe in science to quit, nurses who don’t believe in medicine to quit and cops who don’t believe in public safety to quit. I’m failing to see the downside to this.”
GOHMERT ASKS WHY REP. JOHN LEWIS WASN’T TREATED THE SAME AS JAN. 6 INSURRECTIONISTS. During a Congressional Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Merrick Garland, Rep. Louie Gohmert complained that the late John Lewis (D-Ga.) was not prosecuted for interfering with House business in 2016.
“On June 22 of 2016, judge, most of the Democrat members of Congress took over the House floor, and, for the first time in American history, members of Congress obstructed official proceedings. Not for four to six hours, but for virtually 26 hours. Not just violating over a dozen House rules, but actually committing the felony that some of the Jan. 6 people are charged with,” Gohmert said.
“That was during the Obama administration, nobody’s been charged, and those kinda things—where you let Democrat members of Congress off for the very thing that you’re viciously going after people that were protesting on Jan. 6—gives people the indication that there is a two-tiered justice system here in America.”
The reality that then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan—a Republican—is the one who didn’t censure Rep. Lewis or any Democratic representatives for the sit-in, wouldn’t ever factor into a GOP lie like this, Walter Einenkel noted (10/21). “But more grotesquely, the idea that the two events could be possibly similar in anything other than their location, is offensive.”
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2021
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