HUGE News: Progressive Win Marks The Start of Something Big

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ojIMBLXfGc&feature

AMAZON WORKERS BLOCKED DELIVERY TRUCKS FOR HOURS

By Lauren Kaori Gurley, Vice.

August 5, 2020


https://popularresistance.org/amazon-workers-blocked-delivery-trucks-for-hours/





A Caravan Of Protestors Demanding Increased Pay And COVID-19 Protections Disrupted Business At An Amazon Distribution Center In The San Francisco Bay Area On Saturday.

Amazon warehouse workers shut down deliveries at an Amazon Distribution Center in the San Francisco Bay Area for several hours on Saturday, demanding the company implement more safety measures to protect workers against COVID-19 and increased pay to reflect the cost of living in one of the country’s most expensive metro areas.

Early Saturday, a caravan of cars, organized by Bay Area Amazonians, an Amazon warehouse worker and delivery-driver led group, drove into the warehouse parking lot, blocking Amazon delivery vans from leaving the facility for roughly three hours and disrupting the flow of business, according to the protest’s organizers. Alongside Amazon warehouse workers, workers from the nearby Fremont Tesla factory and several local Bay Area unions rallied outside the facility, waving signs and banners and chanting: “Black Lives Matter.”

The protest at the San Leandro, California warehouse follows a series of walkouts, strikes, and actions coordinated by Amazon employees around the country in recent months. Workers have demanded increased safety measures and transparency from the company that has received widespread criticism for its treatment of its employees during the pandemic. In May and June, as new COVID-19 cases soared in Amazon warehouses, the company rolled back its $2 an hour hazard pay and ended its unlimited unpaid time off benefits enacted in March to prevent the spread of Coronavirus.

“Nothing is more important than the health and well-being of all of our employees, and we are doing everything we can to keep them as safe as possible,” Brittany Parmley, an Amazon spokesperson, told Motherboard. “We’ve invested over $800 million in the first half of this year implementing 150 significant process changes on COVID-19 safety measures by purchasing items like masks, hand sanitizer, thermal cameras, thermometers, sanitizing wipes, gloves, additional hand-washing stations, and adding disinfectant spraying in buildings, procuring COVID testing supplies, and additional janitorial teams.”

Saturday’s protest marked the first time Amazon warehouse workers shut down an Amazon facility in the greater Silicon Valley area, according to some organizers. Amazon warehouse workers in New York City, Chicago, and Minnesota have also staged walkouts related to COVID-19 concerns in recent months.

“I think the most important thing was yeah we showed workers that it’s not a one way street,” said John Hopkins, an Amazon employee at the San Leandro warehouse and lead organizer of the protest. “When I went into work that night, everyone was talking about it and no one ever says anything anti-Amazon inside the warehouse. I think momentum is building.”

In April, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, an employee who organized a walkout in protest of the company’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak at the Staten Island warehouse. Later, a memo obtained by VICE News revealed that Amazon’s general counsel had referred to Smalls, who is Black, as “not smart or articulate.” In May, Amazon fired another Black employee involved in labor organizing.

Leaders of the Saturday’s protest had demands similar to those made by Amazon workers at other facilities across the country in recent months: two weeks of paid leave for employees exposed to COVID-19, a redesign of the warehouse with social distancing markers, and a transparent process for informing workers about positive COVID-19 cases at their facilities. Amazon currently offers two weeks of paid sick leave only to employees with positive, or presumed positive COVID-19 cases—and often takes weeks to inform workers about positive cases at their worksites.

Warehouse workers at the San Leandro facility say the warehouse has had at least four positive COVID-19 cases reported over the past month.

To mitigate the rising cost of living in the Bay Area and other challenges faced by Amazon workers in the area, the protestors also demanded $30 an hour and full health benefits for all workers, as well as an in-house route designer for delivery drivers.

“Our base demands are necessary,” Adrienne Williams, a former Amazon delivery driver and a lead organizer of Bay Area Amazonians told Motherboard. “We need $30 an hour, full medical benefits for everyone and a route designer in each warehouse. Our routes are designed by employees in Seattle. They’re so dangerous and inefficient. You could fix this immediately if the drivers just had someone to talk to.”

Trump Isn't First - Every President Has Been Racist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-4LGxH-TTI&feature

Google Translate Sings: "Hey There Delilah" by Plain White T's (PARODY)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCh4IMeQuCU

Aftermath of Beirut explosion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoBdr-CPpmM&feature

I WAS WRONG: CONGRESS ISN’T COWARDLY; IT’S EVIL!

By Danny Sjursen, Antiwar.com.August 5, 2020


https://popularresistance.org/i-was-wrong-congress-isnt-cowardly-its-evil/





Blocking Withdrawal From A Hopeless Afghan War Opposed Even By Its Veterans, Counts As Criminally Heinous – And Par For The Congressional Course.

Sometime during my “brief” spell as an imperial-accomplice, zombie-flicks became all the rage. So did tweeting and texting, by the way – which I learned the hard way when a phone bill ran to several hundred bucks after returning from my first failed war-surge. Turns out my data plan was almost as inadequate as the Pentagon’s Operation Cobra II scheme in Iraq. Perhaps it’s fitting then, that Representative Liz Cheney – progeny of its zombie neocon architect working on his second heart – took to Twitter last month to declare victory in America’s own zombie Afghan war. Not the classic sort of victory that ends a war and brings home victorious troops, naturally. Rather, hers was a partisan triumph, the culmination of the bipartisan battle not to end Congress’s favorite endless war. Got that?

The absurd upshot was the Crow/Cheney amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), prohibiting the expenditure of monies to reduce U.S. troops levels below 8,000 unless stringent security conditions are met. Last month, the House Armed Services Committee approved the measure in a 45-11 landslide, then unanimously passed the full NDAA – as did the full House by a 295-125 margin. As if invented in an establishment lab, Crow/Cheney states that “a rapid military drawdown and a lack of United States commitment to the security and stability of Afghanistan would undermine diplomatic efforts for peace.” (In the contemporary American-dialect of Orwellian “Newspeak,” withdrawal from even 19-year-old wars counts as “rapid.”) Good to know that Congress is in the ending-any-ending of endless wars business.

The US Constitution explicitly states that only Congress “shall have power” to declare and finance wars. Yet over time, first gradually, then rapidly, – especially since World War II – legislative primacy eroded. Covetous presidents clutched war powers that Congress often voluntarily abdicated. But even if commanders-in-chief now near-unilaterally resolve where and when America fights, wars cost money and congressmen could shut them down right along with the fiscal spigot. They almost never do.

That’s largely because, since the draft ended in 1973, retaining inertial wars is low risk; and ending them offers almost no rewards. In fact, even when a war – like the record-length Afghan one – becomes clearly hopeless, the party, faction, or legislator that blinks incurs serious political costs. They can expect to be smeared as “soft” on national security (or “communism,” or “terror”) and/or alienate their true masters: donors, lobbyists, and media moguls who all share a professional and pecuniary interest in a mammoth military-industrial-complex. As a result, aside from some momentary grandstanding, partisan point-scoring, rather than principles or prudence, usually drives decisions on the minor matters of war and peace.

Two standout examples should suffice. Despite enduring hawk-peddled myths that Congress ended the Vietnam War by cutting off votes or funds – thereby “abandoning the troops” – legislators never meaningfully did so. As late as September 1970 – when the US had incurred more than 90 percent of its total fatalities – the McGovern-Hatfield amendment, which called only for an end to the war’s Cambodian incursion, failed by a vote of 55-39. By the time Congress did cut funding to South Vietnam – four years later – from a proposed 1.26 billion to 700 million dollars, 99.88 percent of the doomed American soldiers had already died in vain.

In other words, Congress never actually defunded the troops. It decreased military aid to the South Vietnamese only after Presidents Nixon and Ford had decided, for their own complex reasons, to end the US war. It is true that as North Vietnamese tanks drove towards Saigon in April 1975, key senators came to the White House and firmly refused to reopen the US war effort; but by that point, there were few American troops left and they had almost zero combat role. The conclusion of a specially commissioned 1975 House Democratic Study Group may be the final nail in the sell-out-the-troops myth’s coffin: “Up to the spring of 1973, Congress gave every president everything he requested regarding Indochina policies and funding.”

Thirty-some odd years later, the Democrats seized both Houses of Congress in a November 2006 election that amounted to a veritable referendum on the Iraq quagmire. Still, wouldn’t you know that just a month later – despite polling suggesting 2/3 of Americans opposed the war and a majority desired rapid withdrawal – none other than incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took Congress’s power of the purse off the table. Asked by a reporter if the new Democratic-controlled Congress would vote to stop funding of the war if President Bush refused to change his Iraq strategy, Pelosi answered “We will not cut off funding for the troops…Absolutely not.” That master-bargainer is still at the helm of the “People’s House.”

Then there was the Democrat’s Obama-era hypocrisy penchant. You remember that stage of the abusive relationship with our representatives, right? The part when we learned that morality and efficacy of extrajudicial drone executions, regime change fiascoes, and forlorn troop surges mainly hinges on the party affiliation of the reigning elected emperor. These were the fearful political calculuses I’ve long dubbed “Congress’s Romance with Cowardice.” Only I was wrong – hopeless optimist I am – all along.

The Crow-Cheney pivot demonstrates a congressional capacity for criminal obscenity that should’ve been obvious long ago. We the People’s esteemed representatives have truly jumped the democratic shark and inverted the Founders’ intended function for their war-purse powers. Congress has created the seemingly scientifically impossible: a perpetual (warfare) motion machine. The crime in that, according to my colleague and early muse Andrew Bacevich, “is to persist beyond all reason in a misguided war…to put American soldiers at risk for no definable purpose.”

In part, Congress’s proclivity to prolong the Afghan pointlessness is fueled by a dubious and dangerous Russian Bounty-gate yarn that bipartisan majorities fell for hook-line-and-sinker. Worse still, the regrettable roll call of Crow/Cheney and its inclusive NDAA supporters includes more than just the usual militarism suspects. Any sentient subject would expect peace-pushback from Republican neocons, bipartisan Israeli-“assets,” and hawkish-Dem “deplorables” like, respectively, Tom “troops-in-the-streets” Cotton, ex-CIA-analyst/recipient of ample AIPAC-largess, Elissa Slotkin, and the Armed Services Committee’s in-house Pelosi-plant Donald Norcross.

But hawkish overreactions to Bounty-gate also included folks with some otherwise admirable antiwar positions. Even Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy – a commendable critic of U.S. complicity in the Saudi crime against Yemen – attacked Trump’s “failure to hold Russia accountable for bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan.” He and others decline to define what exactly should constitute accountability-holding in a long lost war that Murphy himself wanted to end – until, that is, it was Mr. Trump negotiating the ending.

Yet the wretched roll contains even the much-touted post-9/11 combat vets recently recruited by Democrats to bolster their toughness bonafides. These ostensible “brothers”-in-arms are dead to me. Full stop. After all, what does one call a Mr. Smith Crow who shares your struggles, employs his vet-badge-of-honor, then “goes to Washington” only to sell out the 73 percent of his brethren who support full withdrawal from a war that broke so many? I vote “Congressional Collaborator.”

The Democratic Iraq/Afghan veterans on the House Armed Services who backed the perpetual-war-amendment – Jason Crow, Seth Moulton, Jared Golden, and Ruben Gallego – along with all the other vet-quislings on The Hill deserve (metaphorically, I suppose) the same post-liberation treatment as French women who fornicated with their Nazi occupiers. Only instead of shaving their fraternizing heads, let’s trim these turncoats terms in office.

Now that Congress has shown the “courage” of its combat-continuation “convictions,” expect a repeat performance enabling the next (potentially extinctive) war – this time in Europe. As I noted with exasperation here last week, congressional majorities are appalled, just appalled, by Trump’s plan to withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany. It doesn’t matter that the Europeans can capably handle their own defense in the event of a future war that America’s expatriate-soldiers shouldn’t risk, can’t win, and mustn’t be fought. At least if our species-mates would like to meet their prospective grandkids. After all, Raytheon and Lockheed want to maximize profits, their indebted congressional pawns desire job security, and even re-deployments have price tags – probably several billion dollars, per Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s initial swag.

So strap in for likely Crow-Cheney encore folks – relentless Liz already tweeted her (and 21 colleagues) opposition, since withdrawing any troops from Germany would surely “do grave damage to our national security.” See, those soldiers might not be going anywhere. The Donald rarely denies himself even premature victory laps, but just this once he ought to recall the “Gambler” wisdom of the late Kenny Rogers: “You never count your money, when you’re sitting at the table.” In Imperial America, the Military-Industrial-Complex “House” always wins; and congressional dealers are a wily lot. Here’s a pro-tip for my buddies stationed in Germany: maybe hold off on packing your bags.

Unfortunately, unlike in Europe, there’s nothing hypothetical about an extant Afghan adventure where Washington’s gamblers count their losses in other people’s blood. At least a handful of the remaining American troops, and who knows how many thousands of Afghans, will undoubtedly perish in this hopeless mess. On the ground, that US zombie-war is already over. It was unwinnable from the start and lost long ago.

Just a shame no one told all the walking-dead still patrolling the place…

Red Legacies

This book, first published in 2011, remains useful in this time of renewed popularity for socialist ideas. As reviewer Terry pointed out when the book was first published, it is an informative treatment of its topic, despite its weaknesses.


August 5, 2020 Michael Terry THE BROOKLYN RAIL


https://portside.org/2020-08-05/red-legacies




The “S” Word

A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism
John Nichols
Verso Books
ISBN: 9781784783402

In The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism, John Nichols begins with the story of an aging Walt Whitman and his daily meetings with a young writer named Horace Logo Traubel. In Camden, New Jersey, the two had a series of conversations that would lead to a book itself, detailing the thoughts of one of America’s great poets. In addition to discussions about the craft and nature of poetry, they would often talk politics. In reference to a then recent essay titled “Walt Whitman as a Socialist Poet,” Walt said, “Of course, I find I am a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was.” In Nichols’s newest work, he sets out to show to all Americans that in fact we all are. Released at a time when our strange political discourse has viciously reduced the “s-word” to a variety of wild misinterpretations and misappropriations, Nichols counters this by using the profound historical record to revise the revisionists, in order to save an essential part of our past and hopefully, Nichols feels, our future.

Indeed, Nichols seems to be exactly the man for this much-needed task. Long on the vanguard of a mostly weary American Left, he has spent his career as a journalist avoiding the ease of malaise that so many others on the margins have chosen. As a contributor to In These Times and the Progressive, as well as his wonderful blog for the Nation,his reporting and writing have been epitomized by a worthy combination of reason and passion, along with an optimism that never becomes naïve. This impressive style is on full display in this work, in which he successfully illustrates his indisputable yet often ignored point.

In order to perform the daunting rescue mission of resuscitating our idea of socialism in America, Nichols takes the reader on a journey from the nation’s founding through to the present day, stopping off along the way to illustrate how many of the same people so revered by those who disdain all things and all people socialist were themselves socialists, had clear socialist ideas, and conversed with socialists and even (gasp) communists. Starting with Thomas Paine, the Founder whose pamphlet Common Sense is often attributed as being the spark that ignited the American Revolution, was more than just a town crier bent on personal liberty (as Glenn Beck would like you to believe). Nichols tells the story of Beck’s attempt to “re-write” Common Sense, illustrating wonderfully the ignorance and selective memory held by those who find it necessary or pleasing to forget that Paine himself was a “proponent of taxation, especially progressive taxation for the purpose of redistributing wealth to the poor and the dispossessed. His ideas about guaranteed incomes, national health care and social-welfare schemes earned him recognition as the first great proponent of old-age pensions.” As Nichols points out, these critical details are nowhere to be seen in Beck’s revision of Paine.

And what about the Party of Lincoln? Well, it is here where Nichols argument is perhaps at its strongest. He details the writing of Karl Marx, often celebrating the early incarnation of the Republican Party, and indeed Lincoln himself, something that many of its current day members would loathe to learn. Many glowing articles of America’s new radical party penned by Marx appeared in the New York Tribune. When Lincoln won re-election, Marx wrote him a congratulatory letter. What did Lincoln do to wholly disassociate himself from this evil man? Well, he wrote a letter back of course, accepting Marx’s good wishes “with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence.” Indeed, most every president up until 1980 engaged socialists, and hired socialists, formed policies ranging from Medicare to anti-poverty legislation to Civil Rights using socialist thought as part of deliberations. Unfortunately for those who pretend otherwise, Lincoln was one such president.

Nichols demonstrates how Martin Luther King Jr., another man whose history Glenn Beck has recently attempted to revise, was strongly influenced by socialism and socialist leaders as he rose to prominence. Nichols’s description of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as a socialist undertaking underscores this fact, and emphasizes how notions like guaranteed employment and social justice were key elements of the subtext in MLK’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech. Throughout the book, Nichols manages to tell the great story of socialism in America without having to play it up. His strength as a writer is found in the manner in which he treats the facts at hand, and the statements of the various historical players stand as a testament to his idea that socialism has not somehow worked to destroy America, but in fact is responsible for many of the great programs and people that have graced the American stage.

There is much to respect in Nichols’s effort, and there is no doubting that this sort of response was long overdue. However, despite all its qualities, it seems unlikely that the book will do much of anything other than provide those already sympathetic with this cause some anecdotes and evidence with which to argue. Despite the book’s title, Nichols provides scant attention to the history of the word itself, the incredible state of disrepair the language of the Left is in, and the worrying prospect that almost anyone who does not already agree with the underlying ideas of this work would likely reject it out of hand as, well, just another socialist plot to overthrow America. Just how deep the anti-socialist sentiment is sown into the modern American fabric is something not really addressed here by Nichols, even if it is true that we are more socialist than we thought. If that is the case, then why are we so obsessed with pretending we are not? Hopefully, Nichols will attack that issue sometime soon. However, what he has managed to do is deliver a strong, concise history that at least begins the attempt to help America reconnect with those of its roots which are, in fact, socialist.