Wednesday, November 4, 2020

CN Live! 2020 US Election: THE AMERICAN DECISION

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4FhRkpSGR8&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=ConsortiumNews



2020 Election Results Live: Presidential and Senate races | Fox News

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmrGeWxd87Y&ab_channel=FoxNews



Voter suppression, arbitrary state rules make this the worst election ever




NOV. 1, 2020
3 AM



https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-11-01/voter-suppression-worst-election-ever






To the editor: In my 70 years of being alive, this election season has got to be the absolute worst ever. (“Memo to the Supreme Court: Let the people vote,” editorial, Oct. 30)

The reduction of polling places and ballot dropoff boxes in some areas; the slowdown of mail service; the withholding of federal funding to certain states for nakedly political reasons — all are making this election particularly difficult.

This is a federal election. States could follow the same rules. Why should a voter in Texas have to drive for miles and miles to drop off a ballot?

I have long thought that all campaigning should be limited only to three months prior to election day. If a candidate cannot explain their stance on the issues within that time, too bad. Doing this would greatly reduce the fighting and allow the citizens to exercise their franchise as guaranteed by federal law. Of course, it would reduce the income of the various fields of the media industry.


And God knows, it would reduce the time we’d have to listen to and read of the insults made by the candidates of their opponents, which are, just plainly, rude behaviors.

Randy Smith, Cathedral City




To the editor: I don’t understand the thinking of the U.S. Supreme Court justices and their suppression, or at the very least discouragement, of voting.





They must have, at some point in their vaunted Ivy League educations, heard about the rise of fascism in Europe. Why on Earth are they bending the rules to favor authoritarianism in this erstwhile beacon of democracy?

I am mystified.

Zena Thorpe, Chatsworth

..


To the editor: The wisest thing the Supreme Court could do regarding the election is to stay out of it and avoid getting drowned in the quagmire with the disreputable Rehnquist court, which decided Bush vs. Gore in 2000.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh didn’t do Chief Justice John Roberts any favors by citing the Rehnquist court in his recent opinion on voting in Pennsylvania, but he did lay his cards on the table so we can see what things might look like down the road.

Democrat Joe Biden may well win the election handily, making it unnecessary for the Supreme Court to intervene. If so, Kavanaugh’s way of thinking is going to force Biden and Congress to expand not just the Supreme Court but probably the entire federal judiciary.

Kavanaugh has made it very clear what a 6-3 conservative majority will mean for Biden, and Biden will certainly realize that it will mean a failed presidency. It could also mean trouble for Kamala Harris if she runs for president in 2024.


The Supreme Court must be expanded and the conservative majority must be sidelined.

Muriel Schuerman, Downey



letterer Email Addr






Trump's FCC Repeals NET NEUTRALITY Again

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTblsgtB2FY&ab_channel=TheJimmyDoreShow



Contested Election? Labor Unions Vow General Strike

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I75nGWB0zc&ab_channel=GrahamElwood



Debt Forgiveness For The Rich, Destitution For The Rest

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCSmMB-s1Cs&ab_channel=RedactedTonight



Labor’s Uphill Battle





Enthusiasm for strikes, walkouts, sick-outs, and pickets has surged. A new, progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented by young women of color like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—has won the enthusiasm of millions of young people.




November 3, 2020 Lauren Kaori Gurley NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS




https://portside.org/2020-11-03/labors-uphill-battle




On a blustery October afternoon, Joe Biden stopped in Erie, Pennsylvania, a lakeside city in a battleground county that swung to Trump in 2016, to speak to an attentive group of plumbers at a union hall. “If every investment banker in New York went on strike, nothing would change much in America,” Biden said, addressing members of United Association Local 27, who stood by their workbenches in blue shirts and face masks. “If every plumber decided to stop working, every electrician—the country comes to a halt. I mean, literally, not figuratively. Literally, it comes to a damn halt.”

A video of Biden’s comment went viral, circulated by members of the country’s resurgent labor movement, by and large a young, multiracial coalition of social media–savvy leftists—a demographic that perhaps only shares common class interests with white, middle-aged plumbers in Erie. Many of these young labor enthusiasts had been supporters of Bernie Sanders for whom Biden was not a second or even a third choice in the primaries, and who nevertheless responded to Biden’s comment with support—and calls for a general strike.

During the 2008 recession, popular support for labor unions, according to Gallup, hit an all-time low. (Historically, American opinion on unions has suffered during economic crises.) But in the last four years, enthusiasm for strikes, walkouts, sick-outs, and pickets has surged, often in unusual places. In 2018, West Virginia public school teachers, demanding higher wages and smaller classroom sizes, staged a wildcat strike that spread to a series of red states: Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Amazon warehouse workers, Google and Microsoft engineers, and journalists at digital media companies have ignited their own combative movements, gaining widespread support on social media. Earlier this year, when UC Santa Cruz graduate students staged a wildcat strike for a $1,412 increase to their monthly stipend, their strike fund received nearly $300,000 on GoFundMe and support from Bernie Sanders on Twitter. Protests, organized on Twitter and Facebook, spread to nearly every single University of California campus in the state.

The new gig economy, which emerged out of Silicon Valley in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, has been a major site of labor organizing in recent years. Start-up platforms like Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, DoorDash, and Caviar—all founded in the span of four years, between 2009 and 2013— enticed millions of underemployed Americans into rideshare and food delivery jobs. These gig workers are not paid per hour, but per ride, delivery order, or task—in a poverty wage “piecework” labor model resembling the garment industry at the turn of the twentieth century, when Jewish and Italian seamstresses living in overcrowded New York City tenements were paid per piece of needlework, with no standardized minimum wage. Since 2018, thousands of gig workers have mobilized from coast to coast, staging massive multicity strikes and rallies at airports, corporate office towers, and the homes of billionaire investors. “All of the money I make goes to bills and car maintenance and gas,” an Uber driver in Orange County, California, who participated in a strike last year the day before Uber’s stock market debut, told me bitterly. “I did a ride yesterday where the rider paid $8.60, and my pay was $2.56. When you’re the driver and you see that, it makes your blood boil.”

Meanwhile, a new, progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented by young women of color like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—whose campaigns have spotlighted the labor issues affecting their working-class constituents—has won the enthusiasm of millions of young people on Twitter, Instagram, and most recently, the livestreaming service for gamers, Twitch. Support for unions among the American public, according to Gallup, is rising again to nearly the highest it has been since the 1960s.