Friday Open Thread [6.19.15]
Today is Juneteenth — a commemoration of the day that General Granger got to Galveston with his soldiers (including a Colored Regiment) troops to remind the citizens there that Lee had surrendered and that the slaves were free. It is important to remember this day — good reading on this at TPM and the NYT.
On the eve of Juneteenth, the brilliant Jon Stewart says everything that needs to be said about our attitudes towards the casual racism that shelters terrorist acts like those committed in the AME church in Charleston:
All eyes on Coons and Carper? Not really. They are in the bag for this corrupt corporate lobbyist written trade deal. Of course they brag about how great it is for American workers and how wonderful they are because they got some peanuts thrown toward “aid for workers displaced by international trade” as if that was some kind of accomplishment.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House has revived President Barack Obama’s embattled trade agenda. But a potentially tough Senate battle awaits.
The House voted 218 to 208 Thursday to grant Obama “fast track” authority to send Congress trade agreements it can reject or ratify but not change.
The Republican-driven vote marks a dramatic turnabout from last week’s stunning setback dealt to Obama by House Democrats. This time fast track was separated from another matter that the Democrats had used to scuttle the whole package.
The GOP-controlled Senate could take up the issue next week. The bill needs help from about a dozen Democrats. They want assurance that Congress also will renew federal aid for workers displaced by international trade.
It is obvious that any benefit to the middle class from this deal will come from what little trickles down from the corporate scions who make bundles off of it…
I understand its being framed as a bastion against the Chinese… We do have to worry that China will one day set prices for labor so low across the world so that we will have no choice but to follow China’s lead, just as American retail twenty years ago, followed Walmart’s lead to the detriment of all of us still earning our living week by week, or month by month (as opposed to financial quarter by financial quarter)
Now if this agreement set a global minimum price on labor, at $15 American dollars and all parties would have to uphold that and agree to boycott Chinese and other nations’ products made with lesser wages, then this bill could be beneficial to the middle class. But it doesn’t… its catastrophic effect has already been glimpsed in that the framers of the plan saw it necessary to sweeten the deal with aid to American workers who are about to lose jobs….
So indeed we’ve been forewarned….. JOBS WILL BE LOST…. and by the amount of the aid, it will be a lot of jobs… We can at least see this plain as day, despite all the murky secrecy surrounding the details…
But we must really look at the underlying myth behind this thing… and that myth is that whatever is good for corporations is good for America… Historically that has not held up across America’s history… It wasn’t true in the 1890’s, 1900’s,and 1910’s. It wasn’t true in the late 1920’s, and it certainly hasn’t panned out in the 2000’s and 2010’s…. In fact. The only time middle Americans have ever prospered…. IS WHEN OUR GOVERNMENT HELD CORPORATIONS IN CHECK…. When we taxed them fairly, like 60-90%… When we forced them to accept unions and go whichever way employees voted. When we said that if your shop was union, no one could work there without paying dues.
What that gave us were people who built trains, and got a piece of the profit… What that gave us were people who built cars, and got a piece of the profit… What that gave us were people who built skyscrapers and bridges, and got a piece of the profit… Those only with enough clout today to argue for the same, are professional sports stars… They have the luxury to quit work in order to hold out for a more fair piece of the profits….
Now if we were in bazarro world (Seinfeld reference); if we were struggling over an amendment to the TPP which was there to give corporations relief to pay for all the people this bill would force them to hire, then we might be inclined to believe the words of Coons and Carney and Carper who say this is needed for workers and more jobs….
But, when that amendment is to cover jobs lost…. we know we are up that stinky creek. How long will that money flow? As with Race To The Top, we quickly found it stops dead…. after the program is done… There is no interest keeping it up indefinitely… As we found out with extended unemployment…. It stops dead when its time runs out. As we found with SNAP and Medicaid…. as soon as it can be cut drastically, it will be….,
We know this… We… all… know…. this…. Therefore we need to a) fight our Congressional delegation’s complacency by controlling ALL messaging on their home turf (which we do well)…. and b) we need to groom able and electable people who understand that investors and corporations, despite as nice and beneficial as they are, are at least right now, the enemy of the middle class, and that levying much higher taxes on the top 1%, will be the benevolent friend of all those still struggling day to day to barely make ends meet while under the top 1%’s control.
Well said. That “aid for workers displaced by international trade” is particularly revealing AND galling.
Carper and Coons are (further) cutting open the veins of American workers and saying “Don’t worry. Here is a bucket you can use to catch the blood.”
Coons are Carper are impervious to phones calls, but…
DiscoverFreedmen.org
This websites unlocks the public archives of FOUR MILLION emancipated slaves, needing prepared records to be extracted and the information entered in a computer index for all to have access. This work can be quick, it can be long, you decide. You pick–marriage records? Land grants? Schools……regardless, it’s fascinating and available. It will absolutely move you when a record of the era “comes up” on the screen, and you KNOW that town, or street, or recognize a last name. You are ABSOLUTELY guided thru the process of what is needed to be digitized. All levels of capabilities, and NO EXPERIENCE necessary. Televised today was the launch….and believe it or not one of the hurdles I never would have thought about…….cursive writing! Kids and teens are doing this–and loving the work–but they don’t know cursive like we do for translation! So grab a teen, sit with a youngster and knock out a 20 minute “batch” together. It’s addictive. It’s more of the story……..
DiscoverFreedmen.org
Museum of African American History and Culture opens in 2106 at the Smithsonian and is COUNTING on much of this work to be complete. Without these records digitized they will sit in the National Archives, because the anticipated cost without volunteers was 30 years, and 1.7 billion dollars in cost to prepare and format. Make the next connection. Thanks!
Watching Firefly on AXS tv, and the singer from some hipster band jumps off the stage and the crowd drops him ,and I’m like wtf. Then I notice that every damn one of them is holding their cell phones up in the air. Of course they are going to drop him.