Open Thread for Sunday, October 29, 2017
Everybody waiting for Mueller’s Monday reveal, but writing about it is difficult because nobody knows anything more than the bare bones. I’m skipping all the prediction stories — Mueller will be fired! — because they were written to fill a void, not because journalists make great predictions. The best thing I found was this clear-eyed John Cassidy piece for the New Yorker, in which he notes that “five months into his investigation, Mueller has brought a first set of criminal charges. By the standards of recent special prosecutors, that is fast work, and it confirms Mueller’s reputation as someone who doesn’t like to dally.”
Lots of people noticed how much the forces of Sauron ratcheted up the “you’re the puppet” talk last week — trying to pin the Steele dossier on Democrats, resurrecting the deal that sold a uranium mining operation to Russians — anything to shift the focus from their sorry conspiratorial asses. The most unhinged actor was Roger Stone, a man so craven he has a full-back tattoo of Richard Nixon. His rantings got him banned from Twitter, but before he left he made an ominous prophecy about CNN that Josh Marshall examines.
The GOP’s latest play has been to discredit Mueller himself, with clearly coordinated calls for his resignation coming in from all quarters.
Baseball’s World Series is all even after four games, but the big news from the Fall Classic is on the Brotherhood of Man front. The Commish has ruled that a Cuban hitter making a racist gesture at a Japanese-Iranian pitcher was un-American.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Have at it, and add anything you find worth talking about.
A thought on sexual harassment in the workplace. For me, it is impossible to separate sexual harassment in the workplace from America’s odd and backward labor policy. I have written in this space before many times that the US and South Africa are the only two industrialized countries in the world that subscribe to an “at will” labor policy. It says, “innocently”, that either the employer or the employee may end the work relationship with a simple “I quit” or “you’re fired”. This is supposed to suggest the playing field is “level” as either party may end the work relationship. It is another “conservative” sham. It’s no secret that in the US, business is dominated by men. And men have found that being able to fire someone without any recourse sets up a situation in which men can behave like very bad boys. It is our peculiar form of capitalism that aids and abets this. Men want “liberty” to create the kind of workplace that favors the owner (them), in order that the owner can reap the benefits of his labor. This doesn’t work as well for employees, especially if the employee is a woman, who needs a job to support herself or her family. Her boss can come on to her at his whim, and as we are seeing, he does. A little sex on the side? At little to no cost? Which bad boy could resist that? It’s time to address this horrible situation. We are not colonies anymore. We don’t need to sacrifice our “liberty” for all to survive as a country or as a business. And under the ideals of our country, it is not only “owners” who should benefit from our labor. And it is owners who should come to understand that a woman does not come to work to be your plaything. Just the opposite. Let’s reset our labor policy to reflect who we “all” aspire to be, not just owners. Throw “at will” on the scrap heap of history and engage together to write some labor policy that enables more Americans to experience the exhuberance of “liberty” in the workplace. We all know that men, as humans, are flawed. Now we need to see that US labor policy, as written, only favors owners and men, and needs to be replaced.