DL Open Thread: Saturday, August 20, 2022

There’s No DeJoy In Gasville.  Although the rogue head of the Post Office could still insist on a modicum of gas guzzlers:

The Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law this week, includes a windfall for the United States Postal Service: $1.29 billion for the purchase of zero-emission delivery trucks, plus $1.71 billion for accompanying infrastructure, like charging ports, to support those vehicles.

Earlier this year, USPS announced that it would buy 165,000 trucks from the manufacturer Oshkosh Defense, and that 90 percent of those would be gas powered. Environmental activists and Democratic politicians were outraged. Sixteen states and two environmental groups filed lawsuits.

The agency has since recalibrated, announcing last month that it would bump the proportion of electric mail trucks up to 40 percent of the new fleet. But with the passage of the IRA, the USPS is running out of reasons to move forward with purchasing any gas-powered vehicles at all.

Until the USPS formalizes a new contract with Oshkosh Defense, the manufacturer of the new trucks, the lawsuits filed by states and environmental groups will go on. “Until they vacate that decision, we’re gonna proceed with the litigation,” Martinez said. “We need greater assurances than via press release about what their intentions are.”

How Chains Turned Pharmacy Into An Unattractive Profession:

Universities ramped up enrollment in pharmacy programs, leading to a fivefold increase in graduates — to roughly 10,000 new pharmacists — in the decade that ended in 2007. (Pharmacists typically take two or three years of college-level prerequisites before earning a four-year professional degree.)

But by the 2010s, the market for pharmacists was cooling thanks to some of the same factors that have weighed on other middle-class professions. Large chains such as Walgreens and CVS were buying up competitors and adjacent businesses like health insurers.

This consolidation generated large fees for workers at the top of the income ladder — financiers and corporate lawyers — but slowed the growth of retail outlets where pharmacists could find employment. After striking a deal in 2017 to acquire roughly 2,000 Rite Aid stores, Walgreens shut down more than 500 locations. It closed a few hundred more over the next three years.

Pharmacies also faced external challenges. To hold down the cost of prescription drugs, insurance companies and employers rely on so-called pharmacy benefit managers to negotiate discounts with drugmakers and pharmacies. Consolidation among benefit managers gave them more leverage over pharmacies to drive prices lower. (CVS merged with a large benefits manager in 2007.)

Big drugstore chains often responded by trying to rein in labor costs, according to William Doucette, a professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Iowa. Several pharmacists who worked at Walgreens and CVS said the formulas their companies used to allocate labor resulted in low levels of staffing that were extremely difficult to increase.

Enough fair use.  I can tell you that everything in this article is true.

New CNN CEO Promises To Kiss Rethuglican Ass.  Yep, he actually met with them. Then fired their highly-respected media reporter:

CNN’s new CEO, Chris Licht, has been attending to an audience neglected by the network for the past several years: Republican lawmakers.

The network boss camped out in mid-July in a room on the first floor of the Senate side of the Capitol, S-120, where he asked GOP lawmakers to come talk with him privately. That arrangement avoided alerting the reporters who stalk the halls of the Capitol, sources said, and accommodated Republican lawmakers who preferred not to be seen hobnobbing with him.

Since joining the network in April, Licht has made clear he is trying to do something different. Just weeks into his tenure, he announced the abrupt cancellation of CNN’s much-vaunted digital media project, CNN+, just a month after its splashy launch.

How A White Police Chief Bragged About Killing ‘N—–s’ In A Miss. Town That’s 86% Black.  Well, the town is basically owned by a wealthy white family, so there’s that:

JULIAN filed the suit after recordings surfaced of Sam Dobbins, who was police chief in the town at the time, using racial and homophobic slurs and bragging about killing multiple people as a police officer. The town’s Board of Aldermen voted 3-2 to remove Dobbins from his role after the recording surfaced, and he was fired on July 20.

In the recording, Dobbins describes shooting a Black man in a cornfield as “justified, bro.”

“I shot that n****r 119 times, OK?” he says in the expletive-laden recording that also includes the statement: “I don’t talk to fucking queers, I don’t talk to fucking f****ts.”

Dobbins also tells an officer in the recording that he had killed 13 people in his career, and that he was proud of the fact that the Lexington community “fears” him, according to the lawsuit.

Black residents make up about 86% of Lexington, a town of less than 1,800 people. In its lawsuit, JULIAN calls the town “tiny and deeply segregated,” and says it is “controlled” by a wealthy white family, as well as a white mayor, former police chief, city judge and city attorney.

“Every single branch of government is controlled by white people in a town that is 86% black,” Jill Collen Jefferson, the president and founder of JULIAN, told HuffPost. “This is Jim Crow at its finest. What I want people to see is that this never ever stopped.”