DL Open Thread: Sunday, November 14, 2021
My Kind Of Anti-Vax Story. Washington State Senator, who doubles as a registered foreign agent, stranded in El Salvador, begs for Regeneron:
“Do any of you have any ideas on how I could get the monoclonal antibodies sent to me here,” Ericksen continued. “Ideally, I would like to get it on a flight tonight so it would be here by tomorrow.”
It was unclear Friday if GOP lawmakers were assisting Ericksen, and whether any efforts might succeed.
Ericksen this year sponsored a bill to protect the rights of state residents who won’t get a COVID-19 vaccine. But SB 5144 never got a hearing in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
Last month, the Freedom Caucus called on Inslee to resign after nearly 1,800 state workers were let go for refusing to comply with the governor’s vaccine mandate.
“Never have we witnessed a failure of leadership in this state as we have seen under Gov. Jay Inslee,” Ericksen said in a statement at the time. “For nearly 600 days, he has used COVID emergency powers to establish autocratic rule, refusing to call the Legislature into special session, and shutting the people out.”
Ericksen in 2019 registered with the U.S. Department of Justice as a foreign agent to conduct lobbying work on behalf of the Cambodian government, scoring a $500,000 contract for his new firm.
That contract came after Ericksen traveled to Cambodia to observe — and ultimately praise — the country’s widely condemned 2018 elections. Those elections took place as a government crackdown shuttered independent media organizations and dissolved a key opposition party.
The Nation’s Toxic Cancer Hot Spots. You can just type in a city name, or a zip code. Looks like Delaware’s worst–and it’s bad–is right around the notorious Croda plant, which DNREC continues to baby. Specifically, the area is 4.4 times the EPA’s acceptable risk limit. Just type in 19720 in the search box, and see for yourself. Essential reporting from ProPublica.
Kaiser Permanente Workers Victorious!:
Kaiser Permanente reached a tentative agreement with its workers’ unions Saturday, handing its workers a big victory and averting what would have been a historic strike by two days.
Essentially, workers feared that Kaiser was trying to create a caste system within their ranks, paying workers who do the same jobs, even side by side, different salaries and benefits. These kinds of moves can splinter workers into different groups of have-somes and have-lesses, making it harder for them to organize in the future. In the end, Kaiser dropped its push for the two-tiered pay system.
The health care giant had defended the proposed cuts as necessary to stay competitive, but the numbers tell a different story. In 2019, Kaiser gave its outgoing CEO Bernard Tyson a $35 million pay and retirement package. During the pandemic, it made $10 billion. And it made that money while its workers were ground down by the grueling conditions of laboring through a global pandemic.
Is This How Democracy Dies In Pennsylvania?
Voters across the Keystone State decided who will run their polling places in the next two elections, but you could forgive them if they didn’t realize it. Buried near the bottom of their ballots on November 2 were a pair of posts: judge of elections and inspector of elections, bureaucratic titles that most people have never heard of. In many counties, the contests didn’t even make the first page of local races, falling far beneath those for supreme-court justice, county executive, and the school board—even tax collector and constable merited higher placement.
Grassroots Republican supporters of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat targeted these posts throughout the state, and many of them won their race last week. “There hasn’t been a sophisticated, concerted effort to sabotage elections like the one we’re facing now,” Scott Seeborg, the Pennsylvania state director for the nonpartisan group All Voting Is Local, told me.
Families Of Police Shooting Victims Call For Justice. It’s possible some revisions to the ‘Police Bill Of Rights’ could pass the Senate in 2022. But there will be nothing approximating justice until the Kop Kabal is out of power in the House of Representatives. That should be the #1 focus of challengers to the retired cops and the cop groupies who ‘serve’ in the House. We need new leaders, and we’re not far from accomplishing our goal.
What do you want to talk about?
The 2022 election is going to be a new standard for attacks on democracy and the contradicting of the will of the people, sad to see Pennsylvania playing that game but having been to the western part of the state am not surprised. Wonder if the anticipated “Nullify the election” game will be played and wonder if any of the players will emerge alive and not on the run. This will spur anger above and beyond what we have seen as of late, hoping it reveals that the Republicans have far less support for Fascism then they think.