May Day 2020: Worker Unity in the Age of Pandemic (Common Dreams): Happy May Day! Around the world May 1 is celebrated as International Workers Day in commemoration of workers who were killed at Chicago’s Haymarket Square, protesting in support of strikers…that is May Day is celebrated everywhere but the United States. But, maybe will change. Today, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Fed Ex, and other companies who employ “essential workers†are striking for safer working conditions, hazard pay, sick days, and other needed benefits.
Water Utilities Want a Bailout. Will Congress Listen? (Circle of Blue): I’d guess that everybody but the most hardened anti-science Trump cultist would agree that We Need Water, soooooo why hasn’t Congress thrown some cash at the people who bring us clean drinking water? Why has the Trump administration been silent on this? Seems to me that water flowing during a health crisis would be a non-partisan free throw. Apparently not.
In Conversation: Thomas Piketty The scholar of inequality warned us that our economic systems couldn’t withstand a global catastrophe (New York): When Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century came out in France in 2013, the buzz was instant. Six month’s later, when published in the US. It became a best seller, insane considering that Capital… is a 700-page study of the failures of capitalism and the dangers of income inequality. It has since become one of the most important econ text ever. Piketty talks about the mess we are in now.
Trump officials spook economists with talk of skipping debt payments to China (Washington Post): Listen, Trump has never really been held responsible for his word or actions. He fucks and runs, leaving behind a trail of children and god knows how many cases of chlamydia, so why should we expect the man to police his words or accept responsibility for their fallout. Shoot up bleach, he says. Spike in calls to poison control centers? Not his fault. Talk about the US defaulting on loans from their second biggest lender and the markets start to spiral? Must have been some other Donald Trump.
Administration eyes expansion of immigration ban, weighing demands from restrictionists and business (Border/Lines): We know that Trump and Stephen Miller’s long term plan is to purge this country of all non-white immigrants who aren’t currently in the service of the wealthy (and as slanted as that sentence seems, it is pretty damn objective). They are using the coronavirus as cover to move fast on this mission. The people at Border/Lines, a great newsletter, spill.