We need to de-throne Scrooge McConnell

It's our money that Moscow Mitch Scrooge McConnell and the Republican death cult is withholding. People will lose jobs, homes, transportation, and lives because of the failure of the GOP to act.

January 5th is coming. Meidas, the Lincoln Project, Fair Fight, and others are working on getting out the vote and getting information to the electorate in Georgia.



Omaha Steve set up the DU actblue link for Warnock, Ossoff, Stacey Abrams' Fair Fight:

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/dufor2020runoff

A few questions: https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=14520874

and answers: https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=14520972

Here's Omaha Steve's daily update on the progess:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214759560

Beaten Mom with Toddler ... Demands Officers Be Fired

Black Mom Swarmed & Beaten by Philly Riot Police with Toddler in Car Demands Officers Be Fired

A Black mother who was attacked by a horde of Philadelphia police officers is speaking out about the harrowing experience. Rickia Young was driving an SUV with her 2-year-old son and teenage nephew on October 27 as the city was engulfed in protest over the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr. earlier that day. Officers descended on the vehicle, broke its windows, assaulted and arrested her and separated her from her child. Young’s arrest went viral due to a shocking video of the police swarming her vehicle, and after the National Fraternal Order of Police — the country’s largest police union — posted a photo of her 2-year-old on social media, falsely claiming he “was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness.” More than a month after the police attack, Rickia Young is demanding the officers involved be fired. “The police have not offered an explanation as to why they acted the way they did that night. They responded instead with a police investigation into Rickia,” says Kevin Mincey, Rickia Young’s attorney.

[ Transcript and video (warning: violent) at link above ]

Let Them Eat COVID, Or These Fabulous New Job Numbers!

https://www.wonkette.com/let-them-eat-covid-or-these-fabulous-new-job-numbers
by Liz Dye
December 04, 2020

So much for that V-shaped recovery. The November jobs report is out this morning, and it's not great! Economists were looking for 445,000 new jobs, and they got 245,000. That's compared to a gain of 610,000 jobs in October. Hey, remember when Kush 'n' Munch promised us a soaring year-end recovery thanks to the Dear Leader's wise stewardship? Yeah, not so much.

As the next wave of coronavirus crashes over us and Mitch McConnell's end of unemployment benefits time bomb detonates under nine million Americans, it's clear we're in for a rough winter.

Theoretically, unemployment declined from 6.9 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month. But the reality is that 400,000 people dropped out of the labor force permanently, disguising what's probably a net loss of actual jobs. Anyway, the month-on-month data is just a metric to tell us how much progress we've made digging out of the covid hole. The more meaningful comparison — the one that tells us how much shoveling we'll have to do to get back to "normal" — is where we are now compared to where we were in February when the virus hit.

In February, the unemployment rate was at 3.5 percent, and there were 152 million people working. Now it's 6.7 percent, and there are 142 million people working. That's 10 million more unemployed Americans before the next wave of covid-related closures decimates the hospitality industry.

No doubt Mitch McConnell appreciates the Bureau of Labor Statistics' commitment to producing charts so boring they'll make your eyes bleed. He's hoping you'll fall asleep before you work out that he and the rest of those evil fuckers have been dicking around for four months, pretending that the House plan for a massive stimulus bill was just Democrats being Democrats. Look at Crazy Nancy with her wacko demands for a $3 trillion package. LOL!

[ . . . ]

Inside the Lives of Immigrant Teens Working Dangerous Night Shifts in Suburban Factories

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/11/immigrant-child-labor-factories-bensenville-illinois/
During the day, they attend high school. At night, they work to pay debts to smugglers and send money to family.

Melissa Sanchez

It’s a little before 6 a.m. and still dark when Garcia gets home from work this October morning. The apartment where he lives with his aunt and uncle is silent. They’ve already left for their own jobs.

After nine hours hosing down machinery at a food processing plant, Garcia is tired and hungry. But he has less than an hour to get ready for high school, where he is a junior. He quickly showers, gets dressed and reheats some leftover chicken soup for a meal he refers to as his dinner. Then he gulps down some coffee, brushes his teeth, and walks outside to catch the school bus waiting near the edge of the sprawling apartment complex.

Here in the Chicago suburb of Bensenville, and in places like it throughout the country, Guatemalan teenagers like Garcia spend their days in class learning English and algebra and chemistry. At night, while their classmates sleep, they work to pay debts to smugglers and sponsors, to contribute to rent and bills, to buy groceries and sneakers, and to send money home to the parents and siblings they left behind.

They are among the tens of thousands of young people who have come to this country over the past few years, some as unaccompanied minors, others alongside a parent, amid a spike in the number of Central American migrants seeking asylum in the U.S.

[ . . . ]

Life is almost back to normal in Melbourne, Australia.

https://www.vox.com/2020/12/4/22151242/melbourne-victoria-australia-covid-19-cases-lockdown
How Melbourne eradicated Covid-19
Life is almost back to normal in Melbourne, Australia. Here’s how they did it.
By Dylan Scott

In July and August, the Australian state of Victoria was going through a second Covid-19 wave. Local leaders set an improbable goal in the face of that challenge. They didn’t want to just get their Covid-19 numbers down. They wanted to eliminate the virus entirely.

By the end of November, they’d done it.

They have seen no active cases for a full four weeks. Melbourne, the state’s capital and a city with about as many people as the greater Washington, DC, area, is now completely coronavirus-free.

Australia enjoyed plenty of advantages over the United States in containing Covid-19. It has no land borders to speak of. Its population density is very low (though the population is concentrated on the coasts). Its outbreak never got nearly as bad as the US’s did. On its worst days, Victoria saw about 700 new cases; Missouri, with (very roughly) a similar population and landmass, is currently averaging more than 3,000. Some of the Australian states also closed their borders to the others, which lowered the risk somebody might bring Covid-19 from one part of the country to another.

But the Australian epidemic has also mirrored America’s in important ways. Once the coronavirus arrived in the spring, the country went into lockdown. When cases abated, some of those restrictions were eased — and, before too long, Covid-19 cases were spiking again. Each state was responsible for its own response, with the federal government playing an advisory role outside of obviously national issues like foreign travel.

Covid-19 puts workers in danger. It's another reason we need unions

by Steven Greenhouse
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/24/covid-19-workers-dangers-unions

n May, workers at a McDonald’s in San Francisco said that when they asked their employer for masks, they were told to use coffee filters instead. In April, at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, a workers’ representative told me they only saw two hand sanitizers for the facility’s 5,000 employees. A Walmart worker in New Orleans said in April that several cashiers were sent home without pay for refusing managers’ orders to stop wearing masks, after some shoppers interpreted it as a sign they had Covid-19.

Some financially stretched retail workers say they were all but forced to go to work sick because their companies didn’t give paid sick leave for Covid-19 unless they first had a test showing they had contracted the virus, and in many places it was extremely hard to get tested.

Alarmed about the spread of Covid-19, health officials in Colorado criticized the JBS meatpacking company for having a “work while sick” culture. At a Mom’s Organic Market in Philadelphia, workers voiced alarm that their store was experiencing abnormally high sales volume, but little was being done to limit the crowding.

For many frontline workers, one of the most maddening aspects of the pandemic is that their employers have often ignored their concerns and suggestions about health and safety, even though workers arguably know best about what they need to stay safe on the job. This frequent failure of employers to listen to their workers – “a lack of worker voice” – is a deep-seated problem in the US, and it has become especially problematic during the current pandemic. If companies paid more attention to their workers’ concerns about safety, would a staggering 890 workers at the Tyson pork plant in Logansport, Indiana, have contracted Covid-19? Would more than 780 workers at the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota? Would eight workers have died at JBS’s beef-processing plant in Greeley, Colorado?

Tucked into the Covid-19 stimulus package? Protection for corporations

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/05/tucked-into-the-covid-19-stimulus-package-protection-for-corporations

The proposed legislation would shield corporations from liability if their workers die from Covid-19 in unsafe workplaces

In early October, Harvard researchers sounded an alarm: they released a report showing a pattern of coronavirus deaths surging soon after workers filed requests for workplace safety assistance from the US labor department. The takeaway was clear: workers are desperately begging the government to help protect them from a deadly pandemic, the government has been unresponsive, and lots of workers have subsequently died preventable deaths.

Today, a little more than a month after the study came out, the federal government is finally responding: a bipartisan group of Senate and House lawmakers have announced legislation to shield corporations from lawsuits when their lax safety standards kill more workers.

In practice, the legislation, which is being tucked into a larger Covid relief package, is a holiday-season gift for corporate donors: it would strip frontline workers of their last remaining legal tool to protect themselves in the workplace – at the same time the unemployment system is designed to financially punish those workers if they refuse to return to unsafe workplaces during the pandemic.

The legislation comes not only as workers continue to die, but also as roughly 7- 9% of the total Covid-19 death count are “take home” infections traced to employees unwittingly spreading the disease to their families and friends.

BREAKING: Donald Jizzbrain Trump is still the biggest LOSER in U.S. history!

Just a friendly reminder, plus I like taking note of the fact that every day that child-molesting, treasonous, uncouth, Nazi-sympathizing murderer is a loser.

"Ann" on Great Performances, PBS

A local PBS station is rebroadcasting the June 19th premier of "Ann". Holland Taylor did a pretty good job of portraying Ann Richards.

Proof that Texas wasn't always Shrub and Gohmert country.

Best I can provide -- 30 second 'official' preview:

Why Alabama Beachgoers Aren't Worried About COVID-19

runtime 3 mins 01 secs