So much random bullshit.
I guess now we know what people are doing with all the guns bought during the pandemic. As restrictions ease, shootings everyday everywhere of every sort of person you could imagine.
A certain conservative talking head continues to use the word metastisize in describing the Maricopa County election audit as though it has a positive connotation. I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means. I mean yes, it does mean spread, but most people associate it with the lethal spread of cancer in the body. In this instance, I guess for once he’s telling the truth, but I don’t think it’s a truth he meant to tell.
I can’t pretend I have a deep understanding of the politics of the United Kingdom, but it seems to me that if you are the architect, or one of the architects of Brexit you would want to reap the rewards or swan around enjoying the fruit of your success. Afterall, the UK did indeed Brexit. Instead, for some bizarre reason, Nigel Farage is popping up all over the United States, doing a speaking tour apparently. I guess he’s been here for six weeks then he ‘s going home and returning in July. Umm….I guess there’s a feeling that certain conservative nonsense sounds better with an English accent? Sure we are allies with the UK, but is it at all ironic that his main audience is the #1776 crowd?
It’s also amusing (very, very lower case amusing), that the same people who are populism, populism populism, and think the Republican party can remake itself as champions of the American worker can’t seem to bring themselves to support an increase in the minimum wage, but do support the less than nuanced narrative certain jobs are going unfilled because people are being ‘paid to not to work’.
If you listen closely, underneath the ‘paid not to work’ complaining you can hear the age old anyone that actually needs and receives financial help must be lazy. This chestnut designed to either discourage or prevent any sort of help that involves the actual money people need is barely, thinly disguised. For people who want to be a worker’s party, it might be nice if they remembered that millions of people were thrown out of work without notice, lost health insurance during a global health disaster, and faced eviction.
More than one Republican congressperson/state leader has mentioned talking to local businessowners about their pandemic related hiring issues. Missing from their telling? Having spoken to anyone who would be doing the actual work. If you want to be a party for working people, you actually have to talk to working people. In place of that we are to Jaime Dimon of JP Morgan Chase’s hot take on why some workers may not return to their jobs. Or aren’t returning as quickly as the boss class would like? Would these be the same workers who were shown pretty definitively that they had the kinds of jobs that in certain crises were either temporarily expendable, or permanently disappeared from the landscape.
Two or so hours before I was to report to one of my jobs (I’ll get to the other one later) on March 12, 2020, I found out that we would be closed for quarantine lockdown, indefinitely. That was fourteen months ago.
A pandemic is a disaster, and there are other potential disasters on the horizon. Should California, for example, have the Big One, how necessary will the local nail salon be. How many restaurants would structurally survive well enough to stay open and need staff? Perhaps people ‘don’t feel like going to work’, or perhaps people in certain industries have seen all kinds of writing on the wall, and understand more clearly how their specific job fits into the American employment hierarchy. Workers have the agency and the right to make adjustments that will benefit them and their families in the long run. Some employers will reap the reward of that, others won’t.
I have been fortunate not to have been financially devastated by the pandemic. I was kept whole by the enhanced/extended unemployment as it was intended. I was fully eligible to receive regular employment benefits because of the state mandated shutdown of my workplace, however my second job remained up and running part-time. With unemployment insurance, what you earn each week is substracted from the regular weekly unemployment payment. For me that meant the total amount of regular unemployment insurance I was scheduled to receive, once what I earned each week was substracted was essentially nullified. The enhancement replaced the nullified state unemployment. Without it my regular income would have been cut in half these last 14 months. The enhanced unemployment has allowed me to wait until I could be recalled to the job that was shutdown March 2020. I have received a return date, let the employer know I intend to return, however the return date is still two months away.
Fortunately, my state has not jumped on the punish pandemic victims bandwagon.
Tedium! 