I Won't Work Tomorrow. You Shouldn't Either.
I Won't Work Tomorrow. You Shouldn't Either.
April is almost over, and International Workers' Day is on deck.
I’m not dispatching a newsletter tomorrow, Friday, May 1st. It’s not a coincidence that the federal politicians in both parties and their capitalist pimps blotted out May Day as a notable holiday on the American calendar.
From the paper of record of our times, Wikipedia:
International Workers' Day, also known as Workers' Day or Labour Day in some countries[1] and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of labourers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labour movement which occurs every year on May Day (1 May), an ancient European spring festival.
The date was chosen by a pan-national organization of socialist and communist political parties to commemorate the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago on 4 May 1886. The 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International, called on "all Social Democratic Party organisations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace."
The first of May is a national, public holiday in many countries across the world, in most cases as "Labour Day", "International Workers' Day" or some similar name – although some countries celebrate a Labour Day on other dates significant to them, such as the United States and Canada, which celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday of September.
“The Haymarket Affair” — more accurately described as the Haymarket Massacre (and the ensuing kangaroo conviction and execution of innocent men) — is another incident the federal government doesn’t want people to know about it.
Our historic era of wealth inequality almost assures the rise of a militant labor movement. And that was before coronavirus accelerated the timeline.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (net worth: $300 million) said he expects the average American family to subsist on its $1,200 stimulus check for 10 weeks. As of April 24th, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos has made $24 billion. He has undoubtedly added a few more billion in the six days hence.
This bald, buff lizard is so bored with his wealth he is stuffing something called a “10,000 year clock” inside a mountain vault that probably includes vials of his DNA and sperm. I’m sure the aliens that find it after exterminating the human race will be really impressed with the sociopathic book broker.
Well, Bezos is officially on notice in 2020. As is Target and its delivery subsidiary Instacart. These companies have raked record profits and refused to adequately protect their workers that are falling by the dozens.
Amazon, Whole Foods, Target and Instacart workers will go on strike starting tomorrow. It’s the kind of strike this country hasn’t seen in a long time, and the workers are smart enough to realize they will never have as much leverage as they do now.
It ain’t like management is going to roll up their sleeves and risk their lives to re-stock shelves, make calls from cubicles in crowded indoor spaces or express ship the essential three-pronged dildo to a suburban wine mom that unfortunately married a Republican who thinks taxation is theft but her uterus belongs to the unfuckable halfwits that construe the upper echelons of our state and federal government.
Don’t patronize these companies unless you want to go down in history as a scab. Instead help me feed the cats of Franklinton by subscribing to my newsletter for dispatches five days a week (starting Monday).
If you don’t need to work at these companies to tell your boss to fuck off. Take a sick day if you can. Or better yet tell your boss your car blew up and you can’t make it in tomorrow. You get the drift.
One thing this pandemic has showed is the 40-hour work week is OVER when we get back to whatever the new normal is. Life is short and you can’t take days off when you’re dead.
LORD FORGIVE ME….
I swear to Christ that I’m trying to become less pugilistic on Twitter. The problem is I’ve been arguing with people online since roughly 1998. I also have 500,000 opinions. Not all of them are correct but I’m ready to die over each one of them.
I don’t see the point in pulling punches when arguing. It can come off angry to people that don’t know me in real life. Some people envision me as frothing at the mouth while typing a torrent of typo-ridden tweets when I’m actually sitting on my couch in boxer briefs high as hell at 2 p.m. eating a bowl of sugared breakfast corn while weighing the big questions of the day like do I want to shower this week?
Some stuff does piss me off, though. I was ready to move on from my beef with the odious corporate Democrats. At least until next week. Then of course I log into Twitter and see the head of the Black Congressional Caucus dunking on a consumer rights lawyer who had the audacity to challenge a millionaire politician who has literally made a career out of self-dealing.
I said yesterday anybody can act gracious when they win. I didn’t say everybody took that road.
My new kink is entrenched politicians who are still wildly insecure. I guess in Hakeem’s mind when Democrats win their seats they are unaccountable to anyone else within the party. If I didn’t know any better I swear a Republican was talking.
Hakeem’s thinking errors in two ways: The Congresspeople started the fight by failing to adequately represent a large swath of the population to the point somebody was willing to say fuck it, I’ll tangle with a more-financed opponent with higher Name-ID.
The Centrists can’t hide behind older voters forever. So we will see who finishes this fight. It certainly wasn’t decided with an election where Goliath felled David.
Perhaps more perturbing than the head of the Black Caucus shitting on a young black woman who raised high six figures and mounted an insurgent Congressional campaign that brought wide swaths of newcomers to the political arena is a white careerist and Ohio Democratic Party senior staffer calling Harper’s supporters “complete morons” who “wasted all that money” against Joyce Beatty.
Hmmm. Why is only one of Ohio’s 12 Congressional seats flippable in a state careerists like House swear is purple ? Oh, that’s right. Because Joyce Beatty aided and abetted Republican gerrymandering efforts in exchange for a safe seat ensconced by voters GOP operatives referred to as “dog meat.”
It’s galling watching these centrists freaks spike the football like they were the underdogs. Joyce Beatty needed $2.2 million to beat a candidate her camp dismissed as a pretender. The career politician outspent Harper three-to-one in a pandemic primary that was grossly inequitable and thus favored the older more affluent voters that have been sending Beatty to Congress for a decade.
Then these same people turn around and wonder why we’re not enthusiastic to cast a presidential ballot for a walking corpse that refuses to release his Senatorial papers from the University of New Hampshire that would exonerate him from the latest credible accusation of sexual misconduct.
THE HOSPITAL THAT WEXNER BUILT HAS A LABOR DISPUTE ON ITS HANDS
If I were a billionaire sex freak that just got shamed into selling my child lingerie company due to my decades-long friendship with the most infamous dead pedophile in the world and was thus looking to further whitewash my legacy before my inevitable death, I would pour an unprecedented amount of money into the hospital that bears my name to make sure every worker was adequately protected from a deadly infectious disease without a vaccine.
Instead the union representing 4,000 OSU nurses says the hospital endangers their health and and safety.
From Glenn McEntyre of 10tv.com:
In a written complaint to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Tuesday, the President of the Ohio State University Nurses Organization says more than 85 health care workers at OSU have been infected with coronavirus.
Rick Lucas writes "many have suffered serious illnesses and lost work time and may have also exposed or infected their families."
The complaint says, "Registered Nurses, Patient Care Associates, Respiratory Therapists, and other health care professionals are in imminent danger of infection and serious illness associated with SARS CoV-2 across the entire Medical Center," but lists 15 units where the risk is especially high.
I get stressed coming back from Kroger. Not because I could be dead of coronavirus in three weeks but because I could give it to my cats.
It’s hard for me to envision what families of nurses and doctors must be going through right now. You know your wife/husband/partner/mom/dad/whatever is doing life-saving work. Yet at the same time you know death could be walking through the door every time they come home. And it ain’t like every marriage in America is built on a solid foundation to begin with.
I’m tired of reading posts about our heroic healthcare workers. I’m more interested in getting them personal protection equipment and more money in their pockets since our incompetent government failed to prepare for an inevitable pandemic.
DRIVE-IN OWNERS: TRUST US TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC WHILE WE RAKE THIS CASH OFF THE GROUND
Well, Mike DeWine has officially done it. He has rustled the jimmies of the business tyrants in the state. Now we have the proprietor of the Sundance Kid Drive-In (admittedly a bad-ass name) claiming he has enough knowledge of epidemiology to ensure the safety of his workers and customers during a pandemic in which he stands to see a boom in business.
From Michael Tartar of wtol.com:
LIBERTY CENTER, Ohio — Some Ohio businesses are getting ready to open back up Friday. That doesn't include social-based ones like bars and movie theaters.
But local drive-in car theaters are appealing to the governor to allow them to open their doors.
Picking up your remote and watching whatever you want from home has become the new normal. But drive-in movie theaters say they can let people practice social distancing while bringing a little normal back.
"We're a business that was made for social distancing," said Jim Walter, owner of Sundance Kid Drive-In in Oregon.
Local drive-in theater owners were shocked when they weren't included in Gov. Mike DeWine's first wave of businesses allowed to reopen.
This assumes people will attend movies with only people they live with and/or stay in their fucking cars!
I’ve seen enough posts on Instagram to know people are hanging out with people they do not live with. The worst ones are the people who think they’re cute and having family get-togethers in a “socially distant” manner. If they can all fit into an Instagram frame, it ain’t social distance.
I know people are horny for a sense of normalcy. I watched two hours of Michael Jordan commercials and the third-round of the NFL Draft this past week.
I don’t trust business owners to do the right thing, and I sure as hell don’t trust the public to do the right thing. As anyone who has watched Ozark will attest: you can bet your cartel blood money on the Law of Large Numbers.
The goal is to stay at home as much as possible. They’re not even making new movies right now. Stay at home and rent that shit like everybody else. This ain’t 1986. Enjoy our modern-day blessings like OnDemand video and the Pirate Bay.
THOSE WMDs. The murders at the lake… 25 videos of Goths dancing outside during the daytime… On smarm… As coronavirus drags on, Mexico’s food prices rise… The worst rebrand in the history of orange juice… The Justice Department solicited questions about AG Barr and it backfired spectacularly.