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The World Is Not My Home but I Am Here |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
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Friday, 20 August 2021 12:42 |
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Keillor writes: "I'm an old liberal and I do think that America has been spared a great deal of trouble by the fact that so much hostility that might go into terrorism is expended instead on competitive sports."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)
The World Is Not My Home but I Am Here
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
20 August 21
 y favorite word today is “unsubscribe” and I’ve been online clicking it on dozens of emails asking for my cash contributions to their battle in behalf of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which one wants to support, but once you do, your name is transmitted to other righteous causes and now I’m getting appeals from folks running for city council in Omaha and a group petitioning Congress to outlaw the internal combustion engine, the chance of which is less than slight, so I unsubscribe and instead I gave to a soup kitchen raising money for school supplies for indigent kids: how could I say no? A nice red book bag, notebooks, pencils, a sharpener, a ruler, the same stuff I treasured when I started school.
I loved school. I come from fundamentalist people and every year they asked that I be excused from square-dancing in gym class so that I would not be tempted by carnal pleasure, but still they didn’t object to my reading secular literature such as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. They were gentle people, not like the bearded men with machine guns riding through the streets of Kabul, or the American mujahideen sacking the Capitol in January or Mr. Roseberry in his black pickup parked in front of the Library of Congress Thursday, claiming to have explosives enough to destroy whole city blocks. Finally he had to pee and he surrendered.
Republicans are in control of provincial capitals in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, but here in Manhattan, we feel far away from the fundamentalists. We have plenty of Orthodox Jews on the Upper West Side but they don’t come into St. Michael’s and try to make Episcopal women wear head coverings. The buses run on Saturdays. Linguini in clam sauce is available in many restaurants. But the collapse of Kabul sends a clear message: liberal values lack the dramatic emotional appeal of faith-based cruelty. Liberalism is weak tea when up against men with rifles who operate on divine guidance. Liberalism is basically neighborliness and it lacks the satisfactions of ferocity.
I’m an old liberal and I do think that America has been spared a great deal of trouble by the fact that so much hostility that might go into terrorism is expended instead on competitive sports. Christians aren’t influenced by the Sunday sermon so much as by the NFL game afterward, the sacking of the quarterback, repeated in slo-mo, his arm up to pass and three behemoths hit him amidships and the helmet flies off and he crumples to the turf, a broken man: thus our lust for violence is sated. The Yankees beat the Red Sox in three straight games this week and thereby satisfied the hormonal urges of a half-million men who otherwise might drive down Amsterdam Avenue in pickups, waving guns, attacking the Red Cross and Red Lobster, running down people displaying red articles of clothing, yelling at people to show their underwear and anyone wearing red gets depantsed. No, it was very civil.
The American heartland was once a hotbed of religious intolerance and then Jim Naismith invented basketball and now in Kansas and Iowa and all through mid-America it has taken the place of Protestantism. If the American military had spent twenty years and billions of dollars building ice arenas in Afghanistan and teaching Afghans to skate and play hockey, the outcome would’ve been quite different. Women’s hockey is a revelation. We old fundies grow up seeing women as Sunday school teachers and mommies and caregivers and then you go see them in helmets and shoulder pads, carrying sticks, and you see that they do not shy away from belting each other hard enough to rattle their molars.
Women are capable of ferocity and once they’ve tasted the pleasures of aggression they do not lie down and submit to bullying. I look at the beards in burnooses holding rifles and ammo belts and I doubt that the Taliban can put the cap back on the bottle now that it’s been opened. The Middle Ages is a long long time ago. While the beards were holed up in the mountains for twenty years, many of those women were studying engineering, learning how to make the wheels turn and the power flow. Some women became ophthalmologists. You need vision, men. Let them help you.
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Nabisco Workers Are on Strike in Three States |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51252"><span class="small">Alex N. Press, Jacobin</span></a>
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Friday, 20 August 2021 12:42 |
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Press writes: "A month after Frito-Lay workers walked off the job, workers who make Nabisco products like Oreos and Triscuits are on strike in Colorado, Oregon, and Virginia. They say management is trying to make already bone-grinding schedules even more intolerable."
Nabisco workers on strike in Richmond, Virginia. (photo: International Union Local 358)
Nabisco Workers Are on Strike in Three States
By Alex N. Press, Jacobin
20 August 21
A month after Frito-Lay workers walked off the job, workers who make Nabisco products like Oreos and Triscuits are on strike in Colorado, Oregon, and Virginia. They say management is trying to make already bone-grinding schedules even more intolerable.
 hen workers at a Frito-Lay production plant in Topeka, Kansas, went on strike last month, they threw into relief the fact that the increased pandemic-era snacking that has boosted profits for PepsiCo, Frito-Lay’s parent company, has come courtesy of working conditions so bad as to lead to suicides and divorces. Now, workers are on strike at another snack-food company, one responsible for Oreos, Triscuits, Planters nuts, and Ritz crackers — Nabisco.
Workers at a Nabisco bakery in Portland, Oregon, went on strike on August 10. They have been working twelve-to-sixteen-hour shifts, with some working seven days a week. The workers say the company is pushing for an alternative workweek, a concession that would take away overtime pay for Saturdays and Sundays, with time paid at regular rates until a worker hits forty hours, regardless of the shift’s length or the day of the week. One worker told the Huffington Post that the changes could amount to a loss of $10,000 a year for some workers. Nabisco is also pushing for a two-tier health care plan, which would slot newer workers into a higher-cost deal while also serving to divide workers within the union.
While Nabisco, which is owned by parent company Mondel?z International (the company was spun off from snack giant Kraft Foods in 2012), saw profits nearly double in the latest quarter of 2021, its workers have seen none of that money, all while working through the pandemic. As the Northwest Labor Press noted, Nabisco CEO Dirk Van de Put received $18 million in compensation in 2020, 561 times that of the company’s median worker.
The Portland workers are members of Local 364 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), the same union that represents the Frito-Lay workers in Topeka. In the days since the roughly two hundred workers in Portland began their strike, other Nabisco bakery and production workers have followed them out the door. The strike has spread to Aurora, Colorado, and Richmond, Virginia. Nathan Williams, an oiler at the Richmond plant who has worked there for thirty years, told Vice that, during the pandemic, “Some people worked every day — 16 hours a day — for three months.”
The workers are covered by a pattern agreement, meaning they have identical contracts, all of which expired earlier this summer. In a statement on the spreading strike, Mondel?z International said that it is “disappointed” by the workers’ decision to strike, adding, “Our goal has been — and continues to be — to bargain in good faith.”
The Nabisco strike is another example of a dynamic spreading across industries in the United States: as employers scramble to staff up, many currently employed workers are subjected to mandatory overtime, with bosses seeking to work them to the bone rather than recruit more people — a potentially costly move when workers are hard to find. In response, some workers are using their increased leverage during a period of employer panic over the tight labor market to push back, demanding better wages and working conditions — and much of the time, those demands are about hours and scheduling.
In a statement on the Richmond strike, which began on August 15, BCTGM president Anthony Shelton said workers in all three states “are telling Nabisco to put an end to the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and get off the ridiculous demand for contract concessions at a time when the company is making record profits.”
The reference to outsourcing is a long-standing concern, as Nabisco continues to close operations in the United States while building up plants in Mexico. In 2015, the company told workers at its Chicago factory to accept a 60 percent cut in pay and benefits or it would lay them off and focus on a newly established operation in Salinas, Mexico. The workers refused the obscene concession. Despite receiving rhetorical support from both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign — on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Trump said, “I’m not eating Oreos anymore” — they failed to force Nabisco to reverse its decision. Some six hundred workers lost their jobs.
As Stephen Franklin wrote of the Chicago plant closure at In These Times, the move was a means of taking advantage of the exploitation faced by workers in Mexico. Shortly after opening its Salinas plant in 2014, Nabisco signed a union contract that “capped the top day rate at 200 pesos, about $14.90 per day. BCTGM eventually obtained a copy of the contract, which it called proof that the Mexican workers were victims of a protection contract.” Such contracts are dictated by the company, which picks a union and enforces its terms through it, hobbling workers’ ability to independently organize. This move by Nabisco underlines the necessity of raising labor standards across borders, with workers at Nabisco’s operations in the United States and Mexico needing one another if they’re to stymie the company’s ruthless pursuit of lower labor costs.
This year, Nabisco closed two locations — one in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and the other in Atlanta, Georgia, affecting some one thousand BCTGM members. The union says the company continues to threaten to shutter operations in the United States if workers don’t accept concessions.
Such is the context for the Nabisco strike: pushed to the brink, workers walked out. Spirits are high on the picket lines — community members and organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are showing up in support, with the Frito-Lay workers in Topeka sending pizza. A growing number of people are sick of the tyranny of work, fed up with spending so many hours either on the job or on the way to and from it. Nabisco workers are some of those people. Now is no time for concessions.
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FOCUS: A Hopeful Pandemonium Ensues |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=60557"><span class="small">Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Website</span></a>
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Friday, 20 August 2021 12:10 |
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Moore writes: "So, our empire has once again lost another war."
Michael Moore. (photo: The New York Times)
A Hopeful Pandemonium Ensues
By Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Website
20 August 21
 o, our empire has once again lost another war. We won our last one 76 years ago this past Sunday. At some point, don’t they relegate us out of the Premier League or sell us off to Yahoo?
In 2001, in the days after 9/11, mine was a lonely voice insisting that we not invade Afghanistan. On September 15th, 2001, I sent a personal letter to my email list, saying this:
I feel I have a responsibility as an American to speak out and say what needs to be said: That we, the United States of America, are culpable in committing many acts of terror and bloodshed and we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants. I know it's a hard thing to hear right now, but if I and others don't say it, I fear we will soon be in a war that will do NOTHING to protect us.
In a subsequent letter I asked the nearly one million people on my list to join me in trying to stop this war. Many of you were on that list. You inundated Congress with calls and letters. Although we couldn’t stop that war, nor the one in Iraq, we continued to organize, to march, to vote and to raise a generation who grew up to overwhelmingly prefer peace and detest state-sanctioned killing (fact: since 9/11, nearly 80 million young people have become of voting age).
I continued sending you those letters. Sometimes upwards of 20,000 of you would write back. These were the days before social media; soon we would all switch to “likes” and tweets — and letters and emails began to fade. I missed that immensely, the more personal and intimate discourse we could have — and it wasn’t long before many others missed it, too. Facebook had made us stupid. Twitter made us angry. Instagram just made us hungry for well-lit food. Emails — the thoughtful letter to a long lost friend, the angry missive to a member of Congress — eventually made a glorious comeback.
I want to reconnect with all of you in this manner by sending you my weekly letter with a bunch of new thinking and fresh ideas of how we can turn things around. We are in the midst of trying to survive three massive pandemics all at once: Covid, Climate and the vicious assault on our Democracy.
We are in a disastrous ecological pandemic that may also be the cause of the coronavirus pandemic. Mother Nature has decided the only way to protect her Earth is to attack those trying to kill it — us! By fire, flood, virus, dead oceans, drought, bats, biomass, starvation — she is just throwing everything at us to see what sticks and I’m guessing she’s thinking two or three more pandemics should do the trick with these mutant apes.
The final pandemic thrust upon us is the impending Death of our Democracy — a plague of millions of white people who know their race is being depopulated and are hellbent on destroying what’s left of our system of elections, governance and our hopes of equity, fairness and freedom. They are the superspreaders of hate and ignorance, and our only comfort right now is that there are about ten million more of us than them — and thanks to their believing Covid is a hoax and bleach is a medicine, we are now going to ironically outlive them because we lined up and got the shots that Trump himself ordered for us.
So there’s hope.
Here’s how my new Letter to You will work. I have teamed up with an amazing free service for writers and artists called Substack. Substack is a publishing platform that I and many other writers believe to be a better and easier way to send you our latest writings, rants, podcasts, videos, ideas, and recipes by way of a simple, elegant email that’s informative, subversive and entertaining. A place where we can write you a poem, sing you a song, help open the only abortion clinic in your state, discombobulate the domestic insurgents, eliminate the filibuster (and the Senate barbershop), and show you our plan on how to get 93% of the world vaccinated.
Each week I’ll share my new writings, a random thought or two, my weekly podcast (embedded in the email), and some bits & bobs or something I’ve run across from a far corner of the world that I know you’re going to like. All of this will come to you in one breezy email! A simple, easy-to-use-and-share Letter from Mike, from me to you. Just like that.
And you can share your thoughts back with me! Here’s how to think of it: A million of us coming together and acting as one! Finding ways to embrace each other, embrace and protect our Democracy and embrace this fragile world which we inhabit.
I have been a witness to 40+ years of those in power seeking to dumb us down, demoralize us, crush our spirits and keep us in our place with little or no political or economic power. If we want to speak up, to write, to broadcast ourselves, to have our voices heard — where do we go? Ask Anderson Cooper to have us on his show? Instead of a hedge fund closing a local paper, how ‘bout give it to us? Social media? Let’s be honest: They’re all massive corporations, complete with their own, often insidious, motivations to “drive eyeballs” no matter the cost to our social fabric. That’s what passes now as “freedom of speech.”
My dear friends, I am longing for a place to have an intelligent, civil exchange of new and brave and beautifully radical ideas, a platform where I can write what I want to say, to have a thoughtful conversation with you, to truly connect without the trolls and bigots stinking up the place. I want to ACT, with YOU, all of us, NOW, in ways that will actually effect change because you and I both know that our time is running out.
I’ve been shaken by loss this year, subsumed by the injustice of it all and consumed in a quiet rage — and by some strange accident of will, I began recording a podcast in my tiny guest bedroom, exactly two weeks before the first Covid death. After that, I didn’t stop. I’ve done 205 episodes, and thanks to many of you, 30 million of those episodes have been downloaded. I honestly don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t had the chance to talk with all of you through my Rode NT-USB microphone, 2-4 times a week. And hey — we got rid of The Former Guy! Right! Right?
I know, I know. Nearly half this country is sick, mad, unvaccinated — and they ate it up and they will again. But remember — we’re the majority now. 80 million millennials have saved us for now.
So this is my plea, my promise, to you. We have a choice. We are all in Earth’s ICU together and yes we can beat back the monster — but it won’t be easy and it won’t work unless we all lock arms and fight the greatest nonviolent fight of our lives.
If you’ve received this letter as an email from me today, that means somewhere through the years you’ve already subscribed to — and are currently on — my email list. You will continue to receive these letters and my online work for free. If you got to this page through social media or from a friend sharing it with you, I encourage you to make sure you are subscribed to my free email list here:
And, of course, if you prefer to not be on this email list, I encourage you to unsubscribe, which you should be able to do at the bottom of this email (no hard feelings!).
All of my writing here on Substack — which will also carry an easy-to-listen-to version of my podcast — will always be free. No paywalls! I want us to reach as many people as possible, and I’d love for you to share this work and these ideas far and wide.
At the same time, if you’d like to help support our work and give us the ability to produce more of it, then please consider contributing $5 a month as a member of our team, and this will help us with the next movie, the next series, the podcast and this Letter (you can save by making a once a year gift of $50 which covers you for the whole 12 months). If you do decide to become a paid member, then I’d love to have you join me for these special member events, which this Substack platform will bring to you free of charge:
- Mike’s Movie Night – Members will be invited to virtually watch with me a brilliant movie I’ve picked out for us all to enjoy. These movie nights will often include discussions with the film’s director, its actors or some of my “special” movie-loving friends.
- As a member, you will get to have an early Sneak Peek of some of my upcoming works and sorta act as my “test audience.” I’ll take you behind the scenes of what we’re up to as long as you promise not to tell the authorities.
- You will also be invited as a member to participate with me in live, video Q&A sessions — where you can ask me anything you want!
Additionally, in the name of keeping this platform free of those trolls and racists, the comments section will only be accessible to members. Those wishing to still troll me can do so on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, MSNBC, Yelp or Myspace.
There are hundreds of thousands of you on this email list that was first started back in 1994. Over the course of 27 years of my email newsletters, not only have I been able to share my thoughts, ideas, fatwas, and fears with you, but I have gotten genius ideas from you, words of inspiration, the title for one of my films (!), story ideas and scoops — all of which have informed me as I’ve made my movies and TV shows and written my books.
You have not just been my audience. You have been my partners, my co-conspirators, my sources, and my mentors. I truly appreciate you, I thank you and love you, and I can’t wait to reconnect with you through this medium and get back to working with and supporting one another on what must be done.
Yours through it all,
Michael Moore
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RSN: How California's Top Democrats Paved the Way for a Republican Governor |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 20 August 2021 11:30 |
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Solomon writes: "Four weeks from now, a right-wing Republican could win the governor's office in California."
The Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant near Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. (photo: iStock)
How California's Top Democrats Paved the Way for a Republican Governor
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
20 August 21
 our weeks from now, a right-wing Republican could win the governor’s office in California. Some polling indicates that Democrat Gavin Newsom is likely to lose his job via the recall election set for September 14. When CBS News released a poll on Sunday, Gov. Newsom’s razor-thin edge among likely voters was within the margin of error. How this could be happening in a state where Republicans are only 24 percent of registered voters is largely a tale of corporate-friendly elitism and tone-deaf egotism at the top of the California Democratic Party.
Newsom has always been enmeshed with the power of big money. “Gavin Newsom wasn’t born to wealth and privilege but as a youngster he was enveloped in it as the surrogate son of billionaire Gordon Getty,” longtime conservative California journalist Dan Walters has pointed out. “Later, Getty’s personal trust fund – managed by Newsom’s father – provided initial financing for business ventures that made Newsom wealthy enough to segue into a political career as a protégé of San Francisco’s fabled political mastermind, Willie Brown.” In 1996, as mayor, Brown appointed Newsom to the city’s Parking and Traffic Committee. Twenty-five years later, Newsom is chief executive of a state with the world’s fifth-largest economy.
Last November, Newsom dramatized his upper-crust arrogance of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Photos emerged that showed him having dinner with a corporate lobbyist friend among people from several households, all without masks, in a mostly enclosed dining room – at an extremely expensive Napa Valley restaurant called The French Laundry – at a time when Gov. Newsom was urging Californians to stay away from public gatherings and to wear masks. The governor’s self-inflicted political wound for hypocrisy badly damaged his image.
After deep-pocketed funders teamed up with the state’s Republican Party to circulate petitions forcing a recall election, initial liberal optimism gladly assumed that the GOP was overplaying its hand. But the recall effort kept gaining momentum. Now, there’s every indication that Republicans will vote at a significantly higher rate than Democrats – a fact that speaks not only to conservative fervor but also to the chronic detachment of the state’s Democratic Party from its base.
Newsom’s most fervent boosters include corporate interests, mainline labor unions and the California Democratic Party. Just about all leaders of the CDP, along with the vast majority of Democrats in the state legislature, are pleased to call themselves “progressive.” But the label is often a thin veneer for corporate business as usual.
For instance, the CDP’s platform has long been on record calling for a single-payer healthcare system in California. Such measures passed the legislature during the time when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, from 2003 to 2011, and he surprised no one by vetoing the bills. But the heavily-Democratic legislature has obliged the latest two Democratic governors, Jerry Brown and Newsom, by bottling up single-payer legislation; it’s been well understood that Brown and Newsom wanted to confine the state party’s support for single-payer to lip service.
In the same vein, the CDP’s current chair, Rusty Hicks, signed a pledge that the state party would not accept fossil-fuel money. But he went on to do exactly that to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.
As an elected member of the California Democratic Party’s central committee during the last decade, I’ve often witnessed such top-down maneuvers. Frequently, the CDP’s most powerful leaders are in a groove of thwarting the progressive aspirations of the party’s bedrock supporters – and blocking measures that would materially improve the lives of millions of Californians.
“This is what happens when the culture of high-priced consultants and cult of personality meets a corporate-controlled legislature and party,” said Karen Bernal, a Sacramento-based activist who chaired the CDP’s large Progressive Caucus for six years. She told me: “The campaign promises and vows of support for progressive policy are revealed to be nothing more than performative, while the hopes and dreams of the party’s progressive base are sent to die in committee and behind closed doors. The end result is a noticeable lack of fight when it’s most needed.”
Now, with the recall election barreling down on the state, the routinely aloof orientation of the state party’s structure is coming back to haunt it. Overall, the CDP’s actual connections to grassroots activists and core constituencies are tenuous at best, while Newsom comes across as more Hollywood and Wall Street than neighborhood and Main Street. No wonder Democrats statewide are less energized about voting on the recall than Republicans are.
If Newsom loses the recall, his successor as governor will be determined by who gets the most votes on “part 2” of the same ballot. In that case, you might logically ask, isn’t the “part 2” winner a safe bet to be a Democrat in such a heavily Democratic state? Actually, no.
On the theory that having any prominent Democrat in contention would harm his chances of surviving the yes/no recall vote on the ballot’s “part 1,” Newsom and party operatives conveyed to all of the state’s prominent Democrats: Don’t even think about it.
The intimidation was successful. Not a single Democrat with substantial name recognition is on “part 2” of the ballot, so no reasonable safety net contender exists if the recall wins. As a result, Newsom’s replacement looks as likely to be an ultra-right Republican as a Democrat. And if the replacement is a Democrat, it would almost certainly be a highly problematic fellow – a financial adviser and YouTube star named Kevin Paffrath, whose grab bag of ideas includes a few that appeal to Democrats (like marriage equality, higher teacher pay and promotion of solar and wind farms) but features a lot of pseudo-populist notions that would do tremendous damage if implemented.
Paffrath’s proposals, as described by the Southern California News Group, seek “to make all coronavirus safety measures optional, to ditch income tax for anyone making less than $250,000, to use the National Guard to get all unhoused Californians off the streets and to give trained gun owners more rights.” As a clue to the inclusivity of the “centrist solutions” that Paffrath says he’s yearning for, he introduced himself to voters with a video that “features clips from Fox News and from conservative media host Ben Shapiro.” Recent polling shows the 29-year-old Paffrath neck and neck with the frontrunning Republican on the ballot – bombastic Trumpist talk-show host Larry Elder.
Whether Newsom will remain governor past mid-autumn now looks like a coin flip. And what’s at stake in the recall goes far beyond California – in fact, all the way to the nation’s capital.
California’s 88-year-old senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, is widely understood to be in poor health and suffering from cognitive decline as she – with increasing difficulty – navigates the U.S. Senate, now evenly split between the two parties. Under state law, if she dies or otherwise leaves her seat vacant, the governor gets to appoint the replacement. In a worst-case scenario, a Republican becomes governor when the recall election results are certified in October and thus for at least 14 months would have the power to select Feinstein’s replacement, thereby making Mitch McConnell the Senate majority leader.
Given the looming political dangers, Sen. Feinstein should resign so that Gov. Newsom could appoint a Democratic replacement. But such a selfless move by Feinstein is highly unlikely. Despite all the talk about loyalty to their party and determination to defeat the extremism of the Republican Party, corporate Democrats like Newsom and Feinstein routinely look out for number one. That’s how we got into this ominous recall mess in the first place.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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n the spring of 1975, as North Vietnamese forces approached Saigon, it began to dawn on President Gerald Ford that the government of South Vietnam was likely to collapse. Though it would be 
