|
Rush, Roger, Rupert, and the Donald May Ride Forever, as Do Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death. |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52536"><span class="small">Robert Lipsyte, TomDispatch</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 08 March 2021 09:03 |
|
Lipsyte writes: "The Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse - Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump - have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their hoofprints on our politics, our culture, and our lives."
Radio personality Rush Limbaugh was awarded the Medal of Freedom by First Lady Melania Trump during the State of the Union address on February 4, 2020. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Rush, Roger, Rupert, and the Donald May Ride Forever, as Do Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death.
By Robert Lipsyte, TomDispatch
08 March 21
Only recently Donald Trump had his Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) moment. He promptly announced that, despite rumors he had reportedly spread, he did not intend to form a third party (“fake news, fake news”) — not when the second one was his for the asking and he could potentially defeat a future Democratic presidential candidate as a Republican. “Who knows?,” he told that audience, “I may even decide to beat them for a third time.” Admittedly, he spent much of his CPAC speech time at the border mourning his “great” (if largely nonexistent) wall there and decrying Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House as “the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history.” As he put it, “In just one short month, we have gone from ‘America First’ to ‘America Last.’”
And yes, if you bothered to listen to that jut-jawed canary tweeting up a storm and were a CPAC devotee, you, too, might have been chanting, “We love you, We love you!” (although ominously enough only 68% of his fans in that conference hall actually want him to run again in 2024). If you weren’t part of his base, however, you would have found yourself listening to a genuinely dangerous, all-too-mad man who — if, say, the economy crashes — might indeed still win in 2024, sending this country over the edge of time, space, and god knows what else.
On TV, as Robert Lipsyte, TomDispatch jock culture correspondent, suggests today, it was indeed like watching one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in action. The Donald even took the time to “defend” women’s sports (as he’s never defended women) from the coming of supposedly record-breaking transgendered athletes. (“Joe Biden and the Democrats are pushing policies that would even destroy women’s sports.”) Of course, if you’re thinking of apocalyptic horsemen and sports — and you have a long memory — you might recall the 1924 Notre Dame football team of which, after a victory against Army, sportswriter Grantland Rice so famously wrote:
“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon…”
Meanwhile, saddle up and join former New York Times sports columnist Lipsyte, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, in a wild, very personal gallop into our very own world where, for years, four distinctive horsemen of what indeed could prove to be the apocalypse rode us into the ground. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Rush, Roger, Rupert, and The Donald May Ride Forever
As Do Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death
 he Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse — Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump — have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their hoofprints on our politics, our culture, and our lives. Two of them are gone now, but their legacies, including the News Corporation, the Fox News empire, and a gang of broadcast barbarians will ensure that a lasting plague of misinformation, propaganda masquerading as journalism, and plain old fake news will be our inheritance.
The original Four Horsemen were biblical characters seen as punishments from God. By the time they became common literary and then film currency, they generally went by the names of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Matching each with Limbaugh, Ailes, Murdoch, and Trump should prove a grisly but all-too-relevant parlor game. The originals were supposed to signal end times and sometimes, when I think about their modern American descendants, I wonder if we’re heading in just that direction.
Reflecting on the lives of those modern embodiments of (self-) punishment makes me wonder how we ever let them happen. Isn’t there any protection against evil of their sort in a democracy, even when you know about it early? Maybe when evil plays so cleverly into fears and resentments or is just so damn entertaining, not enough people can resist it. Hey, I even worked for one of the horsemen. It was my favorite job… until it wasn’t.
But first, let me start with Rush Limbaugh. The nation’s leading right-wing bullhorn died last month at 70. His vicious wit (“feminazis”) and ability to squeeze complex subjects into catchy sound bites (“In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the Black kids cheering”) stirred and nourished a devoted mass who would become a crucial part of Trump’s base. Limbaugh, earning by the end more than $80 million a year, left his heirs a reported $600 million.
Those numbers, I believe, defined him far more than any political stance he took and, at the same time, made him indefensible. He was Pestilence, spreading poison without either genuine ideology or principle of any sort. He was doing shtick, whatever worked for him (and work it certainly did). He was, by nature, a great entertainer. One more thing: don’t kid yourself, he was smart.
I realized this in 1995 when Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., was approaching Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,130 consecutive baseball games. The Yankee star set that record in 1939 when, after 17 big league seasons, he finally took himself out of the lineup because he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, later known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Tongue-in-cheek, in my then-weekly New York Times sports column, I called on Cal to take a day off to avoid breaking the record. I wrote that, if he did, he would “be remembered forever as an athlete who stepped proudly over the statistical rubble of his sport to lead us all into a higher level of consciousness. He will end up a bigger Calvin than Klein.”
The response from pundits, sportswriters, and fans was overwhelmingly negative. I was called clueless and stupid or, at least, a running dog of a new, much-mocked and demeaned “participation culture,” unaware of the competitive nature of sports. Worse yet, I was trying to deny a hero his due.
It seemed that, of all people, only Limbaugh picked up on the mindless paradox of the situation — after all, Ripken would merely have to show up at work that day to claim his trophy — or even how obviously I had been offering my advice tongue in cheek. And he said so on a national radio network carrying his shows.
As the saying goes, it takes one to know one. That he saw what I was actually doing convinced me that he, too, often had his tongue tucked firmly in that cheek of his and away from anything that might pass for his rational brain. And this would, in the end, make it all that much worse. My guess: he wasn’t ever truly a believer in the right-wing trash he talked. From the beginning, he was a mercenary, a commercial provocateur who found fame and fortune by spreading ever more toxic takes.
Down Under with Murdoch
Of the Four Horsemen, I came upon Rupert Murdoch first — in early 1977, soon after he bought that once-liberal newspaper, the New York Post. Among his earliest hires as columnists (strange indeed, given what we now know of him) were progressive icon Murray Kempton and me.
I already knew something about Murdoch’s Australian and British reputation as a venal press lord, but the lure of a no-holds-barred cityside column and the possibility of sharing an office with Kempton proved irresistible. Murdoch and I first met in the crowded, raffish Post newsroom in lower Manhattan. He was brisk but pleasant that day, asking me at one point how I would improve the paper. I answered breezily: “For starters, I’d hire more women, Blacks, Latinos, gays, so the city can be properly covered.”
He regarded me coolly. “Hmm, yes,” he said, “but instead I’m hiring a liberal like you.”
At that moment, I sensed that he was a monster and that this would end badly. I lasted all of seven months, mostly thanks to another monster, the serial killer Son of Sam, who terrorized the city that year. Like so many other tabloid writers of that moment, I spent the summer writing about the hunt for him, which mostly kept me out of trouble, since Murdoch loved sex, violence, and crime. But then there were those off-his-message columns I wrote about Israel, the South Bronx, and his favored candidate for mayor, Ed Koch.
And there were my shoes. They were soft Italian suede. Beige. I felt cool in them. One day, a new Australian editor took me aside and said, “Lose the poufter boots, mate. The boss hates them.”
Of course, now I had to wear them every day despite that boss’s homophobia. It was about then that whole paragraphs simply began to disappear from my column (without anyone consulting me), while the column itself was often shoved ever deeper into the paper, especially if I wrote about, say, marching in a women’s movement or gay pride parade with one of my kids. Sometimes the column would be cut entirely.
I resigned from the Post live on Dave Marash’s 11 p.m. local CBS TV news show. The next morning, in answer to a question during a press conference in Los Angeles, Murdoch claimed that he had fired me. When that didn’t fly, he said that I had never been much good anyway. By then, thanks to TV, more people had heard about me than had ever read anything I wrote at the Times or the Post — a lesson about the new world we were all being plunged into.
As it happened, there would be no escape from Rupert Murdoch. After quitting the Post, I went back to writing books for HarperCollins, the publishing house that he had bought. Thank goodness he never seemed to make the connection. Not so far anyway.
Soulmates Without a Soul in Sight
Among the Four Horsemen, Murdoch is surely Famine. Given the sports and gossip-driven sensibility of his newspapers and the role of Fox News as a tool of right-wing and Trumpian political propaganda, he’s helped starve people on at least three continents of the kinds of information they would need to truly grasp our world and make educated decisions about it.
His most reliable collaborator in those years was Roger Ailes, who became the chairman and CEO of Fox News. He would prove so skilled when it came to purveying misinformation that he deserves a horse of his own. And no question about it, Ailes represented War, both against the truth and (within journalism) for circulation, eyeballs, and the clicks that always favor profit over facts.
Of all four horsemen, I had the least personal interaction with him. One evening in 1990 (I think), I went to see him at his poorly lit midtown office. It was evening and I had the feeling he might have been drinking, though he didn’t offer me anything. I was then the host of a nightly local public television show and we wanted to put him on a political panel we were forming. By then, after all, he had successfully advised presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush (though he wouldn’t join Murdoch for another six years). He had blown off all the producers who tried to book him on their shows but had agreed to let me come in for a pitch.
I didn’t know it, but around then he first met his future co-horseman Rush Limbaugh who, at the time, was still trying to invent himself as a radio star. Limbaugh had walked into New York’s posh 21 Club looking for famous people to buttonhole. He soon spotted Ailes but was too intimidated to introduce himself.
As Rush would later tell it, Roger was the one who first swaggered up to him and boomed, “My wife loves you!” Soon after, they began talking and, so Rush reported, he felt that he had met his “soulmate.” Ailes would soon be producing a short-lived Limbaugh TV show. Alas, it would prove long-lived indeed by becoming a model for the bogus news/talk format of Fox News a few years later when Murdoch hired Ailes as the devil’s consigliere. Later, Ailes would use that very position to advise George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Still, when I met Ailes that was the unknowable future. It comes back to me now as if in a dream, brief and weird. He listened to my description of my show, “The Eleventh Hour,” and why we wanted him as a guest. I may not have been as fawning as I remember myself being. (I hope not anyway.) He nodded along as I made my pitch, offered me the most perfunctory thanks for coming, and dismissed me with body language suggesting that he had checked me out and found nothing he wanted. He simply turned away and began murmuring to a woman I could barely see in the darkened office.
In 2016, after years of commercial and political success together, Murdoch dumped Ailes in the midst of an ever-spreading sex scandal. He had not only personally harassed Fox employees but had created a company-wide climate of abuse and intimidation. He left with a reported $65 million. A year later, he died in Palm Beach (as would Limbaugh four years after that). He was 77.
A “Great Show” for a Great Showman
Of all the horsemen in those years, I spent the most time with Donald Trump. (By now, haven’t we all?) He’s our greatest shame because while we in the media may have thought that we were using him — listening sneeringly to his lies and braggadocio since it pushed our media products so effectively — he was using us bigly. Making the “fake news media” his very own accomplices may have been his greatest skill.
I was no exception to the media patsies who flocked to him for easy stories. Maybe I didn’t take him seriously enough then because we both came from Queens, a scorned outer borough of New York City, or because he was already a well-known publicity hound and boldfaced tabloid name.
Honestly, who could have taken an obvious buffoon like him seriously? And back then, we didn’t have to, as long as we took him. And here’s what I do remember from those days: he would always respond to a question, no matter how negative, as long as he was its subject. That’s all he truly cared about. Him, him, him, and him again.
The first time we met, in the early 1980s — he was then an ambitious real-estate mogul and B-list celebrity — he insisted that he didn’t much like attention, but felt obligated to do the interview because I represented “a great show” (“CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt”). He would then go on to lie about his scheme to pressure the National Football League into admitting to its ranks the New Jersey Generals, the United States Football League team he then owned.
In a later meeting, I remember him offering me his supposed credo as a public figure, one that in retrospect seems grimly ironic, if not satiric: “I tend to think that you should be decent, you should be fair, you should be straight, and you should do the best you can. And beyond that, you can’t do very much really. So yeah, you do have a responsibility.” Then, as if adding a note in the margins of his bland comment, he added, tellingly enough, “I’m not sure to what extent that responsibility holds.”
Once, for reasons I can’t recall, I returned to that supposed sense of “responsibility” of his, asking him if he’d like to “run the country as you have run your organization.” That was in 1984 (no symbolism intended) and he responded, “I would much prefer that somebody else do it. I just don’t know if the somebody else is there.” So, 32 years before his election, he was, it seems, already imagining the unimaginable that would become our very own surreal world in 2016. “This country,” he added ominously, “needs major surgery.”
“Are you the surgeon?” I asked, innocently enough.
“I think I’d do a fantastic job, but I really would prefer not doing it.”
I would have preferred that, too, but it’s much too late now and, sadly enough, there’s no reason to think that the ride of the modern Four Horsemen is over. Limbaugh and Aisles have left their vast poisonous pools behind and they won’t dry up soon. Murdoch, turning 90 just days from now, is still running his empire. And Donald Trump, of course, continues to gallop toward the future astride his pale horse, as the rider called Death.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
 |
|
Forget $15 an Hour - the Minimum Wage Should Be $24 |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35798"><span class="small">Jon Schwarz, The Intercept</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 07 March 2021 13:42 |
|
Schwarz writes: "The coronavirus pandemic relief bill passed by the House of Representatives this week would raise the federal minimum wage in steps until it reached $15 an hour in 2025. But an increase in the minimum wage has been removed from the Senate's legislation. At least for now, it is stuck at $7.25."
President Harry Truman, center, signs legislation raising the minimum wage from 40 to 75 cents on Oct. 26, 1949, in Washington, D.C. (photo: AP)
Forget $15 an Hour - the Minimum Wage Should Be $24
By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
07 March 21
The minimum wage once went up hand in hand with the productivity of the U.S. economy. It should again.
he coronavirus pandemic relief bill passed by the House of Representatives this week would raise the federal minimum wage in steps until it reached $15 an hour in 2025. But an increase in the minimum wage has been removed from the Senate’s legislation. At least for now, it is stuck at $7.25.
This is bad enough in itself, but even worse is that almost no Americans understand how low we’ve allowed our aspirations to become. Our country’s productivity gains in recent decades should have translated into a minimum wage today of $24 an hour — and by 2025, it should be almost $30.
This may sound preposterous. But in fact, U.S. society was once on a path to this destination. We simply chose to step off that path.
From both a moral and practical perspective, the minimum wage should go up in step with the productivity of the U.S. economy — that is, our ever-increasing ability to create more wealth with the same amount of work. Morally, as a country grows richer, everyone should share in the increased wealth. Practically, companies that sell things need lots of people with the money to buy them.
We know that this can work because it already did. During the 30 years from the establishment of a minimum wage in 1938 to 1968, Congress repeatedly upped the minimum wage so that it did in fact go up hand in hand with U.S. productivity. By the end of that period, it was worth the equivalent of $12 per hour today.
Since 1968, American productivity has substantially increased. Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points out that if the minimum wage had gone up at the same rate, it would now be over $24. At that level, as Baker says, a couple who both worked full time at minimum-wage jobs would take home $96,000 a year. Baker also calculates that by 2025, rising productivity would bring the minimum wage close to $30 an hour.
But instead we’ve gone in the other direction. After the late 1960s, Congress stopped raising the minimum wage in step with productivity. Instead, over the past 50 years, Congress has allowed the minimum wage to plummet in real terms. That is, minimum-wage workers of the past were actually paid more than minimum-wage workers make today — even though today’s workers live in a much richer society.
Indeed, since 1950, the hourly minimum wage has almost never been lower than it is now. Of course, 1950 is literally a lifetime ago, and the U.S. is now a completely different country. Our per capita gross domestic product is now four times greater. A UNIVAC computer of the time was 38 feet long, weighed eight tons, and had about 1/1,000,000 of the memory of today’s cheapest iPhone.
Yet somehow, everyone working a federal minimum-wage job in 2021 is paid less per hour than the inflation-adjusted $8.25 or so that they would have gotten in 1950. During the past 71 years, the inflation-adjusted minimum wage has only been lower than it is now in 1989 and from 2004 to 2006.
The first federal minimum wage was established in 1933 with the passage of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act. It was soon struck down as unconstitutional by the era’s ultra-right Supreme Court. President Franklin D. Roosevelt then ran for reelection in 1936 promising to keep fighting for a federal minimum wage. By contrast, that year’s Republican platform conspicuously did not call for one, although it did piously allow that it might be okay if individual states created minimum wages for women and children.
Roosevelt’s landslide victory intimidated conservative Justice Owen Roberts enough that he reread the Constitution and realized that in fact it does allow the federal government to set a minimum wage. He switched sides in a 1937 minimum-wage case, clearing the way for the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.
The Fair Labor Standards Act set the minimum wage at 25 cents per hour. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $4.60 today. Tellingly, this was a compromise with Southern senators: The original version of the bill would have established a minimum wage of 40 cents per hour, the equivalent of about $7.37 now.
The minimum wage only made it to 40 cents by 1945. It then was almost doubled when President Harry Truman signed a bill at the start of 1950 increasing it to 75 cents, worth $8.25 today after adjusting for inflation.
What happens now is unclear, but certainly the situation doesn’t look good for any significant minimum-wage changes. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that minimum-wage provisions cannot be passed via the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 50 votes, and the Biden administration has refused to use its power to ignore the parliamentarian. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said that the two versions will not go to conference committee to be reconciled. Instead, the House will simply pass the Senate bill and send it to President Joe Biden for his signature.
Democrats can now try to pass a stand-alone increase in regular order over a GOP filibuster, but that would require all of the Democratic senators and 10 Republicans, which is difficult to imagine. They could also change Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, something that seems equally unlikely.
So for the moment, it appears that America’s worst-paid workers have been abandoned yet again by the federal government. But let’s not pretend this isn’t a choice we’re making. Any time we want, we can choose to get back on the path to a different, fairer, better country.
|
|
|
FOCUS | Meet the Censored: Myanmar Writer Zaw Moe Shinn |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58567"><span class="small">Matt Taibbi and Emily Bivens, TK News</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 07 March 2021 11:51 |
|
Excerpt: "Not long ago, TK was contacted by a young writer from the beleaguered country of Myanmar, named Zaw Moe Shinn. Zaw, who is well known in his country for translating English books into Burmese, had just called a mutual acquaintance from the capital city of Naypyitaw, where there were over 10,000 protesters on the streets at the time."
Myanmar. (photo: TK News)
Meet the Censored: Myanmar Writer Zaw Moe Shinn
By Matt Taibbi and Emily Bivens, TK News
07 March 21
A military junta shuts down the Internet every night, while plotting by day to impose draconian controls over dissent. A warning from Myanmar
 ot long ago, TK was contacted by a young writer from the beleaguered country of Myanmar, named Zaw Moe Shinn. Zaw, who is well known in his country for translating English books into Burmese, had just called a mutual acquaintance from the capital city of Naypyitaw, where there were over 10,000 protesters on the streets at the time.
The country had just gone through a military coup, and Zaw wanted to share the unique story of Internet censorship that flowed from that event. We arranged to interview him for “Meet the Censored.”
Zaw’s is a little different from the other tales in this space, as it primarily involves a state authority, not oligopolistic tech firms. But it’s horrifying all the same, and holds some potent warnings for those who haven’t thought through the worst-case scenarios for Internet crackdowns.
In order to understand the context of our interview with the young writer and activist, some background is required.
On February 1st, military authorities in Myanmar overthrew the civilian government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi. The army, led by General Min Aung Hlaing, detained Suu Kyi on the grounds that her election was “marred by fraud,” and declared a one-year state of emergency.
Within hours after seizing power, the new “emergency” government cut the Internet, stalling information flow while the organs of the state were taken over. This temporary measure soon became a regular feature, as the government soon began imposing regular nightly blackouts of the Internet. As reported in Al Jazeera yesterday:
Every night for more than two weeks, the military has imposed an internet blackout from 1:00 a.m to 9:00 a.m. across the country. At the same time, it has also moved to grant itself sweeping powers to censor and arrest online dissenters. The regime has also banned access to websites, including popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The blackouts have inspired the spread of many rumors, including a popular theory that the nightly blackouts involve an attempt at “installing new tech,” perhaps with more tamper-proof controls on speech and dissent. Meanwhile, the new government has drafted a new Cybersecurity Bill, along with proposals for a series of changes to its Electronic Transactions Law.
Human Rights Watch was one of many international organizations to denounce the proposals, which would require online service providers to make a broad range of user data available to the military junta, while also blocking or removing several categories of information, including, “misinformation and disinformation,” “causing hate,” and “disrupting unity, stabilization, and peace.”
The Chambers of Commerce offices of eight countries, including ones representing the United States, Germany, and the U.K., signed a statement condemning the proposals:
Investors understand the importance of a robust cybersecurity framework and creating a secure digital environment for all, however… As currently drafted, it requires internet service providers to disclose user information to the authorities at any point in time and without justifiable reasons or an authorization from an independent judicial body of competent jurisdiction…
Note the phrase “without justifiable reasons.” The faraway Myanmar junta naturally attracts the opprobrium of offices representing Western powers with more established democratic traditions. But the type of arrangement the Myanmar army is proposing to enact out in the open already exists in secret in the United States, where we learned in a series of episodes (including via the whistleblower Edward Snowden) about “ongoing, daily” collaboration between agencies like the NSA and companies like AT&T, Verizon, and others.
The new junta’s authoritarian script should sound familiar. It combines a declared political emergency with professed concern for stemming misinformation, hate speech, and incitement, providing the rationale for turbocharged surveillance authority.
Reported plans to form an official body that would arbitrate truth as part of efforts to prosecute and jail those guilty of spreading “false information” look to be an obvious Orwellian canard. It should strike American readers how similar the language used by dictatorial generals and Western advocates for increased speech control sounds. Calls for censorship always come in the context of a proclaimed political emergency, and are always framed as being in the interest of protecting the citizenry from falsehood, hate speech, or political violence — the only difference is, it’s more obviously a lie in some contexts, versus others.
There is a lot of complicated background to this story, from the army’s repression of the Rohinga Muslim minority to the Suu Kyi government’s own fall from grace — Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, faced calls to strip her of the award after criticism of her role in the Rohinga massacres. Most of the story Zaw told to TK’s Emily Bivens, however, is self-explanatory:
TK: Can you describe the feeling that day, February 1?
ZMS: It was shocking and hopeless, the strongest hopeless feeling in my life. Since I was sixteen, I’ve had a lot of difficulties in my life. But February 1st was the hardest one. I felt hopeless, like “Oh, my life has gone.” We all know what will happen to us if we live under that military leadership.
It's obviously annoying to hear that they’re lying again and again. They said they will hold an election in a year. Yes, they might do that, but their main, idea is to get rid of Suu Kyi’s party, to get rid of that party completely. And the [National League for Democracy] won't be able to participate in the next election, that is the first thing that we want. That's why they are doing everything they can, like saying there’s been voter fraud, and they don't have proof. They are completely, shamelessly lying to the people of Myanmar, and to the international communities.
TK: Do you worry about being arrested yourself?
ZMS: Every day. Yeah. I could be arrested anytime, because I’m a sort of famous person on Facebook. I'm a writer myself, and people know me. And I’m still writing things against the military coup on Facebook. And I know I could be arrested anytime, but I can’t just keep silent. Because I wouldn't be able to live with that guilty feeling. So I speak out. And I know I could be arrested at any time.
TK: Is Facebook available in Myanmar?
ZMS: So far it is blocked, but people use it with VPN. It’s still blocked. The internet has some other websites blocked by the military. And we’re using Facebook with VPN, and every night, they cut off the internet. You know that, right, every night they cut off the internet from 1:00 a.m to 9:00 a.m… I think it’s been 20 days in a row or something, I'm not sure, but they've been consistently cutting off the internet. And then, you know, the internet is one of the few weapons that we have. We can go live on Facebook and people can see what we are facing and if they are, if they are around they can come to help. And so they take away our rights to use the internet freely.
TK: When did you become a political commentator?
ZMS: I’ve been writing political-related things for two years now, on Facebook. I didn’t have any problem. I wasn't afraid, or thinking I could be arrested any time before that coup, because I could write freely on Facebook, and I didn't know this coup would happen. But I thought that people, especially young people, need to know more about politics. What happened in the past 15 years is why our education system, has become the worst in Asia, maybe in the world. So, we’ve became more ignorant of the politics, and we’re afraid to talk about it.
My dad actually called me once and said, “If you want to keep writing those freaking political things, don't contact me again. Don’t call me again.”
TK: So, it’s created family strife for you?
ZMS: Older people [here] are afraid to talk about politics.
TK: Are you saying the older people are afraid, or are they just more comfortable with the change in regime?
ZMS: I think the fear comes first. And, you know, the comfortability comes next… Maybe they are really afraid, because they know how brutal the military is, you know, they have killed a lot of people in the past. Maybe they’re afraid their sons and daughters will be killed in this revolution.
The parents don't want to let their children go out and protest, but the good thing about this younger generation is they don't care because they have tasted democracy. It’s really free and it's good and you can do whatever you want. But for this whole February, it was like hell for them. Internet censorship, they had never heard of that… Internet censorship and everything… that makes them disgusted. They might not have a lot of knowledge about political things in the past, but they know what is right and what is wrong.
That's why they are protesting going out every day, knowing that they could be shot.
|
|
Louis DeJoy Is Killing It |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58564"><span class="small">Casey Taylor, New York Magazine</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 07 March 2021 09:39 |
|
Taylor writes: "Up until about a year ago, carrying mail for the United States Postal Service was among the most predictable ways to earn a living. My father did it for 20 years, and I worked alongside him for two of them."
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy during House testimony in 2020. (photo: Megan Paetzhold/Tom Brenner/Getty Images)
Louis DeJoy Is Killing It
By Casey Taylor, New York Magazine
07 March 21
 p until about a year ago, carrying mail for the United States Postal Service was among the most predictable ways to earn a living. My father did it for 20 years, and I worked alongside him for two of them. You show up, throw magazines and loose letters into the labeled slots at your designated mail case, and deliver the route. You come back when the truck is empty, and the next morning, you get to work filling it up again. A Sisyphean means of community service. “Every day!” echoing in a sing-songy voice on the floor by carriers with a strong sense of gallows humor: The mail never stops, and it’ll keep going long after they’re gone.
Until last year, that is, when the pandemic began to crush this American institution under the weight of its sworn duty. As frontline workers, carriers began getting sick: By September last year, roughly 8 percent of postal workers had taken time off as a result of illness or exposure, a percentage that surely increased along with cases. Considering the increase in overall mail volume thanks to the pandemic’s e-commerce boom, this resulted in overworked carriers covering unprecedented levels of empty routes. On-time delivery of presorted first class mail fell from 94 percent at the end of 2019 to 91 percent after the start of the pandemic in 2020.
The pandemic would’ve been enough, but in May 2020, former logistics CEO and Trump donor Louis DeJoy was named Postmaster General. The hiring was criticized from the start as a conflict of interest on two different fronts: Not only was DeJoy seen as a Trump loyalist, but he also had millions invested in USPS competitors or contractors, the very companies that would most benefit should the post office become another federal institution stripped and sold for parts to the profiteers. As such, when he began ordering carriers to hit the street at specific times, often leaving mail behind in the process and disassembling mail-sorting machines, it wasn’t clear whether it could be best explained by sheer incompetence, an attempt to undermine an election, or a desire to kill the very service he was meant to advance. By October, DeJoy’s changes caused on-time delivery to fall all the way to 86 percent nationally, with rates below 80 percent in major cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit. To put a finer point on just how ineffective his leadership was, even these dismal numbers represented an improvement over previous months, all because injunctions required the USPS to roll back some of DeJoy’s policies ahead of the election.
Carriers who had longed joked about the mail never stopping started to wonder if they’d spoken too soon. “People are always scared that the post office is gonna die or whatever, or they’re gonna take away Saturday delivery. When the last postmaster left, it was right after DeJoy, and on his way out, he says to me: ‘Young man, get as much money as you can the next few years, because this is going away,’” said a carrier in southeastern Pennsylvania who has worked seven days a week since last March. “This time feels different.” A continued decline for the postal service also means a narrower pathway to the middle class for Black Americans, who are 27 percent of the USPS’s workforce.
Saving the post office became a rallying cry during the summer of 2020, as national media and politicians began to draw attention to the disruptions in service and the possible nefarious purpose of a Trump appointee sabotaging mail-in votes that skewed heavily Democratic. Joe Biden even made it a key part of his campaign: He laid out a comprehensive plan to save the post office in October and accused Donald Trump of deliberately undermining the election.
Once it became clear that DeJoy’s bungling hadn’t prevented Biden from winning the election, the issue mostly fell out of the news. Despite that, working conditions for postal workers and mail carriers have remained largely static for the same reasons they’d deteriorated in the first place. The pandemic rages on, and sorting machines are still decommissioned, causing massive backups in mail volume and sorting that clerks and carriers simply can’t keep up with. The issue created by eliminating sorting machines is one of extreme volatility within individual branches. Some days are impossibly light, others a flood. “My base average usually stays within a couple hundred pieces day to day, but I’m going from like 600 letters one day to 2,800 the next,” says a carrier on the Central Coast of California. While it’s difficult to pinpoint a precise reason, he says, “… it’s certainly was not the norm at any other point in my career.”
“Not the norm” feels like an excellent summary of the transition period between the previous presidential administration and this one. A few postal workers expressed some degree of understanding for the reduced urgency around the problems. “You’ve got the pandemic, you know. You’ve got the vaccine. There’s a lot that kinda pushes it to the back burner,” says Larry King, former president and current treasurer of the National Association of Letter Carriers’s Local 520 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
Despite their understanding, however, the urgency among letter carriers remains just as high as it had been before the election. DeJoy continues to stall on the presentation of his ten-year reform plan for the USPS, telling the House Oversight Committee last week that they would likely have it “some time in March,” without committing to a date. When asked to elaborate on what would be included in the plan, DeJoy used the indecipherable jargon trail blazed by other CEOs faced with questions they have no answers for — “unachievable hurdles” and “aligning to the new economy” and “better operational management” and other preemptive justifications for what will inevitably be internal cost cuts, reduced service quality, and increased postage rates. There is no evidence that DeJoy’s mission, which has appeared to be to destroy the USPS entirely, has veered from its course. If Biden plans to save the post office, as he pledged to do on the campaign trail, then there’s little time to waste in taking action.
To his credit, Biden acted immediately after DeJoy delivered his testimony to the House Oversight Committee, naming three nominees to fill all but one of the four open vacancies on the postal board of governors. Assuming confirmation from the Senate, that would create a perfectly balanced board, with four Democrats, four Republicans, and one independent (Amber McReynolds, chief executive of the Vote at Home Institute, a voting-rights group with support from liberal and left-leaning organizations). On the surface, it would appear that Biden has a clear majority with four Democrats and one independent sympathetic to his side. A majority is necessary to remove DeJoy, as the president doesn’t have the authority to fire a postmaster general, only a vote by the board members can do that. But one of the Democrats, Ron Bloom (appointed by Trump) reiterated his support for DeJoy and the ten-year plan this past week.
Even with Democrats in place, that alone won’t stop DeJoy. The board may be able to slow his progress once Biden’s nominees begin their tenure, but without a clear majority, there are significant limitations to what can be done. They can voice displeasure and generally make life more difficult for the postmaster general, but only a majority can remove him or prevent him from implementing the business plan that’s being developed in conjunction with one of the Democrats currently on the board.
The only remaining hope for the postal service is that Biden exercises the nuclear option at his disposal — firing the board of governors with cause and installing an entirely new board that will enable the swift removal of its saboteur. Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, has already called for the president to do so, citing the collective failures of this past year to be the only cause needed to justify it. Failing to intervene immediately means more delayed bills and prescription medicines, more 70-hour work weeks for clerks with no days off, and — perhaps worst of all — another year’s worth of eroded public trust that must be repaired. Firing the board is sure to create a legal dispute that the Democrats would need to fight in order to see it through.
In the meantime, while the administration awaits yet another peaceful resolution that is somehow always just out of reach, the workers the president swore to save will toil away. “I mean, I realized last year that the future of my career rests on Joe Biden,” the carrier from Southeastern Pennsylvania said. “That’s not really where you want to be, even if he’s better than the other guy.” Other carriers weren’t quite as cynical, but expressed similar levels of concern for the future of their jobs. “Unless there are some changes made to how things are done, at the very least, I don’t think this is sustainable,” says Joe Roman, a carrier of 26 years and nine-year shop steward for the Bloomfield branch in Pittsburgh. He’s careful to add that he doesn’t tie that directly to DeJoy, but to operations more broadly. However, other carriers Intelligencer interviewed for this story all shared a universal belief that, regardless of what his intentions or motivations are, DeJoy and his changes are the problem and nothing will be fixed until he’s removed.
Turnover for new postal workers is high, with veteran carriers and clerks citing lower pay and increased chaos as a key reason why nobody tends to stick around longer than a couple of months. It makes things harder on a daily basis, but more importantly in the eyes of carriers who have spent decades fulfilling their duty to the community, it devalues the service. “I’ve been delivering my route for a decade,” said one carrier. “I know every person on my route. That makes you take an extra effort to get them their mail. Some guy that’s in and out, and then another takes his place. I mean, that’s obviously going to impact the mission.” The inability to retain new employees exacerbates the absurd workload issues that have made 70 hour weeks the norm for carriers in high volume branches.
Postal workers who thought they were signing on for the last sure thing that exists for the American working class — a clear path towards decades of financial security in exchange for backbreaking community service — are watching in real time as it’s whittled down to another gig. “Morale is as low as it’s ever been,” says King, the union official. “I mean, we were just in a meeting last week, and they’ve got these formulas and charts and it’s just not possible. It had been bad for a little while but it just keeps getting worse for us.”
|
|
ast March, during the first wave of the pandemic, Adriana Heguy set out to sequence 
