Amazon workers succeed in union effort

I was surprised and pleased that yesterday a majority of the 8,000 employees at one of the four Staten Island, NY Amazon warehouses voted in favor of forming a union by a margin of 2,654 to 2,131. A similar vote at a Bessemer, AL warehouse is too close to call at the moment. Even the latter stand-off is encouraging since Alabama is not a union-friendly region, unlike Staten Island.

Progressives hailed Friday’s unionization vote by employees at an Amazon warehouse in New York City as a historic victory for workers across the United States and an inspiring call to action for others seeking to organize.

“This is the catalyst for the revolution.”

In what’s being described as a “tremendous upset” of “David versus Goliath” proportions, employees at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island—led by fired worker Chris Smalls—defeated a multimillion-dollar union-busting effort by one of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations and voted to form the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

“It’s official,” ALU tweeted after the vote. “Amazon Labor Union is the first Amazon union in U.S. history. Power to the people!”

“This is the catalyst for the revolution,” Smalls, the ALU organizer and president, said while celebrating the vote.

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TV Review: The Plot to Overturn the Election

The so-called ‘Big Lie’, the idea that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election and that there was a major conspiracy to steal the election and give it to Joe Biden, is so preposterous that one has to be delusional to give it any credence. And yet, it seems like many Republicans have bought into it.

The excellent investigative journalism outfit ProPublica has combined with the PBS program Frontline to produce an absorbing 53-minute documentary in which correspondent A. C. Thompson (who has previously investigated hate groups) tracks down the origins of the Big Lie, the people behind it, and their goal of trying to rig future elections to get the results they want. Although I have been following this story closely, I learned a lot of new things about it.

The cowardly Alex Jones held in contempt for skipping depositions

The conspiracy theorist who created such acute distress for the families of those killed in the Sandy Hook massacre by spreading the lie that it was a hoax and thus inspired his rabid followers to persecute those families and make their lives a living hell, talks very tough. But it turns out that he is, like all bullies, a coward. He has been sued by the families and been ordered by the judge to attend a legal deposition and be questioned under oath but he did not show up, citing vague medical reasons, even though he was appearing on his show that same week. Jones is clearly trying to avoid a legal reckoning for his reckless and hateful instigation against the families. He has offered a settlement to the people suing him but they have refused, demanding that he appear in court.
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The awful Madeline Albright is dead

The first woman to occupy the position of US Secretary of State, that occurred during Bill Clinton’s presidency, died last week and there were many tributes to her for this achievement. While breaking down gender and other barriers is always a good thing, the fact is that Albright’s record was awful, though she fitted in perfectly with the Clintons’ neoliberal, so-called ‘liberal interventionist’, warmongering policies. Glossed over was her infamous comment in 1996 that the estimated deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to the cruel sanctions imposed by the US on that country was “worth it”. Here is the clip of her saying it, so casually and cold-bloodedly, that I will never forget it.

Jon Schwarz gives her the send-off that she really deserves by describing all that was wrong with her.
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Second Republican governor vetoes ban on transgender sports

The bans on transgender athletes being proposed by Republican state legislatures are so cruel and unnecessary that even some Republican governors are taking a stand against them. Utah governor Spencer Cox has just joined fellow Republican governor Eric Holcomb of Indiana in vetoing such legislation. In doing so, he offered some heart-warming words. (All boldfacing is mine.)
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Wars and war crimes

War crimes follow wars as surely as night follows day.

When you look at the list of things that constitute war crimes according the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Tribunals, you will immediately see that any sustained conflict inevitably leads to actions, such as “Atrocities or offences against persons or property, constituting violations of the laws or customs of war”, “the wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages” or “devastation not justified by military necessity”, that fall into the category of war crimes. So when the US declares that Russian troops have committed war crimes during its invasion of Ukraine, they are undoubtedly right. One major crime is “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.”

But what is infuriating is the revolting hypocrisy demonstrated by all the righteous indignation by the US and its allies about Russian war crimes when the long and ugly and incontrovertible history of war crimes by the US is ignored by the US political class and that mainstream media. After all, the US has so many times in the past been involved in the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”, Iraq being merely one of the most recent.

I was trying to formulate a post about this but Chris Hedges pretty much said it all.
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Covid-19 fatigue

I am one of the fortunate ones in that I was able to get vaccinated and boosted and since I am retired, during the worst of the pandemic I could spend most of my time at home and thus could easily practice social distancing. I also wore masks whenever I was in any indoor facility with other people. But while it was not onerous, I too have started to feel weary of taking these precautions and was hopeful that the rapid decline in cases in the recent past signaled the transition from a pandemic phase to an endemic phase that would enable us to let down our guard and just take the kinds of precautions we are used to with other familiar airborne contagions like the flu and cold, where we stay at home when we have symptoms and avoid contact with people who are exhibiting symptoms.

But now we hear reports of a delta-omicron hybrid and a BA.2 version of the omicron variant causing a slight uptick in cases in Europe and the UK, which in the past have been leading indicators of what would happen in the US after about two or three weeks. 45% of the US population has been infected with omicron and thus have some immunity to that BA.2 version of it but that still leaves a large number at risk.
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The US is no longer the world’s longest consistent democracy

Politicians in the US (and many ordinary Americans) like to boast about how this country is the greatest and the oldest continuing democracy. The former claim has always been dubious since from the beginning the country has gone out of its way to limit the right to vote to a favored class: first by not giving Blacks and women to vote, then by placing restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests that excluded the poor, and to this date seeking to find novel ways to discourage poor and minority communities from voting by making them jump through various hoops and by gerrymandering electoral districts so that the elected representatives are not representative of the electorate.
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Great moments in cheerleading

You would think that by now, after all the protests about racist depictions of Native Americans, that at least some person in large organizations would realize when something is at best racially insensitive or downright racist and say, “Wait a minute! This is not appropriate.” But apparently not.

Walt Disney World apologised after a Texas high school drill team performing at the entertainment giant’s Florida theme park wore fringed outfits and chanted: “Scalp ’em, Indians, scalp ’em.”

“The live performance in our park did not reflect our core values and we regret it took place,” a spokesperson, Jacquee Wahler, said in a statement.

Native American advocates criticised Disney and Port Neches-Groves high school after video of the performance to Twitter.

“Any Natives who attend [Port Neches-Groves high school] should prolly just accept their classmates dehumanising them cuz ‘tradition’, right?” wrote Tara Houska, an Ojibwe tribal attorney and founder of the Giniw Collective and Not Your Mascots.

“Shame on [Disney] hosting this,” she said. “Nostalgic racism is RACISM.”

According to the Orlando Sentinel, a Disney employee asked the troupe to remove headdresses prior to their performance.

Wahler, the Disney spokesperson, said the performance that followed was “not consistent with the audition tape the school provided and we have immediately put measures in place so this is not repeated”.

I am pretty sure that Native Americans must be simply fed up with people ‘honoring’ them without first consulting with them about what would be an appropriate form such an action should take, and instead going with the first stereotype that they can come up with and then defending their decisions with ridiculous rationalizations.