And It's A Hard, It's A Hard, It's A Haaaaard
Things are looking down and frowning
Links are at the end.
Friends and family in rainy California are staying more or less dry and undamaged; I hope everybody here in the cozy confines of the newsletter has done as well.
Cancel Culture With The TKO
Beleaguered hip-hop and fashion maven Ye was in a deal late last year to buy Parler, the Twitter knock-off dedicated to providing a safe space for people who fancied themselves canceled, or wanted to think they might be canceled if only anyone cared to do so.
Parler has been through some stuff: booted by their hosting company, pulled from the Apple and Google Play stores until they agreed to beef up their content moderation, and victims of an embarrassingly basic hack. The agreement with Ye would presumably have bolstered their finances while offering him a platform from which to declaim his increasingly vile beliefs.
Those beliefs (“I like Hitler,” e.g.) as declaimed from other platforms may or may not have tanked the deal, but tanked it has become and the site has reportedly laid off about 75% of their employees — stop me if this sounds familiar — in an effort to staunch their various wounds.1
21 Wonderful Years
That’s right: the oozing human rights sore that is the U.S. prison/torture/black hole at Guantanamo Bay is about to achieve its majority, old enough to drink most anywhere and likelier than not older than some of the troops there. Amnesty International has some surprisingly temperate thoughts on the impending anniversary.2
“It’s tragic that 21 years after the opening of an offshore detention facility specifically designed to evade the rule of law, the US government continues to detain 35 men at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Most have never even been charged with a crime. None has had a fair trial. Many of the detainees were tortured.
“The military commissions created to try some of the detainees have proven ineffectual and unfair, denying defendants an impartial arbiter and access to critical evidence. This has also denied victims of the 9/11 attacks their right to justice.
The organization calls for Biden to shut the prison down and see to the safety and comfort of the remaining prisoners who haven’t been charged, and to ensure fair trials for those the U.S. absolutely refuses to free. Which, haha: the U.S. has been in uninterrupted violation of the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment for at least the past 21 years, and we’re not gonna stop just when we have momentum. Hell, we violate it every day against our own citizens just walking around minding their own business.3
Come Fly With . . . Oh Wait
Not to be outdone by Southwestern and other airlines screwing the pooch during the past year and some, part of the FAA’s system crashed yesterday and stayed that way at least in part throughout most of today, leading to thousands of flights canceled (canceled I say!) or delayed.4
This is likely an infrastructure issue — cause unknown, as of this writing — made the more piquant by the Senate’s refusal to advance Biden’s nominee to head the agency out of the commerce committee, where the nomination has been languishing since July.
Of course that’s only about three weeks of actual work for the Senate, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.
Remember, Kids: Fuck the Fed!
The Fed, along with outside agitators such as evergreen labor opponent Larry Summers, really wanted to screw workers by increasing unemployment as a large part of their effort to attack inflation. To this point, that part of the effort has been unsuccessful: unemployment, or at least the traditional measure of it,5 remains low, at under 4%. (Among other factors, a lot of Boomers who dropped out of the labor force during the harshest days of pandemic unemployment have declined to throw their bodies back into the mix to compete for jobs.)
Threatening to further tighten the labor supply (shoes for industry!) is the money that in theory will be available from the Inflation Reduction Act to boost green energy jobs.
That money is dependent on meeting federal targets for oil and gas development, but solar and wind energy developers say they’re already running into a labor squeeze that is forcing them to consider higher-than-prevailing wages and in some instances, the horror of hiring union workers.6
The Biden Administration has repeatedly promised that new green energy jobs would be well-paying union jobs.
But many of those jobs have lagged the fossil fuel industry in pay, according to a 2021 study by BW Research, as clean energy companies have sought to contain costs to compete with entrenched industries. The IRA seeks to address that by tying prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements to the subsidies.
Those provisions -- and the hiring challenges -- have put pressure on some employers to use unionized labor.
Even Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), a company that has been embroiled in disputes with workers trying to organize, has used union labor to build the electric charging infrastructure for its fleet of electric delivery vehicles in Maspeth, Queens, NY.
The U.S. is still on target to badly miss our 2030 greenhouse gas reduction commitment, but barring a turnaround in what looks at this point like a Fed failure to create a recession for workers, the IRA may actually create opportunities for people to make a living wage in areas where they couldn’t before, which is critical in terms of getting fossil fuel union workers to consider supporting a decline in their industry.
Which I have to say I didn’t anticipate. Early days, but the potential is visible now.
Music is the heart of the beast
Marxist Love Disco Ensemble, “MLDE:”7 Rubber Oh, “Strange Craft;”8 Superorganism, "World Wide Pop" and "Superorganism."9
Someone will surely like Marxist Love Disco Ensemble, which obviously I chose for the name, but it isn’t me. Rubber Oh was enjoyable, and I really liked Superorganism.
And that, Comrades, is all I got.
Be well, take care, share the newsletter around, and subscribe if you’ve not already and you like what I do—it’s free unless you want to pay.
...rain's gonna' fall?
Closing Gitmo made sense a decade ago. Now it stands as the Dick Cheney Memorial to Fuck Off Justice.