ive had some moments in the past several months where i’ve been like “oh no robert this is not it”
and i wish i had had the time to get on here to talk abt them while they were relevant
unfortunately that didnt happen bc i have other shit to do besides being online. im sure yall understand based on how chill youve been over the past few years
that said i guess i wanna be like. despite the url and how funny i think it is to refer to a journalist as my little meow meow or what the fuck ever, i think sometimes i should do more critical discussion about the podcasts
not bc i wanna be negative but just bc tumblr’s a good site for longform discussion, as compared to twitter and reddit, where i assume most robert fans live and make wisecracks for attention or whatever (this is my judgement towards those platforms not judgement of robert fans)
anyway. if anyone ever has any alternative (but still leftist, anticolonial, and/or environmentalist!!!!!!!!!!! not gonna give up ALL my biases) takes on a topic covered by coolzone media and you’d want people who know abt coolzone to chime in, feel free to forward your posts my way and i’ll consider rbing next time i’m online
if i don’t get to them pls don’t take it personally tho. or even as a statement of my estimation of your idea. i just have limited time to dedicate to this blog and i already get too many messages on this account overall which has several blogs on it
CW for extremely distressing and graphic descriptions of injuries and suffering, including babies and children.
How can anyone support this?
How can anyone dare to say it is 'necessary'?
How can anyone claim this is 'self-defence'?
If you can, please donate to Medical Aid for Palestinians, who are doing their utmost and more under truly hellish circumstances: Medical Aid for Palestinians (map.org.uk)
A review of the global "wall" that divides rich from poor.
The Walled World consists of the U.S. and Canada (in North America); Japan and South Korea, plus Australia and New Zealand (in the Asia-Pacific region); plus basically the entire European Union (2); and also Israel. In 2009, that club of nations represented just 14 percent of the world’s population but earned 73 percent of its income. Conversely, the “gray areas” outside the walls were home to 86 percent of humanity, who scraped together just 27 percent of the world’s income.
The average monthly income inside the wall is around €2,500. Outside, it’s just €150. Money may or may not buy happiness, but it does buy quality of life. The yellow dots, which represent the world’s top 50 cities in terms of quality of life, are almost all inside the wall — only Singapore is outside, and that relatively wealthy city-state should arguably be included inside the wall anyway.
In other words: the poor are many, the rich are few. That’s not a new phenomenon of course, nor are the migratory pressures it causes. That’s where those barriers come in. The map lists some examples, the locations and the circumstances of which are all different — but which are all pieces of the same puzzle shown on this map.
There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.
Take the 2019 LA teachers' strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:
Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it's still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike:
The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the "union avoidance" playbook. She's banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines:
She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:
And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:
She's also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:
(As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)
A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:
She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:
UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won't give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand.
As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:
While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:
Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.
Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":
And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:
UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.
Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it:
It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"
Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It's the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:
Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:
Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works:
Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:
A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:
In her interview with Capital & Main's Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone:
Care work is a "triple dignity investment": first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: "It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."
The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicare, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:
Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":
The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass – and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
On 5th December of 2023, The Atlantic came out with an article titled "War in the Congo Has Kept the Planet Cooler" written by Ross Anderse, the senior editor at the Atlantic, where he oversees the science, technology, and health sections. As you could've guessed, this genocide-friendly title did not fly by the internet and they have since (9th December at the time of writing) changed the title to "The Grim Ironies of Climate Change", a paywalled article.
Let us break this down further to try to understand their thought process-
1) They posted an article with an insanely insensitive and dangerously racist title.
2) They, rightly, faced backlash.
3) With the knowledge that what they had done was wrong at least on some level, they decide not to remove the dangerous article...
4) ... but rename it and continue to unapologetically host it in their site?
There is no way to make sense of it outside of the framework of white supremacy that has dehumanized African bodies to the point where they, to a colonial mind, appear as viable sacrifices to quell the climate disaster that continues to be driven by the same countries whose foreign policy is to keep Congo as unstable as posible. There is no "war" in Congo, there is a genocide for raw minerals that, through multiple levels of slave labor, become the smartphones and other electronic devices you and I own. And the colonizers know this -- that they have implicated billions of people around the world in their inhumane project, and they hope to turn this forced complacency into active genocidal intent, where the plunder of Congo becomes acceptable to you if it buys the west a little extra time to protect what little comforts it has thrown your way. I am not going to tell you how to think. Sit with this information and come to your own conclusions.
They might have changed the title of the article but the internet is forever. Here is the link to the Wayback Machine snapshot of the original title. Ironically, you can access the archived version that implicates them for free, while you would have to pay to read the current version.
This is not directly related to The Happenings that have gone on, or even about creators themselves, but I do think this is a relevant addition to the discussion when we talk about "why" and "what makes someone do this", on a broader, existential scale.
This web show itself started on Cracked, before Scripps bought it and shut all of the video department down, and began rounds of mass firings.
I encourage people to take all of this in as part of the same ecosystem issue.
Search giant Google has lost its first antitrust case in a San Francisco jury trial. The breakup of Big Tech begins.
Big news: Google has lost its first antitrust case. Via Matt Stoller:
So what happens now? In this case, the judge will come up with remedies next year. The order could be broad, and will likely loosen Google’s control over the mobile app ecosystem. Google has already announced that it will appeal, so the case isn’t over.
That said, Google is likely to be in trouble now, because it is facing multiple antitrust cases, and these kinds of decisions have a bandwagon effect. The precedent is set, in every case going forward the firm will now be seen as presumed guilty, since a jury found Google has violated antitrust laws. Judges are cautious, and are generally afraid of being the first to make a precedent-setting decision. Now they won’t have to. In fact, judges and juries will now have to find a reason to rule for Google. If, say, Judge Amit Mehta in D.C., facing a very similar fact-pattern, chooses to let Google off the hook, well, he’ll look pretty bad.
