Honestly the whole point of capitalism is that the owners of the business get to decide what their moral responsibility is and if you don’t like that then maybe we should try something else
They should also pressure producers/sellers on their market to do the same. I have a box of cat water fountain filter things. Comes in like packs of 8 in a cardboard/paperboard box. That's good, easily recyclable. Except the filters are individually plastic wrapped, for no discernable reason.
The American public seems to have emerged from the initial jolt of the pandemic with a newfound clarity familiar to survivors of catastrophes. Many people experienced an evaporation of the things that lent their lives the illusion of stability. Jobs disappeared and the social safety net’s holes loomed large. For scores of working people, it was—though they might not use this term—a radicalizing experience. Millions suddenly confronted the fact that if we didn’t protect ourselves, nobody else would. “I don’t really know if any amount of money would make working in this environment and being exposed to this level of risk feel worth it,” one grocery worker said early in the pandemic. For “essential” workers, it became clear that the work and the risk were a package deal.
This realization supercharged public interest in organized labor, bolstering a surge of support for union activity, which had already been growing slowly since the Great Recession in 2009. Polls show that public approval of labor unions is now at its highest point since 1965. This is unsurprising. Since the start of the Reagan era, wages for average workers have stagnated, astounding wealth has flowed to a tiny percentage of society, and the resulting rise in economic inequality has destabilized our political landscape. When this slow but steady erosion of the American Dream met the shock of Covid, it became all but impossible to avoid the conclusion that “Organize or Die” could be a literal slogan.
In 2020, we saw the launch of the (ultimately unsuccessful) union drive at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama—at that point the most serious organizing effort against the Bezos empire. The addition of Covid’s burden to the weight of algorithmically driven warehouse work was the tipping point for fed-up workers unwilling to risk their lives for $15.50 an hour. That effort was followed in 2021 by a series of victories: a successful union vote at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, the launch of the still-growing Starbucks union organizing campaign, and a mini-wave of strikes dubbed “Striketober.” The drumbeat grew louder in 2023, with major strikes in Hollywood and at the Big Three automakers. In September, Joe Biden spoke at a picket line in support of United Auto Workers, the first sitting president in history to do so. It was clear that something was happening.
But what, exactly? The long-overdue return of unions to the spotlight is not the sea change that it can appear to be. In the middle of the 20th century, when American unions were at peak membership, about one in three workers was in a union. By 1980, the number had fallen to one in five, and by 2005, one in eight. This unrelenting decline in union density—the percentage of workers who are members—is the biggest problem facing organized labor. And since strong unions tend to improve wages and conditions even for nonunion employees, and make politics more worker-friendly, low union density is a problem for the entire working class and, more broadly, anyone with a job. Each success is meaningful to individual workers. But the wins do not add up to a transformative movement unless they can reverse decades of decline—which has not yet happened.
In 2022, even as the popularity of unions hit a generational high, union density fell to 10.1 percent, the lowest on record. The inability to channel all this excitement, during the most pro-union administration of most voters’ lifetimes, into an economy wide barrage of large-scale organizing drives, should put a lump in the throat of anyone who cares about the class war. The traditional analysis of union decline cites two main causes. The first is the devastating effects of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act—which restricted how unions could strike; outlawed “closed shops”; and enabled states to pass “right to work” laws, which under the guise of worker freedom allow a member of a unionized workplace to opt out of paying fees. The second cause is corporate America’s decades-long project to perfect its union-busting tactics.
But you can’t just chalk up organized labor’s woes to the old saws of union-busting businesses and hostile laws. They also reflect the atrophied state of labor’s institutions, a lack of adequate organizing infrastructure and budgets, and, in many cases, an attitude of resignation that decades of decline inflicted on some union leaders who should, right now, be rushing to capitalize on the favorable conditions.
just fyi, its not the whole body. there is more. i don’t want to break any rules or upset the publisher by posting the whole article. they need the traffic too
Joe Mansion and Christian Cinema are just this administration’s Joe Liberalman. Aw beans, we wanted to do a good thing, but this one guy is gumming up the works! If only there was something we could do…
… like kick him off his committees. Pull his funding. Pull his endorsements. Revoke his party membership. Revoke federal contracts and close military bases in his state. Anything. Literally just change the rules! The Senate can do that!
And that’s just moral, ethical, rules-and-order-and-norms stuff they could do. There’s plenty of evil (but perfectly legal) shit the President can do. Pull Mansion or Sinema into the back of The Beast, and show them some live footage of a predator drone flying over their houses. Remember, Obama established that you can drone strike US citizens if you’re the President!
Anything. Literally just change the rules! The Senate can do that!
The Senate can do that with a simple majority of votes. But when they need Manchin and Sinema to achieve that majority and neither of them are interested in helpful changes like fixing the filibuster, no. No they can’t do that.
so you’re saying they can’t get anything done, because they follow special, unwritten rules against getting things done. because getting a good thing done is bad.
another ringing endorsement to vote for the Democrats.
No. I’m saying that they can’t get things done until we do our part. We have to give them a majority that can make people like Manchin irrelevant. It’s our fault that things are like this, not theirs. Operating within the rules and not pursuing their lust for power is just one of the reasons we ought to be helping them attain that majority.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. The current political climate and the restrictions they’re operating under is not something that can reasonably be blamed on the White House or the current Senate Democrats.
Right, it’s my fault the planet is dying because I personally failed to recycle my .0000000001% of plastic waste that I didn’t ask to have produced
Everything would be fine if people like me just didn’t litter, no more pacific garbage patch!
Those starving children in Africa are only hungry because I’m neglecting my personal responsibility to donate to charities!
This historical moment didn’t arise from nowhere. It’s basically a straight fucking line for the last 90 years, the process is this way on purpose, the democrats are this way on purpose
Operating within the rules and not pursuing their lust for power is just one of the reasons we ought to be helping them attain that majority.
Why would I miss a day of work to vote for someone who is going to handicap themselves instead of using the tools at their disposal?
If dems kicked Mansion and Sinema off all committees, cut all discretionary funds flowing into the state, and Biden’s AG indicted Manchin/his family for corruption and Sinema for campaign finance violations, then I could believe they genuinely wanted to pass the policies these people are blocking.
Instead the dem’s actions are no different than if they opposed these policies.
Operating within the rules and not pursuing their lust for power is just one of the reasons we ought to be helping them attain that majority
So you’re saying we should support the democrats because when they get into power they won’t try to get any the good things they want done done unlike the republicans who will happily stoop however low they can to get all the bad things they want done
What good legislation? The Crime bill? Clinton’s Welfare Reform? The Telecom deregulation? Repeal of Glass-Stegal? The resolution to invade Iraq? The Patriot Act? The bill Biden backed to keep people from discharging student loans through bankruptcy? Watered down ACA with no public option?
They never codified Roe. They never codified Ogerfell. They never did anything about Citizens United.
Edit: Wall Street bailouts in 08? Forcing people back to work during Covid? Not sending people the $2,000 they promised? That bill crushing the Railroad strike?
They’re authoritarians whenever a minority asks them to stop killing them but when it comes to opposing fascism that’s when they slap the handcuffs on themselves and insist them doing nothing is the morally superior choice.
Unless there’s a contingent of people who would actually support the dems if they adopted the strategy of “literally doing anything at all to oppose fascism”
Oh no, we don’t want it to look like we’re retaliating against fascists
The worst is that people (in this very thread) are blaming the Democratic party. I’m sure most of them are posting in bad faith, but I know there are people who think this way. There’s an entire party actively working to undermine our democracy, but it’s those “shitty Democrats” that suck for making this happen.
I think the fundamental disconnect here is that there is one political party dedicated to destroying the government and installing themselves as permanent oligarchs, and one party who doesn't agree with them but at the same time treats the other party with congeniality and does little to oppose them. People want a party willing to fight the fascists, but democrats will fight tooth and nail to not do that, harder than they are willing to fight the republicans.
In the remedy video linked in the article, she said that she only wanted to keep the show going. I can feel that she indeed values the show and the connection it made between people. However, it’s also sad to see how this kind of blissful ignorance turns the creative drive into something that perpetuates inequality and harms the people connected by the show. She hurts people in a way she doesn’t understand. Maybe she’ll learn something this time.
Agreed. I feel she tried to do the right thing but didn’t. I hope she learns and I don’t really have animosity towards her. People make mistakes. And admitting you’re wrong is a huge thing our society doesn’t value like it should.
Meanwhile Bill Maher tried to do the wrong thing and managed to successfully do the wrong thing, but for the wrong reasons. So… task failed successfully? I have zero expectations for him and yet he always manages to be a disappointment.
Maher doesn’t even need to open his mouth for you to know what a smug bitch he is. But for the life of me I can’t figure out what he is feeling smug about.
I thought his smugness worked… for a while. He’s been right on a great many things across his career, and was able to frame his scathing critiques in fairly unique, clever ways. (and/or his writers were) Indeed, at one time I admired his ability to look at things from pretty daring angles, even if he was sometimes way off.
Problem is, he’s not the same anymore. Sort of like Joe Rogan, who at least started out with honest, interesting, amusing takes in a sort of ‘college student+’ kind of way. But something seems to have happened to these guys across the years. Not just the wealth, but the growing insulation from reality and… the normalisation of right-wing extremism. Something like that, anyway.
Still, I can’t just forget that Maher was killing it for plenty of years, there, even if he did rub people the wrong way.
You hit it on the nose. He had, and to some extent still has, a whiplash in his dialogue but man has he really gone off the deep end in the last couple of years. When he started sounding like some soap box winey resident from the villages blaming millennials for random shit that’s when I started to tune him out. His interview with Musk was boarder line creepy. Kind of like the age of the women he dates.
Deadpool 3 is filming using a shooting script written by WGA members. Barrymore and Maher would have started filming with themselves replacing the work their writers would’ve done.
As for during the writer’s strike, I believe they could still film what was written. They just couldn’t write more or change the script. So I;d guess the idea might have been to film as much as they could, then do rewrites and reshoots after the strikes end.
Everything I’ve read has suggested Drew Barrymore was going unscripted until the WGA strike was over (i.e. they were fully working within the terms of the strike).
Based on this article, yes and no. A writer improv-ing is the same as writing changes. An actor without a writing credit could still improv. Thanks for verifying
Yes and no? Improve is off the top of your head and is usually an acting method or exercise… writers do not improv. the writer may give prompts to have an actor or speaker go off the actors own ideas, but there is no structured writing and ideas coming from the writer going into the content of the improv exercise or method… whose line is it anyways, is a good example… there are prompts for the actors, but all content came from the actor themselves.
Is it actually budging the studio exec billionaires though? Or is it just prolonging infighting among the little folk, which distracts from the actual villains causing this situation in the first place?
Because if the first thing isn’t true, it doesn’t matter at all.
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