Someone should tell Jeff Bezos that charity begins at home

The founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos has said that he plans to give the majority of his wealth of $124 billion to charity, telling CNN “that he will devote the bulk of his wealth to fighting climate change and supporting people who can unify humanity in the face of deep social and political divisions.” He did not say when and how much and to whom he will give money away, so frankly I am going to wait and see if he actually follows through.

But here’s an idea. Why doesn’t he start by paying his workers decent wages and benefits and provide them with decent working conditions so that they are not forced to urinate in bottles because of the pace of work?

Amazon has apologised to a US politician for falsely denying that drivers are, at times, forced to urinate in plastic bottles.

Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin, referenced Amazon making “workers urinate in water bottles” in a tweet.

The official Amazon Twitter account then replied: “If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

The company has now apologised after evidence emerged of drivers having to urinate in bottles.
…

Mr Pocan rejected the apology on Saturday, tweeting: “Sigh. This is not about me, this is about your workers – who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity. Start by acknowledging the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for ALL your workers, then fix that for everyone and finally, let them unionise without interference.”

Also, why not pay his house staff a decent wage and give them decent conditions so that they are not forced to sue him?
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Trump and election deniers were the big losers

To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy for 2024 in a rambling hour-long speech that the media cut away from because it was largely a warmed over version of what he says at rallies, except that it seemed even more incoherent. Even Fox News cut away, showing just how much his star has faded and Rupert Murdoch has reportedly told him that Fox News will not support his candidacy. That will not deter his MAGA cultists who will be delirious with joy at their Dear Leader riding to their rescue.

Trump is clearly announcing his run from a position of weakness because he had undoubtedly expected that he would be riding a wave of election successes by his acolytes in the various races. But they lost all over the place. Now his announcement is seen as a desperate attempt to stem the calls for him to stay out of the race and to stymie those who might think of challenging him. The Republican establishment is recoiling from the thought of him dragging them down again. With a normal person, pressure might work to get a failing candidate to withdraw and one can expect all manner of maneuvering behind the scenes to try and keep him out so that someone else can be the party nominee. But that may not work because Tump is not a normal person. He is a delusional narcissistic pathological liar who sees anyone who is not totally supportive of him as an enemy and he will lash out at them. Republicans have created a monster and it is now turning on them.
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The Twitter albatross around Elon Musk’s neck

Elon Musk is by no means stupid. No one who creates his own company and in the process becomes one of the world’s richest people can do so without having considerable acumen in some areas of life. But such people can be, and often are, jerks and narcissists who get carried away by their success in one area to think that they somehow have a general ability to succeed at whatever they do that they can apply anywhere. That is what seems to have happened with Musk. Musk was a highly successful user of the Twitter platform, having close to 100 million followers, and was able to use it to sway financial markets and bring attention to himself. This must have made it seem that he could easily run it even better and draw even more attention to himself and was why he rashly made an offer to pay $44 billion for it, a figure that analysts said was way too high. After he realized that, he tried to back out of the deal but was sued and had to go through with it. After being forced to buy Twitter, Musk said in a tweet that he did so not “to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love”. And there was much laughter in the land.
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I clearly pay too much attention to the crazies

Last Tuesday turned out to be the best mid-term elections for the party in power in 20 years, thwarting the so-called Red Wave. Republicans, Trumpists, and election deniers had been salivating over the prospect of getting massive wins in the Senate and House of Representatives and state offices and that simply did not happen.

Some of those down ballot races for state offices were very important. Take Nevada. Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who had never run for elected office before, defeated Trump-endorsed election denier Republican Jim Marchant for the position of secretary of state. This is important because the secretary of state oversees state elections and Marchant was the founder of an organization called America First Secretary of State Coalition that consists of seven election deniers running for similar positions in other states that sought to restrict access to the ballot as part of their effort to make sure that Republicans win.

Aguilar, an attorney and first-time candidate, cast himself as a bulwark against Marchant, who had intimated that he would try to make it easier for Trump to win his state in a comeback run for president.

“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024,” Marchant said at a Trump-hosted rally in Nevada in early October.

“The secretary of state’s job is to protect democracy by keeping our elections fair and transparent,” Aguilar said in his most-played general election TV ad.

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Democrats take control of the Senate, reduce gap in the House

So much for the red wave. Democrats have already won 50 seats in the US Senate even before the Georgia runoff to be held on December 6th, meaning that they retain control.

Nevada announced the results of their election for US senate and incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto was declared the winner over Republican Adam Laxalt Jr by 48.8% to 48.1%. When this is coupled with yesterday’s result in Arizona where Democrat Mark Kelly retained his seat, defeating Blake Masters fairly easily by the margin of 52% to 46%, that gives Democrats 50 seats, the same number that they had before the elections, and thus will retain control of the senate.
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In US elections, a draw can become a win

One of the most encouraging results of Tuesday’e elections have been the ballot measures in the various states that resulted in expanded access to abortion (even in deep-red Kentucky), voting, and legalized marijuana and increases in the minimum wage. Oregon also seems likely to pass measures to establish a right to health care and to require a permit to buy firearms and high-capacity magazines.

When it comes to elections for offices, in objective terms, the results of the mid-terms has been a draw. The results are so close that at this point, the final outcome of which party controls the House of Representative and the Senate is still up in the air though it seems likely that the Republicans will have a tiny majority in the former. Right now, there are four undecided senate races. Of those, the one in Alaska is guaranteed to return a Republican since the top two candidates Lisa Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka are both from that party. It will take some time to get the results since Alaska has a system where the top four people in the open primary go on to the general election and the winner there is decided by ranked choice voting, which takes longer to tabulate.
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No red wave for Republicans

At the time of this writing, it looks like the big issue of the election, which party get majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, remains up in the air. Republicans had been hoping for a ‘red wave’ that would easily give them control but that has not materialized. The typical situation where the party that holds the presidency loses big in the mid-term elections, did not pan out, despite Joe Biden’s low approval ratings.

Another provisional interpretation is that Joe Biden has defied the odds again. Just some years ago he was written off as a 2020 presidential candidate after a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire only to rally and win the party nomination.

Now the president looks set to best his Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton, who lost 54 House seats in his first term in 1994, and Barack Obama, who lost 63 seats in his first term in 2010. With the congresswomen Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton having survived in Virginia, it seems there will be no “shellacking” this time.

This is not just a Democratic phenomenon. The Republicans lost 40 seats in. 2018, the mid-terms held during the Trump presidency.
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