I was not sure what would await me from my brief hiatus from blogging when I started following the news closely again. I did not expect to anything as wild as the story involving Matt Gaetz. For those not familiar with him, he is a MAGA-loving Florida congressperson, one of Trump’s most ardent supporters and considered a rising star in Republican circles, who looks like one of those used-car salespersons on late-night TV. Or an extra from the film Grease, what with his high head of slicked black hair. One expects him, Travolta-like, to whip a comb out of pocket and use it whenever he sees himself in any reflecting surface.

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After Reconstruction when Black voters obtained the right to vote, there have been serious efforts to limit their voting by raising all manner of obstacles as part of the Jim Crow laws that limited Black participation in civic life. The Republican party has for the longest time, ever since they realized that they were in danger of becoming the permanent minority party, sought to disenfranchise voting by poor and minority communities so that they could hold on to power by retaining a majority in the white community. In the past, these efforts were more discreet but Trump’s failure to win re-election and the loss of their majority in the senate by two senatorial defeats in Georgia, of all places, has resulted in a re-thinking. This is because despite their efforts at Black voter suppression and energizing their white voters to come out in record numbers for Trump, voters of color were energized even more and the increase in their numbers dwarfed increased white turnout.
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Today is the last day of voting for the unionization drive at the Amazon center in Bessemer, Alabama. Amazon has pulled out all the stops to defeat the move because Amazon is a rapacious predatory company. Amazon boasts about the fact that it pays $15/hour but its working conditions are deplorable, as it uses advanced technology to drive its workers to the limit.

But the significance of the drive has more to do with the company itself. Amazon is now among the largest private employers in the United States; its founder, Jeff Bezos, is arguably the wealthiest man in modern history. The company has paid every one of its workers fifteen dollars per hour since November, 2018, while also pioneering second-by-second monitoring of its employees. “This isn’t just about wages,” Stuart Appelbaum, the R.W.D.S.U.’s president, told me, on Monday. It is also about the strenuous pace of work, and the real-time surveillance methods that Amazon has used to monitor employees. Appelbaum said some of the workers that his union has represented have had employers that monitored their locations with G.P.S. chips in their delivery trucks, “but there’s nothing like this, where you’re expected to touch a package every eight seconds.” It had been hard to organize within the Bessemer facility, he said, in part because many of the workers did not know one another. “It’s hyper-Taylorism,” Damon Silvers, the director of policy and the special counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said. “Amazon has determined an optimal set of motions that they want their employees to do, and they have the ability to monitor the employee at all times and measure the difference between what the employee does and what they want them to do, and there is nowhere to hide.” Appelbaum said, “People tell us they feel like robots who are being managed by robots.”

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Some congressional Democrats have introduced a bill to shift some of the spending for a new weapons system to other uses that actually help people.

Congressional Democrats are introducing legislation to transfer $1bn in funding from a controversial new intercontinental ballistic missile to the development of a universal Covid vaccine.

The Investing in Cures Before Missiles (ICBM) Act, introduced in the House and Senate on Friday, would stop funding on the proposed new missile, known as the ground-based strategic deterrent (GBSD) which is projected to cost a total of $264bn over its projected lifespan, and discontinue spending on a linked warhead modification program.

Instead, the life of the existing US intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, would be extended until 2050, and an independent study commissioned on how best to do that.
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