Modern forms of wage slavery

American businesses keep looking for ways to keep wages low. One way they have been able to do that is because since most people’s health insurance is obtained through their employment, that makes it difficult for people to leave since that would require them to find new health care providers, assuming the new employer does provide health insurance. And during the period between jobs, you would not have insurance. For many people, the least troublesome option is to stay with the same employer until it becomes intolerable.
[Read more…]

Trump is really losing it

Trump lies shamelessly during his press conferences and also make racist allusions. Reporters have mostly left it to commentators to later deconstruct these statements but by then the damage has been done. But increasingly it looks like reporters at the press conferences are challenging him in real time to explain and back up his statements and he clearly does not like it. A week or so ago Jonathan Karl of ABC News kept asking for examples when Trump made one of his baseless, fact-free, sweeping assertions and Trump of course could offer none and just got peevish. Yesterday, Trump abruptly ended the conference and left when two such pushbacks occurred. Watch.


[Read more…]

The mysterious video of the jogger’s murder

The killing of the Ahmaud Arbery, 26, who was shot while jogging in a residential upscale neighborhood outside Atlanta, Georgia on February 23 is revealing layers of racism and cronyism by the police and prosecutors in Glynn county that is unfortunately all too common in the US. Arbery is black and the two men who had blocked the street with their truck and confronted Arbery before killing him are white. The event was captured in this video.


[Read more…]

Testing for me but not for thee

We learn that people in the White House are very frequently tested for covid-19 and as a result more and more people working there have been found to have it. It was because of such infected people that Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of the NIH’s infectious disease program and a member of the coronavirus task force), Dr. Stephen Hahn, (commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration), and Dr. Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) were quarantined because they were found to have been in contact with some of them.
[Read more…]

How the bizarre Venezuelan ‘Bay of Piglets’ plot fell apart

As more details emerge of the foiled attempt on Tuesday, May 5th at overthrowing the Venezuelan government of president Nicolas Maduro, the sheer ineptitude and hubris and arrogance of the plotters becomes ever more incredible to behold. Take this report about the ringleader, a former member of the US Special Forces Green Berets named Jordan Goudreau and how he worked with representatives of Juan Guaidó, the person the US treats as the president of that country even though, you know, he is not, to plan and implement the foiled attempt.
[Read more…]

This is not good

Three of the US’s top health officials, Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of the NIH’s infectious disease program and a member of the coronavirus task force), Dr. Stephen Hahn, (commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration), and Dr. Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have gone into two weeks quarantine after having come into contact with people who have tested positive for covid-19.
[Read more…]

A tale of three cities

Brian Melican has an interesting article in the April 20, 2020 issue of the New Statesman about three cities and how their failed responses to previous pandemics led to sweeping changes in the structure of the cities: Marseille, France in 1720 during the plague; Hamburg, Germany during the cholera epidemic in 1892; and Östersund, Sweden during the flu pandemic of 1918. It is a familiar story that resonates today about how business and civic leaders put the interests of commerce and low budgets ahead of the best scientific advice of the day, that overcrowding, poverty, unsanitary conditions, and lack of access to clean water and health services contribute to the widespread outbreaks of disease.
[Read more…]

The danger of sampling error

In analyzing a situation using data, one of the common errors that one can fall into is that of sampling error, when one bases one’s conclusion on a sample that is not representative of the population at large. That is how many stereotypes and prejudices arise, because people form judgments about entire groups based on their experiences with just a few members of that group that they happen to encounter in their own lives.
[Read more…]

As usual, the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy and against the poor

As I have said before, it is an iron rule in the US that any law or regulation that deals with taxes or economic or business regulatory issues will have loopholes that enable the rich to get richer, while at the same time placing increased hurdles in the path of the poor. We saw how the stimulus package supposedly meant for small businesses had most of the money immediately snapped up by big companies, including publicly traded ones and even professional basketball teams because they had the lawyers to quickly file the paperwork and the big banks that were tasked with disbursing the money found it most profitable and least work to shovel it to their bigger clients. Small companies who were the intended beneficiaries got shut out before they knew the doors were even open.
[Read more…]