Don’t believe the lies about the minimum wage

State and federal-mandated minimum wages set a floor for what employers can pay their employees. It benefits more than the minimum wage workers because it raises wages up the line. Hence it is should be no surprise that the capitalist class and its supporters hate raises in the mandated minimum wage and try to do everything in their power to keep them from being raised because it lowers their ability to exploit workers and increase their profits. In their mind, the there should be no mandated minimum wage and all wages should be set by the employer and the employee, negotiating freely. Of course they oppose unions as well since those too interfere in the glorious working of the free-market. In this world view, a single employee and a company or massive corporation are equally matched powers and thus the figure they arrive at would reflect the true market value of labor.

Of course this is a fantasy indulged by the capitalist class and has no basis in reality. There is a massive power discrepancy between employer and employee and you need the federal and state governments and unions to at least partially redress that imbalance.
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The true believers

The only good thing for me to personally emerge from the disaster that we are going through is that I have stopped paying too much attention to political news and have used the released time for other things. But I still read some articles and was struck by this one that looked at the reactions of poor people in one area of Pennsylvania about how they viewed the future under a Trump administration that has vowed to cut the federal budget by huge amounts.

The sad thing is that many of them are under the delusion that the cuts will affect other people, not them, that they will be magically spared and even benefited, because they think that Trump really cares about them and that cutting money spent on these other freeloaders will leave more for them.
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Back in the saddle again

This has been a somewhat long hiatus from blogging due to being down with flu. That may have suggested to readers that I was suffering from serious symptoms. But in actual fact, after the first two days, I was almost back to normal. ‘Almost’ in the operative word here. My temperature was back to almost normal but I could not get rid of a low-grade fever and had a residual dry cough. The latter is for me a common consequence to a flu, not to be shaken for a couple of weeks.

But what really kept me from blogging was sense of blahness that left me with no enthusiasm for doing anything, such as everyday chores or even an appetite. In that condition, the enthusiasm to write, which comes usually comes easily to me, deserted me until today. The fact that it took me this long to get back to normal may mean that this was a different flu variant or that as I get older it will take me longer to bounce back.

It is not that these days were totally wasted. I did find that I could enjoy reading and so took the opportunity to read books that I should have read a long time ago and watched some films and TV shows.
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Good move: Biden commutes death sentences of 37 federal inmates

As his term of office winds down, Joe Biden is trying to minimize the damage that Trump can do and one of things is the federal death penalty. The federal death penalty had.not been carried out for 17 years but when Trump took office in 2017, he proceeded to carry them out with vigor. Biden put back the moratorium when he took office in 2021 but there were still 40 people on death row. He has now commuted 37 of those.

Biden has been somewhat of a vacillator on the death penalty, supporting it during the heyday of ‘get tough on crime’ but then evolving as the political climate changed.
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The BRICS challenge to US financial dominance

The US is an imperial power. Unlike other former empires such as Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium, it hides its imperial nature by various ways, as Daniel Immerwahr describes in his book How to Hide an Empire that I reviewed back in 2019 and further discussed here. Rather than exercising direct over control over large countries, the US empire consists of small regions it calls ‘territories’ and bases scattered over all the world, because that enables it to exercise control without having to deal with large local populations. It is what Immerwahr calls a ‘pointillist’ empire.

China is challenging the US on the global stage and is also adopting the pointillist model with its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ in which China invests heavily in infrastructure and other development projects in countries around the world, cementing economic links. Back in 2019, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted a summit on this and despite heavy lobbying by the US to deter countries, 125 nations signed up and attended.
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The great pizza conflict

(Sherman’s Lagoon)

It used to be the case that people had very strong opinions for and against anchovies on pizza. But as the range of pizza toppings has greatly expanded over time, anchovies have faded into the background and the big divider now seems to be over the merits of pineapple.

I myself love pineapple as a fruit but revolt at the thought of putting it on a pizza, maybe because I do not like mixing sweet and savory tastes.

Chaos comes early to the US

After Trump was elected and started surrounding himself with weirdos for his cabinet and advisory roles, people like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Elise Stefanik, and Pete Hegseth, I expected that come January 20th when he actually takes office would be when the chaos started.

But it looks like he decided to get an early start and has chosen the budget process to throw his weight around. The current budget authorizes funding only until midnight on Friday and Republican speaker Mike Johnson thought he had worked out a deal to keep the government running. But then Elon Musk waded in and said the bill was not good enough and effectively scuttled it yesterday. Johnson then tried to get another bill that had the main thing that Trump wanted, which was to suspend the debt ceiling for two years so that he could give his wealthy friends a big tax cut. In order to get it passed in the House of Representatives, Trump vowed that any Republican who voted against it would face primary challengers supported by him.
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A more sophisticated form of identity theft

A couple who are friends of mine woke up yesterday to find that during the night, starting at midnight, hackers had got into their bank accounts and shifted money out of it to various other accounts in several steps during the night.

This kind of breaking into the security of banks and other businesses is not new. What was new was that the thieves had also at the same time hacked into their cell phone service provider and taken over their phone numbers so that they could not use the phones. What was worse, any text alerts that the banks might have been sending to them about suspicious account activity was going to the thieves. It was a nightmare for them to correct the situation because when they went to the local branch of their bank to report it, they were put through to the fraud office and the people there, in order to verify that they were who they said they were, wanted to send them a confirmatory text which of course they would not get because they no longer had a phone. It took them multiple calls all of yesterday and today to finally get the situation at least partly rectified. Now they have to go through the tedious business of telling all their contacts their new phone numbers.and also tell the businesses they deal with that use two-factor authorization of their new numbers.
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The rise of the manosphere

There have been many ugly developments following the election victory of Trump. It seems like all the worst elements in society who harbor abhorrent views have been emboldened to think that they are in control.

Christine Fernando writes about one particular area, and that is the rise of what is known as the ‘manosphere’, where men think that they now have even more power over women than they had before and are willing to say so openly.

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”

“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.
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