Look for the Union Libel, Continued

 

Via redditor Honest_Horky.

Little Marco takes a stand on the Amazon workers in Alabama, in USA Today:

Here’s my standard: When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers. And that’s why I stand with those at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse today.

Right. He'll support unionization at a company he thinks is too liberal, because they deserve to be punished. If he likes a company's "culture", like the Little Sisters of the Poor and their unrelenting efforts to stop their employees from getting affordable birth control, he'll side with the company.

Because the Little Sisters are on the side of "working-class values" and the workers are against them. Sure thing.

How does Amazon fight against "working-class values"? It

Joe Did What? Labor Edition

In "Joe Did What?" news, President Biden posted a video reaction to the upcoming vote of the 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama as to whether they should become the first workers in Amazon history to be represented by a union (the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union):

“Workers in Alabama, and all across America, are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Mr. Biden said in a direct-to-camera address posted on the White House Twitter page, after a recent pressure campaign by pro-union groups pushing him to weigh in on the drive.

“Let me be really clear: It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union,” he said. “But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an employer to decide that either.”

Yes, sir, the second sentence was more clear than the first. Thank you.

Amazon's inveterate opposition to unions is well known (that's what torpedoed their plan for a Long Island City headquarters, more than anything else, making it impossible for Mayor de Blasio to keep supporting the deal), and the company has been willing to descend to a near–Roger Stone level of dirty trickery to stop them, as in this Alabama case, as Sarah Jones reports at New York:

Breakup

Image by Justin Metz via The Economist.

Silliest response to the Amazon decision to give up on their Long Island City project was, I'm sorry to say, from Senator Professor Warren:

.@Amazon – one of the wealthiest companies on the planet – just walked away from billions in taxpayer bribes, all because some elected officials in New York aren't sucking up to them enough. How long will we allow giant corporations to hold our democracy hostage? https://t.co/O9pz7en43B

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) February 14, 2019

So now you're going to complain about corporations not taking bribes? There's just no satisfying you!

That said, it looks like the decision was for all the right reasons, and speaking as a New Yorker I'm feeling more and more not sorry it's ended this way:

New York note: In defense of Bill de Blasio, don't @ me

Photo by Yeong-Ung Yang/New York Times.

My distinguished tweep Nathan Newman lays out a reasonable schema for how we should feel about the deal making Long Island City, Queens, one of Amazon's new HQ2s:

Two things can be true. (1) Allowing cities to bid for jobs should be illegal since lets companies retain large chunk of value they create in those communities, (2) There is still significant value left over in communities in many cases, so bidding for those jobs is rational.

— Nathan Newman 🧭🌹 (@nathansnewman) November 14, 2018

That is, it's a horrible feature of late capitalism that giant companies should be playing off localities against each other in a race to the bottom in which they award the prize to the one that allows them to exploit it the most, but given that that's the way it is, and the feds won't do anything to stop it, local authorities would be irresponsible not to see if they can get something out of it for their citizens.

I've been listening to Mayor de Blasio on WNYC radio explaining the Amazon deal under questioning from Brian Lehrer and a couple of callers-in, and he's obviously kind of defensive, under intensive criticism from everybody from Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez and Jumaane Williams to Rod Dreher and the National Review, as Roy points out at the subscription site, but I'm inclined, on the whole, to think he may have done this thing right, or at the least that he's not just kidding when he presents himself as a kind of Mitterand figure:

Cheap shots and chasers 4/6

Nun sequitur: According to Romney, Mrs. Romney

says that she’s going across the country and talking with women, and what they’re talking about is the debt that we’re leaving the next generation and the failure of this economy to put people back to work. She says that she talks to women and they’re concerned about the jobs that their kids are going to get. And they wonder whether their future is going to be prosperous and bright, as have been our lives. And that’s what they’re talking about. And the, my goodness, what the president has done, with regards to this issue on health care, he came in and said, look, under Obamacare, we’re going to tell the Catholic church that it has to violate its religious conscience… (Politico)

Because how are those kids going to get decent jobs if the bishops are all upset? What Romney is trying to do here is show his agreement with the postmodern feminist theory that logic is a patriarchal plot.

Nuns grading papers. From Upmag.net.

Incidentally, if you click the photo credit link you get to one of those hokey collections of kids' bloopers which are maybe too unsophisticated for you all, but not for me; it's purported answers to quiz questions on the Scriptures, and starts off

1. IN THE FIRST BOOK OF THE BIBLE, GUINESSIS. GOD GOT TIRED   OF CREATING THE WORLD SO HE TOOK THE SABBATHOFF.
2.  ADAM AND EVE WERE CREATED FROM AN APPLE TREE . NOAH’S WIFE WAS JOAN OF ARK. NOAH BUILT AND ARK AND THE ANIMALS CAME ON IN PEARS.
3. LOTS WIFE WAS A PILLAR  OF SALT DURING THE DAY, BUT A    BALL OF FIRE DURING THE  NIGHT.
4. THE JEWS WERE A PROUD  PEOPLE AND THROUGHOUT HISTORY THEY HAD TROUBLE WITH  UNSYMPATHETIC GENITALS.

"And opossu-umm in a pear tree". From Better Homes and Gardens Nature's Garden.

 I got some snail mail from Common Cause inviting me to join in (i.e., help pay for) a movement to "take back our democracy".  I do not really love this hysterically bipartisan organization anyway, and I was a little taken aback myself by the Republicanity of the expression. But I also couldn't help thinking, "I got this democracy on sale last week but it didn't really fit... I think I have the receipt..."

Librairie Libo, Luxembourg.

Amazon has reportedly been doing some tax dodging of its own in the United Kingdom, managing to make £7.6 billion in sales over the last three years without paying any corporate income tax.... 

Amazon was able to pull this bit of tax trickery by registering all of its corporate profits in Luxembourg, a notorious corporate tax haven, calling its UK business simply a delivery service. (Think Progress)

Right—UK customers were so fussy about making the drive to Luxembourg to pick up their copy of The Hunger Games...

Michigan governor Rick Snyder leaps ahead of stiff competition from Maine, Florida, and Wisconsin in the Republican gubernatorial fascism stakes with the news—broken last night by Rachel Maddow, it seems (via Eclectablog at Kos)—that the Michigan legislature has passed practically all of its legislation this year as emergency legislation with immediate effect, by ignoring a constitutional requirement for a two-thirds majority. It's the Midwest's first illegal dictatorship!