People Who Don't Work From Home Both Lose Their Jobs and Are To Be Forced to Take Jobs

      . . . .  "It’s Been Hard Not to Roll My Eyes”  and  "Pay A Living Wage Or Flip Your Own Damned Burgers."

....Many of these workers resent that people upset over being asked to return didn’t display the same concern for the safety of those who have been there all along. And they wonder why they’ve been left out of so much of the national narrative about what this year has been like for workers. They haven’t been stuck at home baking bread or going stir crazy from being cooped up with family members; they’re out risking their lives working with the public and/or in close quarters with colleagues every day, and they feel invisible in much of the conversation about pandemic life. More than anything, they’re deeply, deeply exhausted....

Goes right along with this WaPo's story about yet another expanding restaurant owner,  thinking we should all 'weep for me', unable as he and the industry are, at finding enough people to work in their intolerable conditions, for pennies and no bennies. 

The comments, which number, last time looked, hit nearly two thousand, are about 99.09 contemptuous of these guys.

I am particularly am contemptuous because this where the financial speculation industry, capitalists in general and rethugs in particular always point when pronouncing that 'people don't want to work and prefer collecting massive government benefits.  So make unemployment illegal!"  See: South Carolina, etc. Same states passing Jim Crow voting repression laws, who have 'right to work' / no right to unionize laws, etc. Also, recall these are the states that made it illegal for labor, i.e. African Americans, to leave neighborhoods and states and go elsewhere for work outside of sharecropping and domestic work.

https://money.yahoo.com/south-carolina-cancels-federal-unemployment-benefits-212914813.html

https://abcnews.go.com/US/south-carolina-montana-declining-federal-unemployment-funds-huge/story?id=77553102

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/montana-south-carolina-ending-participation-in-fed-unemployment-programs.html

Why are they weeping though?  They've gotten what they've been howling about for decades: deportation and anti-immigration.  They promised then wages here would go up -- A Good Thing!  Now they have it, and yet, yet, yet, persist in whining ... about wages going up.

In the meantime the restaurant industry, i.e. owners and landlords, has gotten billions in federal  relief. Not to mention whole transfers of public, tax-payer owned property, for absolutely zero payment – nor do they even clean the messes their covid sheds make in the gutters, streets and on the sidewalks, where, of course pedestrians, blind people and people in wheelchairs can’t even navigate a path -- again, capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich.  This also reminds me a great deal of England and Europe in wake of the 14th centuries first three great waves of pandemic Bubonic Plague, passing laws to keep prices for wages for labor and prices of commodities exactly what they were prior to the Plague, even though so many had died (which contributed greatly to all sorts of social mobility upward for non-aristos in the 14th and 15th centuries).

And ya, there is, and will be, inflation of up the wazoo, due to choked, interrupted, halted supply chains for absolutely everything, everywhere in the world, along with some damned bad harvests due to not only pandemic, but catastrophic weather.  It's going to get quite bad, one may think indeed, if judging by historical periods in which pandemic coincided with bad harvests and labor shortages -- while war continued, unabated.

Homo Saps are too stupid to survive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And GD!  Americans Will Lose Unemployment Benefits If They Turn Down Jobs, NPR SAYS Biden Says, just now.

Except Biden said NO SUCH THING. Not even in the text NPR posts under that headline.  Shame, Shame, SHAME! on NPR.  Gods I loathe NPR.

Biden, in his Monday remarks to reporters, pushed back on the suggestion that funds from the progressive relief package were being abused in any meaningful way and encouraged employers to offer competitive wages to court Americans back into the workforce.

"My expectation is that as the economy comes back, these companies will provide fair wages and safe work environments, and if they do, they'll find plenty of workers. And we're all going to come out of this together and better than before," he said.

"No one should be allowed to game the system."

Biden said that while he took allegations of fraud seriously, the government could not "turn our backs" on those who had lost jobs as a result of the pandemic. He placed the blame for the sluggish state of the national economy on his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, who Biden said "bungled" his handling of the virus and its fallout.

"We'll insist that the law is followed with respect to benefits. But we're not going to turn our backs on our fellow Americans. Twenty-two million people lost their jobs in this pandemic through no fault of their own. They lost their jobs to a virus, and to a government that bungled its response to the crisis and failed to protect them," Biden said.

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME on NPR.

But it's still hard to take, hearing Biden say that anybody offered an appropriate job must take it or lose benefits.  How does he get to decide what is an appropriate offer?  So it will be the chiseling, cruel restaurant owners.  Shame on you too, Biden.

Long Time Gone: Emergence

      . . . . It's May 7th!  Nor has there been a post here since last month, on the 14th.  I guess . . . things just happen . . . or don't happen?

True, a great deal has happened, while it continues to feel as though nothing is happening -- which that latter is untrue, that nothing is happening, because a lot has gone down and is happening  and is going to happen, from dental appointments to planning the end-of-June trip to . . .  Miami . . . in fulfillment of the grant provided to perform discographic research in the Diaz-Ayala Collection.  Not one's preference for first plane trip in 16 months, etc., but one goes where the materials are, when creating a syllabus for a Discography Studies, a program that has never ever existed. 

Next week Postmambo and NOLA Reconnect host, in cooperation with The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and University of California, Berkeley- American Studies, A Conversation With Gwendolyn Midlo Hall:

Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle

Thursday, May 13, 2021 / via Zoom / 8 pm Central Daylight Time (9 pm Eastern)

Invite link: https://tulane.zoom.us/j/93931683186?pwd=bEcrMFhUYUMzajBTWnRJdVpkMklXdz09

Please join us in celebrating together with pathbreaking historian Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall the publication of her long-awaited memoir, Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle.

From the Haymarket press release:

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history.  

 Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood.

    Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States.

    Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.

Produced by NOLA Reconnect, Postmambo Studies, and CubaNOLA Arts Collective, in association with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley American Studies. Admission is free.

Then there's always Postmambo Movie Night, which needs a lot of attention to set-up so the subscribers can have a smooth experience.

We're embarked upon planning and organizing a major move of books and music materials out of the apartment, which includes the use of professionals of all sorts. And the shredder.  I'm selling all the sf/f to a group who do very well with pop-up used bookshops in Brooklyn; they are desperate for stock.  Certain research groups will be kept, but more of them are going to be sold off, as how things are now we can't even access them, and it's highly unlikely we'll be writing any more books on these topics either.

Shopping / errands take a lot of time. My latest is shopping for a tablet, as the small computer is reaching the very end of its life.  It will be nice to have something that small, light and portable on which I can download books from the library and write and receive e-mail and have access to the internet.

We've also been very carefully initiating a slight approximation of social life, so far only with friends we know with absolute certainty are fully vaccinated, and who are doing the same. It has been very difficult to do this, which came as a shock. Thus this sense that nothing is happening.  Fortunately it seems just about everyone we know is going through this too, so we all understand each other, and there are no hurt feelings.  We'll get there certainly by the time it is warm enough to be comfortably outside at night.  None of us has any desire to meet in covid sheds or inside the restaurants.

It all feels just as weird now and hard to comprehend as it did a year ago at this time, but weird in a different way. Then we were closed down, really closed down, including a curfew. No covid sheds, no restaurant service at all except pick-up/take-out.  No library grab and go. No doctor appointments except emergencies, very emergency emergencies. Now we are very slowly attempting to come out of our cave-bubble, go shopping in real stores -- why yes, even with the tablet I've done research / comparison shopping places like Best Buy and in Apple (where one must have an appointment, as well as a mask in order to enter), buying jeans, since those from over a year ago fall off now, t-shirts and so on. 

Though the right dish drainer remains, evidently an impossibility. Moreover any place that has dish drainers has only a single variety, and it invariably is too small, is not wrongly designed for my space, which isn't, let me emphasize, is not a weird space for a dish drainer.  Cannot find one with a drainage tray that faces the right direction, fits the space, is not attached to the dish rack, large enough, no matter what.  I'm on the third one, which el V brought home the other day, and sure 'nuff, he didn't check, and the drain tray faces the wrong direction. 

But all around us, from Canada and Michigan to Mexico and Latin America, India and other places, the virus is burning down the house and a new variant seems to emerge every day -- while here the mayor and the governor race to be the one to open up the most the fastest and first w/o any restrictions of any kind -- and bring back All The Tourists, at least "36 million by the end of 2021."  One of the attractions?  Get a free vaccination injection, just walk in and probably get a Broadway ticket as swag.  This while pedestrian deaths from speeding cars, bicycles and scooters is already higher by this month than it has been in decades.

Now tell me this isn't weird.

Memphis -- National Civil Rights Museum Reopens

We were there about two weeks ago.  Unable to go in,  we took photos of the exteriors of this very large complex that makes up the whole of this Civil Rights Museum centered around the murder of Dr. King.

In those days of Dr. King's murder, people of color weren't able to stay in the same hotels and motels as white people. For the many blacks who made their living as musicians or were otherwise, like Dr. King, compelled to be frequent itinerants, in the former confederacy, if you were lucky -- the town large enough --  there would be boarding houses and, later, motels, run by black people for black people. So the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was murdered was one of those was built for black custom: musicians in particular would stay there, including many working at Stax Records, whose names have become legendary:  Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton, Aretha Franklin, Ethel Waters, Otis Redding, The Staple Singers and Wilson Pickett.

"From Slave Ship Shackles to the Mountaintop" -- National Civil Rights Museum to Reopen After Reconstruction --  by Edward Rothstein, in the New York Times Arts section.

While establishing a museum where Dr. King was killed once inspired criticism, now some 200,000 people visit each year. In 2002, the museum expanded, with new exhibitions in two annex buildings, incorporating the fleabag rooming house from which Ray had stalked his prey. With the rethinking of the main exhibition space, the museum is building on a trend it also helped inspire: Multiple museums in the South are beginning to confront the region’s troubled racial past at sites and in cities where history is still memory. 

These days, all over the former confederacy, "Black Tourism" as it's called in the states' tourism agencies is touted.  This is not "reconsidering our past in civil rights and slavery."

If it wasn't for the decades of efforts by local black populations this wouldn't be going on at all, as, for instance, with the Forks in the Road memorial in Natchez, the Benches by the Side of the Road as at Sullivan's Island (called the Ellis Island of African Americans for the vast number of captives from Africa processed there) in Charleston sponsored by Toni Morrison. Even the Whitney Plantation, which seems to be conceived as an enormous memorial to those who died in slavery, is expected to become a lucrative draw for weddings, conferences and so on.

It's more than ironic that so many places in the former confederacy, that are so impoverished as in Alabama, are counting on slavery tourism and civil rights tourism to save their a$$e$. To see how seriously the South is about re-thinking its history, look at Alabama and its draconian actions against immigrants, or the on-going investigation into the death of Jackson MS's (Mississippi's capital) first black mayor.

We visited this site last spring on our "Memorial Frederick Bancroft Slave Market Tour"

This is how serious the former confederacy is about rethinking its history: Richmond plans to build a multi-billion dollar baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom, where one of the hugest slave market houses was established, which is part of the Black History trail in Richmond.  Solomon Northup spent a night in one of those jails on his multiple-sale journey down to Epps plantation in Louisiana. He writes about that night there in his 12 Years a Slave.  By all means, let us pave over the shame and enjoy ourselves with beer and howling instead.

The Butler - History and Hollywood

Against all Hollywood's expectations, The Butler is this weekend's number one box office draw.  Everyone passed on this Lee Daniel - Danny Strong project about the Civil Rights Movement.  It had to be independently funded.  Today, with the news still so fresh, that their struggle to bring their vision to the theaters was a winning struggle, Daniels and Strong are on the local public radio flag station, on its anchor mid-day variety talk show.

Among what matters the most to them about the success of The Butler is that all sorts of people had said things like, "It's not possible that a black man could be murdered in 1927 and the police, nobody, even bothered to look into it, nobody arrested, nobody going to trial."  They would assure these people that this happened, and happened all the time, and this is why there was a Civil Rights movement.

And this was the response in Hollywood: "That never happened.  I never saw it in a movie." *

So now it's in a movie, a movie made by a black man who lived through the Civil Rights movement.

As I've quoted previously from el V, in the growing up in Louisiana chapters in The Year Before the Flood, "Movies told me lies. Music told me the truth" about the history of the country, of white and black.

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* Rest in Peace, Treyvon Martin.