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.

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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.

Primary Day + Irma + Cuba

     . . . .  El V says voting together makes him feel all warm and fuzzy.  It makes me feel like we're part of the community.  Our polling place is in the basement of St. Anthony's Church.  The elections workers are neighborhood people we interact with on a regular basis for a variety of reasons.  One of the poll watchers is a Cuban, now a citizen, who also happens to be a splendid musician (piano), whom el V has hired and gotten hired by others often.  That was fun.

We vote in the basement of this church, which  for generations has been the anchor of the neighborhood, as community and neighborhood, providing a sense of place and safety. It has been providing this and other services since long before we arrived, and I would guess will be doing so long after we are gone, as long as there remains a Manhattan anyway, that can support human life.

Voting is still the easiest way to get a happy buzz, one of participating with one's neighbors and as well as the civic duty.  It isn't fattening or in any way bad for one!

But -- I do wish we had better choices for mayor.  I don't like any of them, including the present mayor.  At least our district had some excellent young, committed candidates, who are working hard on the local level to protect our neighborhoods from being completely eaten by the global oligarchy of the obscenely wealthy global corrupt criminals.

El V will bring back cigars for the Church staff from his quick Cuban trip next week.  The Jose Martí Airport re-opened today.

More to the point, what he's taking down there -- everything he can pack into a single piece of luggage.  People need everything.  As with all the other islands damaged and / or destroyed -- it's really hard right now to get things in or even impossible to get to them, or to get off them.

We're trying to figure out an agenda and call a meeting very soon among some of our friends, as to how to begin ramping up donation efforts.  For people here in the US just providing money into the hand is the very best thing to do. W have the the entry and connections to do that, meaning that the money goes to those who need it and the person bringing it won't be keeping or skimming.


Remember -- the last place anyone should be donating to is the Red Cross.  They keep the largest percentage for themselves -- and sometimes all of it.  That actually hasn't changed since the scandals of Katrina.  The reality is that the Red Cross is in the business of selling your blood for their profit.  They may not have started off that way, but that is what they have become.

     . . . .UPDATE:  The Havana Music Conference has been postponed, we have just learned, due to the extensive flood and wind damage and all the rest of the damage in Havana and other parts of of Cuba.  El V will probably go to Havana next week, even so.  Lots of things to bring, and a general survey in terms of the Cuba group visits should be accomplished.

The Midwest - Part 1

     . . . Here we are, in an Hampton Inn room in Illinois on a Saturday morning, listening to a draft of the music Donald Harrison is composing for the Symphony Space Slave Coast performance.

A friend hand-delivered the script to him at a jazz venue in NYC two nights ago. This morning one of those internet 'drop box' things for which Ned has accounts had some music in it already.

We're reading from the script, not the book, on this leg of Slave Coast tour -- and saying so before we begin. So this is particularly hair-raising (in a good way) for audiences interested in these matters. I'm presuming the news of this Symphony Space thing with Donald Harrison as music composer will be particularly of interest to the Chicago audience.

We’re currently in family and wedding mode, which means, since we’re wedding guests, not of the wedding party, we are getting some necessary r&r.  The days prior, and even before leaving, were grueling, and they took their toll, even with all the incredible, positive energy – feedback we have received.

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Arose at 6 AM on Tuesday; headed out finally for the Holland Tunnel about 11 AM. (Among errands that had to be run before leaving included the copy shop to make copies of the Slave Coast script for Donald.)

Delaware Water Gap Scenic Overlook

Once we got out of Jersey City and Chris Christie’s gangland fiefdom, the drive got enjoyble. The Pennsylvania landscape of beautiful, for one thing.  For another, when one knows a lot about our national history and literature, even on interstates and turnpikes just the names on the signage bring up hosts of interesting subjects to think and talk about -- the past ghosts along with us in that car. Pennsylvania – colonial history, the War of Independence, the War of the Rebellion, coal, politics, art, religion.  Among other eras of U.S.history, Michigan's part of significant War of 1812 territory on the other geographical side of the war as conducted on the Chesapeake and in the South.

As well on that 13-hour drive I read aloud the entire Chattanooga campaign chapter over a couple - three hundred miles, from  our current read-aloud book, Grant (2001) by Jean Edward Smith, the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall University (Toronto).  This stuff is exciting, since the author concentrates on the armies and the military campaigns, not the people of the places that are affected and suffer. Unfortunately though Smith does quote without question from Shelby Foote.

Foote's popular history of the War of Rebellion, The Civil War: A Narrative, reads like a novel.  This is because he is a novelist, not an historian. Thus he makes shit up, yet the publisher still catergorizes it as history. Why is this accepted?

Like the novelist Foote was, he has these historical figures say what he thinks they should say – or wants them to say. Those of us who know more about these figures know Foote is making up these words, but those who don't read deeply in primary historical sources take Foote’s books as gospel truth. Thus, at the run-up to the Chattanooga campaign Grant says he doesn't care about slavery and is anti-emancipation, for instance -- while later, Lee states he's anti-slavery and pro-emancipation. These men speak these words ONLY because Foote made them speak these words.  Foote should never be called an historian, and should never be used as a citation. He's a southern story-teller which is a very different thing.

////////////

Before these mansions were built in 1891, the land was owned by a man who experimented with developing better seeds for vegetables and fruits.

At 11 PM we gratefully got into our rooms (they gave us a suite) in The Inn on Ferry Street, situated in a set of the historical Detroit (founded 1701 out of the fur trade) homes erected by Gilded Age Michigan lumber barons, land developers, shipping tycoons, etc.  As an example, think of the Grand Rapids, MI, lumber millionaire in Gene Stratton Porter’s novel Freckles (1904), and Freckles himself in Girl of the Limberlost, busy denuding Indiana’s Limberlost Swamp of every valuable tree his crew can find, and destroying the rest of the swamp environment, trees and creatures as collateral damage – not that the novels mention this aspect. 

Lights out by 11:30. Had another 6 AM call on Wednesday to be breakfasted, showered and caffinated before arriving for the radio station call of 8:45 AM for the 9 AM start of Stephen Henderson's talk and call-in show. It can be heard here.

The radio program was followed by a long tour of Detroit, past and present, by a deeply knowledgable resident, who happened to be instrumental in getting us to Detroit. He even wrote another piece on Slave Coast for Alternet that went up the same day.  I took lots of notes.

He concluded the tour by taking us to his and wife's home for lunch. The other lunch guests made for an excellent mix of company – male, female, black white – in about equal numbers, everyone local, and the artists, local yes, but with national and international careers. The hosts had some Slave Coasts available for sale for the convenience of the guests who weren't able to come to the bookstore for the evening event. These people, professional activists and organizers for years, think of everything.

These kinds of gatherings make one believe that history really matters, and not just to ones self. several of Detroit's local heads, including the director of the African American Museum.  They did all this despite leaving town themselves very early the next morning. And these were only two of the wonderful people who did so much to make our Detroit visit such a success.

The call for the event at the Source, a community bookstore, was .for 6 PM.  Standing room only, many atending who had heard us on Stephen's show that morning, many of whom have known each other for many years, and who have been working together to not only save Detroit's African American and less wealthy communities from the Disaster Capitalists grabbing as much real estate as they can, but since what is called locally, the Rebellion of 1967.  Which bevels nicely into our argument, that from the perspective of African American history, the Was of Independence, the War of 1812, and particularly the War of Rebellion, whatever else they might have been, were also the great African American rebellions against the state sanctioned legal and economic systems created to keep them in a state of being 'merely' resource extraction.

After the reading, there was a long, interesting and productive q&a, which means we learned a great deal -- from people who have wisdom to impart.  We talked with people and signed books until the owner shooed everyone out about 10 PM.  Any place that had food that wasn’t covered with (phony) cheese, mayo, bacon, etc. was closed, as is the general thing in most places.  We wasted time looking for one before in desperation going into a local brew put and having burgers from which we tried to scrape off the other stuff, and salads, that could not be served with dressing and condiments on the side, and thus drowned in more fat and cholesterol, so not worth eating.

Back to the Inn and the showers -- another long drive ahead of us.

Villainy vs. Evil + Jazz + Television + Beer

It was Himself's birthday yesterday (the big party is tonight -- a rooftop barbeque in the West Village).  In the natural order of such occasions, we shared dinner with some old friends.*

I had been somewhat concerned about how dinner would go, meaning the emotional tone of it, here at the conclusion of yet another truly awful week of tragic and terrible events. Not least of which bad news is Congress's refusal to fund anything to help pillaged Puerto Rico even to attempt to counter the Zika crisis that has already infected so many expectant Puerto Rican women -- four of the people with whom we were eating are Puerto Rican.

But mostly, as we are indeed all old, trusted and loved friends, we had an enjoyable time and didn't have to put out a lot of energy to keep from things that are depressing and terrifying.  Music, art, travels, friends in common, some television and film discussion, and always back to music and gossip about some of the more bold face names that the talent agency that of the one of our mutual friends owns, manages.


Pedrito Martínez


Chucho Valdés

We did discuss though, the depressing piece in the Guardian yesterday that inquired whether jazz has risen from the grave of irrelevancy and is again hip.  Why was this depressing?  Because anybody who honestly follows contemporary jazz knows that since the 1920's, for the last two decades, jazz is as least as exciting and ground-breaking, because Afro Latin Jazz artists, particularly from Cuba and Puerto Rico have made it so -- they've long been world class, even though so much of the self-defined hipster non-Spanish speaking music establishment refuses to notice. When not crazed with other work, el V himself tends to be out several nights a week, attending great shows of his Afro Latin jazz buddies everywhere from Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Lincoln Ctrs.'s jazz space at Columbus Circle), the Jazz Standard, Sub Rosa, The Blue Note, The Bitter End, etc.  I often go with him. Yet the stupid article never mentioned a single Afro Latin artist, not even any from Cuba. Talk about self-willed ignorance.

In a different conversation last night, vis a vis talking about a Brasilian telenovella from ancient days, El Rey del Ganado, that was very popular with Spanish speaking audiences too, and the ladies had grown up with In Ponce, while el V and I watched it during that long stay, 1999-2000 in Havana -- we asked, what is a real villain?  What makes a person or character an actual evil person, rather than a cartoon Big Bad Guy Villain? Beyond the lazy signals that change to some degree from one decade to another -- now it's pedophiles in particular.  It used to be gay people, but that's pretty much over. (GOOD!) Some of us still watch Got, while some of us had quit -- some of us quit even several seasons ago.

These television / movie eviLes are outsized cartoons -- a big reason those of us who quit watching Got quit, and why none of us go to superhero comics movies. Audiences adore these villains, while often sneering at their victims. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, we thought of, obviously. And for my own first personal experience of this pop culture attitude, the film Bonnie and Clyde. When I protested that the protagonists got what they deserved because they killed innocent people and stole their money, and many of those whose money was stolen from the Depression era beleagured banks were poor farmers, my more "sophisticated' peers sneered -- "They were stupid and deserved to die!" Those who attempt to counter such villains are also sneered at, and often depicted as bumbling idiots -- or more evil than the villains.

Whereas in life villains seem to be usually well-dressed and don't carry weapons and are merely servants of faceless vast corporations (unless police or George Zimmerman -- and whoops, Zimmerman behaves like a cartoon, but he's still evil, he's still a villain. Which led us to contemplate the cartoon horror from our City currently demanding to be POTUS -- is he evil, is he a villain? As we're all NYC residents at least for our entire adult lives, and thus have been inflicted with him all our entire adult lives close-up and personal, we agreed he's both.

Later we progressed to contemplation of what happened in Dallas -- evil? a villain? a black man whose mind snapped after a lifetime of war made on the color of his skin and the awareness that in the U.S. there's been war waged against black people in this country since 1619.

Why then, is it classified as 'race war' by rightwingers, whites, media and so-called experts only when a person of color kills or attacks a white person / a cop, (cops who kill people of color have also been of color, thus the division into white people and cops / police state), whereas the killings are tragic mistakes day after day, year after year of white people / cops killing people of color with impunity and immunity?  Why are flags all over the country hung at half mast and the Empire State Building lit red white and blue (which was directly in our line of sight from our restaurant table) because cops got killed in Texas, but the Empire State Building doesn't get lit up when people of color are killed every day by white people / cops? Why is it that it's demanded that killing of someone in a blue uniform be classed a federal hate crime and that Men in Blue Matter, but that #blacklivesmatter is now responsible for hate crimes and murder, when Black Lives Matter has always been about exactly the opposite?Needless to say, one might hope, is that none of us advocates or wants anybody to shoot anybody -- or be cruel, mean, bullying, exploitive, repressive or oppressive to anybody.

We did not resolve this question of what makes a villain a villain, what makes evil evil, needless to say.  We were also drinking margaritas. Very, very fine margaritas.





As well we had a happy conversation about this development about a beer pipeline in Bruges; the entire table voted in favor of the pipeline -- this subject also came to us thanks to the Guardian.  As everyone at the table, in one way and another, is part of the European music festival circuit, everyone has been to Bruges and certainly has partaken of Belgian beers.

Yah, a hot an humid night, margaritas and cerveza were the Thing.



A conversation not so festive was what Brexit means for artists, entertainers, musicians and so on. Among other things this means that any BBC production will cost more as those terrific location landscapes made such splendid use of in series such as The Musketeers will be more difficult for the production teams and actors to get to and work in; recall Prague and surrounding locations in the Czech Republic stood in for Paris and the French countryside, forests and mountains. This could also affect, even, gasp, Got!

--------------------------* It was beautiful yesterday, as so many friends from all over the City, the country and, yes, the world, reached out by phone, e-mail, snail mail, and other ways, to wish el Vaquero happy returns of His Day.  The esteem, respect, affection, and in many, many cases, love, in which he's held by peers, colleagues and very old friends is something to behold.  It made him (and me too!) so happy.