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.

Reading Blanche Wiesen Cook's 3 volume Biography of Eleanor Roosevelt

     . . . .  I began, naturally at the beginning with Vol. I The Early Years, 1884-1933  (1992).

Blanche Wiesen Cook

I had read this volume around the time it was published as I was working at its publisher, Viking - Penguin, at the time.  

This is pure Gilded Age era material, and Eleanor Roosevelt was as at the center of the Gilded Age as one could be as a member of the ruling, affluent class of old Dutch New York families. Recall Eleanor's uncle was Theodore Roosevelt, so like Henry Adams, Roosevelts could fairly believe the White House was part of their natural heritage.  But unlike the bitter and disappointed New England aristocrat, Henry Adams, Franklin and Eleanor actually did do politics, and hold political offices -- even if Eleanor, despite her many breakthroughs, could only do so through her husband, so to speak. 

This re-reading, in the depths of our own Gilded Age, while like the previous one should also be more aptly named the Age of Miseries, has me noticing things that must have just slipped by back at the start of the 1990's. Back then I  knew much less of our history than I do now, and truly far less of this period of bottomless corruption and cruelty, ushered in by end to the War of the Rebellion, than I do now. 

ER in Inaugural Ball Gown

Which is why I shudder at the preening announcements of shallow Julian Fellows and his joy in 'the 400' of New York where and when he's locating his new television series, title, of course, The Gilded Age, which was not in use until much later, taken from the title dreamed up by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner for The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today 1873),  their still famous satire of the era's idiocies and excesses.

As Theodore Roosevelt was Eleanor's uncle -- brother to her alcoholic father -- Cook gives us a great deal of background to his family.  What I didn't recall on the first reading was that David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback (1981) contained all this material too (I re-read this one too, rather recently, back in 2015).  As mentioned that the first time I read Vol I. I didn't know all the history I now do -- and I sure didn't know it when reading Mornings on Horseback on the subway to work, morning and night, and at lunch, These two works make good introductions to the residents of their class, for good and a whole lot for ill, who lived at the apex of the age's vaunted opulence, snobbery, bigotry, exploitation and racism.

Having finished Vol I over the weekend I immediately started Vol. II The  Defining Years, 1933-1938 (2000). In the later chapters of Vol I., when Franklin goes through his first campaigns and other election experiences, and takes full advantage of everything Eleanor can and does contribute -- without even acknowledging to anyone else much less ER (throughout the work Cook refers to Eleanor Roosevelt as ER) that she's contributing anything.  It was just what he was entitled to, and many women held him up at all times, beginning with his mother and her money.  The portrait of FDR in these books isn't flattering.  Cook gives him credit when credit is due, but in many ways and far too often FDR shows himself a selfish sob, and even just plain mean, and certainly ready to descend into political skullduggery against other politicians -- but then, he was a consummate politician and that's how they roll.

When ER begins to think politically and of politics and of unfathomable obstacles to women emerging in this sphere, I thought constantly of Hillary Clinton's What Happened (2017). I was certain, of course, that Clinton has read these books, and many more about Eleanor Roosevelt. With what knowing bitterness she has had to recognize ER's conclusions.  So it was exciting then, when the Acknowledgments and Introduction to Vol. II, Cook names First Lady, Mrs. Clinton, who gave her personally a guided tour of the White House in preparation for ER's own White House years.

As ER, with the help of an ever growing circle of brilliant and close friends, began her education in feminism and then became one herself, FDR was already deeply in politics.  ER found everything about politics exciting and felt right at home in all the phases of campaign, and particularly policy, but didn't allow herself to say so, either to herself or the public. She wrote and spoke constantly of the dislike of women by the political patriarchy, and their loathing and disdain at the very idea that a woman could be one of them, either as a designer of policy and strategy or as a candidate herself.  Among her many articles on these subjects in these years she shared with other women in the 'ladies' magazines that when a woman was allowed to run, it would be in elections for seats in which there was no chance of the party winning. This way the party men could say they lost the election because "the candidate was a woman."  ER wrote and spoke of these matters openly and often.

Kirkus review here; NY Times review here.

This project took Cook's adult life, as we see since the concluding  Vol. III The War Years And After, 1939-1962  didn't find publication until two years ago, year of That Election, 2016.   Nothing she learned about the reception of an effective and influential woman at the higher levels of politics either for policy or as a candidate seems to have changed, not even a bit.  Clinton isn't the only one who reads these texts with bitter familiarity.

Hug In the Face Of One Of Our Nation's Ugliest Weeks

This has been a very bad week. All of us fortunate to have loving, supportive, decent partners and friends, need to hold each other more than usual, hold each other closer than usual, kiss each other more often than usual, tell each other what a good people we are, and how glad we are to have us in our lives.
Judging just by the street* women are deeply upset by this week, hurt and depressed, on the behalf of our daughters, sisters, mothers ourselves.  Everyone here is talking about it.  Of course we who lived long in this city have known this man (and his father before him) was the most creepy and disgusting of creatures for all his life, thanks to his always being in the news one way or another, but he's now thrown the shyte that is himself all over the world, pretending he is our country.

Beyond that though, this has been a horrible week for decent males everywhere. When I think I'm ashamed for our country, it's nothing to how el V, for instance feels.  And I'm hearing good, decent men all over the street talking about this too, though fairly quietly, almost with embarrassment.  With real sadness.  They are depressed too.

But we can help each other.  So hug and kiss and express our respect and affection for each other in every way that works.

I am so grateful for all the wonderful, decent, brilliant, honest, talented, funny people in my life -- whichever gender, whichever skin tone, whichever religion, whichever language.

----------------

*   Here, "street' means conversations participated in and overheard while buying ingredients for pasta at Raffetto's (est. 1906!), walking to the dry cleaners, checking out library materials, sitting in the Bistro for a nightcap, riding the subway to Lincoln Center Jazz** looking at greens in the Morton Williams produce section, overhearing the guys at the deli talking with the punters, etc. It doesn't mean media of any kind.  It means face-to-face real life personal contact and experience.

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

**  Lincoln Center's Jazz Club is located in the Time Warner Building on one of the slices of pie that makes up Columbus Circle -- right across the avenue where is located one of the towers branded with the name of the king of narcissism and abuse. This was Wednesday night, and the whole place all the way to the top dead dark, except for a few lights in a few windows on the bottom three floors. No action going on there at all. Nor was there any at the branded with his name hotel down the street in my own neighborhood. This is not the same as 'his' tower, though, where women had been protesting this week.  The orange stalin has splattered many a very ugly NYC building with his name.

What Romantic Art Means - "Critique of Reason"

This is a "sweeping, 300-piece survey of the movement at the Yale University Art Gallery."  The majority of the pieces were produced by English artists as it's a collaboration between the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art.

 

The first major collaborative exhibition between the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, The Critique of Reason offers an unprecedented opportunity to display together treasured works from both museums’ collections. The show comprises paintings, sculptures, medals, watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs by such iconic artists as William Blake, Théodore Géricault, Francisco de Goya, and Joseph Mallord William Turner. The broad range of work selected challenges the traditional notion of the Romantic artist as a brooding genius given to introversion and fantasy. Instead, the exhibition’s eight thematic sections juxtapose arresting works that reveal the Romantics as attentive explorers of their natural and cultural worlds. The Critique of Reason celebrates the richness and range of Yale’s Romantic holdings, presenting them afresh for a new generation of museumgoers.

 

Since seeing the film, Mr. Turner, last year, Romanticism has again been much on my mind, and wondering how much, if any impact it had upon the thought of the new United States and her political - intellectual classes.
 

The War for Independence has been profiled as a product of the Enlightenment, without considering that continental and British Romanticism might have had equal or even contradictory influence. For instance, see the successive religious waves of  The Great Awakening, and their huge footprint in American history.