Welcome to The Breakfast Club!
AP’s Today in History for August 30th
The Civil War’s Second Battle of Bull Run ends; Thurgood Marshall confirmed as first black Supreme Court justice; First black astronaut blasts off; Ty Cobb’s baseball debut; David Letterman moves to CBS.
Breakfast Tune Sailing Roger Sprung, Hal Wylie, & the Progressive Bluegrassers
Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below
- Joe Biden and the Democrats Could Still Screw This Up
BRANKO MARCETIC
- This Looks Like the Beginning of a Civil War
Robert C. Koehler
- New poll suggests beating Trump is about only one thing
Common Dreams
- ALEX MORSE HAS A SECOND OPPONENT: LOCAL MEDIA
Eoin Higgins
- The RNC’s Puzzling Obsession with Socialism
Miles Kampf-Lassin
- Freedom Rider: Democrats are Officially Republicans
Margaret Kimberley
- Black Agenda Report Presents: The Left Lens Eps 5 – Kop-mala Harris for Vice-Warden
Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley
Something to think about over coffee prozac
Cannon fodder: Workers have never been more expendable than they are now
Bob Hennelly, Salon
It’s kind of surreal, but even as the corporate media celebrates the role of essential workers, it’s clear that the lives of the workforce — and by extension their families — have never been more expendable.
Many of them will have been laid off, as cities, counties, states, school districts and transit authorities add them to the list of 1.5 million public sector workers already laid off — all because President Donald Trump and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked efforts by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to provide the local aid so badly needed.
And those folks will be the lucky ones.
Thousands of other essential workers will have already died from the virus that Donald Trump has done all he could do to spread as far and wide as possible, thanks to his inaction at the federal level and inability to coordinate a national public health response.
An even larger number of first responders, health care professional and other essential workers will have survived their bout with COVID, only to face the prospect of long-term respiratory, coronary or nervous system damage from a virus we still know so little about.
Cannon fodder
The time line for our current crisis goes back to decades of disinvestment in America’s public health infrastructure amid an obscene military buildup set the stage for this virus’s explosion. That, multiplied by the years of decline of the American labor movement, set the stage for the devaluation of the lives of American workers playing out now.
The result is a kind of slaughter that has largely gone under-reported, even as it picks up steam and claims more lives of essential workers.
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