Your argument would have legs if the cost of those expenditures were to be deducted from the next budget, but you know it won’t be, and you know I’m right.
That said, yes, Congress has appropriated over $100,000,000,000 for another country’s war.
So instead of what you originally said (that we magicked up extra money for Ukraine), your argument is that we’re using money that we spent anyway, and would keep spending regardless in order to maintain our global standing? Very persuasive.
I don’t know anything about this claim that the national guard would be used. BUT, I think that would be more so the national guard would be used to move anyone blocking rail lines and possibly compelled to operate the railway.
The national guard has no power to “force” a rail worker to work on the railroad.
That’s exactly what I said. The national guard did not force anyone to work as the person I responded to implied (edit: I think I misread their comment in part, so that’s part of the confusion). In any case, to they were deployed to allow strike breakers to get to work, and to reduce violence. Ultimately, they screwed up when their forces were cut and became the violence they were deployed to prevent; these old strikes were not the “peaceful protest” strikes we see today, they could get quite violent.
The railway strike would’ve caused shortages of chlorine for city water supplies, shortages of essential medicines like insulin and antibiotics, severe food insecurity and inflation, and would’ve led to millions of people losing their jobs. Railway freight accounts for 40% of freight transport in the US. Imagine 40% of everything that’s made every day suddenly not getting to where it needs to go. There’s a reason Congress has never refused to block a railway strike every time it’s been threatened over the last 150 years.
The contract was good for the workers but didn’t include paid sick days. Congress imposed the contract on the rail workers when a couple of unions didn’t ratify it (although most of the unions did).
Biden kept working behind the scenes after signing the law Congress passed to block the strike and got the rail workers their sick days without the suffering a rail strike would’ve had on the millions of Americans who were already struggling with high inflation on essentials. The IBEW union explicitly thanked him for it: www.ibew.org/media-center/…/230620_IBEWandPaid
Imagine if more people knew this. They only saw “Biden bad for unions” and parrot the line while it’s more “Biden administration weighs the challenges of a strike that would hurt common people, finds alternate path to satisfy all parties.”
I’ve tried to make this argument on the more extreme political communities and the arguments supporting a strike ranged from “everyone would blame the rail companies” to “the damage to unions is worse” to “all those people without jobs would rise up in protest to support the unions” to “it wouldn’t be that bad, it’s being exaggerated by the corporate media.”
It shows just how privileged those people are to actually think that when people who are already living paycheck to paycheck, rationing insulin to survive, and barely managing to feed their families suddenly lose their income, can’t get insulin, see food prices double, and can’t even drink the tap water anymore because of a “rail strike”, they’re going to understand the nuance of the situation and blame rail companies for not giving the workers sick days.
People here have no concept of nuance here. He didn’t kick down the door and arrest the rail CEOs to force a concession, so he might as well be in league with the Pinkertons to them.
Why not force the companies to accept the union terms then instead of the other way around? Why is it always workers who have to capitulate to capital? The reason the government always interferes because we’re ruled by capital and business interests.
If they’re that important then they should have had all their issues addressed, including safety issues.
Also, the original contract was not good for the workers and that’s why it wasn’t ratified. The higher up union officials haven’t been connected to the rank and file, hence their bad original deals and the IBEW boot licking statement. To be honest the safety issues from Presision Schedules Railroading still aren’t addressed and they’ve only gotten a small amount of the sick days they asked for (Europe gets like 10-15, they got 4-6). It’s something, but it’s pathetic. You can’t say you’re the most friendly labor president and then sign a law destroying a strike. Instead, he should have made speeches blaming the railroad companies and tried to negotiate without signing the law destroying the strike, instead using the threat of a Congress law to force them to come to the table (which it sounds like he did, but only after destroying the unions leverage and absorbing the only power workers have). This was after the midterms so it’s not like he had to worry about an immediate election.
For the record, I get why he did it, but I still disagree that it was the right move, or the only move. There are European countries that have rail strikes, and they manage to survive those apocalypses, and keep a healthier labor movement at the same time.
I had read that the Biden administration kept pressuring the railways behind the scenes after the strike was averted till the unions got what they had wanted in the first place anyway.
I don't know where I first read it but this link seems to confirm it.
“We’re very happy about this. We’ve been trying to get this for decades,” said Artie Maratea, president of the Transportation Communications Union. “It was public pressure and political pressure that got them to come to the table.”
We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement. Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
But the unions representing workers who operate the trains day to day, such as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, have had far less success reaching agreement on paid sick days. “The railroads went to the non-operating crafts first and cut a deal with them,” said Mark Wallace, first vice-president of the Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. “If a carman [who inspects and repairs railcars] has to call in sick and doesn’t come to work, the train will still run. If the engineer or conductor has to call in sick, the train is probably not going to go that day.”
Wallace said his union was negotiating with the major railroads, but said they were seeking to make it harder for the operations workers than non-operational workers to take paid sick days – perhaps by giving them demerits when they do.
They don’t have the votes. I’m sure they would if they actually had a majority any of the last 3 years that didn’t compose “best we can do” folks like Manchin and Senima.
Many didn’t. At times it got so bad they turned to violence against the wealthy. That’s a decent portion of why the government has handouts actually. Bread and circuses is a very famous and long-standing technique to prevent open rebellion for a reason.
If everyone has to farm then no one can specialize to do other things
If you think the USA is a car-dependent sprawl that’s terrible for the environment currently, wait until literally everyone has enough land to sustain themselves and requires infrastructure to connect it all
Legal antisemitism didn’t really happen in Nazi Germany until about 1935 with the first Nuremburg Laws. In 1933, the Nazis were more concerned about consolidating and holding power than they were with the Jews. The antisemitism really wasn’t a popular policy of the early Nazis, either, and it took a few years of brainwashing through state media to get to that point. If this poster was in 1933 Germany, it would probably read “No Communists,” if anything.
Yeah, reading the article, I expected it to say that it was only 30 days, because they realized, she has psychological problems. Punishment doesn’t usually help with that. But I also expected this article to say that the baby will be taken into custody by the state until therapy concedes. And there’s just no mention of any of that.
And what will that actually achieve? Beyond costing a fuckload of money and satisfying those that get their dicks hard at the thought of human suffering?
Or we could, I don’t know, maybe try to treat her? I would rather live in a world where we treated all mentally ill people, even dangerous ones, with compassion than one where we just lock them up and throw away the key. I personally think that we, as a society, have a moral responsibility to lift each other up, but even if you look at it from a selfish point of view, it still makes sense. For example, it’s possible that someday, you might have a mental break, maybe due to a tragic event or brutal experience, and will need help and wouldn’t you rather be treated kindly rather than being locked away and forgotten about?
I hope any person who has to go to trial and this officer is called as a witness uses this as an example as to why they arent a good witness.
“Officer, in 2023 you fatally shot a man after you said he got out of his car and lunged at you with a knife. You later backtracked on this and said he was in his car with the windows up. How can we trust what you have to say if you can’t remember what happened then?”
Alas, his lawyer and the judge would agree on how inadmissable this fact will be. Enjoy getting fucked. Don’t forget to vote to make sure these assholes are the only ones people in town with guns!
There’s actually a registry of cops who have been shown to lie so that their testimony can be disregarded. I hope there’s someone out there who makes this happen for this cop.
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