Sunday, January 31, 2021

“No one is safe until everyone is safe.” 2 more years of death? Vaccinations in the United States are subject to our racist structured society. COVID-19 in the U.S. is a SYNDEMIC. Will we have 2 million additional deaths? And a COVID-26 could come in 2026.

"Inoculation prompts the immune system to make antibodies to the virus, but as mutations change its shape, the virus can become more resistant to those antibodies. In the worst case, failing to stop the spread of the virus globally would allow more mutations that could make existing vaccines less effective, leaving even inoculated populations vulnerable.


“This idea that no one is safe until everyone is safe is not just an adage, it is really true,” said Andrea Taylor, the assistant director at Duke Global Health Innovation Center.


Even in the most optimistic scenarios, Ms. Taylor said, at the current pace of production, there will not be enough vaccines for true global coverage until 2023. The current rollout plans across Africa are expected to vaccinate only 20 to 35 percent of the population this year if everything goes right."


The New York Times


As Virus Variants Spread, ‘No One Is Safe Until Everyone Is Safe’


By Lynsey Chutel and Marc Santora

Jan. 31, 2021
Updated 11:16 a.m. ET




“The urgency of vaccination applies to everyone on the planet, disease experts point out. A mutation in any location will likely spread everywhere — something that happened earlier in the pandemic with a mutation called D614G that appears to have enhanced transmission.


“Vaccine nationalism is very clearly a problem,” said Maria Sundaram, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. 


“The allure of being vaccinated and getting to normal is not quite reality because of the new variants and the underserved communities of the world not getting them.”


Collins, the NIH director, said he sees best-case and worst-case scenarios.


Best case, he said, is that “people roll up their sleeves as quickly as possible to get to that 80 to 85 percent [vaccination rate] and no other strains emerge that are more resistant.”


The worst case is that if people “continue to be irresponsible,” more transmissible variants will rip across the country and potentially escape vaccines, treatments and naturally acquired immunity.


And then, he said, “we’d have to redesign a completely new vaccine all over again.”


MORE AT:

Washington Post


Coronavirus mutations add urgency to vaccination effort as experts warn of long battle ahead

Ariana Eunjung Cha






1. DEFINING SYNDEMICS


"Merrill Singer and colleagues (Singer, 1994, 1996; Singer & Snipes, 1992) developed the concept of syndemics in the early 1990s, in the context of research on the HIV epidemic, which was then ravaging poor, Black, and other communities of color in urban North America. Singer built on the long‐standing observation that communities most impacted by new epidemics often are already facing other threats to their health. In the case of HIV among marginalized people in the U.S., those threats included “a set of closely interrelated endemic and epidemic conditions (eg, HIV, TB, STDs, hepatitis, cirrhosis, infant mortality, drug abuse, suicide, homicide, etc.), all of which are strongly influenced and sustained by a broader set of political‐economic and social factors” (Singer, 1996). The crucial point, Singer argued, was that these conditions did not merely co‐occur; the synergy among epidemics made each worse.


Syndemic theory, then, integrates two concepts: disease concentration and disease interaction (Mendenhall & Singer, 2020; Tsai & Venkataramani, 2015). Disease concentration refers to the co‐occurrence or clustering of multiple epidemics as a result of large‐scale, political‐economic forces and adverse social conditions. Disease interaction refers to the ways that overlapping epidemics exacerbate the health effects of adverse social conditions, either through biological interactions between disease states or through interactions between biological and social processes.


Neither disease concentration nor disease interaction is unique to syndemic thinking; the uniqueness lies in their integration. Attention to disease concentration is a common feature of most frameworks for population health, including fundamental cause theory (Link & Phelan, 1995), ecosocial theory (Krieger, 2001), and the concepts of structural violence (Farmer, 2003) and structural vulnerability (Leatherman, 2005; Quesada, Hart, & Bourgois, 2011). Indeed, more than half a century ago, Cassel (1964) argued for the relevance of social‐science theory to epidemiology by highlighting social processes that lead to the clustering of seemingly unrelated diseases (in his case, tuberculosis and schizophrenia). However, like Cassel, most models of population health frame the co‐occurrence of epidemics in terms of the cumulative burden of disease. What the syndemic framework adds is the prediction that overlapping epidemics are more than the sum of the parts. Both (a) biological interactions between epidemics and (b) biosocial ones between epidemics and the social conditions that shape them can result in more suffering and death than would be expected in models that treat each disease in isolation.


The focus on disease interaction also has deep, historical roots, stretching back at least to Scrimshaw, Taylor, and Gordon's (1959) work on synergism and antagonism between nutrition and infection (see also Scrimshaw, 2003). Disease interaction is usually described in terms of comorbidity and multimorbidity (van den Akker, Buntinx, & Knottnerus, 1996). These concepts, which have gained wider currency in the context of COVID‐19, draw attention to common etiological pathways across disease states and to the complexity of care for patients with more than one chronic disease. Comorbidity and multimorbidity are most salient in clinical medicine but are also relevant to epidemiology and health services research (Valderas, Starfield, Sibbald, Salisbury, & Roland, 2009). Even when invoked in epidemiology, however, the focus is on the distribution of comorbid conditions (and predisposing social conditions or risk factors) at the level of the individual (Barnett et al., 2012). If syndemic theory were concerned only with biological interactions at the individual level (eg, for people who were infected with both HIV and TB), it is not clear what value it would add beyond the framework of multimorbidity. The promise of the theory lies in raising questions across levels of analysis about interactions among clustered epidemics and the underlying social conditions that drive them. This unique perspective is what makes syndemic theory relevant to the COVID‐19 pandemic.


2. RELEVANCE TO COVID‐19


The core tenets of syndemic theory, then, are that:


  1. large‐scale, political‐economic forces, which play out over generations, result in deep‐seated social, economic, and power inequities;
  2. these inequities shape the distribution of risks and resources for health, resulting in the social and spatial clustering of epidemic diseases (disease concentration); and
  3. some overlapping epidemics have synergistic effects due to (a) biological interactions between disease states or (b) interactions between biological processes and the social, economic, and power inequities that shape the distribution of health to begin with (disease interaction).


COVID‐19 has made these ideas feel urgent from the start. In early March, for example, the New York Times highlighted the intersection of social factors that increase the risk of infection in impoverished communities, such as housing density and reliance on public transportation, and “disproportionately high rates of disease and illness” that make infection more deadly (Eligon, 2020). Days later Time predicted that people with low incomes—disproportionately Black, Indigenous, or other people of color—would face higher exposure to the virus (because they are less likely to be able to work from home, more likely to work in service sectors where contact with strangers is routine, more likely to live in multi‐family apartment buildings) and had less access to sick leave and medical care if they did become sick (Vesoulis, 2020). In mid‐May, when the New York City Health Department first released data on COVID‐19 deaths by ZIP code, the prediction had borne out: the highest death rates were in low‐income neighborhoods with disproportionate numbers of Black and Latinx people (Schwirtz & Cook, 2020).


The spatial concentration of COVID‐19 death manifests on a broader scale, too. In early April, The Atlantic ran a story about the demographic distinctiveness of COVID‐19 mortality in the American South (Newkirk, 2020), suggesting that younger people were dying there at higher rates than in other hard‐hit regions because of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The suspected pathway was a higher burden of chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes, which followed from social and political‐economic factors such as poverty, limited government investment in health care, and mass incarceration, among others. 1


These accounts by journalists and others paint a compelling picture. The challenge for researchers is to incorporate such observations into a theory that generates testable propositions about the links between systemic racism, chronic disease, and risk of mortality from COVID‐19. That work has already begun. Social scientists and public health researchers have drawn attention to the structural conditions that shape the concentration of COVID‐19 in communities already facing higher burdens of poverty, racial inequity, and disease (Khazanchi et al., 2020; Laster Pirtle, 2020; Williams & Cooper, 2020). Medical scientists and clinicians have emphasized the interactions among comorbid conditions that are overrepresented among COVID‐19 hospitalizations and deaths—particularly hypertension (Pranata, Lim, Huang, Raharjo, & Lukito, 2020), diabetes (Kreutz et al., 2020), and obesity (Akoumianakis & Filippatos, 2020). Syndemic theory draws together both approaches, bridging the population‐ and individual‐level perspectives of the social and medical sciences, and it adds new questions about possible interactions between COVID‐19 and pre‐existing social inequities that may exacerbate suffering from chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes.


MORE AT:

 

Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative

Systemic racism, chronic health inequities, and COVID‐19: A syndemic in the making?

Saturday, January 30, 2021

Trump will be cleaning toilets in prison. You just gotta be patient. As soon as Merrick Garland takes his place as Attorney General a secret grand jury will convene


 




Donald Trump’s Whitehouse was (maybe still is) an internationally famous mafia organization. 


Most Republican Party officials in Trump’s Mafia are idiots. But maybe a smart snitch will rise the the top of Trump’s criminal brew and make a business out of being a Trump snitch.



A Valentine’s Day message from Sammy “The Bull” Gravano:




Sammy was barely out of the gate. Trump dominates the mafia murder league.



Donald Trump had a hand in 437K deaths in the United States 


AND COUNTING.



 


Sammy The Bull Gravano’s 19 Victims


Sammy “The Bull” Gravano was involved in nineteen murders. He started out doing them by by his own hand. Sammy already had eight victims before joining forces with John Gotti in 1985, when they killed Gambino Crime Family boss Paul Castellano. The bloodshed would only accelerate after Gotti and Gravano took over. Here is the story of Gravano’s 19 victims.

Thursday, January 28, 2021

Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy love Trumpsicles. Trumpsicle: looks orange but tastes like Stalin. WAP in a desperate attempt to be “fair and balanced” with Qanon Republicans

 “McConnell (R-Ky.) voted Tuesday against a procedural motion to proceed with Trump’s impeachment in the Senate, while McCarthy (R-Calif.) planned to meet with Trump in Florida on Thursday to mend relations that were frayed by the Jan. 6 attack, according to an adviser to the former president.


The efforts from the top serve to accommodate Trump’s most fervent supporters as they continue to champion the falsehood of widespread electoral fraud that motivated the attack on Jan. 6 and to seek retribution against the few Republicans who have called for accountability from Trump and the party’s conspiracy-minded elements.


McCarthy has rewarded with committee assignments new pro-Trump firebrands such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a QAnon supporter who in the past appeared to espouse violence toward Democratic leaders. Other members of Congress, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), have promised to inflict punishment on GOP colleagues who voted for Trump’s impeachment.


Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA VIDEO:




For party leadership and top election strategists, video of protesters pummeling Capitol Police officers or chanting for the death of Vice President Mike Pence has proved less germane to current considerations than the potential to quickly return to power. They have been calling for more party comity, even with those holding extremist views…


Operating from Florida, Trump’s advisers have been encouraging party leaders to move on from impeachment and refrain from further criticism of the former president, even as they plot retribution against Republicans who opposed Trump’s final effort to overturn the election. Trump campaign advisers have commissioned and circulated to GOP lawmakers polling that shows him as still formidable in their states and made clear that he would seek revenge for votes against him.


‘We cannot take the House and the Senate back without his help. That’s just a fact,’ said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has called for prosecuting every person who illegally entered the U.S. Capitol but opposes impeachment…


McConnell and his allies are likely to focus less on whether Trump-backed parts of the party will rise in power in the coming elections than on whether Trump’s preferred candidates are viable in general election contests against Democrats. In the past, party leaders under McConnell’s direction have shown a willingness to intervene in primaries after a disastrous 2012 cycle when flawed Republican candidates identified with the tea party movement lost close Senate races in Missouri and Indiana.


But at the moment, the Republican concern over the coming Senate races remains muted. Party strategists are hopeful that candidates with broad appeal can win primaries in states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, where there will be open elections because of the retirement of GOP incumbents. Speculation that the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, might run for the open North Carolina seat or that the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump might mount a primary challenge to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has yet to spark serious hand-wringing about Trump’s intentions…


Former Pennsylvania Republican congressman Ryan Costello is taking steps to run for Senate in 2022

 Posted: January 8, 2021 - 4:50 PM Jonathan Tamari @JonathanTamari jtamari@inquirer.com


"A small and vocal minority of Republicans have continued to call for a reckoning over the extremist and anti-democratic currents that Trump has encouraged. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said Tuesday in an address to the Economic Club of Chicago that Republicans must now make clear that Trump lost the election “fair and square.”


‘Five people died with the attack on the Capitol. Five human beings died,’ Romney said. ‘There is no question but that the president incited the insurrection that occurred.’


The Lincoln Project, a group of Republican and former Republican strategists that has pledged to stamp out Trumpism, also has continued to attack members of the party who support Trump, including McCarthy and McConnell.


‘This is a submission, a surrender to Trump’s coalition but most importantly to the anti-Americanness of that coalition,’ said Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, a former aide to Vice President Richard B. Cheney and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). ‘They are foolish men who continue to believe they are riding the tiger as opposed to riding inside the tiger, which they have been doing for some time.”


Republicans back away from confronting Trump and his loyalists after the Capitol insurrection, embracing them instead


Josh Dawsey

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

US based right wing terrorist linked to foreign right wing terrorist’s ain’t nothin new. Sarah Palin’s Alaskan Independence Party is linked to Chechen separatists & Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda came close to being in the Whitehouse.

U.S. based right wing terrorists linked to foreign right wing terrorists are breaking news after right wing terrorists were minutes away from overthrowing the U.S. Government. 





"During the past two years, U.S. counterterrorism officials held meetings with their European counterparts to discuss an emerging threat: right-wing terror groups becoming increasingly global in their reach.


American neo-Nazis were traveling to train and fight with militias in the Ukraine. There were suspected links between U.S. extremists and the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group that was training foreigners in its St. Petersburg compounds. A gunman accused of killing 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 had denounced a “Hispanic invasion” and praised a white supremacist who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and who had been inspired by violent American and Italian racists.


But the efforts to improve transatlantic cooperation against the threat ran into a recurring obstacle. During talks and communications, senior Trump administration officials steadfastly refused to use the term “right-wing terrorism,” causing disputes and confusion with the Europeans, who routinely use the phrase, current and former European and U.S. officials told ProPublica. Instead, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security referred to “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” while the State Department chose “racially or ethnically motivated terrorism."


White supremacists are building international networks to spread their violent ideology. Efforts at transatlantic counterterrorism cooperation hit an obstacle: the politics of the Trump Administration.


 

MORE AT:

Global Right-Wing Extremism Networks Are Growing. The U.S. Is Just Now Catching Up.



Al Qaeda & McCaine: Sara Palin’s AIP is linked to Chechen separatists & Al Qaeda 


"Because John McCain has not learned how to "watch the internet" or "use the Google", it has been left to the public to vet Sarah Palin for him. I was curious what shady types would attend separatist conventions, such as the one in Tennessee, where the AIP Vice Chairman Dexter Clark extolled the virtues of their candidate Sarah Palin. I expected that hatred for the American Federal Government would bring white supremacists (as speculated in the Daily Kos) and small-time individual hate criminals into their circus tent.


But I did not expect AIP to link itself to a foreign terrorist group personally funded by Osama Bin Laden, that has been merging into Al Qaeda for years, is linked to 4 of the 9/11 hijackers, and other Al Qaeda attacks. That’s right, the Palins are only 2 or 3 degrees removed from the man that McCain swears he would pursue to the gates of hell - Osama Bin Laden.


The LA Times broke the story that the AIP has a link to the Chechen separatists on its website. “The AIP’s website also provides helpful links to other secessionist groups, including the Southern Independence Party of Tennessee (which boasts of going after “these Politically Correct Liberal Communist[s]“), Ulster nationalists and Chechen separatists.” (http://www.latimes.com). Remembering the Beslan school and hospital massacres, and Russian bus and tram bombings, I had to read that twice. I have now compiled an overview of the increasingly indistinguishable relationship between the AIP’s Chechen friends and Al Qaeda:


The Al Qaeda/Chechen Separatist relationship has been evolving since the 1990s. The Bush Administration initially downplayed the Russian assertions that the Chechen terrorists were affiliated with Al Qaeda. However, President Bush later acknowledged Russia’s claims, stating: “We do believe there’s some al Qaeda folks in Chechnya.” (http://www.sfgate.com). 'Washington also called on Chechen separatists to “cut all contact with international terrorist groups." ' (http://www.sfgate.com)



MORE AT:

SIASA DUNI EXPLOSIVE: Country First? Sarah and Todd Palin’s troubled ties to AIP ("Alaska First"), secession and terrorism







 I wrote this in 2010:


Wednesday, October 20, 2010

“Gunmen Dead After Attack on Chechen Parliament”-2nd Amendment Solution?


You can read about the deadly attack on the Chechen Parliament in today’s New York Times. You also can read about the links between the Alaskan Independence Party and the Chechen Rebels in the La Times article below. Sara Palin and her husband Todd are linked to the Alaskan Independence Party.


I think the attack on the Chechen Parliament is exactly what Sara Palin, Sharon Angle, and other Republicans have in mind when they say “lock and load” and talk about “2nd Amendment Solutions.”



New York Times October 19, 2010

"Gunmen Dead After Attack on Chechen Parliament

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ


MOSCOW — Heavily armed gunmen burst into the Parliament building of Chechnya, in southern Russia, on Tuesday morning, killing at least three people and wounding more than a dozen before the assailants were killed by police officers or by their own explosives, officials said." 


From the LA Times:


“Over the years, Palin has actively courted the Alaska Independence Party, or AIP, an organization that supports Alaskan secession from the U.S. To be clear, we're not necessarily talking about friendly secession either: As the AIP's founder, Joe Vogler, told an interviewer in 1991: ‘The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. ... And I won't be buried under their damn flag.’… 


The AIP's website also provides helpful links to other secessionist groups, including the Southern Independence Party of Tennessee (which boasts of going after "these Politically Correct Liberal Communist[s]"), Ulster nationalists and Chechen separatists.”  


From:


latimes.com


Opinion


Palin's secession flirtation  By Rosa Brooks September 4, 2008

"For years she has courted the Alaska Independence Party, which wants to split the state from the U.S.”


There is a shortage of ammunition in the USA in large part because of militia groups stocking up in anticipation of a “2nd Amendment solution. Whether the wing nut Republicans win or lose we will have to deal with the violence that extremist Republicans and their backers at Fox News have brought about.

Monday, January 25, 2021

I knew about this guy long before he was arrested. He was doing teenage girls on the hood of his State Police car & bragging about it. My daughter Julia was too old for him.

The Limerick Barracks was a hotbed of sexual harassment for female state troopers. It was shut down. Northwest Montgomery County is now served by the Schwenksville Barracks actually closer to Skippack PA. 



It’s worth the drive to Skippack to get a Consiglier. Note the Abruzzese/Neapolitan dialect.

Julia was friends with a guy who owns a store at the Italian Market when she went to Perkiomen Valley High School. 


A lot of the store owners at the Philly Italian Market live in and around Collegeville PA. 


Former store owners on South Street in Philly forced out by a crosstown expressway that never happened moved in and around Limerick, Lower Frederick Townships. They took their skills at growing marijuana along with them. 


Trappe PA (insert anywhere near Limerick PA) where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and public officials get high every night. 




Skippack PA is now basically the South Philly Italian Market upscaled and suburbanized. 


Skippack Village 

 

The Consiglier at the Italian Market & Eatery is a killer hoagie 


CONSIGLIER

Prosciutto, lettuce, sharp provolone, and sweet roasted red peppers topped with oil, balsamic vinegar, parmesan, and oregano - $8.99


 



This is the State Trooper from the Limerick PA Barracks sexually assaulting young girls.


Prison must be hard for a police with short eyes.



"According to testimony, Evans pleaded guilty in Berks County Court on Aug. 15 to new charges of corruption of a minor, indecent exposure and indecent assault of a person under 16 in connection with incidents that occurred between June and August 2018, including at his most recent residence in Longswamp Township. 


Under extensive questioning by Fancher, Evans said he admitted in Berks court to having inappropriate contact with a 15-year-old girl at his Mertztown home and that he fondled her and asked her to pose for photographs on his motorcycle while she wore a bra and shorts inside his garage. 


Evans told Fancher and Carpenter he also admitted to fondling the girl while he and an adult woman in the garage engaged in a sex act. 

“I asked him the specifics about every single thing he did because we’re going to have a sentencing hearing coming up and I want to be able to establish the specific facts of the violation and his conduct,” Fancher said. 


Evans quibbled with Fancher when Fancher, reading from an affidavit of probable cause, asked Evans if he paid the 15-year-old girl during the encounter. Evans replied he’s aware of what the arrest affidavit alleges but that he didn’t pay the girl. Pressed further by Fancher, Evans admitted he “offered” the girl money. 


Evans first captured headlines when he was arrested Feb. 15, 2000, on charges that he engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior with three teenage girls while on duty between July 1997 and September 1999. Evans, then 33 and a trooper since 1995, was assigned to the Skippack barracks at the time. 


Two of the teenagers were runaways Evans was ordered to transport. Another victim was a 16-year-old Perkiomenville girl who Evans propositioned while investigating a burglary in her parents' home in July 1997, asking if she would pose for naked photographs to be his "locker girl,” prosecutors alleged at the time. 


At the time of Evans’s arrest, Montgomery County prosecutors held a press conference asking any other victims to come forward. More women did come forward and Evans was re-arrested in April 2000 on charges involving incidents with three adult women who accused the trooper of using his badge to coerce them into sexual relations in exchange for protection or leniency.”


MORE AT:


Ex-Montco trooper admits violating sentence in sex abuse case


By Carl Hessler Jr. chessler@21st-centurymedia.com @MontcoCourtNews on Twitter  Sep 7, 2019 


 

https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914b79fadd7b0493478029b


Sunday, January 24, 2021

AOC is the new Mother Jones!







Fight for $15 and a Union fast food workers strike to demand $15/hour on MLK’s birthday



Asunta Cavallucci and her sister Maria lost her father, a baker in Baltimore MD, when she was 14 (about 1925. 

My Grandmother Isabella Cavallucci had relatives in Coatesville, The Teti family I think. 

Asunta and Maria had to go to work in the textile mills.

Asunta Cavallucci married James Anthony Pitcherella. I was born in 1943. 

My dad was born in 1910. He finished high school and went to work at Lukens Steel Company Coatesville, PA. 

My Dad on the ladder
of his gantry crane. Lukens
Steel Company.
I could see the pain on his face when he spoke about working 12 hour shifts 5 days a week and 10 hours on Saturday. He often worked "an extra." An extra was a 12 hour day shift 1/2 hour for dinner then a 12 hour night shift, followed by a day shift the next day, 36 hours straight.

Occasionally he did 2 "extras" in a week a 94 hour work week with no overtime.

My dad said, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the greatest president we ever had. 






My Grandma Cavallucci holding me at
my 1st. birthday party. Isabella Cavallucci 
was choir director and organist at the 
Holy Rosary Church about 100 feet down
Black Horse Hill Road from our house.
My mom, Sue and my Aunt Mary and my Aunt Lena lived with my dad, my brother Joe, My Grandmom Isabella Cavallucci in Coatesville, PA. 

Now and then I heard them say "the mill." The mill carried a heavy weight. As a young boy I could feel that "the mill" was hell on earth. 



On my Dad's side of the family, the Pitcherella side, My Aunt Angie the second oldest of my Grandmother Filomena Pitcherella's 7 children also worked in the silk mills.



As the first images of President Joe Biden’s Oval Office began to circulate online, a prominently placed bust of labor and civil rights leader Cesar Chavez drew swift comment. Nestled amid Biden family photos behind the president’s desk, the bronze statuette appeared to signal a commitment to the Latinx and worker struggles for which Chavez, founder of the union that would later become the United Farm Workers of America, fought...


Following decades of anti-worker, anti-union labor laws established in this country, the Hunts Point strike comes at a time of robust and potent labor organizing. Last February, the House passed an omnibus labor reform bill, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would overturn a number of anti-worker Supreme Court decisions.


The strike at the market, aimed at a key chokepoint of commodity circulation, underlines the necessity of collective action, the solidarity it requires, and the critical role of strong unions. This sort of high-stakes, hard-fought labor action — which entails significant sacrifices from workers — is the least that powerful business owners should face when workers are deemed “essential” but treated as disposable.


“We’re only essential when it suits them,” said Darren Brenner, a 52-year-old warehouse worker who has been a Teamsters member at the market for 31 years. “There were guys who died. I got the virus and brought it home to my family,” he told me on Thursday afternoon, standing at the barricaded entrance to the distribution center with a few dozen co-workers, maintaining the picket line through the quieter day shift. Brenner said that while he and his family fully recovered from Covid-19, numerous other co-workers “never came back” from the disease.


According to a Local 202 spokesperson, hundreds of workers were infected with Covid-19, and six died. “Our jobs are always dangerous. For them to offer us 32 cents — to think that’s what we’re worth to them. It’s an insult.”


The Bronx’s own Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped draw broader attention to Hunts Point, eschewing Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day to join the picket line. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., while iterating as a thousand mitten-clad memes across social media on Wednesday, tweeted his support for the strike. “Essential workers should not have to go on strike for decent pay,” he wrote.


MORE AT:


Forget Biden’s Bust of Cesar Chavez: Hunts Point Strike Is the Bold Labor Action the Country Needs

Essential workers, ravaged by the pandemic as their bosses raked in millions, organized from the bottom up and won concessions.

Saturday, January 23, 2021

I worked by email on items related to corruption, domestic terrorism & drug deals in the City of Coatesville PA with a locally operating DOJ intelligence officer. Sessions took over, the email went dead. DOJ is corrupted. How do you investigate the DOJ?

"Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.


Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.


Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.


After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.


Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden’s victory, there would be little for them to do until they left along with Mr. Trump in two weeks.


They began to exhale days later as the Electoral College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached."

 

It appears that breaching the Capitol, a coup by Trump assisted & directed by Republican members of Congress & Senate was plan B.

Justice is coming:

It's going to be exposed. Members of Congress & Senate should come clean & make deals now to minimize their prison time. 



“On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.


Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.


Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.


Even as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.


Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.


Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.


The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.


Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.


Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.


Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.


After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.


Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden’s victory, there would be little for them to do until they left along with Mr. Trump in two weeks.


They began to exhale days later as the Electoral College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached.


Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.”


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The New York Times


Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General


Trying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist, and had the men make their cases to him.


Jan. 22, 2021 Updated 10:31 p.m. ET