Christmas movie propaganda, job creator myths, and “sides” in perpendicular axis
Christmas movie propaganda, job creator myths, and “sides” in perpendicular axis
People frame things as “conservative vs. liberal” but there’s also “regular people vs. elites” and successful fiction writers know this, because “All art is propaganda” after all.
I’ve heard it said over the years by many fiction writers that they started out as a journalist, or a non-fiction writer, and figured out that they couldn’t tell all the truth that way, at least not do so and get published — but they could convey many more truths via works of fiction, and actually make some money at it.
Before the working journalist George Orwell wrote “1984” and “Animal Farm”, there was “All art is propaganda” explained in an essay, where laid out are the mechanisms of emotional psychological effect of aesthetic association, ritual, and fond memories in the stickiness of a message.1
Christmas opens a lot of doors, it’s true. Possibly more than comic book heroes, horror, or sci-fi. I’ve only seen a few super hero movies in my lifetime, and many people will never watch Brazil, Parasite, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Three-Body Problem, Get Out, or good gravy, Infinity Pool. But there’s nothing more compelling than a good comfort watch, it’s true.
G. Vaughn Joy is a film historian, writer, podcast host, and PhD candidate at UCL according to this person’s website, their Twitter profile says London England, and does a review of a Christmas movie called “Christmas At the Drive-In” and how it’s propagandizing Americans with “conservative fantasies with an air of liberalism”2 and yet this film historian and writer fails utterly to see the other axis of “sides” in play entirely. A tweet thread describes the premise: “that the guy is selling his late-father's drive-in and the woman is a property law professor who pleads with the town's historic commission to see "the spirit of Christmas" in the drive-in to save it.”3 And then details the conservative political machinations behind the channel this movie is airing on.
And then G. Vaughn Joy asks: “Why are we villainizing the guy who earnestly wants to bring jobs to town? Why are we rooting for the defunct drive-in to stay?”4
I have a hard time understanding who on earth would even ask this question? Everywhere has to subsidize arts and entertainment.5 Even The Met has fundraisers after all.6 And there are always fights over it at any given time down at your local city hall. I’m not saying this Christmas movie isn’t full of conservative tropes and so-called traditional values I don’t give a shit about, I don’t doubt that it might be. But most people, no matter their political orientation, enjoy lots of subsidized arts and entertainment and appreciate and prioritize all kinds of things that are not profitable, even conservative working class folks.
Perhaps it’s the car-centric nature of the drive-in that reads to some like “conservative” or the idea that it’s something that was most popular in the 1950s and 1960s in rural areas that reads as “non liberal” to some. But in many places we still have drive-ins - 302 theatres in the U.S., 28 in Pennsylvania as of November 2022.7 Cars are a reality, drive-ins just work with that, they’re hardly the proponent of civil engineering. And this isn’t always about car culture. I also happen to know of people who love going to the movies but are immunocompromised and may never be safe to go to a regular indoor cinema theatre again because The Economy comes before public safety due to an elite bipartisan abandonment of public health, where leaders have decided to pretend things are ok instead of making them ok.8 There are many people I have talked to over the past few years who have been enjoying going to drive-in movie theatres in the summer because it’s far safer, especially if you’re someone who is at high risk9 in the pandemic. So the idea of doing away with one of the last accessible big screen movie options does sound sad.
But if you’re going to get irritated about anything in that movie it’s that the “jobs” are still brought into the community and apparently destroy a Christmas Tree farm. G. Vaughn Joy strangely thinks that’s the bright side.10
Bringing in jobs is not the winning message some think it is.
What really irked me about this wholly off-kilter critique of conservative Christmas movie propaganda is that it so well highlights the fact that there are so many, usually fancy people with some level of privilege, including politicians in both major political parties in the U.S., who are completely oblivious to how and why “bringing jobs to town” promises are seen as something the bad guy does in a way that needs no further explanation. No, the movie didn’t need to explore it further because it requires no explanation to the people who’ve been living this bullshit for decades.
But, since apparently not everyone understands this stuff, I will tell the stories here, as I have told these stories over and over again to people for years now. These are stories for which I have some personal first hand knowledge, as well as things that are basically common knowledge by word of mouth in northeastern Pennsylvania for years, even if they’re not reported in the news. I’m sure it all could be proven if anyone cared to investigate. Sometimes a lot of this was reported in the news but exists behind local newspaper paywalls, or were published never online, and not in searchable form. As Sarah Kendzior has repeatedly emphasized, good information is behind paywalls, while deliberate disinformation is free.11 But I do my best with references.
Regardless, the local working people know all about promised jobs bullshit. And we remember. And yes, the people promising The Jobs are pretty much always the baddies here, or at least their accomplices. And I wish more people who are interested in my votes would pick up the damn clue phone on this.
The Call Center Debacle
In the late 1990s politicians were crowing about bringing a call center operation to the city of Wilkes-Barre to create a renaissance.12 A bunch of jobs were promised! There were people who’d worked at call centers elsewhere who warned it wouldn’t be “good jobs” per se. And that warning turned out to be spot on and then some. The call center HR manager actually told new hires that the company came to Wilkes-Barre because they could get cheaper labor there than other places13 because people were so poor here and didn’t expect any better. A real feel good way to start off.
At the job interviews applicants were told there would be shift pay differentials, to have a higher starting wage for the night shifts. Once hired, that was thrown out the window and left as a promise in the offing. People did look into how they could get away with that, and apparently there were no laws that prohibited it, at least at that time, at least nothing enforceable without a lawsuit which was not something that was going to happen involving low wage workers.
I know of one story where a person quit after refusing to do something illegal involving a supervisor insisting they lie and tell customers that their credit cards were not stored - they were stored, and it was illegal to lie to people about that. The person was ridiculed in front of the office, insulted with pejoratives & dressed down for insubordination. Another anecdote is that someone with a very serious illness needed to take more time than they had sick time accrued, in order to have a series of debilitating treatments. The FMLA law took effect 5 years before this, but it requires someone be employed for a year before you’re eligible, so I think they didn’t have that option and were going to lose their job because of needing life-saving treatments. I think in the end their coworkers were able to agitate to be able to donate their own sick time so they could keep their job, but I vividly recall that the story I heard was that management was actively trying to block this.
There was no unionization there, but I remember being told that the workers really rallied for the coworker who was in medical need. In retrospect I wondered if the company realized that the area was labor oriented historically.14 That company pulled out, and then there were 2 more call center operations that wound up taking over and each skipping out, costing the city - the taxpayers - big time in unpaid rent, taxes, and other fees.15
The Gas Fracking Debacle
So many politicians promised that the gas fracking boom would be an economic boon to our area, and create tons of jobs for Pennsylvanians, and anything but that happened, and worse did. It turned out to be also largely about real estate speculation16 which maybe makes sense why there was a bust after the subprime mortgage crisis driven financial crash.
Some people who interviewed for these jobs were asked if they had experience in the fossil fuel industry, and were told that the employer would be going with an out-of-towner who was willing to relocate and already had experience in the industry. So Pennsylvanians were left out in the cold, and we knew that people from other areas were being brought in to take these promised jobs.
To add insult to injury, we then had to hear about all these people who when the boom went to bust, they lost their jobs, and of course would qualify for Pennsylvania Unemployment Compensation. The interesting part about it was that Pennsylvania residents with PA UC benefits had mandatory work search requirements and very punitive investigations of determining if people were active enough in “looking for work” - this was the mid 2010s when the economy certainly had not really recovered from the Great Recession in northeastern Pennsylvania. People who came in for gas fracking jobs, made their 6 figure income money, then when they lost their jobs they collected PA UC benefits (probably at the maximum), but since they went back to their own states, we heard that they were NOT subject to work search requirements, while Pennsylvania residents had to jump through hoops and were under scrutiny.
The influx of people from other areas during that time drove up housing prices and apartment rent prices to way above what any locals could ever afford.17 And people who own property were incentivized to push out their long-time tenants in order to jack up the rent18 and take advantage of the transplants who were willing to pay thousands for a room above a garage. This had a knock-on effect to where these rural areas pushed out disabled, elderly, and poor people, and so they came to towns like Scranton to seek subsidized or cheap housing, which then exacerbated the public housing wait lists and drove up rents in the towns. There were stories in the news about disabled people living in campers set up in the yards of their family members.
Then came the stories of people having their well water contaminated and unusable. The companies denied it. And worse, the government went along and sided with the companies and failed to protect citizens, and we all knew it at the time, but it took more than a decade for there to be any formal recognition of that fact.19
When the stories out of Dimock were put into a documentary called “Gasland” in 2010,20 I remember there was some effort to smear it all as made up or at least exaggerated. Meanwhile these people have been living by having tankers of water delivered in order to live in their homes, because their wells were ruined and they have no water systems in that area. A year ago a company was found responsible and now has to pay to construct a new public water system and cover 75 years of water bills for homeowners that were impacted.21
Yet now the latest news is that they’re actually going to start drilling in Dimock again!22 and who knows what environmental catastrophe will be litigated yet again a decade from now, once the damage is done yet again. Will we have another HBO documentary too? How many jobs are promised to Pennsylvanians? What about all the children who have health conditions linked to proximity to gas drilling?23
Will they protect Woodbourne and the eagles24 that live there?
The public safety concerns were known many years ago. I remember distinctly a conversation I had with someone 15 years ago, that when I remarked that fracking might destroy the environment at their beautiful bucolic home, they said they didn’t care because they could just take the money and move if the environment is spoiled from fracking, they’ll have a boatload of money to move anywhere else they want, after all.
Meanwhile poor people who didn’t make money off gas fracking were stuck with an inordinate share of the burdens because of it being thrust into their communities.25 The greed needs to be checked by someone, but the regulation proposed is still uncertain.26 People who dare to say let us protect our health are painted as too extreme.27
The Warehouse Debacle
Generally warehouse jobs were considered to be hard work, but honest work. with fairly decent pay and benefits for laborers. Even the big local Walmart warehouse was considered a fairly decent job. And then Amazon warehouses hit the scene. And I learned the German word Zeitdiebstahl.28
One of the first things I ever heard about Amazon warehouses involved the Allentown warehouse having such heat problems in the summer of 2011, that they were taking workers out in ambulances regularly for heat related medical emergencies because of hot working conditions.29 During the harsh job market years following the Great Recession, I heard stories about people getting hired through temp agencies, and were continuously promised benefits and security if they just hung on awhile longer and worked faster. But then they’d wash out, or the permanent full-time hiring would never materialize. There were reports that when people lost their temp jobs they had trouble qualifying for unemployment,30 in a system that seemed rigged.
By the time they opened more Amazon warehouses in the area, nobody wanted to take credit for it, and Amazon already had such a monopoly and so much clout, I don’t think any politicians needed to stump for them. But the stories have never ceased. The U.K. pee break scandals,31 the strikes in Germany,32 and union busting in the U.S.33 There was a spate of stories about essentially wage theft because of making people go through unpaid standing in waiting lines for security in order to get to their work stations, and finally Pennsylvania cracked down on that a couple years back.34 But the harsh working conditions continue since the demanding work quotas so onerous New York state is now trying to limit their quotas with a specific law.35
The Factory Disappointments
After the Great Recession I started hearing about people who worked in factories, stories about how people were denied mandated safety protocols. Some serious ones were being refused by employers like Lock Out Tag Out. Someone claimed they were told that if they didn't like it they could quit because there were plenty of other people who wanted the job and wouldn’t demand safety measures like that. I don’t think I need to spell it out what people are likely not to demand regulations be followed or report a business to the government, and you can imagine who, after being pushed out of a job like that, might be susceptible to then blaming those people instead of the employers or the government regulation failures.
There are defense contractors in the area making items of war, and if working for the privatized military industrial complex isn’t demoralizing enough, I’ve heard numerous stories about the various downsides of these jobs. Management level people pushed out in takeovers. Line workers in tough conditions making so little they qualify for food stamps. And the same old game of avoiding hiring people permanently full-time so they don’t have to give them health insurance.
For many years there was one paper products company that offered the kind of competitive wages and reasonable working conditions that people were willing to carpool and deal with hour long commutes to work 12 hour shifts 4 days on 4 days off. But even that place started to get a bad reputation for wage offerings not keeping pace, and questions of safety after some accidents.36
I knew of CNC machinists around that time who were skilled professionals in that trade, but were instead taking jobs in tree trimming and landscaping, because the pay and the working conditions were just so much better than the machine shops. And at the same time I heard politicians and pundits urging young people to go to school to become CNC machine operators in order to get better opportunities and solve “the skills shortage” they claimed exists. There were local machine shops that admitted it was a tough working environment, hot, unpleasant, long hours, and these shops were unwilling to offer starting wages any higher than the starting wages at some nearby fast food restaurants. You could get a much more cushy job, with a stool and air conditioning at the chocolate factory with no such skilled training as CNC machinists require. None of this made sense so at the time I started trying to find out what was behind this and I found out that there were a few labor economists trying to analyze the issue, one had written about this same issue occurring in Connecticut a decade ago. And it was like they were just shouting into a void, while officials, community leaders, and op-ed writers continued to drive a drum beat to urge young people to learn CNC machinery because there’s supposedly a shortage. I was talking to people about this a decade ago, and people are still confused about this and having the same conversation in 2023, 10 years later, asking why are machinists underpaid if there’s a shortage?37
Dean Baker38 and Peter Capelli39 have both been ringing this bell for years - how actual shortages would, or should, translate into higher wage offerings, but seemingly don’t, so it’s not what these people say it is. And all that anyone has to do to not offer higher wages is cry to political pundits that “nobody wants to work anymore” - which apparently has been go-to propaganda that less and less people are falling for, for at least a century, so much so it’s a joke meme now.
The nonsensical people in charge with their silly ideas40 can rebrand “quiet quitting” and work stoppages and labor unrest a million times. But if people genuinely wanted to work for the sake of working, you’d see billionaires rolling up their sleeves on the factory lines. You don’t. People do labor out of motivation for the results, not because work itself is imbued with some value beyond what it produces. We work to live, and there’s nothing amiss about that. A lot of us are not fooled by people who try to tell us there’s some moral imperative, especially we don’t believe it coming from rich bosses napping in their corner offices and leaving early at will.
Fiction writers get it. Pundits and scholars?
The writers of that Christmas at the Drive-In movie, and others, seem to get it, at least on some level. They know that for the target audience, “the little people” who want a feel good story, the offer of “bringing the jobs” is not the good side. Even if it is conservative traditionalist propaganda, I’m not really concerned. I don’t think we need to examine the movie any further. I think we need to examine real life better. There are movies and pundits and even elected officials out there producing propaganda that paints all Democrats as dangerous child abusing criminals,41 and tell conservatives that their political opponents are enemies that threaten their existence. Seems like that kind of propaganda might be something to be concerned about more than any Christmas movie chick flicks, no matter how vapid they are.
But I’m just left to wonder - why don’t politicians and film historians understand that this “person promising the jobs” is the quite obvious villain for many of us. And moreover, a source of hot fury? Any mention at all about “creating jobs” or “job creators” or “bringing jobs to the area” or even just political braggadocio about job creation statistics in general, evokes a visceral negative response in me. And I’m sure I’m not the only one because I’ve talked to many people, across the political spectrum, with similar gripes about this over the years. Why is this history of disappointments from broken promises over decades seemingly invisible to the people with the microphones and the platforms and the PhDs and the film historians? They keep thinking they’re feeding us catnip, when the Christmas movie knows better. It’s poisonous. The damn myth of the job creator has become a source of such deep anger and disgust, for good reason, in places people dismiss as “trump country” or Pennsyltucky.
For over 30 years I’ve watched people claim they’re “bringing jobs to the area” only to see what seem to be bait and switch operations. But it’s even worse than that. When you say hey wait, these jobs suck, or hey this is not good for our area actually, then the politicians and pundits tell you some version of “well, then better yourself with education and training so you can work and live somewhere else!” Facepalm! Okay smartass, if you’re saying I need to “better myself” to avoid those terrible jobs, and worse, leave the only home I’ve ever known in Pennsylvania, why did you try to tell me bringing those jobs here, to the place you claim to love too, was such a wonderful idea if they suck so bad the answer is “bettering yourself” and leaving?
I don’t want to leave, and I shouldn’t have to - Pennsylvania is my home.
We should have leadership and representation that looks after our interests. We could make things better and the jobs should follow from that. A good plan, and good messaging, would focus on results, and benefits for a good life experience instead of promises of how you’ll get to toil. There’s no reason at all that makes sense to just make up what David Graeber called “Bullshit Jobs” for the sake of making people pretend to do something42 in exchange for less than what could sustain them. It defies sense and reason.
Is it some kind of eugenics idea that drives this, where if you have a shitty job you must deserve it by the laws of nature?43 And if your knee jerk reaction to this is to think no no, people on the left can’t possibly be supporters of eugenics, or elitists, because hey, they’re helping the little people who want jobs! Yes, peasants always want to eat and stay alive, that’s true! But still then, what is all this cheerleading for bringing shitty jobs but then telling people to better themselves so they don’t have to take them? There’s no other way to square this logically without invoking a eugenics ideology. There’s no moral justification for pointing to the heyday of Scranton and say you want to bring back the economic boom of when coal barons treated my grandpas ill. We have a museum documenting that time period44 and it’s seeming awfully familiar.
This is a very old story, and there are garbagey elites on “both sides” and sometimes they help make good things, yes and sometimes they do really garbage things. Many decent caring and intelligent educated people have been lured into eugenics pseudoscience ideas, even while wanting - and even while doing - good things. Falling for all manner of ideological propaganda against their own interests and against sense and reason, this is apparently not unusual either.45
Gifford Pinchot is honored in Pennsylvania for his stewardship of forests and he saw parks as “a social good” for resources and beauty, to be enjoyed by the public. He was also a filthy rich elitist Yale grad46 with a privileged youth. Pinchot’s family fortune came from a grandfather that was a forestry tycoon that clear-cut the land. The Grey Towers National Historic Site is the grand estate where Gifford Pinchot lived on beautiful grounds47 with some peculiar luxury features his wife enjoyed, thanks to his timber baron lineage. In addition to being considered a good steward of the environment and responsible for the the revitalization of trees in the forests, Gifford Pinchot was also actively supportive of having regulation of child labor, a minimum wage for women, and unemployment insurance.
Gifford Pinchot was also such an enthusiastic eugenicist that he was a member of the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society48 all during the time he was the governor of Pennsylvania.
Native Americans who were present at the time of European settlers to the Americas were managing the land better than Gifford Pinchot’s grandpa later did, but humans always have an impact on our surroundings. There were large ecological impacts caused by small agricultural societies long before the introduction of European colonies in the Delaware River Basin.49 And Native Americans clearly had a rich history with various eras of societal organization, both centralized systems and decentralized systems, and according to David Wengrow and David Graeber, there’s evidence and reason to think people all over the place just changed their minds about consolidated communities, abandoned their centralized organized empire cities, and then this was mistaken by European settlers as primitive, rather than what was maybe just a progressive choice.50 Gifford Pinchot did better than his grandfather because his parents raised him with concern about the damage caused by his grandfather. There were opponents to school consolidation in the 1970s, I remember that, and I think they were onto something,51 and I know more than a few people agree with me.
Whether people do good or bad for their communities doesn’t seem to be all that much dependent on where people were born, who their grandfathers happened to be, their lineage, traditions or religions, nor perhaps even directly connected to their political or other ideologies. Lots of happenstance. Eugenics is just a mirage built at least partly on the cognitive bias fundamental attribution error - the mistaken tendency to attribute another’s actions as a result of that person’s inherent character or innate features or origins, while having the tendency of attributing one’s own behaviour to situational and environmental factors.52 Further deciding whether something is good or that you like it based on whether it’s profitable in the market — a market quite clearly controlled by elite business interests — is a whole ‘nother level of irrational on top of that.
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” – David Graeber
Another truth is that we could make other Christmas movies, and other Christmas memories. And in fact, we do. My favourite Christmas movie is The President’s Analyst53 - I think you can count it because it’s Christmas at the end of the movie. I heard that Die Hard is now considered officially a Christmas movie. I watched that for the first time a year ago in a zoom group watch, and I just didn’t find it particularly compelling to be real honest, and I was told that some even sympathized with the villain!
All art is propaganda.
And “we’re bringing jobs” is neither anymore, it’s defunct, don’t try to romanticize or defend it — let’s have something else, please.
References:
Internet Archive - Full text of "George Orwell - All Art is Propaganda : Critical Essays" George Orwell: Charles Dickens. Inside the Whale, March 11, 1940 - I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his "message," and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, has a "message," whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art. As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there to steal? Why does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens? That kind of question is never easy to answer. As a rule, an aesthetic preference is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-aesthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug. In Dickens's case the complicating factor is his familiarity. He happens to be one of those "great authors" who are ladled down everyone's throat in childhood. At the time this causes rebellion and vomiting, but it may have different after-effects in later life. For instance, nearly everyone feels a sneaking affection for the patriotic poems that he learned by heart as a child. "Ye Mariners of England," the "Charge of the Light Brigade"- and so forth. What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the memories they call up. And with Dickens the same forces of association are at work. https://archive.org/stream/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays/All%20Art%20Is%20Propaganda%20Critical%20Essays_djvu.txt
It's a Vaughnderful Life @gvaughnjoy 8:24 AM · Dec 24, 2023 I have a Great American Family Christmas movie on that is a perfect example of how these films construct conservative fantasies with an air of liberalism, and it is so scarily good at this that we need to analyse the channel. Deck the Halls with Emotional Manipulation: A Thread https://twitter.com/gvaughnjoy/status/1738913660909543650
It's a Vaughnderful Life @gvaughnjoy 8:24 AM · Dec 24, 2023 So this is Christmas at the Drive-In (2022), a GAF movie. The premise is that the guy is selling his late-father's drive-in and the woman is a property law professor who pleads with the town's historic commission to see "the spirit of Christmas" in the drive-in to save it. https://twitter.com/gvaughnjoy/status/1738913663279325359
It's a Vaughnderful Life @gvaughnjoy 8:25 AM · Dec 24, 2023 Why are we villainizing the guy who earnestly wants to bring jobs to town? Why are we rooting for the defunct drive-in to stay? What is actually behind this set up? Is it just about tradition and family and getting these two into a heteronormative relationship? https://twitter.com/gvaughnjoy/status/1738913694786933179
The problem is, we’re not post pandemic. Once more this time with feeling: stop saying "back during covid" (My unpublished Letter to the Editor.) CHLOE HUMBERT DEC 23, 2023 There was an article in my local newspaper, The Times-Tribune in Scranton Pennsylvania, about how Mayor Cognetti is allocating funds to a local community theatre operation that is still struggling to recover from the pandemic, in what the reporter describes as “what most would consider a post-pandemic world.” Said about the children’s performances: “people just are not coming out.” (The theatre owner at least referred to the pandemic in the present tense.) https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/the-problem-is-were-not-post-pandemic
Everything to Know About the 2024 Met Gala: Theme, Hosts, and More By Vogue November 8, 2023 The Met Gala is a charity event that is considered a fundraiser for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. It has traditionally been timed to mark the opening of its annual fashion exhibition. Year after year, the event raises eight-figure sums. https://www.vogue.com/article/everything-to-know-met-gala
UDITOA statistics - As of November 2022: 302 Theatre Locations in the USA 533 Total Screens https://uditoa.wildapricot.org/Statistics
The Wrong Impact Research - Chloe Humbert · Jun 25 2023 “IMPACT RESEARCH” is some kind of PR firm that seems to be guiding Democratic party elected representatives on the pandemic issues to prioritize business and industry over human health. They basically suggest Democrats stick to messaging it’s no biggie, and nothing substantive, when it comes to distinguishing themselves from covid contrarian Republicans. If this is representative of the kind of advice and guidance from Democratic Party consultants, I think it’s evidence the current consultant base has been infiltrated by a lot of fossil fuel industry advocates and libertarians aligned with corporate forces against public health. https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/the-wrong-impact-research-f091a0972134
CDC COVID-19 – People with Certain Medical Conditions – Updated May 11, 2023 This means that a person with one or more of these conditions who gets very sick from COVID-19 (has severe illness from COVID-19) is more likely to: – Be hospitalized, – Need intensive care, – Require a ventilator to help them breathe, – Die https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html
It's a Vaughnderful Life @gvaughnjoy 10:14 AM · Dec 24, 2023 Side bar, ultimately, in the last like 3 minutes, the town gets to keep the drive-in AND get the jobs by selling a different nostalgic property (family Christmas tree farm) so you don't have to feel bad about having silently rooted against jobs for the last hour. https://twitter.com/gvaughnjoy/status/1738941105746382852
Detroit Today: Author Sarah Kendzior explains why misinformation spreads so easily - August 22, 2023 Sarah Kendzior is the co-host of the Gaslit Nation podcast and author of several books. She recently wrote “They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.” She says lack of access to good information can contribute to the spread of bad information. “When well-researched investigative reporting is hidden behind a paywall, you’re going to end up with a population that — even if they’re making their best attempts to find the truth — is going to have a very difficult job doing so,” Kendzior explains. https://wdet.org/2023/08/22/sarah-kendzior-interview/
Times Leader - Room To Grow Corporate Express Call Center Is Now Ready, Willing And Open To New Businesses, Employees - March 28, 1999 But, company and city officials believe those numbers are just the beginning. Operations Director Joseph Pickett heads a business still realizing its promise. The Corporate Express promise is also a promise for South Main Street, downtown Wilkes-Barre and, ultimately, the region. Mayor Tom McGroarty has pinned much of his hope for a renaissance of downtown on the Colorado-based company, whose primary business is selling office supplies and services. Ultimately, the company’s local work force is expected to grow to 2,000 employees taking 2 million orders per week for as many as 36 direct-order companies. How soon? That depends on the company’s ability to attract business from other companies that sell by telephone and don’t want to do the work themselves. Already, employees take orders for Fredericks of Hollywood lingerie, Six Flags Great Adventure tickets, bottled water and professional sports products. Center gets off to a rocky, slow start The road to Wilkes-Barre was bumpy. https://www.timesleader.com/archive/954774/room-to-grow-corporate-express-call-center-is-now-ready-willing-and-open-to-new-businesses-employees
Word Of Mouth Public Perceptions Of What Call Centers Are All About Not Always Right, Businesses Say Pamela C. Turfa Times Leader Staff Writer April 5, 1998 The Luzerne-Lackawanna region has been identified by trade journals as ideal for call center companies looking to relocate or expand: It offers a good basic education. With a higher unemployment rate than the state and nation, it continues to have available workers. And, the cost of living is about the national average and much lower than East Coast population centers. But call centers, with starting salaries in the $7 range, aren’t popular with the public. Barrouk acknowledges the criticism that followed last year’s announcement that Corporate Express would be expanding from Maryland to Wilkes-Barre. The public expects the chamber to bring in high-paying jobs, not positions with starting salaries a dollar or two above minimum wage. But he defends the operations as filling an essential need in the community’s economic structure. The chamber, he says, must develop a range of job opportunities, and back office operations like call centers are one of the target areas. Call centers, which are willing to locate in urban settings as well as business parks, are a way of getting people downtown. https://www.timesleader.com/archive/931586/word-of-mouth-public-perceptions-of-what-call-centers-are-all-about-not-always-right-businesses-say-pamela-c-turfa-times-leader-staff-writer
Alex Lotorto speaks at union healthcare vigil in Scranton Pennsylvania during a nurses strike - Apr 25, 2018 When they went on strike Teddy Roosevelt at the time convened the labor leaders in the White House and he said to JP Morgan if you don't settle this strike I'll take the US Army and take over all the mines in Northeast Pennsylvania so they sat in this courthouse for six months and six hundred miners their wives their children testified about the conditions inside the mines. Clarence Darrow was their attorney gave a two-day closing argument, said not even wolves kill their own young but we send our children into the mines. And that strike didn't end child labor, but 10 years later compulsory education in our public schools became the law of the land in Pennsylvania and our kids were pulled out of the mines and the mills put into schools. So they didn't see the direct result of their fight. And they didn't win recognition of their union either. So sometimes the strike isn't always won in the immediate sense, but it's the movement that we build moving forward that's very important. https://youtu.be/w3UAxrum-U4?si=OQi7qrXApJ7Hwaml
Call Center Controversy Report Sees W-b Tax Jump A Panel Delivers A Scathing Indictment Of Mayor Mcgroarty’s Handling Of A Business Project And Predicts Trouble For Taxpayers. The Mayor Calls The Conclusions Biased And Political. October 6, 2002 The Redevelopment Authority, with the city’s backing, in 1998 floated two bonds to help finance the project, one for $7.5 million and another for $2.38 million. The building’s first tenant was Corporate Express. A short time later, the lease was taken over by United Stationers. In 2001, a new tenant came into the picture, Customer Satisfaction First – and a new lease was negotiated, without council approval, the report states. That tenant failed to pay rent and other fees. As of Oct. 1, 2002, the unpaid rent owned by the Texas-based corporation was $621,939. The report states that the taxpayers of the city are on the hook for $15,098,423 and another $2,765,800 in state and county grants. Also, the city has taken $464,240 from its general fund to help pay Customer Satisfaction First’s unpaid debts. https://www.timesleader.com/archive/1028345/call-center-controversy-report-sees-w-b-tax-jump-a-panel-delivers-a-scathing-indictment-of-mayor-mcgroartys-handling-of-abusiness-project-and-predicts-trouble-for-taxpayers-the-mayor-calls-thec
The Rolling Stone - The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind Aubrey McClendon’s Gas Boom. It’s not only toxic – it’s driven by a right-wing billionaire who profits more from flipping land than drilling for gas. March 1, 2012 According to Arthur Berman, a respected energy consultant in Texas who has spent years studying the industry, Chesapeake and its lesser competitors resemble a Ponzi scheme, overhyping the promise of shale gas in an effort to recoup their huge investments in leases and drilling. When the wells don’t pay off, the firms wind up scrambling to mask their financial troubles with convoluted off-book accounting methods. “This is an industry that is caught in the grip of magical thinking,” Berman says. “In fact, when you look at the level of debt some of these companies are carrying, and the questionable value of their gas reserves, there is a lot in common with the subprime mortgage market just before it melted down.” Like generations of energy kingpins before him, it would seem, McClendon’s primary goal is not to solve America’s energy problems, but to build a pipeline directly from your wallet into his. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-big-fracking-bubble-the-scam-behind-aubrey-mcclendons-gas-boom-231551/
NPR - Oil Industry Ups And Downs Price Out Longtime Residents Of Fracking Towns December 17, 2015 - 4:19 PM ET Heard on All Things Considered By Marie Cusick RAMONA DIMASSIMO: Many mornings, I just didn't even want to get up 'cause I just didn't know how I was going to get through another day. CUSICK: Finally, she decided to move. But with a modest income from Social Security and disability payments, she soon realized she had been squeezed out of the rental market in her hometown of Williamsport, Pa. DIMASSIMO: When the gas came in here, everything skyrocketed. CUSICK: A few years ago, this small city in rural north-central Pennsylvania became a major hub of Marcellus Shale gas drilling. The big influx of workers and small supply of housing drove up prices. Jonathan Williamson chairs the political science department at Lycoming College and serves on Williamsport's city council. He's studied the housing issue and says prices have dropped as drilling has slowed down, but not enough for many seniors and people living on low incomes. It's also been difficult to plan around the cyclical nature of the oil and gas business. JONATHAN WILLIAMSON: Housing is a kind of a permanent asset for a community - or, relatively permanent - and so you can't just build it and tear it down on the fly. CUSICK: In the early days of the boom, Williamson says some people were priced out of their homes by landlords looking for more money. WILLIAMSON: You know, they're in crisis mode when they're forced out of their home. If they were used to paying, you know, $500 or $600 for rent and they can find nothing in that price range at all, what can they do in the short run? https://www.npr.org/2015/12/17/460166868/oil-industry-ups-and-downs-price-out-longtime-residents-of-fracking-towns
Mackay, A. (2015). Housing-Related Migration in the Marcellus Shale Region of Pennsylvania (Master's thesis, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/849 Regardless of the duration of work deployments, the influx of gas workers increases competition and cost for rental housing (Christopherson & Rightor, 2012; Herzenberg et al., 2014; Jacquet, 2014; Komadina, McNally, & Young, 2014; Williamson & Kolb, 2011). Rural counties like Bradford and Lycoming have reported rent increases of at least 50%, “with many communities experiencing a doubling or even tripling of rents” (Williamson & Kolb, 2011, p. 10). Some property owners target gas workers for higher, short-term rent, while keeping rates lower for long-term rentals that usually go to local residents. Yet others see an opportunity to capitalize on the market knowing that rents may return to pre-boom rates once the initial wave of workers move on. These property owners indiscriminately raise rent across the board (Williamson & Kolb, 2011, p. 7, 10). https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/849
Pennsylvania Attorney General - 43rd Statewide Grand Jury Finds Pennsylvania Failed To Protect Citizens During Fracking Boom June 25, 2020 Attorney General Josh Shapiro today announced the findings and recommendations of Pennsylvania’s 43rd Statewide Investigating Grand Jury report on the unconventional oil and gas industry. The Grand Jury’s two-year investigation uncovered systematic failure by government agencies in overseeing the fracking industry and fulfilling their responsibility to protect Pennsylvanians from the inherent risks of industry operations. In addition to exposing failures on the part of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Health, the Grand Jury made eight recommendations to create a more comprehensive legal framework that would better protect Pennsylvanians from the realities of industry operations. “This report is about preventing the failures of our past from continuing into our future,” said Attorney General Shapiro in a press conference Thursday. “It’s about the big fights we must take on to protect Pennsylvanians — to ensure that their voices are not drowned out by those with bigger wallets and better connections. There remains a profound gap between our Constitutional mandate for clean air and pure water, and the realities facing Pennsylvanians who live in the shadow of fracking giants and their investors.” https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/43rd-statewide-grand-jury-finds-pennsylvania-failed-to-protect-citizens-during-fracking-boom/
PennLive - 'Gasland' review: Documentary on gas drilling in Pennsylvania isn't perfect, but it's worth watching - By Donald Gilliland Updated: Jun. 21, 2010 Tap water isn’t supposed to catch fire. It does in Dimock. The documentary “Gasland,” which premieres tonight on HBO, begins and ends in Dimock, a rural area of Susquehanna County, Pa., where kitchen sinks began to spit methane and catch fire after Cabot Oil & Gas Co. started drilling wells nearby. Josh Fox, the director of "Gasland," chronicles his search to discover what gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale might do to his beloved Delaware River watershed should he and his neighbors sign the leases they received in the mail. That search takes him first to Dimock and then across the United States, where he meets people struggling with unexpected consequences of gas drilling in multiple states. The film won a prize for documentaries at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2010/06/gasland_review_documentary_on.html
PublicSource - As prosecutor, Josh Shapiro was for fracking reform. Can he pull it off as governor? The attorney general’s tough talk on fracking suggests potential new regulations, but the governor-elect’s support for a hydrogen hub and the realities of a divided general assembly could fuel more drilling. Quinn Glabicki November 30, 2022 Yesterday, Shapiro announced that Coterra Energy Inc., formerly known as Cabot Oil and Gas, pleaded no contest to 15 environmental charges brought by the 2020 grand jury, which found that the company polluted well water in the Susquehanna town of Dimock with metals and high levels of methane. As part of the plea, Coterra will pay $16.29 million to construct a new public water line and cover 75 years worth of water bills for homeowners that were impacted. Shapiro called it an “historic settlement.” “Companies will take notice that we won’t allow communities like this to be taken advantage of or forgotten,” he said in a press release. https://www.publicsource.org/josh-shapiro-governor-pennsylvania-pa-fracking-natural-gas-drilling-hydrogen/
WHYY Drilling under Pa.’s ‘Gasland’ town has been banned since 2010. It’s coming back. “I was played a fool,” said one resident, who will have a gas well running under her land. “This was the most egregious betrayal I’ve experienced." By Associated Press Michael Rubinkam December 20, 2023 A year after pleading no contest to criminal charges, one of Pennsylvania’s leading natural gas companies is poised to drill and frack in the rural community where it was banned for a dozen years for polluting the water supply. Coterra Energy Inc. has won permission from state environmental regulators to drill 11 gas wells underneath Dimock Township, in the state’s northeastern corner — the sweet spot of the largest natural gas field in the United States, according to well permit records reviewed by The Associated Press. Billions of dollars worth of natural gas, now locked in shale rock deep underground, await Coterra’s drilling rigs. Some landowners, long shut out of royalties because of the state’s lengthy moratorium, can’t wait for the Houston-based drilling giant to resume production in Dimock. Other residents dread the industry’s return. They worry about truck traffic, noise and the threat of new contamination. https://whyy.org/articles/pennsylvania-gasland-coterra-energy-gas-wells-dimock-twp/
A Pennsylvania study suggests links between natural gas drilling and asthma, lymphoma in children - Aug 17, 2023 By —Marc Levy, Associated Press The taxpayer-funded research by the University of Pittsburgh adds to a body of evidence suggesting links between the gas industry and certain health problems. In the reports, the researchers found what they called significant associations between gas industry activity and two ailments: asthma, and lymphoma in children, who are relatively rarely diagnosed with this type of cancer. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/a-pennsylvania-study-suggests-links-between-natural-gas-drilling-and-asthma-lymphoma-in-children
Bald Eagle at Woodbourne Forest And Wildlife Preserve in Dimock Township Pennsylvania USA Photo Taken on October 7, 2017 by Chloe Kaczenski https://www.flickr.com/photos/wat3rm370n/51760070378/
Scientific America - Poor Communities Bear Greatest Burden from Fracking - By Brian Bienkowski - May 2015 One thing was clear from the Clark University study: poverty levels are strongly associated with active fracking wells in Pennsylvania. “Our analysis shows that environmental injustice was observed only in Pennsylvania, particularly with respect to poverty: in seven out of nine analyses, potentially exposed [census] tracts had significantly higher percent of people below poverty level than non-exposed tracts,” the authors wrote. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poor-communities-bear-greatest-burden-from-fracking/
Pennsylvania Capital-Star - Gov. Shapiro’s deal with fracking company splits environmentalists Voluntary agreement on health and safety reforms hailed as progress but critics say it lacks teeth. By: Special to the Capital-Star - November 20, 2023 By Audrey Carleton for Capital & Main Buried in this announcement was news that the DEP would begin the process of promulgating new regulations around methane, drilling waste, chemical disclosures of fracking fluids and corrosion of gathering lines that transport natural gas. The partnership, which Shapiro’s office said in a press release added to “an already robust regulatory framework,” comes three-and-a-half years after Shapiro, as state attorney general, published a grand jury report that found the DEP had failed to protect Pennsylvanians from the health and safety risks of fracking. That report came with eight recommended reforms. CNX’s agreement adopts several of them, but fails to mention an enforcement mechanism. https://www.penncapital-star.com/energy-environment/gov-shapiros-deal-with-fracking-company-splits-environmentalists/
PublicSource - ‘It’s just too close’: People living near fracking suffer as Pa. and local governments fail to buffer homes. A Pennsylvania bill that would limit fracking near homes and schools was shelved this summer right before a scheduled committee vote. In a small town in shale country, accounts of misery and discord show the stakes. - Quinn Glabicki September 14, 2023 State Sen. Gene Yaw, R-Williamsport, raised what he called a “serious concern” with legislation that was scheduled for a vote the following day. House Bill 170, if passed, would follow the recommendations of the 43rd Grand Jury and expand Pennsylvania’s no-drill zones to restrict fracking within 2,500 feet of homes and 5,000 feet of schools or hospitals. Yaw said he had received a memo from the DEP’s legislative affairs director indicating the administration’s support for the bill. “For all practical purposes, that would shut down about 99% of the drilling in the most productive areas in Pennsylvania,” Yaw said. “If it’s your intent to ban drilling, then let’s say, ‘We’re going to ban drilling.’” https://www.publicsource.org/fracking-setback-legislation-pennsylvania-washington-county-health/
DerStandard - Die Diktatur am Arbeitsplatz - US-Arbeitgeber kontrollieren ihre Mitarbeiter sogar bis ins Privatleben. Wie es dazu kam und warum die Amerikaner von den Europäern lernen können - 10. Juni 2019, 08:00 (The dictatorship in the workplace - US employers even control their employees' private lives. How this came about and why Americans can learn from the Europeans) https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000104512684/die-diktatur-am-arbeitsplatz
Business Insider - Amazon Forced Warehouse Employees To Work In Suffocating 110 Degree Heat. Jay Yarow Sep 20, 2011 The brutal conditions of working at one of Amazon's warehouses are coming to light this week after a big expose from the Morning Call, an Allentown, PA newspaper. Employees were forced to work in heat that hit 114 degrees at a warehouse in Lehigh Valley, PA. Amazon kept paramedics in the parking lot of the warehouse to treat employees who were fainting, suffering from dehydration, or exhaustion. After employees started to complain OSHA, Amazon began to fix some of the problems. But overall, it sounds like a pretty bad situation. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-2011-9
Amazon warehouse workers fight for unemployment benefits By The Morning Call PUBLISHED: December 17, 2012 Fritchman, 67, remained poised and gave a detailed account about how she struggled working in brutal heat until medical personnel examined her and told her to go home. Following company policy, she provided a doctor’s note upon returning to work, and she was still terminated without explanation, she said. “I did the best I could under those working conditions,” said Fritchman, speaking more forcefully in her closing remarks. “I didn’t want to end up in an ambulance.” This scene has become commonplace since Amazon opened a Lehigh Valley warehouse in 2010. But the human resources agent is not from Amazon. She works for Integrity Staffing Solutions, a company paid by Amazon to recruit workers who unload boxes, process orders and pack shipments for the giant online retailer. The temporary staffing firm plays a crucial role in Amazon warehouses around the country, especially during the busy Christmas shopping season. Its relationship with Amazon has made Integrity Staffing Solutions the biggest temporary-employment firm in the Lehigh Valley and one of the fastest-growing agencies of its kind in the country. Part of its role is fighting to keep its workers from collecting unemployment benefits after they have lost a job at Amazon. https://www.mcall.com/2012/12/17/amazon-warehouse-workers-fight-for-unemployment-benefits/
The Verge - Amazon warehouse workers skip bathroom breaks to keep their jobs, says report In the UK, an undercover reporter and a labor survey exposed harrowing work conditions By Shannon Liao Apr 16, 2018 Amazon warehouse workers are forced to pee in bottles or forego their bathroom breaks entirely because fulfillment demands are too high, according to journalist James Bloodworth, who went undercover as an Amazon worker for his book, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. Targets have reportedly increased exponentially, workers say in a new survey revealed over the weekend, and as result, they feel pressured and stressed to meet the new goals. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse-jobs-worker-conditions-bathroom-breaks
ThinkProgress - Unionized Amazon Workers in Germany Go On Strike Over Wages And Conditions - Amelia Rosch - Dec 8, 2014 Union supporters believe the company is misclassifying workers in order to underpay them, and the strikers hope to force the company to raise its starting pay from the current level of nearly $12 an hour. The German dispute reveals sharp contrasts with the workplace situations that face Amazon workers in the United States, where Amazon has been largely successful at preventing unionization. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/unionized-amazon-workers-in-germany-go-on-strike-over-wages-and-conditions-2ebde0731ba3/
CNBC - Amazon broke federal labor law by calling Staten Island union organizers ‘thugs,’ interrogating workers - Published Fri, Dec 1 2023 - Annie Palmer The NLRB said Friday that Administrative Law Judge Lauren Esposito found Amazon “committed multiple violations” of federal labor law at its largest warehouse in New York, called JFK8, between May and October 2021, a period that saw an increase in organizing activity. In April 2022, employees voted to join the Amazon Labor Union, a grassroots group of current and former workers, becoming the first unionized Amazon facility in the U.S. Since that victory, the group has been fighting to reach a contract with Amazon. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/01/amazon-broke-federal-labor-law-by-racially-disparaging-union-leaders.html
Reuters - Amazon workers must be paid for security checks - Penn. top court By Daniel Wiessner July 21, 2021 The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday said Amazon.com Inc should have paid warehouse workers for time they spent in security screenings after their shifts, finding that state wage law is broader than the federal statute that does not require such pay. The court in a 5-2 decision said Pennsylvania law defines "hours worked" as any time during which a worker is required to be on an employer's premises, and that included the few minutes each day that workers spent in security checks at Amazon's Breinigsville, Pennsylvania warehouse. https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/amazon-workers-must-be-paid-security-checks-penn-top-court-2021-07-21/
CNBC - New York lawmakers pass bill limiting Amazon’s use of worker productivity quotas in warehouses Published Fri, Jun 3 2022 Annie Palmer The bill requires companies to disclose quotas to workers, and bars the company from implementing measures that prevent employees from taking breaks. Amazon employees and worker advocacy groups have argued that Amazon’s focus on speed has led to an increase in workplace injuries. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/03/new-york-passes-bill-targeting-amazon-warehouse-productivity-quotas.html
WNEP 16 - Procter & Gamble Employee Dead After Accident. A Luzerne County man is dead after what investigators are calling an industrial accident Saturday afternoon at the Procter & Gamble plant in Wyoming County Author: Renie Workman Published: 5:44 PM EDT March 25, 2012 Updated: 12:46 PM EDT March 26, 2012 The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, has been called in to investigate. A P&G spokesperson said in his 25 years with the company, there has never been an accident like the one Saturday, but officials are still looking into how the incident happened. Grief counselors will be at the plant this week. https://www.wnep.com/article/news/local/wyoming-county/procter-gamble-employee-dead-after-accident-2/523-bab3f665-5904-4e3a-a41c-5abed56dcebe
Reddit r/Machinists - Posted by u/LogicMan428 July 14, 2023 - Why is machining so underpaid if there is a shortage? So I am just trying to understand the economics here. Supply and demand, right? Machining is a skilled trade and so unless there's a major glut in the supply of skilled machinists, the pay should be decent to even high, right? But yet even with a shortage of skilled machinists now, it is still very low from what I understand. Why is this? Shouldn't the pay go up as a result of a shortage? https://www.reddit.com/r/Machinists/comments/14zbwqq/why_is_machining_so_underpaid_if_there_is_a/
The American Prospect - Shortages of Utility Workers: How Dumb Are the Seven Figure CEOs? by Dean Baker May 17, 2007 While the pay for line workers may be doing somewhat better than the average for utlity workers as a whole, these data imply that line workers' wages can't be rising too rapidly, unless pay for other workers in the sector is plummeting. In short, there is no shortage of line workers. This sounds like a case where utlity executives have adopted a strategy where they don't want to pay enough to get the necessary workforce, which would lower corporate profit and CEO pay. They will then whine about worker "shortages" when people are forced to go without electricity. The media should be exposing a strategy that is putting the health and well-being of the country in danger, not cooperating with utlity company executives by spreading stories that are clearly not true. https://prospect.org/economy/shortages-utility-workers-dumb-seven-figure-ceos/
TIME - The Skills Gap Myth: Why Companies Can’t Find Good People By Peter Cappelli June 04, 2012 One of my favorite examples of the absurdity of this requirement was a job advertisement for a cotton candy machine operator – not a high-skill job – which required that applicants “demonstrate prior success in operating cotton candy machines.” The most perverse manifestation of this approach is the many employers who now refuse to take applicants from unemployed candidates, the rationale being that their skills must be getting rusty. Another way to describe the above situation is that employers don’t want to provide any training for new hires — or even any time for candidates to get up to speed. https://business.time.com/2012/06/04/the-skills-gap-myth-why-companies-cant-find-good-people/
Elite Panic. Big shots have different goals than the rest of us. Politicians should be representatives, businesses shouldn’t lead, even billionaires can’t seem to buy common sense, and tech won’t save us. CHLOE HUMBERT JUL 13, 2023 Corporate elites are in a tizzy panicking about “quiet quitting” so much that CEOs from Vimeo, Mercer, and Wipro had a weird panel on the topic at Davos. But from Ken Klippenstein’s report, “The 5 Creepiest Moments at Davos”, it’s hard to tell if they were trying to curb “quiet quitting” or telling bosses how to drive people to it. One “solution” they proposed was “conducting hourlong, open-ended meetings with no agenda” – which sounds like it’s straight out of the 1944 OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual on how to disrupt a workplace and hobble an operation’s functioning, and keep MeetingBoy.com stocked up with jokes in the queue. Who needs quiet quitting when you can create loud learned helplessness? https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/elite-panic
The Hill - Greene defends calling Democrats ‘pedophiles,’ eliciting eye roll from ’60 Minutes’ Stahl by Lauren Sforza - 04/02/23 Stahl asked Greene about what she called “over-the-top” comments, such as saying that “Democrats are a party of pedophiles.” “I would definitely say so,” Greene responded. “They support grooming children.” “They are not pedophiles,” Stahl responded. “Why would you say that?” “Democrats support — even Joe Biden the president himself — supports children being sexualized, having transgender surgeries,” Greene responded. “Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.” https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3930528-greene-defends-calling-democrats-pedophiles-eliciting-eye-roll-from-60-minutes-stahl/
Strike Magazine - On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant by David Graeber Printed: Issue 3 The Summer Of... August 2013 It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don't really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens. While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets. The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Eugenics as an ideology. Legal and political agendas have motivations to make semantic arguments that obscure eugenics and maybe that’s why we don’t have a separate word for eugenics as an ideological belief. CHLOE HUMBERT NOV 30, 2023 Though Peter Greene didn’t mention the word in a republished blog post about school privatization, he explains this concept of eugenics perfectly in describing adherents that “believe the marketplace is God's own way of sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. Their own wealth and success are a result of their superior awesomeness, not the luck of timing and circumstance. And if you are poor, that is a reflection of your unworthiness, your moral failings, your character flaws, and trying to boost you out of that is to go against the laws of nature. The implication underlying all this? Not everyone can succeed, and not everyone should.” https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/eugenics-as-an-ideology
National Park Service - Steamtown National Historic Site, Pennsylvania https://www.nps.gov/stea/index.htm
Scientific American: Why Do Smart People Do Foolish Things? Intelligence is not the same as critical thinking — and the difference matters. By Heather A. Butler, October 3, 2017 University of Waterloo psychologist Igor Grossmann and his colleagues argue that most intelligence tests fail to capture real-world decision-making and our ability to interact well with others. This is, in other words, perhaps why “smart” people do “dumb” things.The ability to think critically, on the other hand, has been associated with wellness and longevity. Though often confused with intelligence, critical thinking is not intelligence. Critical thinking is a collection of cognitive skills that allow us to think rationally in a goal-orientated fashion and a disposition to use those skills when appropriate. Critical thinkers are amiable skeptics. They are flexible thinkers who require evidence to support their beliefs and recognize fallacious attempts to persuade them. Critical thinking means overcoming all kinds of cognitive biases (for instance, hindsight bias or confirmation bias). Critical thinking predicts a wide range of life events. In a series of studies, conducted in the U.S. and abroad, my colleagues and I have found that critical thinkers experience fewer bad things in life. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-smart-people-do-foolish-things/
National Park Service - Gifford Pinchot: The Father of Forestry Gifford Pinchot was an important figure in the American conservation movement. As the first chief of the US Forest Service, Pinchot tripled the nation’s forest reserves, protecting their long term health for both conservation and recreational use. Unlike some other seminal figures of the conservation movement, Pinchot was more interested in the practical elements of conservation and less preoccupied with the spirituality of nature. He saw protecting the parks as a “social good” and recognized that national forests had value not only because of their beauty but also because of the resources they provided to citizens. Part of this recognition came from Pinchot’s personal background. His family fortune had been earned in the sale of products coming from forests. https://www.nps.gov/articles/gifford-pinchot.htm
USDA Forest Service - Welcome to Grey Towers National Historic Site Grey Towers was the home of Gifford Pinchot, founder and first Chief of the US Forest Service. Located in Milford, Pennsylvania, Grey Towers was completed in 1886 by Gifford's father, James Pinchot, a successful businessman and philanthropist. Today Grey Towers offers, trails, various wayside exhibits, free visitor films, conference center, leadership training, free parking, a visitor center, gifts shop, and ticketed museum tours. https://www.fs.usda.gov/greytowers
Environmentalism’s Racist History By Jedediah Purdy August 13, 2015 Gifford Pinchot, the country’s foremost theorizer and popularizer of conservation, was a delegate to the first and second International Eugenics Congress, in 1912 and 1921, and a member of the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society, from 1925 to 1935. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history
Baylor University - Baylor Study Shows Native Americans Significantly Modified American Landscape Years Prior to the Arrival of Europeans March 21, 2011 The Baylor study found that pre-European so-called "natural" floodplains have a history of prehistoric indigenous land use, and thus colonial-era Europeans were not the first people to have an impact on the hydrologic systems of eastern North America. The study also found that prehistoric small-scale agricultural societies caused widespread ecological change and increased sedimentation in hydrologic systems during the Medieval Climate Anomaly-Little Ice Age, which occurred about 700 to 1,000 years ago. "These are two very important findings," said Gary Stinchcomb, a Baylor doctoral candidate who conducted the study. "The findings conclusively demonstrate that Native Americans in eastern North America impacted their environment well before the arrival of Europeans. Through their agricultural practices, Native Americans increased soil erosion and sediment yields to the Delaware River basin." https://news.web.baylor.edu/news/story/2011/baylor-study-shows-native-americans-significantly-modified-american-landscape-years
Everything We Think We Know About Early Human History is Wrong | David Wengrow on Downstream - Novara Media - Dec 4, 2022 there are various theories about this to do with environmental collapse um which are in my opinion not entirely compelling um and increasingly I think people are looking at this situation in the same way that they're beginning to look at the the so-called Puebla civilizations of the American southwest where again you have these um you know quite big centralized sites which are subsequently abandoned is that well why shouldn't we at least consider the possibility that people are genuinely uh walking away and deciding to create a different uh a different kind of social order different kind of social arrangements and actually when you start looking at it that way it enables you to join the dots or make a bit more sense of the kinds of societies that Europeans did eventually encounter few centuries later in the same regions some of which were still very hierarchical like little mini cahokias but others had developed this highly egalitarian way of living which you know the natural assumption for Europeans to make is that they've just always been that way um but of course we're talking about people with fully developed historical consciousness who do have in their own histories the history of kerokia and the whole Regional system that it generated which goes almost as far north as the Great Lakes so there is a hierarchical past there that people have for one reason or another turned their backs on and created a different form of society um and uh that's something that we um we dwell on a bit in the book because it just you know it enables you to get past this idea um that we're talking about people who are somehow you know Frozen in one pattern of culture uh or sort of have no history https://youtu.be/UR-EN0YIBIg?si=V2AIy_tYrxGU6My3
Lockdown revisionist hysteria taken to its ultimate conclusion. My Letter to the Editor about a ridiculously bad op-ed which was recently published in my local newspaper. CHLOE HUMBERT DEC 20, 2023 Maybe the people opposing school consolidation back in the 1970s were onto something. All that consolidation means larger more concentrated vulnerabilities for infectious disease, weather events, infrastructure failures, and our endemic gun violence. One thing is certain: the answer to school disruption is NOT accepting the most horrendous potential outcomes as normal. https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/lockdown-revisionist-hysteria
Harvard Business School Online's Business Insights Blog - The Fundamental Attribution Error: What It Is & How to Avoid It - 08 Jun 2017 - Patrick Healy The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual's tendency to attribute another's actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. In other words, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions. For instance, if you've ever chastised a "lazy employee" for being late to a meeting and then proceeded to make an excuse for being late yourself that same day, you've made the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error exists because of how people perceive the world. While you have at least some idea of your character, motivations, and situational factors that affect your day-to-day, you rarely know everything that's going on with someone else. Similar to confirmation and overconfidence biases, its impact on business and life can be reduced by taking several measures. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution-error
The President’s Analyst, movie review by Roger Ebert February 16, 1968 Writer and director Theodore Flicker’s satire is modern and biting, and there are many fine, subtle touches in the film. All of the FBI agents are clean-cut, sharp-jawed, impeccably groomed men of exactly 4 feet, 11 inches tall. And when Coburn is kidnapped by the phone company, there is a nauseatingly pleasant young man who lectures him on why the phone company is his friend. To accompany the lecture, there are animated cartoons like a TV commercial — but done in a peculiar way so all the little dancing men look uncoordinated. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-presidents-analyst-1968