Aug 30 2020

The Breakfast Club (MREs & Birthday Cake)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club!

AP’s Today in History for August 30th

The Civil War’s Second Battle of Bull Run ends; Thurgood Marshall confirmed as first black Supreme Court justice; First black astronaut blasts off; Ty Cobb’s baseball debut; David Letterman moves to CBS.

Breakfast Tune Sailing Roger Sprung, Hal Wylie, & the Progressive Bluegrassers

Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below

Something to think about over coffee prozac

Cannon fodder: Workers have never been more expendable than they are now
Bob Hennelly, Salon

It’s kind of surreal, but even as the corporate media celebrates the role of essential workers, it’s clear that the lives of the workforce — and by extension their families — have never been more expendable.

Many of them will have been laid off, as cities, counties, states, school districts and transit authorities add them to the list of 1.5 million public sector workers already laid off — all because President Donald Trump and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked efforts by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to provide the local aid so badly needed.

And those folks will be the lucky ones.

Thousands of other essential workers will have already died from the virus that Donald Trump has done all he could do to spread as far and wide as possible, thanks to his inaction at the federal level and inability to coordinate a national public health response.

An even larger number of first responders, health care professional and other essential workers will have survived their bout with COVID, only to face the prospect of long-term respiratory, coronary or nervous system damage from a virus we still know so little about.

Cannon fodder

The time line for our current crisis goes back to decades of disinvestment in America’s public health infrastructure amid an obscene military buildup set the stage for this virus’s explosion. That, multiplied by the years of decline of the American labor movement, set the stage for the devaluation of the lives of American workers playing out now.

The result is a kind of slaughter that has largely gone under-reported, even as it picks up steam and claims more lives of essential workers.
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adelaidecarandin

For a Sig line I can't decide between "Sanctimonious Purist", or "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities."