Our Weekly Discontents, 4/12/2021
There's a difference between hype and hope.
It is with heavy hearts that we dedicate this week’s newsletter to Sue Edgar, the mother of our Discontents colleague Libby Watson. Sue passed away on Sunday after a long battle with cancer. She was a longtime socialist, a passionate advocate for social justice, and a wonderful mother and person. Her loss will be felt by all who knew her, even by those of us who only knew her through Libby. Sue regularly donated to her local food bank and she also had a fondness for Connecticut, having lived for a time in New Haven—where she was very happy and made wonderful friends, but was also appalled at the inequality and poverty she saw. Since most of our readers are in the US, we’re asking, if you’re able, to please consider making a donation in her honor to the Connecticut Food Bank.
Our thoughts and prayers are with Libby and her family.
Hello friends! Kim Kelly here, It’s been awhile since I wrote the opening essay or showed my face here at Château Discontents, mostly because I haven’t updated my own Substack newsletter in a long time. At this point, I am planning to kill it off entirely, in solidarity with the trans writers and community members who have pointed out the platform’s propensity for shelling out cash to transphobes and other assorted bigots. In its stead, I’m going to continue updating my Patreon (which has been my primary direct-to-reader platform anyway), and going forward, will sub that in for Discontents purposes.
That being said, I am glad to be back among friends. I just got home from the airport and am pretty wrecked. I’ve spent the past two and a half months closely covering the RWDSU union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, a small city between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, and have spent nearly five weeks of that time on the ground in Alabama. Those first four weeks were spent haunting the union hall, interviewing workers, organizers, and community supporters, writing scripts, shooting interviews, sneaking onto the Amazon grounds, and generally embedding myself into the guts of what was happening there.
I was working with an organization called More Perfect Union, and together we produced 18 videos highlighting the campaign, explaining various aspects of the struggle, and most importantly, passing those workers the microphone to tell their stories. I think we did good work.
The people I met and spent time getting to know have become true friends and comrades, and I can’t really express how much I wanted them to win the union they need and deserve so badly. I’ve been indirectly accused of “hyping” the campaign up too much; all I have to say to that is that there’s a difference between hype and hope, and a lot of us who were down there were genuinely hopeful. I really believed that they would squeak out a narrow win, and the workers I spoke to thought so, too.
This past weekend, I went back to Birmingham to say goodbye. There was a community rally on the 11th, and Rep. Andy Levin and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler came down to pay their respects and emphasize the importance of passing the PRO Act. If we’d had that on the books by the time they started organizing, Amazon workers in Bessemer would already have their union.
As most people know by now, it didn’t shake out like that, and now they’re facing months of legal challenges to Amazon’s dirty union-busting tricks and, eventually, a new election. This battle was always uphill, and now, it’s gotten even harder. I still think they’re going to win, even if it takes months or years or turns into another Smithfield.
Winning a union election in the U.S. is incredibly difficult even under the most perfect conditions; as anyone who’s been paying attention knows, Amazon turned this drive into a protracted trench war. It matters that the workers got this far (and bear in mind, when the challenged ballots are considered, the union effort only failed by around 400 votes). And what’s more, they’re not giving up.
I’ll pass this over to the rest of the Discontents crew now. If you like whatcha see, sign up for a free Discontents subscription if you haven’t already, and tell all your friends.
Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
You may have seen a lot of headlines last week that were like lol the guy who took the infamous Fyre Fest sad sandwich photo is selling it as an NFT. As it turns out Trevor DeHaas the guy in question is doing it to try to raise money for a kidney transplant he’s going to need soon to survive. I talked to Trevor about his experience with kidney disease and his crowdfunding effort and our perverse American healthcare system that forces people like him into positions like this. Also about how much fun he had at the festival!
I also wrote about a recent study that further hammers home the absurdity of how we handle healthcare. A lung surgeon realized he was performing a surprising number of surgeries on patients who were exactly 65 years old. A subsequent study of tens of thousands of cancer patients found a significant spike at that very age. Many people are postponing necessary tests and procedures until they become eligible for Medicare losing valuable years to cancer they might not even know they have yet because it’s too expensive to find out.
Both pieces are paid only but you can read excerpts of them here or subscribe for $4.73 a month with this coupon.
Wars of Future Past
Kelsey D. Atherton
Who owns the images of war? There are two answers: the first is photographers out in the field, who often license those images through Getty or another news service, where they get paid for their work and get those pictures shared in front of a large audience. At legacy media, this is the general pattern, and it supports a valuable profession and gives readers particularly valuable visual context for a story.
For organizations and writers without an organization-wide subscription to Getty or the budget to regularly purchase one-off image rights, the images used to illustrate stories of war are likely to come from the Pentagon itself, because the federal government is required by law to release the media it produces into the public domain.
“The images and videos in the public domain are the tools that we have to tell our story,” writes political scientist Paul Musgrave. “They’re overwhelmingly militarized. And that means it’s easier to show—and tell—a militarized story.”
Musgrave encountered this limitation of available visual language in his work preparing lecture slides. I’ve found it trying to illustrate virtually any story I’ve had to write about an event where I was not physically present. In the upcoming Wars of Future Past, I’m sharing Paul’s essay in full, alongside a conversation we had about how, exactly, everything from IP-scraping bots and caution over legal fights has let the military fill the void on illustrating what happens abroad.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
I was very pleased to welcome Win Without War’s Kate Kizer to Foreign Exchanges as our newest contributor this week. Her debut piece offered an early assessment of Joe Biden’s foreign policy:
“A foreign policy for the Middle Class” has been the Biden administration’s tagline for its vision of reforming US foreign policy. It has issued Interim Strategic Guidance that highlights progressive analysis about the connections between domestic and foreign policy and that elevates the greatest existential threat the world faces—the climate crisis. It appears to be seriously engaging in diplomacy to mitigate further violence and suffering in Yemen and reducing Trump's unnecessary build up of troops in the region. And it’s true that having an administration making foreign policy decisions based on reality is a welcome breath of fresh air after four years of a near descent into fascism.
Yet, though he has a chance to enact one of the most progressive domestic agendas in history, Biden’s approach to foreign policy thus far tells a different story. In that area, at least, Biden has not capitalized on this moment of state and societal failure to make a clean break with the past. Instead, it appears his team has decided to prioritize the views of the foreign policy establishment (the “Blob”) over the needs of working people. It has adopted the tactic of antagonistic diplomacy, in the hopes of appearing tough for hawks in Washington, while largely doing the bare minimum to meet campaign promises.
Discourse Blog
Hi everyone, Jack Crosbie from Discourse Blog here. Goes without saying, but all our love is with former coworker and comrade Libby after the loss of her mum.
Here’s what we got up to in the past week.
First, Amazon appears to have successfully quashed the Bessemer warehouse workers’ unionization attempt. But despite the fact that the company is clearly desperate for this to never happen again, Paul Blest explained that Bessemer was just one battle in a war that is far from over. The unions will try again and one of them will win. What doesn’t help, of course, is lazy framing that painted the union’s defeat as a victory for workers, as Jack Mirkinson explained.
Paul had one more labor story this week, on Duke University Press workers who are gearing up for a fight for recognition from their bosses. These stories are becoming a strong point for us, so it’s a great time to subscribe if you want to keep an eye on any nascent labor movements and union drives across the country.
Our big news this week, and sorry for burying the lede here, is we kicked off our Worst Politicians in America series. This was an idea that started all the way back at Splinter, which, like the blog itself, has been resurrected. So for two whole years, we’ll be going through every state in the country and naming and shaming the worst politicians in it. We’re starting, of course, with Texas.
And here’s the rest: I wrote about Insider’s idiot bosses and Biden’s gun policy, Jack wrote about Kyrsten Sinema, Prince Phillip finally going to hell and the National Review continuing to be racist, Caitlin wrote about the thumbs up emoji, Rafi wrote about Gutfeld!, and if you smash a click on the site you’ll find even more blogs I don’t have room to put here. See you next week.
The Flashpoint
Eoin Higgins
Look for reporting on the Boston Police Department coming soon to The Flashpoint—in the meantime here are a few musings..
I keep thinking about the Biden administration's immigration policies with more and more anger as the new boss appears committed to staying the course set by the old boss. What makes me even angrier is the way that liberals are reacting to it—when they react at all.
Here's a good video on Vice President Kamala Harris's level of interest in addressing the crisis now that she's in charge:
New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait compared accusations about GOP Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz's sex with teens to teachers' unions advocating for remote learning until it's safe to do in person classes. By my count it's been at least three months since Chait last disclosed his wife's job as a charter school consultant in his semi-regular attacks on public schools.
In Texas, lawmakers are trying to push through a bill that would allow police to remove children from their home if their parents accept their gender identity, according to Chase Strangio. Earlier today, one of Twitter and Substack's most hateful transphobes claimed being trans comes with privileges, "especially if you milk the hell out of it." It really emphasizes how harmful anti-trans bigotry is in the real world.
The Insurgents
Jordan Uhl & Rob Rousseau
We’re back from a brief hiatus with Ben Burgis, Jacobin columinst and author of the forthcoming book Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique Of The Contemporary Left, we talk about how the fractured state of the american left that for a brief, glorious time had been more or less all pulling in the same direction during Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns. Since Bernie’s endorsement of Biden, factionalism and infighting have once again resumed their rightful places as any leftist’s preferred pastime, so how does the US left and their international allies move forward in a productive way to actually go about doing what we all want: building social movements and working class power? There aren’t any easy answers to this question but we have a great conversation about it.
We also take a few minutes to pay tribute to friend of the show Prince Philip, tragically taken too soon, who is now in heaven doing the Wakanda salute with RBG, Philip Seymour Hoffman and others.
BORDER/LINES
Gaby Del Valle & Felipe De La Hoz
While the Biden administration immigration policy so far has been a mixed bag for immigration advocates. The rhetoric has softened and the president has taken some active steps to shift away from the vicious enforcement posture of his predecessor, but the rollback has been cautious and incomplete, leaving in place several unprecedented restrictions and taking great pains to message that asylum seekers should stop coming. Still, most of this restrictionist streak has been one of omission, refusing to walk back Trump’s policies and maintaining some of the tough posturing at the border. Biden and his administration officials have by and large avoided touching the contentious subject of new or expanded policies to increase enforcement.
That is, until Homeland Security Secretary Ali Mayorkas told an audience of ICE personnel that he favored going after sanctuary jurisdictions, among other things, according to notes of the conversation obtained by the Washington Times. He didn’t specify how exactly he’d mount this campaign, but the Trump administration spent years trying out different strategies against states and localities that refused to cooperate on immigration enforcement, including by trying to withhold certain federal grants. The secretary also mentioned a desire to ramp up the use of criminal prosecutions against immigration violators.
It could well be the case that Mayorkas was grumbling to an audience that would be naturally receptive and won’t actually try to put these things in action. In last week’s BORDER/LINES, we explore how they at least signal that Biden’s top immigration enforcement official seems to think there is both a need and various avenues for a harsher federal stance on border and internal enforcement.
KIM KELLY
While I was down in Alabama covering the last few days of the first phase of the BAmazon Union campaign, there was another big labor action happening less than an hour away. 1,100 coal miners at the Warriot Met coal mine in Brookwood, AL have been on strike since April 1st, and as of April 9th, have overwhelmingly voted down a tentative agreement that their union, the United Mine Workers of America, had reached with the coal bosses. They’re still on strike, and intend to stay out until they get what they deserve.
On Saturday, I drove down to the picket line to drop off some Krispy Kremes, chat with the miners, and see if I could get any of them to go on record about the strike. I wrote about what I found, and have just made the post public so y’all can see what I’ve been getting up to over on Patreon. Solidarity forever.