Around the world, nurses -- like other workers -- are striking. Australia is one example:
And. of course, we're striking in the US:
Of course, corporations don't try to help the workers and that's why we're in the situation that we're in. Alice Herman (In These Times) notes:
As the first wave of Covid-19 hit the United States, Jen, a 53-year-old nurse struggling to pay her bills, received an intriguing message. “THE TIME HAS COME TO DEPLOY AT INCREDIBLY HIGH RATES,” read the mass text from Krucial Staffing, sent to nurses nationwide in March 2020 and forwarded to Jen by a colleague.
Jen (a pseudonym used to protect her from retaliation from employers) could barely believe the wages promised by the Kansas-based healthcare staffing firm. As part of its massive recruitment drive during the first wave of Covid-19, Krucial was paying $10,000 a week to nurses willing to travel — or “deploy,” in the company’s lingo — to the frontlines in New York City.
“FLEXIBILITY IS KEY,” it continued. “EMERGENCY STAFFING IS NOT FOR EVERYONE.” Travel nurses would have to be ready to deploy with a few days’ notice. Once on assignment, nurses would work 14 to 21 days straight in overwhelmed hospitals with the potential, but no guarantee, to renew their contracts.
Jen already worked 60- hour weeks as a wound care nurse at a Maryland rehabilitation center. The pay there, at $38 an hour, wasn’t bad, but her expenses were overwhelming. Jen was the provider for her two teen nieces and had taken in her adult son, who was recovering from severe meningitis, all while trying to pay off her own medical debt.
So Jen put in her notice at the rehab center and called Krucial, hoping the company would send her to New York immediately. She called the company line repeatedly, and on March 28, 2020, a Krucial recruiter picked up and offered Jen an assignment in New Orleans. The job would pay $95 an hour — two-and-a-half times her previous rate.
“It was like winning the lottery,” Jen says.
Drawn by high pay and the chance to help save lives, tens of thousands of healthcare professionals have served short-term stints as travel nurses during the pandemic, pouring into areas with Covid-19 surges to shore up local hospital systems. Many, like Jen, left full-time jobs to work gigs with staffing firms like Krucial.
While some travel nurses extol the freedom of the lifestyle, others caution that, while they’re paid far more than gig workers who pack boxes or deliver groceries, they face many of the same problems — including corporate employers who treat workers as expendable.
Arriving in New Orleans in March 2020, just 24 hours after receiving her assignment, Jen steeled herself for long hours at a convention center functioning as a Covid-19 field hospital. But she didn’t anticipate that she would end up being “demobilized” — another industry term — after complaining about sexual harassment she alleges was rampant at the hotel where the nurses were lodged. Jen alleges Krucial has since effectively blacklisted her, barring her from future work with the company. Other nurses told In These Times they were sent home early by Krucial after speaking up about poor accommodations or working conditions on assignments — a form of retaliation the nurses say is rampant across the travel nursing industry.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Thursday:
Thursday, January 20, 2022. Violence in many forms (including whoring for poltiicians) plagues us all.
Starting in the United States where the organization Veterans for Peace has issued its "Nuclear Posture Review" which concludes:
The world is a much more dangerous place with nuclear weapons, particularly given the current
confrontations among nuclear-armed nations. The United States military seeks “Full Spectrum
Dominance” and the government appears determined to be the preeminent global power, even in the face
of diminishing economic power relative to a rising China. It is hard to imagine the US taking serious steps
toward nuclear disarmament without a sea change in the thinking among its political elites and real
change in its posture toward the rest of the world.
Activist efforts to restrain US militarism and intervention around the globe, to cut the military budget, and
to encourage mutual respect and diplomacy among nations must therefore go hand-in-hand with efforts
to reduce and eliminate all nuclear weapons.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which went into effect January 22, 2021, is an
historic and extremely important event. It expresses the clear desire of the peoples of the world to be free
from nuclear weapons and the threat of a nuclear war that could end human civilization.
The Nuclear Ban Treaty is a valuable tool for education and organizing. Even though the US and other
nuclear-armed states have yet to sign on to the TPNW, many cities in the USxxx have passed resolutions in
support of signing. New York City is the latest to sign on to the ICAN Cities Appeal. The US states of
California, Oregon, New Jersey and Maine have also passed resolutions in support of the TPNW. Veterans
For Peace encourages all of our chapters, members, friends and allies to pursue similar support for the
TPNW in their cities.
It is important to build an intersectional movement for peace at home and peace abroad. We are engaged
in struggles for racial justice, for non-intervention in the affairs of other nations, and for redirecting funds
from the military – and nuclear weapons – to healthcare, education and other human rights. We are
making common cause with the burgeoning Climate Justice Movement, proclaiming that climate
catastrophe and nuclear war are the twin threats to all life on earth.
Our VFP Nuclear Posture Review provides a stark contrast to the Nuclear Posture Review being prepared for
President Biden by the Pentagon, which will continue to justify the discredited idea of nuclear deterrence,
while feeding billions more dollars to nuclear weapons manufacturers. We are providing a
well-researched and credible alternative that reflects the global desire for nuclear disarmament and peace.
We hope that the VFP Nuclear Posture Review will be a guide, a useful tool and an inspiration for all who
wish a peaceful future for our children, our grandchildren and generations to come.
Nuclear weapons threaten the planet's very life. They aren't the only threats. There's pollution -- pysical pollution. There's the less noted mental pollution where we all enter into some form of a daying will wherein we agree to lie to ourselves that some worthless politician is going to save us. They're not even going to address our most basic needs so you have to lie pretty big to pretend they're actually going to save us.
At BLACK AGENDA REPORT, Margaret Kimberley notes the push to distort Joe Biden in order to carry his tired, corporate and corrupt ass into the White House:
“Biden came across as a plantation owner telling the field hands that they have a good life and ought to be grateful.”
This columnist wrote those words in December 2020 before Joe Biden was inaugurated. His meeting with a group designated as Black leaders was as bad as one could expect, complete with dismissal, rudeness, and outright disrespect. It was vintage Biden, a man who was never the brightest and is now elderly and not fully in command of his faculties.
But the real Biden was always an unreconstructed racist, bragging about the 1992 Crime Bill which he said would, “Do everything but hang people for jaywalking.” Barack Obama chose him as a running mate precisely because of his credentials among conservative, race baiting democrats. Having run as a fake progressive Obama needed someone decidedly in the conservative camp to balance the ticket.
In 2020 Obama and the rest of the party establishment decided to make Biden the nominee, ordering others out of the race and clearing the field for the candidate who had no constituency outside of the wealthy individuals and corporations that keep the democrats afloat. A combination of fundraising prowess and antipathy towards Donald Trump created a large voter turnout and Biden won the popular and electoral vote.
The democrats’ propaganda machine played no small role in dragging Biden over the finish line. They settled on the term “harm reduction” to convince the skeptical that they should put aside their concerns and vote for the man they didn’t want. Biden won with a record breaking number of votes, and in cities across the country democrats quite literally partied in the street when he won.
Biden was propelled by the same propaganda effort when his term began one year ago. We were told that he was “the most progressive president since FDR.” The democrats are still living off their reputation from Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security Act and the creation of Medicaid and Medicare during the Lyndon Johnson administration. No democrat has created anything of the sort in the last 50 years but the memories lingers and scoundrels evoke the past in order to fool the people in the 21st century.
We were told that Biden’s stimulus plan and child tax credits would “cut child poverty in half.” Absent an increase in the federal minimum wage and lacking permanent legislation, it did no such thing. The child tax credit ended in 2021. Unemployment compensation ended three months ago, and republican led states refused to provide the additional payments that congress had authorized. They did so without push back from Biden or from democrats in congress.
Now Biden’s approval ratings have plummeted and it isn’t hard to understand why. Put simply, he lied in order to get votes. He said he would forgive student loan debt for those who attended public colleges and whose families met income guidelines. He could have done this without congressional approval but he hasn’t acted. It is clear that he never had any intention of raising the minimum wage, using the Senate Parliamentarian as an excuse to avoid doing what he promised voters he would do.
That politicians lie is not a new or novel observation but grasp this went beyond the candidate. A lot of whoring was involved in carrying Joe to the White House -- a lot of whores lied and knew they were lying. They're as deadly to the planet as any run off into our streams and rivers. They don't just lie for the candidate, they bully people trying to silence critics and trying to drum up votes.
They're dirty whores. They say things like -- you know who I mean here -- that right now, in 2021, there actually has been an increase in wages because if you look at the stimulus from 2020 . . .
You know the whore I'm talking about. You know him very well.
They can't stop whoring.
And, honestly, shame on the people who promote them.
When do we get the reckoning?
How about when do we get the truth about Tara Reade?
I believe her. Her accusations against Joe Biden are credible.
I don't know her and I'm actually glad I don't because Tara's lied to herself since she came forward. Shes pretended that certain people were going to help her and defnd her. That was Tie's Up, that was Ryan Grim and THE INTERCEPT, that awas so many people.
If we knew each other, we would not have had nice conversations.
I don't play. About the nicest thing I would've said was, "Can you drop the TAR-rah and just pronounce it Tara since this is the US and not the UK and we really don't need to combat charges of pretentious natures as well as everything else."
People were laughing at her, for example, at THE NEW YORK TIMES, over the pronuciation of her first name.
When I spoke to one NYT-er over the phone about how the paper was treating her, they made me first agree that she was asking for mockery with "TAR-ah."
That would've been our easisest converation. And she probably would've stuck with TAR-ah since that's how it's been her whole life.
But I wouldn't have played and pretended the way some did -- a lot of people around her just didn't know better but there were some who damn well should have known what was going on.
We noted that Time's Up didn't just refuse her case but they were actually working against her.
Actively. Not in the past but while the story was briefly being cov ered.
We noted that Alyssa Milano attacking Tara based on what Times Up told Alyssa was outrageous and unethical -- Times Up was not q clearinghouse devoted to attacking women -- that's not why it got money.
But Ryan Grim was not at all interested in that story. It was put to him. He didn't see the merit.
Of course, thanks to what happened with Cuomo, the whole world knows what a fake Times Up was. How it betrayed women and worked with powerful Democratic men to destroy women.
Ryan could have had that story but that would've required some actual work. A friend tried spoon feeding it to him but he was either too scared or too stupid to grasp what he was being handed.
At any rate, we called out the betrayers here.
And Tara trusted the wrong people.
SUch as "Mama's boy" who was never going to ride to her rescue because his Mommy was never going to let him -- please, it's only in the last five or so years that she's let him -- yes, let him -- be openly gay. Mommy was not going to let him go after Joe. No matter what Rose might have told Tara, Mama's boy was not riding to her rescue. (And he never did.)
But what has prevented the press in all the time since from re-examing what went down. Times Up, as we noted here in real time, was feeding NYT and other outlets smears against Tara. They were treated as trusted sources and got to be off the record.
I don't think that should have happened in real time which is why I called it out..
But now that the world knows that Times Up lied about women who were assaulted, that Times Up lied to protect Andrew CUomo, isn't it past time that those outlets that shaped their coverage of Tara based on smears from Times Up had to go back and actually report?
Mama's Boy is Ronan for anyone who didn't grasp it. I'm not in the mood in this morning. I was there when Mia had her freakfest over Ronan wanting to be a girl. I was there when Mia had her freakfest over Ronan might be gay. I was there . . . I know what Ronan's allowed to do and what he isn't. I'm just glad Mommy's not hopping in the bed with him.
pekaing of which, Dylan whatever her name is now --Blaine, Liar, I don't know. What I do know is that her hugely inventive story doesnt hold up. And I never would have said that if she and Mia hadnt launched their attacks on others. Up until the Iraq War, I was Mia's friend of many years. I knew Woody before Mia but knew him largely through Mia. I did not like Woddy. I still don't. But when Mia conspired to create draama and attack others, she begged the world -- even her friends -- to question the lie she'd put forth for years.
Grasp that HBO has done no multi-part story on Tara Reade. She's accusing the President of the United States, the sitting president. And her story is credible.
Dylan's is not at all credible. You have family members who say "no."
You also have logic.
For the story to be true, Woody molested one child and only one child. That's not the profile of a pedophile.
More to the point, as that Bbad HBO mini-series made clear without realizing it, the story is that Woody molested her once. Once. That's a pedophile?
All the times they were together. Many times without Mia. And he only molests Dylan once? And he waits until after the media is abuz with the custody battle between Mia and Woody?
But that nosnense and that garbage is treated as reality by HBO while Tara accusing a sitting president of having assaulted her is ignored?
Dylan gets coverage because of favors and I'm damn sick of it. I've not just dropped a friend and stopped promoting her hear because of her rallying to Dylan late last year, I'm also preventing her from getting film roles. She was up for a comedy. I'm friends with the actor that's already cast in the role. I spent an evening with him and his wife reviewing how former-freind doesn't just bust up her own marriages but bust ups the marriages of her male co-stars. Did they really think her so-so talent -- and promise to reduce for a month at a fat farm if she got the role -- justified them risking their own marriage by letting her be his co-star? Nope. They didn't.
HBO allowed lies to be told about Woody -- and broke the law by using clips from his films without his autorization, he should have sued -- but Tara is not to be believed? Tara's story is not to be explored?
Joe and company lied about where the complaint would be and refussed to allow access to his papers. The phone call of Tara's mother to Larry King was turned up -- the clip of Tara's mother calling in to Larry King's CNN show. She has friends wh has told about this over the years.
And this gets ignored. But the adopted daughter of an acclaimed filmmaker and a celebrity claiming she grew up with a pedophile who molested her once and only once is treated newsworthy despite the fact that two investigations found nothing to support the claims Mia made and coaced Dylan on? Coached. We can use that term because that is what the findings suggested in the only actual investigations that took place.
A lot of whores worked the streets to discredit and attack Tara Reade. One of those? Times Up and we now know what they really were. So why isn't the public record being corrected?
There is not even the pretense of a funcitioning press in the US these days. In fact, refer to Jonathan Turley and the topic of the post is important but especially note things like:
Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor issued a rare joint public statement Wednesday to disclaim the bombshell NPR report by Legal Affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg on the unpopularity of Gorsuch among his colleagues and his alleged refusal to wear a mask despite a threat to the health of Sotomayor. The justices stated that Totenberg’s account on the mask controversy was false.
[. . .]
In one incident, NPR itself expressed regret that Totenberg did not reveal a close personal relationship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg despite years of coverage.
[. . . ]
Chief Justice John Roberts also issued a statement that it was false, as claimed, that he asked any of colleagues to wear masks on the bench.
[. . .]
The controversy at NPR occurs after the publicly funded company changed its policy to allow its reporters to take active parts in protests for social justice — erasing a long-standing bright-line rule in journalism. The impact of such advocacy journalism is evident in every poll where the faith in the media has plummeted. Indeed, the “Let’s Go Brandon” movement is as much a criticism of the media as it is President Biden. The United States ranked dead last in media trust among 49 countries with just 29% saying that they trusted the media.
We will not be able to restore the trust in the media until these companies abandon reporting “in some form” and return to simple journalism.
Again, where is the functioning press?
On 18 November 2021, US Representatives, Peter A. DeFazio (R-Oregon), Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York), wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to specify on which constitutional basis he was bobming Syria and Iraq.
At the end of the two-month regulatory deadline, the White House has still not responded to them. The military actions perpetrated by the United States against these two countries are, therefore, not only violating their sovereignty, but also the US Constitution.
I hadn't heard of that letter and I'm not familiar with the outlet so I'm using "maintains." (The item was sent to the public e-mail account.)
Violence continues this morning in Iraq. AHLULBAYT NEWS AGENCY reports:
Iraqi media sources reported on Thursday morning that two horrific explosions took place in the southern province of Basra.
The blasts were caused by two improvised explosive devices, Shafaq News quoted security officials.
The first explosive device exploded near the Taiz company belonging to the security defense in the Manawi Basha district.
The second blast occurred near an Islamic bank on Esteghlal Street.
And we'll wind down with this from THE NEW ARAB:
An Iraqi man shot dead his daughter, his ex-wife and her mother and then committed suicide at the scene in Hillah city in the central province of Babil, the police said on Tuesday, in the latest deadly case of domestic violence in the country.
Security forces blocked the area off and moved the bodies for forensic examination, The New Arab's Arabic-language sister service, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported.
"The 19-year-old son of the killer was wounded in the attack, and the incident occurred in the killer's ex-wife's house in the Nader neighbourhood in downtown Hillah," Babil Bar Association member Ahmed Abdel Ghani Al-Fatlawi said.
"Initial investigations show the crime was planned by the man, who committed suicide immediately after killing the victims."
Iraq's High Commission for Human Rights previously said it had seen a clear increase in domestic violence crimes, saying that this type of crime disproportionately impacts women and children.
The following sites updated:
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Nurses strike11 hours ago
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Jizzy Pants Maxwell back in the news11 hours ago
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Charisma responds11 hours ago
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