"It would be stupidity on steroids" for Congress not to pass a pandemic bill whose essential core is the shielding of employers from liability for workers who get sick from Covid-19, either by being forced back on the job, or being forced to work under unsafe conditions. So said multimillionaire Senator Mark Warner on the unveiling of bipartisan legislation which would also cut already-expired federal unemployment benefits right in half, forgo sending Americans a second round of $1200 stimulus checks, and utterly fail to protect people from a looming spate of evictions and foreclosures.
Democrats, after pretending for months that this liability shield was the only obstacle to them agreeing to the much more generous package then being proffered by Republicans, now plead that it's the best we can hope for. Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo helped foam that runway for them when he absolved New York nursing home operators from culpability as the virus rampaged through his state's care facilities last spring. He was then handsomely rewarded, not only with campaign contributions from the same operators, but with a special Emmy award for his performance artistry during press conferences. There's a lot more money where that came from, from nursing home lobbyists and myriad other corporate predators, and Congress critters of both parties all over Plague Nation have their grasping arms stretched out so far they're practically dislocated from their shoulders.
Since it would indeed be stupidity on steroids for them to stop enabling capitalism on crack, the House of Representatives went whole hog and also finally voted to decriminalize marijuana last week. The stated objective is to rectify the institutional racism which has disproportionately jailed Black and Brown people for minor drug convictions.
From the New York Times:
“The effects of marijuana prohibition have been particularly felt by communities of color because it has meant that people from the communities couldn’t get jobs,” Representative Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview.
Mr. Nadler, who spearheaded the legislation with Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California and the vice president-elect, described the collateral consequences of a conviction for marijuana possession as creating “an often-permanent second-class status for millions of Americans.”
The subliminal objectives of what amounts to a political stunt are twofold First, Joe Biden, one of the leading instigators of the War on Drugs and the ensuing mass incarceration via his 1994 Crime Bill, can be seen as redeeming himself. Second, by tacitly (and ever so magnanimously) encouraging people to smoke pot, politicians from both parties hope to deflect attention from the fact that no pandemic relief is coming, and that the political class has abandoned people during the worst public health crisis in US history.
As of last week, Covid-19 is now the official leading cause of death in America. Some 11,000 additional people died of the virus in just the last week of November, with the death toll expected to reach half a million by March - when, President-elect Joe Biden desultorily forecasts, a more robust "stimulus" package may or may not come to pass. In the meantime, folks, just try to hang on. Smoke a little pot. But if you get the munchies, you're on your own. Maybe you can look at Youtube clips of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bragging about her designer ice cream stash before she "caved" to Republicans.
Everybody must get stoned in one way or another. Can it also be a coincidence that even Bob Dylan just caved and has sold his entire catalog to the music publishing division of Vivendi, the giant media conglomerate headquartered in France? Now owning one of the "Big Three" recording giants, Vivendi has recovered from a series of bankruptcies because of overleveraging. In 2002, Mitt Romney's Bain Capital was among the private equity vultures that swooped down to glut themselves on the leavings.
Mitt Romney is also an integral part of the small bipartisan Congressional cabal which authored the latest corporation-friendly Covid-19 relief package. It's a small world, a big club, and -- altogether now - You Ain't In It.
As Mitt Romney would say, if you haven't stashed away that first and only $1200 stimulus check like Nancy Pelosi's ice cream, or if you foolishly blew your entire temporary unemployment windfall on food and rent, then you obviously don't care anything for your own lives. You didn't save for the proverbial rainy day. He won't even let you ease the pain of plague-enhanced bipartisan austerity by letting you smoke marijuana for medical reasons. He'll fight legalization with his whitened teeth, his manicured nails and his gleaming little stones.
6 comments:
As someone who has litigated the source of an illness, I can say from experience that it is very difficult to prove by a preponderance of the evidence just exactly where an illness was caught by a patient. In my case, a man was infected by something you can only get from infected chicken, and he'd only been in contact with chicken in one restaurant, so clear case, right? But he was a plumber, and plumbers can get it from their work. So was it a claim against the restaurant, or a work comp claim? It was some claim, but those are separate places to litigate, and they can give separate inconsistent results, each blaming the other. This was far from easy.
It is such with Covid-19, only more so. "I got Covid from work" would be a very difficult case. I got it from anywhere specific would be a difficult case. Not very many good cases would ever be brought.
Then there is the issue of "cost shifting." Yale Law School professors pioneered the idea that tort law is really a matter of assigning the costs of something to the part of the economy that ought to bear that cost in order to shape an effective response to the risk: Those who can avoid harm ought to pay the cost of not doing so, to force them.
That model of cost shifting won't work well for cases you can't prove. It also is not a good policy choice to put the costs on all employers for something that it hitting everybody across society. Is this a burden for work comp insurance?
And be clear, liability of employers is not liability in court for tort, it is work comp claims.
Is that the best health insurer to cover this?
Is a work comp death claim for some but not for others the fair way to handle the risk to life of Covid across our society?
I believe in tort law. I did it for my living. It is not the one answer to all things. It is not the best answer to Covid-19. So give the protection against lawsuits, AND create another mechanism to protect all Americans, not just those few who might be able to prove they got it at work.
Use of the term 'marijuana' irks me. It has no scientific meaning, and is essentially a xenophobic epitaph originally popularized to (negatively) associate cannabis with Mexican people.
And Bob Dylan, did he cave? My impression is that he was always a bit of a charlatan, blowing with the wind.
@pete
You’re a braver man than I, Pete. About Bob Dylan, I mean. I would never dare to say BD is overrated, sings very badly, and is simply blowing in and out on his harmonica, with mixed results –– things you did not actually say, but which I might have thought. As for his lyrics, well, it would be downright foolhardy for us to admit to heavy doubts about Dylan’s poesy and the depths hidden therein, especially now since the Swedes laid last year’s Nobel literary laurels on his curly head. But thank you so much for speaking up first. Despite my guarded words, any flack I might catch from his offended admirers (who know better than we) I’ll refer back to you.
Incarceration rates started to rise in the 70's and the real growth in rates occurred prior to the passage of the 1994 crime bill.
Kat -- That just means that the direction events were driving was already clear, when the 1994 Crime Bill jumped on it with both feet to cement in the trends. They had no reason to be surprised that what they did made more of the same, and made it permanent. The prior trend is not an excuse, but rather an indictment.
Well, I for one - although I do not smoke pot myself - am glad it has become legal/decriminalized. From where I sit, it isn't any worse than drinking alcohol and should have the same laws controlling it - mainly, no driving under the influence. I always saw it as an economic issue - from what I understand, it is pretty easy to grow and people don't have to rely on a capitalistic corporation or vineyard to buy it.
I agree with you Karen: it is a bone they are throwing progressives to take our minds off of using government dollars that should be going to the 95% and giving government welfare to the 5%.
I know I shouldn't have expected anything different from Biden - and I didn't - but I am still discouraged. As my husband pointed out, we are simply treading water with Biden whereas we were drowning with Trump and would have been pulled completely under if he had been re-elected. Either way, the multinationals have come out the winners - AGAIN.
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