Your next infection could be the one that permanently disables you by George Monbiot

 

You could see Covid-19 as an empathy test. Who was prepared to suffer disruption and inconvenience for the sake of others, and who was not? The answer was often surprising. I can think, for instance, of five prominent environmentalists who denounced lockdowns, vaccines and even masks as intolerable intrusions on our liberties, while proposing no meaningful measures to prevent transmission of the virus. Four of them became active spreaders of disinformation.

If environmentalism means anything, it’s that our damaging gratifications should take second place to the interests of others. Yet these people immediately failed the test, placing their own convenience above the health and lives of others.

Now there are even fewer excuses, as we have become more aware of the costs of inaction. One of the justifications for selfishness was that liberating the virus would build herd immunity. But we now have plenty of evidence suggesting that exposure does not strengthen our immune system, but may weaken it. The virus attacks and depletes immune cells, ensuring that for some people, immune dysfunction persists for months after infection.

We also know that, with every new exposure, we are more likely to suffer adverse effects. A massive study in the US found that the risk of brain, nerve, heart, lung, blood, kidney, insulin and muscular disorders accumulates with every reinfection. The impacts of long Covid, according to health metrics researchers, are “as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury”. Now that we know how the virus attacks our cells, “traumatic brain injury” looks less like an analogy than a description. The outcomes can be devastating, ranging from extreme fatigue and breathlessness to brain fog, psychotic disorders, memory loss, epilepsy and dementia.

We are all playing Covid roulette. The next infection could be the one that permanently disables you. I’ve been hit three times so far, and feel lucky still to be active. But I’ve lost a little every time: stamina, lung capacity, sleep, general fitness, however diligently I’ve exercised since. In all three cases, it seems, the infection has come from school. For families with school-age children, the chamber turns more often than for those without. Yet, three years after the pandemic began, the government still does almost nothing to make schools safe.

There’s a powerful argument that just as cholera was stopped by cleaning the water, Covid will be stopped by cleaning the air. The virus thrives in badly ventilated, shared spaces – especially classrooms, where students sit together for long periods. One study found that mechanical ventilation systems in classrooms reduce the infection risk by 74%.

The importance of ventilation and filtration is not lost on our lords and masters. Parliament now has a sophisticated air filter system, incorporating electrostatic precipitators. According to the contractor that fitted them, they ensure airborne viruses and bacteria are “kept to an absolute minimum within the space”. The same goes for the government departments where ministers work. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this month, there were filtration systems in every room, in some cases protecting politicians who have denied them to their own people. It’s almost as if they believe their lives are more important than ours.

The clean air standards rich and powerful people demand for themselves should be universal, rolled out to all schools and other public buildings. Instead, while private schools have been able to invest in ventilation and filtration, state schools, many of which are close to bankruptcy, rely on government disbursements that are strictly rationed by a series of nonsensical conditions. It’s another classic false economy. The extra costs of healthcare caused by repeated waves of infection and the long – perhaps lifelong – impacts for many of those affected must greatly outweigh the investment in cleaner air.

But instead of taking simple and effective actions – proper (N95) masks in public places, filtration in shared spaces – we have steadily normalised a mass disabling agent. It’s likely, eventually, to reduce the number of quality years for almost everyone. Those who suffer the extreme version of this disablement, long Covid, are treated as an embarrassment we would prefer to forget.

You need only gently propose that we might return to wearing masks on public transport to provoke hundreds of people on social media to bray “freedom!” and denounce you as a tyrant. Against their tiniest of freedoms – keeping their faces uncovered on trains and buses – the trolls weigh freedom from disability and even death, and decide that their right to breathe germs on to other people is the indispensable liberty.

These are the people who, with their threats and conspiracy theories, may have helped drive Jacinda Ardern, the politician who arguably protected more people from the virus than any other, out of office. They are the people who, in some cases, have abused mask wearers in the street, and doctors and nurses in hospitals. If they have not yet been infected, they attribute their good fortune to “natural immunity”, rather than not getting out very much. An Old Testament ableism pervades the ideology: those who are ill deserve to be ill.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who fails to wear a mask on public transport fails the empathy test. That would now condemn almost the entire population. But, without direction from the government and the cultural shift this could provoke, even the kindest people end up behaving as if they have no regard for others.

“Move on”, “get over it”: these are the incantations of people who seek to shed responsibility for their actions. It’s what Tony Blair said after the Iraq war. It’s what Boris Johnson said after he was caught repeatedly breaking the rules. Of course we urgently want it to be over. But it isn’t. The virus is now embedded, and will continue to mutate to avoid our defences, grinding down – unless we treat each other with respect and demand universal standards of clean indoor air – our immune systems and our health, until everyone’s life is a shadow of what it might have been.

Do we really mean to sit and watch as this infection encroaches on our freedom to be well, brutal winter after brutal winter? Or do we step in where the government has failed, and normalise concern for the lives of others once more? Like all the other moral challenges we face, this is now on us.  

-The Guardian

 

Crosby was an unreconstructed 1960s radical who kept his political commitments 'til he died by Micah Sifry

“…So I was saddened, as were many, by the news of David Crosby’s passing at the age of 81. Reading and listening to many of the tributes and obituaries that appeared after his death, though, I’ve been struck by how little most have said about his politics.

“Yes, he deserves our attention for his seminal role in two great bands, the Byrds and then CSN; and forgive me, for his seminal role in helping singer Melissa Etheridge artificially conceive two children. His battles with drug addiction and the law also belong in any balanced appreciation of his life.

“But if you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal or any number of other obituaries, you’d know more about his consumption of drugs along with his defense of menages a trois than you would about his fierce radical politics.

“Over the years, he poured his musical stature into unpopular causes like opposing the Iraq War in 2006, when CSNY played 33 venues (a project that was instigated mainly by Neil Young); he sang benefit concerts for causes like opposing nuclear power and weapons, for the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, to fight an anti-union campaign finance initiative in California in 2012, as well as performing at Occupy Wall Street in 2011; and in 2022 he along with his old bandmates took their music off of Spotify to protest its spreading of COVID misinformation. None of that got mentioned in any of the obits I saw.

“I suppose this is old news; corporate mainstream media long ago sanded the politics off the edges of the Woodstock Generation to make it easier to sell jeans and anniversary concert tickets. But Crosby, like his former bandmate Young, never abandoned his political values.

“When I saw him perform a solo show at New York City’s Town Hall in 2015, between songs he ranted (perhaps a bit too long) about how the Warren Commission had covered up the truth of who killed John F. Kennedy and he lambasted America’s ever-increasing military budget.

“His 2019 NPR ‘Tiny Desk Concert’ with The Lighthouse Band includes a beautiful new song, Half the Light, about letting women run the world, along with a great rendition of Joni Mitchell’s anthem Woodstock. On Twitter, where Crosby developed a whole new following, he expressed strong support for climate activist Greta Thunberg, he decried despotism, he slammed far-right Republicans, he bashed rightwing billionaires — and that was all just a sampling from his posts in the last few weeks.

“For me, Crosby’s singing stands for remembering and honoring those young people who dared to change the world and shake America open by not conforming, at a minimum, or, at a maximum, by giving their lives for causes like civil rights and ending the Vietnam War.

“These were not small fights and it’s a shame to see them ignored, belittled or condensed into tidy little packets of pablum. Young people are always the innovators and the cannon fodders of movements for social change, then and now. I can still hear Crosby crying, ‘Why? How many more?’ in the counterpoint to the ‘Four Dead in Ohio’ chorus of Young’s protest anthem Ohio, and know that the question is still as relevant today as it was when that song was written in 1970, days after the Kent state shootings.”

Micah Sifry is co-founder Civic Hall. Publisher of The Connector newsletter (find it on Substack). Board member Consumer Reports.

Think commas don't matter? Omitting one cost a Maine dairy company $5 million

 

An absent "Oxford comma" cost a Maine dairy company $5 million. The suit, brought against Oakhurst Dairy by the company's drivers in 2014, sought $10 million in a dispute about overtime payment.

A federal appeals court decided to keep the drivers' lawsuit, concerning an exemption from Maine's overtime law, alive last year. Court documents filed... show that the company and the drivers settled for $5 million.

“For want of a comma, we have this case,” U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Judge David Barron said in March, 2017.

The sentence at the heart of the dairy drivers' case referred to Maine's overtime law and whom it doesn't apply to: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

“(1) Agricultural produce;

“(2) Meat and fish products; and

“(3) Perishable foods.”

The disagreement stemmed from the lack of a comma after the word "shipment."

The use of the Oxford comma — also called a serial comma — delineates the final item on a list. For example: "Milk, cheese, and yogurt." Proponents of the punctuation argue it helps to differentiate subjects, while opponents say it’s cumbersome.

Different style guides have different rules about the Oxford comma, which gets its name because it was preferred by Oxford University Press editors.

In 2017, Judge David Barron reasoned that the law's punctuation made it unclear if "packing for shipping or distribution" is one activity or if "packing for shipping" is separate from "distribution."

The five drivers who led the lawsuit will receive $50,000 each from the settlement fund, according to the Portland Press Herald.

The other 127 drivers who are eligible to file a claim will be paid a minimum of $100 or the amount of overtime they were owed based on their work from May 2008 to August 2012, the Press Herald reported. 

-Kalhan Rosenblatt, NBCnews.com and Associated Press, February 12, 2018 

 

"Our Future Is Public": Santiago Declaration Envisions End of Neoliberalism Death Spiral

 

A new manifesto calls for building "a sustainable social pact for the 21st century" in which "our rights are guaranteed, not based on our ability to pay, or on whether a system produces profit, but on whether it enables all of us to live well together in peace and equality."

An international coalition made up of more than 200 trade unions and progressive advocacy groups on Thursday published the Santiago Declaration, a manifesto for "a complete overhaul of our global economic system."

The undeniably anti-neoliberal document proclaiming that "our future is public" is the product of a meeting held in Chile—the "laboratory of neoliberalism" where Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago acolytes' upwardly redistributive economic model was first imposed at gunpoint by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military junta.

From November 29 to December 2, more than 1,000 organizers from over 100 countries gathered in Santiago and virtually to germinate a left-wing movement against "the dominant paradigm of growth, privatization, and commodification."

"Who owns our resources and our services is fundamental. A public future means ensuring that everything essential to dignified lives is out of private control."

"We are at a critical juncture," the manifesto begins. "At a time when the world faces a series of crises, from the environmental emergency to hunger and deepening inequalities, increasing armed conflicts, pandemics, rising extremism, and escalating inflation, a collective response is growing."

"Hundreds of organizations across socioeconomic justice and public services sectors—from education and health services, to care, energy, food, housing, water, transportation, and social protection—are coming together to address the harmful effects of commercializing public services, to reclaim democratic public control, and to reimagine a truly equal and human rights-oriented economy that works for people and the planet," reads the document. "We demand universal access to quality, gender-transformative, and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society."

The Santiago Declaration continues:

“The commercialization and privatization of public services and the commodification of all aspects of life have driven growing inequalities and entrenched power disparities, giving prominence to profit and corruption over people's rights and ecological and social well-being. It adversely affects workers, service users, and communities, with the costs and damages falling disproportionately on those who have historically been exploited.

“The devaluation of public service workers' social status, the worsening of their working conditions, and attacks against their unions are some of the most worrying regressions of our times and a threat to our collective spaces. This is deeply linked with the patriarchal organization of society, where women as workers and carers are undervalued and absorb social and economic shocks. They are the first to suffer from public sector cuts, losing access to services and opportunities for decent work, and facing a rising burden of unpaid care work.

“Austerity cuts in public sector budgets and wage bills are driven by an ideological mindset entrenched in the International Monetary Fund and many ministries of finance that serve the interests of corporations over people, perpetuating dependencies and unsustainable debts. Unfair tax rules, nationally and internationally, enable vast inequalities in the accumulation and concentration of income, wealth, and power within and between countries. The financialization of a wide range of public actions and decisions hands over power to shareholders and undermines democracy.”

Against the heavily privatized status quo, "we commit to continue building an intersectional movement for a future that is public," the document says. "One where our rights are guaranteed, not based on our ability to pay, or on whether a system produces profit, but on whether it enables all of us to live well together in peace and equality: our buen vivir."

According to Global Justice Now, the Transnational Institute, and other signatories, the creation of an egalitarian and sustainable society hinges on ensuring universal access to life-sustaining public goods delivered by highly valued workers.

"We need to take back control of decision-making processes and institutions from the current forms of corporate capture to be able to decide for what, for whom, and how we provide."

"Who owns our resources and our services is fundamental," the manifesto argues. "A public future means ensuring that everything essential to dignified lives is out of private control, and under decolonial forms of collective, transparent, and democratic control."

As the Santiago Declaration explains:

“A future that is public also means creating the conditions for enabling alternative production systems, including the prioritization of agroecology as an essential component of food sovereignty. To that end, we need to take back control of decision-making processes and institutions from the current forms of corporate capture to be able to decide for what, for whom, and how we provide, manage, and collectively own resources and public services.

“The public future will not be possible without taking bold collective national action for ambitious, gender-transformative, and progressive fiscal and economic reforms, to massively expand financing of universal public services. These reforms must be complemented by major shifts in the international public finance architecture, including transformations in tax, debt, and trade governance.

“Democratizing economic governance towards truly multilateral processes is critical to overhaul the power of dominant neoliberal organizations and reorient national and international financial institutions away from the racial, patriarchal, and colonial patterns of capitalism and towards socioeconomic justice, ecological sustainability, human rights, and public services. It is equally essential to enforce the climate and ecological debt of the Global North, to carry out an expedited reduction of energy and material resource use by wealthy economies, to hold big polluters liable for their generations-long infractions, to accelerate the phasing-out of fossil fuels, and to prioritize finance system change.”

The call to build "a sustainable social pact for the 21st century," the coalition observes, "follows years of growing mobilization around the world."

It also comes as a complimentary alliance convened by Progressive International meets in Havana, Cuba to map out an emancipatory "new international economic order."

During Friday's opening session, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called for the establishment of a movement capable of dismantling "the existing, exploitative, catastrophically extractive imperialist international economic order so as to build a new one in its place... in which people and planet can breathe, live, and prosper together."

-Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams

 

Trump secretly donated $1m to discredited Arizona election ‘audit’

 

One of the enduring mysteries surrounding the chaotic attempts to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential battle has been solved: who made a secret $1m donation to the controversial election “audit” in Arizona?

The identity of one of the largest benefactors behind the discredited review of Arizona’s vote count has been shrouded in secrecy. Now the Guardian can reveal that the person who partially bankrolled the failed attempt to prove that the election was stolen from Trump was … Trump.

An analysis by the watchdog group Documented has traced funding for the Arizona audit back to Trump’s Save America Pac. The group tracked the cash as it passed from Trump’s fund through an allied conservative group, and from there to a shell company which in turn handed the money to contractors and individuals involved in the Arizona audit.

Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company that led the Arizona audit, disclosed in 2021 that $5.7m of its budget came from several far-right groups invested in the “stop the steal” campaign to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory. It was later divulged that a further $1m had supported the audit from an account controlled by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican election lawyer who advised Trump as he plotted to subvert the 2020 election.

But who gave the $1m to Mitchell? In September 2021, as Cyber Ninjas was preparing to deliver its findings, the New York Times reported that unnamed “officials” had denied that Trump had played any part in securing the funds.

Republican leaders of the Arizona senate who asked Cyber Ninjas to carry out the audit also publicly denied that Trump was involved, saying “this absolutely has nothing to do with Trump”.

Documented’s analysis pierces through that denial. Basing its research on corporate, tax and campaign finance filings, as well as emails and text messages obtained by the non-partisan accountability group American Oversight through public records requests, the watchdog has followed the money on its circuitous journey from the former US president’s Pac to the Arizona review.
 
‘Highly hypocritical’

Cyber Ninjas’ widely-lambasted inquiry was focused on Maricopa county, Arizona’s most populated area. Biden won the county by 45,109 votes.

The purported investigation was suffused with wild conspiracy theories, including the claim that bamboo fibers found in ballot sheets proved they had been printed in Asia. The review was decried even by local Republicans as a “grift disguised as an audit”.
 
Bill Gates, the Republican vice-chair of the Maricopa county board of supervisors at the time of the Cyber Ninjas audit, said he was “disappointed, but not surprised” by the Guardian’s revelation that Trump had helped to pay for it. “I have no problem with audits,” Gates said.

“What I have a problem with is an audit that is undertaken with a goal in mind, and that is literally being funded by one of the candidates. This is absolutely what we do not want to happen.”

Gates pointed out that under Arizona law, electoral candidates are not allowed to fund vote recounts which have to be financed with taxpayer dollars. Though the Cyber Ninjas review was technically not a recount, it served a similar purpose.

“At the very least, it is highly hypocritical for the Arizona state senate to have allowed the audit to be funded in this fashion,” Gates said. 

-Brendan Fischer & Ed Pilkington, The Guardian

 

"People who read books live longer than people who don’t"

 

Bookworms rejoice! A new study in the journal Social Science and Medicine just discovered that people who read books live longer than people who don’t.

Researchers at Yale University asked 3,635 participants over 50 years-old about their reading habits. From that data, they split the cohort into 3 groups: non-readers, people who read less than 3.5 hours per week, and people who read more than 3.5 hours per week. The researchers followed up with each group for 12 years. The people who read the most were college-educated women in the higher-income group.

Over the course of the study, the researchers consistently found that both groups of readers lived longer than the non-readers. The readers who read over 3.5 hours a week lived a full 23 months longer than the people who didn’t read at all.

That extended lifespan applied to all reading participants, regardless of “gender, wealth, education or health” factors, the study explains. That’s a 20% reduction in mortality created by a sedentary activity. That’s a big deal, and a very easy fix for improving quality of life in anyone over 50.

The results get better. “Compared to non-book readers,” the authors continue, “book readers had a 4-month survival advantage,” at the age when 20% of their peers passed away. “Book readers also experienced a 20% reduction in risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow up compared to non-book readers.” The authors continue:

“Further, our analyses demonstrated that any level of book reading gave a significantly stronger survival advantage than reading periodicals. This is a novel finding, as previous studies did not compare types of reading material; it indicates that book reading rather than reading in general is driving a survival advantage.”

The reason books had greater gains than periodicals is because book reading involves more cognitive faculties. The readers didn’t begin with higher cognitive faculties than the non-readers; they simply engaged in the activity of reading, which heightened those faculties. 

“This finding suggests that reading books provide a survival advantage due to the immersive nature that helps maintain cognitive status,” said the study’s authors.

As any book lover knows, reading involves two major cognitive processes: deep reading, and emotional connection. Deep reading is a slow process where the reader engages with the book and seeks to understand it within its own context and within the context of the outside world.

Emotional connection is where the reader empathizes with the characters, and that promotes social perception and emotional intelligence. Those cognitive processes were cited by the Yale team and used as markers for this study. 

While they apparently offer a survival advantage, “better health behaviors and reduced stress may explain this process [as well],” according to the study. Still, those cognitive benefits are real…

All the data was self-reported via phone survey and it didn’t really account for ebooks, but it’s still encouraging. There are no real downsides to reading, other than making the time for it… .

-Laurie Vazquez, Big Think

 

SCOTUS’s First Decision of the Term Is a Unanimous Blow to Disabled Veterans: Why did the liberals co-sign Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s harsh opinion?

 

After an unusual delay, the Supreme Court finally issued its first opinion of the term on Monday: a unanimous decision in Arellano v. McDonough siding against disabled veterans who seek compensation for disabilities related to their service. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion for the court denied these veterans (and their survivors) the ability to obtain benefits retroactively if they filed a late claim—even if the delay occurred because of their disability, or some other factor beyond their control.

It’s a painful blow to military members who were injured while serving their country, and a puzzling one: At oral arguments, the justices sounded divided, yet all three liberals lined up behind Barrett’s harsh opinion. Maybe they genuinely believed that Congress intended to impose an exceedingly stringent deadline on disabled veterans. Or perhaps the three-justice minority is so outnumbered that it has decided to pick its battles, and Arellano was not worth the fight.

The facts of the case deserve more attention than Barrett gave them. Adolfo Arellano served in the Navy from 1977 until he was honorably discharged in 1981. During his service, he worked on an aircraft carrier that collided with a freighter in the Persian Gulf. Arellano was nearly swept overboard, and he saw his shipmates get crushed to death. After this incident, he began showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and tardive dyskinesia. These conditions rendered him severely disabled and incapacitated, and ever since, his brother has served as his legal guardian and caregiver.

Because of his incapacitation, Arellano did not understand that he qualified for disability compensation. His brother did not find out until 2011, at which point he filed a claim on Arellano’s behalf, asking for retroactive benefits for the previous 30 years. The Department of Veterans Affairs granted compensation moving forward, but denied compensation for the past three decades. It said that federal law allows retroactive compensation only if service members file “within one year of discharge,” which Arellano did not.

But that law wasn’t the end of the story. The Supreme Court has long held that statutes of limitation are subject to a presumption of “equitable tolling.” That just means a deadline can be suspended when some “extraordinary circumstance” prevented a party from raising their claim on time. The doctrine reaches back to the founding era and has always served as a “background principle” whenever Congress drafts statutes of limitations. It does not apply, however, when ignoring a deadline would be “inconsistent with statutory text.”

There are several very good reasons why equitable tolling should apply here. First, the Supreme Court has said that “interpretive doubt” must be read in favor of veterans; as Justice Antonin Scalia once noted, this rule is “more like a fist than a thumb” on the scale, “as it should be.” Second, the broader statute expresses special solicitude toward veterans as they navigate a bureaucratic maze in search of their rightful benefits—precisely the context in which equitable tolling would normally apply.

Third, there are practical reasons to suspend the deadline here. Many service members were subject to excruciating and unethical chemical testing, most notoriously at the Edgewood Arsenal from 1955 to 1975, then threatened with criminal charges if they disclosed their experience. Victims of this military-administered torture did not file claims for compensation within a year for fear of prosecution. In 2006, the government declared it would not prosecute Edgewood victims for acknowledging their abuse. But by that time, the one-year deadline for retroactive compensation claims had long since passed.

Finally, even outside these devastating cases, there are plenty of reasons why veterans and their survivors are prevented from filing within a year of discharge. Some, like Arellano, have psychiatric disorders that prevent them from pursuing a claim. Others suffer disabilities that do not present themselves until more than one year after service. And still more get shafted by bureaucratic blunders: One survivor, for instance, filed a claim on time but was falsely told by the VA that she was too young to qualify. Years later, she realized the VA was wrong and filed a claim for retroactive compensation. The VA rejected it because the one-year deadline had passed.

This stringent interpretation of the law has tragic consequences. Service members and their survivors are denied years’ or decades’ worth of compensation because problems outside their control prevented them from filing promptly. For that reason, multiple veterans’ groups urged the Supreme Court to suspend the one-year deadline when fairness requires it—a coalition that included Disabled American Veterans, National Organization of Veterans’ Advocates, and Paralyzed Veterans of America.

But SCOTUS refused, siding against Arellano’s request for equitable tolling. Why? Barrett, a former civil procedure professor, ignored the principle of solicitude toward veterans in favor of a wooden analysis of the “statutory scheme.” She focused on the fact that federal law includes 16 explicit exceptions to the general rule that veterans can’t get retroactive compensation—and equitable tolling isn’t one of them. “The presence of this detailed, lengthy list,” Barrett wrote, “raises the inference that the enumerated exceptions are exclusive.” Put differently, it is “difficult to see” why Congress “spelled out a long list” if it did not want the list to be comprehensive.

As Chief Justice John Roberts noted at oral arguments, though, this list of exceptions could cut both ways. It might suggest “that the insistence upon strict enforcement is really not that important.” Rather, Roberts said, “the plethora of exceptions seems to me to make it more likely that you ought to stick with the normal rule” of equitable tolling. When Congress creates so many other exceptions to the deadline, Roberts continued, how does it “make any sense” to say the “one area” where equitable principles won’t apply “is service-connected disabilities?”

This argument carried great weight given that, as deputy solicitor general, Roberts argued and won the foundational case on this topic. As a matter of common sense, it’s also a strong counterpoint to Barrett’s logic: Shouldn’t the presence of so many exceptions indicate that Congress did not want rigid enforcement of the one-year deadline?

Yet Roberts signed onto Barrett’s opinion in favor of the VA. So did every other justice—including Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom sounded skeptical of the VA’s position during oral arguments. For all we know, they ultimately decided that Barrett got it right, and that Congress intended to subject veterans like Arellano to its harsh deadline.                                                

It’s also possible that the term is filled with so many contentious cases already that no justice wanted to eat up her time writing a dissent in a relatively minor case when the outcome was inevitable anyway. After all, the ongoing backlog of opinions indicates that the justices are taking an unusually long time to write—possibly because of extensive disagreements and bad blood behind the scenes.

If that’s the reason for the unanimity in Arellano, it’s a shame. A seemingly small case like this one can make a huge difference in the lives of real people. Disabled veterans deserved a fairer shake than they received from this court.

-Mark Joseph Stern, Slate

 

What else did Kevin McCarthy say?

 

“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy said. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”

Kevin McCarthy reportedly said he would “never leave” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right, conspiracy theorist Republican congresswoman from Georgia, after she backed him through a rightwing rebellion and 15 rounds of voting for the position of US House speaker.

“I will never leave that woman,” McCarthy told a friend, according to the New York Times. “I will always take care of her.”

Elected to Congress in 2020, Greene quickly became a figurehead for the pro-Trump far right, particularly after Democrats then in control of the House ejected her from committees, citing her racist statements and encouragement of violence against political opponents. Eleven Republicans supported the move.

Greene also voiced support for QAnon, the conspiracy theory which holds that Democratic leaders are pederastic cannibals; spoke at a white supremacist rally; criticised and contravened Covid-19 public health measures; and, among countless other controversies, suggested Jewish-controlled “space solar generators” were responsible for destructive wildfires.

-The Guardian   

[In other words, McCarthy is a spineless, unethical, power-hungry, avaricious, obsequious and treasonous idiot.]

Why Macron and French Unions Are at Odds Over Pensions

 

PARIS — The French government is presenting a bill on Monday that foresees broad changes to the pension system that will notably push back the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. 

Unions aren't happy, and more than 1 million people took to the streets last week to reject the measure. More strikes and protest action are planned Jan. 31, and probably beyond.

What does President Emmanuel Macron's government want to change and why, and what does it mean for workers, and why are so many people opposed?

THE PENSION SYSTEM

All French retirees receive a state pension. The system's funding is based on the redistribution of a specific tax from those who are working to those who are retired. The system is projected to dive into deficit in the coming decade amid France's aging population.

The average French pension this year stands at 1,400 euros per month ($1,500 per month) once taxes are deducted. The system is complex, with differences depending on professions, and the private and public sectors. Some are allowed to take early retirement, including the military, police officers and people with physically demanding jobs.

THE GOVERNMENT'S PLAN

The government says the changes will make the system financially sustainable. Workers who were born in 1961 and were supposed to retire this year will need to work three additional months. Those born in 1968 and after will need to be at least 64 and have worked for 43 years to be entitled to a full pension.

Those who don't fulfill the conditions, like many women who interrupted their careers to raise children or those who undertook a long period of study and started working late, will have to wait until the age of 67 to get a full pension — unchanged from the current system.

Those who started working from the age of 14 to 19 will be allowed to get early retirement, as will people with major health issues. The government argues that the changes will also allow for the increase of the minimum pension by 100 euros, to reach about 1,200 euros for a full career.

OPPOSITION TO THE PLANNED CHANGES

Opinion polls show a majority of French are opposed to the plan. Thursday's protests, the first public show of resistance toward the measures, gathered larger crowds than in past years. France's eight main workers' unions are calling on the government to abandon the age measure altogether. It is the first time since 2010 that all the unions joined forces against a planned reform.

Opponents argue that there are other ways to get financing for the pensions — for instance via a tax on the wealthy or an increase in payroll contributions paid by employers.

Most opposition parties, including the hard-left France Unbowed, the Greens and the Socialist party, as well as the far-right National Rally, vowed to wage a harsh battle against the bill at parliament.

WHAT'S NEXT?

The changes are included in a budget amendment bill that has been formally presented at a Cabinet meeting on Monday. They will start being debated at parliament on Feb. 6.

Macron's centrist alliance lost its parliamentary majority last year; yet, it still has the most important group at the National Assembly, where it has hopes of being able to join up with the conservative Republican party to pass the measure.

Otherwise, the government may use a special power to force the law through parliament without a vote — but such a move will come at the price of heavy criticism. The bill will then need to be voted on by the Senate, where the Republicans have the majority.

The government aims at passing the bill by summer so that changes can take effect in September. Yet, its plans may be disrupted depending on the scale and duration of protests and strikes. 

-Sylvie Corbet, Associated Press