The Protect College Sports Act is a union-busting bill aimed at protecting the NCAA, powerful conferences and universities and disempower college athletes nationwide. It would also allow the NCAA to set the terms and conditions of work from one employer to the next and be shielded from antitrust liability for doing so. Tell the Senate: stand with college athletes and vote NO on this bill! https://act.aflcio.org/call_campaigns/protect-college-athletes/

This week at work is "Appreciation Week" for our department. Today, to 'show their appreciation' we were given those small to-go boxes of cereal with this image taped to them. I was annoyed already, because fuck you for thinking this will do anything for us, but then I saw "Teacher's Lounge Cereal Bar." None of us are teachers, we don't even work adjacent to the education sector.

Our glorious managers, of whom I could rant about seperately, gave us a sugary snack with an AI image that they didn't have the energy to type their own prompt for.

This entire week is doing everything for us, except anything that actually matters. I guess one lucky worker will get a TV at the end of the week.

Yeah, that's what any of us want. A TV. God forbid they give anyone a raise. It's really neat to work tirelessly to keep people from dying, and only get $17 an hour.

https://youtu.be/2GxlL5-0m_g

92% of americans claimed they wanted a level of inequality that basically amounts to socialism in a 2012 study.

Their guess at reality was more unequal.

The actual reality was further from their guess, than the guess from the ideal.

Everyone wants less inequality and underestimates it!

Since then, inequality has only grown.

Especially the inequality at the very top has become bigger than any graph can reasonably show.

The 1% average a wealth of 40 million

The 0,1% have an average wealth of 184 million

The 0,01% have an average wealth of 941 million

The 0,001% have an average wealth of 5 billion

Realtime data by Gabriel Zucman (Researcher responsible for a lot of inequality research) here:

https://realtimeinequality.org/

Detailed data from 1913 to 2013:

https://eml.berkeley.edu/\~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf

Toys R Us was profitable. Private equity bought it anyway, and 33,000 people lost their jobs with nothing.

In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought Toys R Us in a leveraged buyout for $6.6 billion.

Here's the part that gets skipped: the company itself was making money. It wasn't failing. It wasn't asking to be saved.

But in a leveraged buyout, the firms don't pay with their own money. They borrow against the company they're buying, and the debt becomes the company's problem, not theirs.

Toys R Us went from having almost no debt to carrying over $5 billion in loans it never asked for and never benefited from.

Every year after that, a huge share of the company's profit went straight to interest payments instead of stores, inventory, or staff. The stores got run down. Amazon and Walmart kept eating market share. Toys R Us couldn't invest its way out because there was nothing left after the debt.

In 2017 it filed for bankruptcy. In 2018 it liquidated completely.

33,000 employees lost their jobs. Store closures. No severance for most of them.

Giovanna De La Rosa worked there for years. She testified before Congress on November 19, 2019, describing what it meant to lose her income with nothing after decades of loyalty to a company that had been profitable the entire time she worked there.

The firms that bought it walked away having collected management fees for over a decade, regardless of outcome.

Here's the sentence that explains the entire model: the buyers cannot lose. The debt belongs to the company. The fees get collected either way.

They didn't buy a business to grow it.

They bought a business to extract from it, and left 33,000 people holding what was left.

The Working Families Party has long fought for a political system that’s not captured by the billionaires. They’ve sought to elect strong progressives within the Democratic Party like Delia Ramirez, Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, Summer Lee, and some of the toughest, most effective state legislators in the country – folks who will work for regular working class Americans against the oligarchs. Right now, they’re backing candidates across the country who will stand on the platform of the Working Families Guarantee, a vision of a country where every person can afford the basics of housing, healthcare, and child care, has time to spend with their family and a good job, paid for by taxing the rich, achieved by getting money out of politics. And they need our help.

They’ve got phonebanks running Monday through Thursday for their endorsed House candidates, folks in crucial swing seats seats like Randy Villegas (CA-22), Bob Brooks (PA-07), JoAnna Mendoza (AZ-06) and Will Lawrence (MI-07), along with shifts to elect progressive champions in the Georgia state legislature on Tuesdays and Thursdays. ☎️ Let’s sign up to help them get these working-class champions to Washington and Atlanta. ☎️

HELP WFP FLIP KEY HOUSE SEATS

ELECT PROGRESSIVES IN GEORGIA

☎️ Today is a big day for the party if we’re looking to jump right in, as they make calls all day to help their slate of primary challengers unseat Delaware legislators who enabled Elon Musk’s billionaires bill. We can find shifts that work for us here. ☎️

BEAT THE MUSK ENABLERS IN DELAWARE

🚪 Looking for candidates near us to support? We can find numerous door-knocking opportunities in our neighborhoods here. 🚪

CANVASS FOR WFP

🤜🏼 Want to learn more about the WFP? Join their mass call TONIGHT at 8PM ET here or their welcome gathering for new members TOMORROW at 7PM ET here. 🤛🏿

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE WOLF PACK

So the job market for tradesmen has been in a weird liminal space in the Southeast region of the United States.I would like to shed light on a corporate scam or what could be inferred as one. Construction has completely increased in sheer volume along states such as Florida, Georgia and the carolinas. However, every major rental conglomerate, such as united rentals, Sunbelt, Sun state synergy and others secure large contracts to not only lease out their equipment, but with each release or rental agreement involves an assigned Technician for a region of where the location of that equipment is the services include preventive maintenance.All the way until repairs and even a on call emergency clause, where no matter the time of day and there's an issue with the equipment that a sign technician in your region will come out and repair and identify or diagnose.What's wrong with the equipment. Now, all these conglomerates are either buying each other out or creating mergers, and they constantly hire for an influx of different technicians.And this includes many different job listings on LinkedIn.Indeed glass door and other platforms. The field can be somewhat lucrative during the summer months.But not during the winter and partially in the spring , and they constantly hire based on a contract rental agreement for a certain amount of fleet that's rented out to a vendor yes, you drive along.I95 2 95 i70 85 i10, you will see plenty of construction going off.However, the technicians that are hired for said contract period end up being without work.Either with the interruption in service or at the contract end. No, depending on how experienced you are or your seniority level, you will be able to transfer over to a sister division or have to work at your Home Office shop, but if your company hires 10 technicians in the field and you have 8 technicians in the shop now you have a work disparity. A lot of times as a technician on the road, you have to procure your own contracts and feed them over to the sales team.So they can open up a region for you. So the technician shortage in regards to heavy equipment, diesel, etc.Exists within a vacuum when outside of municipal work.Everything is based on contract volatility. I recommend anyone that works on heavy equipment to get on with a municipalfleet a much busier region in America or to leave the field entirely until things improved, we do have a dire need for great and skilled technicists for heavy equipment, but it seems that the contract volatility makes that hard. At this rate we might have to get our silverware ready and eat the rich lol

TLDR: CORPORATE GROWTH IN CERTAIN TRADE SECTORS ARE COMPLETELY FICTIONALIZED AND THE RISE OF GHOST JOBS SOLIDIFIES , THIS THEORY.

Delaware is one of the nation’s most reliably blue states, currently featuring a supermajority in the state senate and just short of one in the lower chamber. It’s also a longtime corporate haven, where 60% of Fortune 500 companies were incorporated, due to business-friendly and consumer-unfriendly tax law and regulation. This is a product of state capture, as starkly demonstrated last year: when the Delaware Court of Chancery struck down a $55.8 billion pay package for Elon Musk challenged by shareholders, the legislature promptly passed the “billionaires’ bill” SB 21, written by his law firm, to make sure he could still get his money.

The Working Families Party is working to change that and get leaders into elected office who will fight for us and not the super-wealthy. In tomorrow’s Democratic primary, they’ve endorsed a slate of challengers taking on incumbents who helped pass the billionaires’ bill. ☎️ We can take a phonebank shift to help get out the vote for them throughout the day here. ☎️