Biden Turns It Up

Joe Biden still has a lead in the polls after both conventions, and with Labor Day finally here (it falls at the latest day possible this year), he's campaigning on the road and in your face ahead of schedule.

This past Friday, after a visit to Kenosha concerning the Blake incident that outclassed Donald Trump's visit there two days before, Biden spoke again (the picture above is from that speech), this time lambasting Trump for his comments on the military, particularly with regard to his late son Beau's own service in Iraq.  Biden then pivoted to the economy, which, inexplicably, remains Trump's strong suit in the polls.  With more people trusting Trump than Biden on the economy, Trump being a (failed) businessman and all, Biden gave a speech linking the recession to the COVID-19 pandemic and driving the point home that many people on this Labor Day are underemployed out of work entirely, need job training and short-term assistance but can't get either, and have fallen behind in an economy that rewards stock market investors more than the people who work at the companies whose shares are being traded.  Furthermore,  Biden said, the economy is linked to the pandemic and how we handle it, and Trump has handled both badly.

That may be a difficult argument to make at time when the virus seems to be slowing its spread and voters rate the overall economy as the most important issue of the election. Biden's speech was a good start, but he has to keep delivering the message over and over, the way Trump lies over and over.  Meanwhile, Biden plans to go to Michigan - a state that benefited from the economic stimulus program Biden oversaw as Vice President in the Obama administration - and talk up his role in saving the auto industry (Biden is a car enthusiast as well as a passenger-rail supporter), so it looks like he'll be doing just that.      

Hiatus: This Time I Mean It!

This time I'm definitely taking a break from what I informally call the Maginnis Post. :-) I thought I'd only be posting sporadically after the hurricane, and I ended up posting once a day as always.  But when you start to notice typos in earlier posts that the spell-checker didn't catch (and I hope you didn't!) and you realize you've been repeating yourself on stories out of Washington that refuse to resolve themselves, perhaps it's time to take a few days off.  And I am accumulating more assignments with the hyperlocal news sites I write for, so I have to be mindful of those.  This has nothing to do with the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee headed this way (and Hurricane Katia may not hit the U.S .after all, though it's still too early to tell).

So I'll be taking the next couple of days off, but don't worry, I'll comment on President Obama's jobs speech if it turns out he actually has something to say.  I'll probably return to a semi-regular posting schedule, or even resume a daily posting schedule, after Friday.

Unless Katia ends up hitting my area.

I hope you all had a happy Labor Day.

Hard Times For Labor

Sometimes I wonder if anyone really understands the meaning of Labor Day anymore. All it appears to be these days is a day on which have one last summer fling before the kids go back to school. But in this severe recession, where two million jobs have been lost and more people are extremely nervous about the future than at any time in recent memory (I remember the 1990-91 recession, and it wasn't nearly this bad), it's worth pausing to think of everything the labor movement has given us - the five-day work week, paid vacation time, health benefits . . . even if labor has been diminished in recent decades.

Tax cuts for the wealthy and investment in luxuries instead of factories (what Ronald Reagan's supply-side tax code was supposed to encourage - yeah, right) have put a great deal of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, with the workers carrying the burden of paying for the upkeep of government. Meanwhile, CEOs usually make 866 times the salaries of workers, only seven percent of whom belong to unions and are one pink slip away from unemployment.

We may have turned a corner with President Obama's election, but the way out of this mess is going to be difficult. Now, more than ever, workers need to hold on and hang in there.