Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 38.3 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
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Today’s news, fermented:
This is one of those days where it seems like everything is going on, and the catastrophes are colliding.
Here are a few collision points.
The world is abuzz with talk of a vaccine, since the NHS of England started vaccinating people earlier this week. A few people have had allergic reactions, which regulators seem to have not anticipated.
The Global North, as it is wont to do, is already hoarding vaccines—53% of the most viable ones, to be exact. This could mean billions would miss out on, as they call them in the UK, ‘jabs.’
Of course, that’s not all the hoarding that’s going on. Billionaires made one trillion dollars—that’s $1,000,000,000,000—during the pandemic. This profit was generated on the backs of workers deemed ‘essential’ yet never paid fairly, offered health care, or taken care of in any way a company might protect its other ‘assets.’ These corporations—Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, and Tyson are at the top of the list—are denying people’s humanity and rights to health and safety.
Power hoarding is basically America’s national slogan, so it’s no surprise that our outgoing pres has fully hijacked the Republican party, and is now using that to (try to) hijack the Georgia election. Of course, the Georgia GOP is coming to his aid, building on its history of using lawsuits and other nonsense to prevent voter registration.
If we shift our focus northward to West Virginia, the power hoarding continues. The ironically named governor, Jim Justice, owns a coal company that has ‘pledged’ to stop violating water pollution rules. Sorry, fossil fuel companies aren’t exactly known for doing what they say…see yesterday’s rant if you missed it.
It’s especially hard to believe a pledge like that when simultaneously, Federal Regulators Are Rewriting Environmental Rules So a Massive Pipeline Can Be Built in the same state. I know there was a lot of talk at the beginning of the year about how the sky was clearing literally and figuratively because of lowered emissions during lockdowns, but it turns out that those reductions will amount to no more than 0.01C, which, as they say, ain’t shit.
Another thing 2020 was lauded for was white ‘liberals’ waking the fuck up, which also is apparently happening a lot more in online behavior than in the form of real change. Is this you? Work ahead. Think it’s not? Still, lots of work ahead. Hundreds of years of white supremacy is not about to get undone in a few seasons of protests.
One necessary piece of good news after this deluge is that mass movements are working in the US and in Argentina, where the country moves closer to groundbreaking legislation that would make it the first Latin American country to legalize abortion. Across Latin America, people with uteri have been persecuted and worse for pursuing abortions and having miscarriages. This legislation would be a big win for human and uterus-having people’s rights.
Here’s another piece of good news—a whale off the coast of Brooklyn.
*Hot Goss*
Back tomorrow from the superb Latifah Azlan.