This is a very good and depressing piece, and really drives home the point that Uber isn't so much a company as a latter-day version of the Pinkertons, lavishly subsidized by venture capital through its multi-billion losses to smash up workers' rights.
"Despite signing the bill [to regulate Uber], Newsom was still trying to negotiate an agreement that would ultimately shield them from it."
Another would-be foe: “The goal of the matter is for everyone to walk away equally unhappy”—the centrist credo really, how inspiring! Can't imagine how Uber has been able to roll over the opposition to its schemes like a tank.
The author makes the point here that the Democrats *could* do all kinds of things to rein Uber in, if they had the will.
And he goes on to say that they may very well not have the will to do a damn thing, with Uber cronies already installed in positions of influence.
Uber has only become a "cherished convenience", as he says, because it's been running for years at a massive loss, with gigantic corporate handouts that enable it to run a $200 million campaign against workers' rights in California.
If you follow the stories about Uber in the business press, the point at which it's going to become profitable is always just over the horizon.
This isn't so much playing capitalism on easy mode as being given the trophy while you're still comatose. But if the real goal is to turn the American workforce into subcontracted helots, who cares about a few billion dollars?
This interview with one of Starmer’s aides, whiny and petulant as it is, is still worth looking at properly to see how inane and vacuous their political vision is. 1/
Harris says that she cries when she thinks about Labour MPs who lost their seats in 2019 (not about the people who have already suffered and will continue suffering under a Conservative government). But why did they lose those seats? 2/
The MPs she mentions all represented Leave-voting constituencies (margins ranging from 9 to 16%). They all gained votes under Corbyn in 2017 but lost in 2019. 3/
Some familiar figures are pushing the absurd and defamatory claim that Ken Loach supports Holocaust denial. The story of this bogus talking-point, which relies upon multiple layers of falsehood and guilt-by-association, makes for a revealing case-study. 1/
It dates back to the 2017 Labour conference. In a NYT op-ed, Howard Jacobson claimed that “a motion to question the truth of the Holocaust was proposed” from the conference floor—a crude fabrication, which the NYT sanctioned in its pages. 2/
If you follow the link supplied by Jacobson or his editors, you’ll see that he was wrong on 3 counts: it wasn’t a motion, it wasn’t at the conference, and it wasn’t in favour of Holocaust denial. Quite the hat-trick! 3/
I wrote this piece back in December, but the plea for consistency was strictly rhetorical: I never expected the NYT and kindred spirits to learn any lessons from Trump. Now they're at it again in their Trumpian reporting on Ecuador's election. 1/
The fact that Latin American left-wing politicians were "accused of corruption and authoritarian overreach" tells us nothing; Biden and the Democrats have been accused of the same by Trump and the Capitol Hill mob. The question is whether those charges have any substance. 2/
Brazil's PT leaders were "accused of corruption" by a rabidly partisan magistrate who went on to take a cabinet post under Bolsonaro after paving the way for his electoral triumph. 3/
This Rachel Shabi article is the first proper attempt, I believe, to articulate in detail a certain line (“Corbyn shouldn’t have been suspended, but his statement on the EHRC report was still wrong”). So it’s worth looking at properly. 1/
Shabi takes the EHRC and its report entirely at face value: a “sobering verdict”, no less. This is not the first time she’s done this: she also uncritically endorsed the claims made in the BBC’s Panorama documentary in July 2019. 2/
She then scolded the Labour leadership for stating that the central claims made in that documentary were demonstrably untrue and indeed the opposite of the truth, something that has become even more obvious since. 3/
I have no issue with people disliking the Canary—it's never been my cup of tea, either. But I've never seen any coherent argument to explain why left figures should no-platform it while still engaging with Britain's commercial newspapers, whose record is incomparably worse.
Corbyn published this post-election piece in the Observer, for example, which not only supported the Iraq war, but ran a batch of fake stories about WMDs to sell it in advance (Nick Davies has a great account of how that happened in Flat Earth News).
If you put together all the sins of the Canary since it first appeared, it wouldn't come close to matching the harmful impact of those Observer stories on Iraq. Should Corbyn have boycotted them, too?
(They stitched him up with the headline, but that's another story)
I think this passage, from Open Labour's Euston 2.0 pamphlet, should kill off the "walk and chew gum" formula once and for all. It's a perfect example of mealy-mouthed equivocation about the complicity of one's own state in war crimes, dressed up as high principle. 1/
"The character of the Saudi intervention" (an aggressive war deliberately targeting civilians) isn't the only thing at stake here. The direct participation of British forces in that war makes it a moral imperative to oppose such complicity. 2/
In 2016, about 100 Labour MPs refused to support a motion calling for an end to Britain's direct participation in the Saudi war on Yemen. Some, like John "Mainstream" Woodcock, openly flaunted their support for that war. 3/