The Party of Child Murder
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
I’m in Washington, DC today to attend the Senate HELP committee hearing on union-busting at Starbucks. The main event will be the grilling of Howard Schultz, the company’s multi-billionaire quasi-founder and failed would-be presidential candidate.
Schultz “returned” to the company for a third time as CEO last year with the aim of stopping a unionization campaign that was beginning to sweep through Starbucks cafes nationwide — “returned” being a relative term, as he’s always lurked and pulled strings as a chair and member of the board of directors. Starbucks is his baby, and the audacity of the people who actually do the hard grunt work essential to the business’s success to ask for fair wages and benefits was simply unacceptable.
Having covered the Starbucks union drive since its earliest moments, seeing Schultz, having resigned again as CEO two weeks early, now being forced to testify in front of the Senate and answer for the brutal and explicitly illegal union-busting campaign, responsible for more than 200 workers fired and more laid off, it’s a bit unreal. I’ll be back here tonight or tomorrow with some thoughts, and you can follow my coverage today at More Perfect Union.
Ignore the narrative peddled by political media and conservative politicians, because there is no “debate” over guns in this country. There are simply people who don’t want children to be murdered, and people that are fine with children being murdered.
That’s it. This is a binary. The mass school shooting in Nashville on Monday was yet another maddeningly clear sign that Congress is morally obligated to ban semi-automatic weapons. Suggesting alternative approaches to solving the everyday scourge of mass murder is simply an act of callous deflection away from the fundamental problem.
This country is suffering from a mental health crisis, but people all across the world suffer with mental illness.
Poverty is endemic everywhere.
Organized crime and ideological extremists hold tremendous influence in just about every nation.
Yet there is only one place where people get blown apart by semi-automatic assault rifles with any regularity, because there is only place where people have easy access to semi-automatic rifles.
If a politician does not support gun control laws that would eradicate AR-15s and other weapons of war, they are sentencing countless other children to the same gruesome fates as Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, the three nine-year-old children who were murdered in Nashville on Monday. Because this will happen again; the massacre at Covenant
Simply put, voting against banning semi-automatic weapons is looking devastated parents in the eyes and yelling that they do not give a shit that their kid was rendered unrecognizable by an exploding bullet, and in fact do not want to do anything to prevent other children and parents from experiencing the same horrific fate.
That this has become a partisan issue is among the most dismal symptoms of our cultural and political derangement. It wasn’t always like this, but money and media have incentivized this race to the seventh circle of hell.
I was in middle school when the Columbine massacre took place. The murder of 13 people by several disaffected students collectively known as the Trench Coat Mafia shook the nation. In the aftermath, tragedy and mourning gave way to a particular kind of American anxiety: Mass shootings happened in troubled inner cities, not in an upscale suburb like Littleton, Colorado.
The shooting so perplexed and horrified people that the national media spent months and months trying to understand why the suburban bubble had suddenly burst with such violence. MSNBC even broadcast a town hall conversation from the high school gym in the town where I was living at the time, which was deemed the most demographically similar to Columbine in the country. (The proximity to MSNBC’s studios in NYC probably helped).
No amount of TV broadcasts of hand-wringing parents could solve the problem, much less prevent the rush of mass shootings that began a few years later. There have been 376 school shootings since, with 348,000 kids impacted. There are a few others that were publicized enough to be given their own shorthand — Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Buffalo come to mind — but at this point, the rest of them sort of blend together and wash out of our memories on a blood-red tide.
This is how Republicans want it. They want the mass murders to fade from memory, unless they can use them to further their disgusting agenda, as is happening in Nashville with the gender identity of the shooter. Never mind the fact that they couldn’t have murdered six people had they not had easy access as an 18-year-old to a semi-automatic assault rifle, of course.
Don’t let them get away with. Democrats have to speak up. They have to call Republicans the party of child murder. There is no other alternative. If they feel aggrieved over it, they can always stop enabling mass child murder.
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