What do workers want? Respect.

If you think your staff is amazing, treat them like it.

Why are we seeing help-wanted signs everywhere, and why are fast-food joints all of a sudden offering $15 an hour? Are workers really so lazy they can’t be enticed to take a job for double minimum wage?

The answer is that people are willing to work, but not for a pittance, not part-time and not without benefits and a somewhat predictable schedule. Workers deserve respect, and they’re starting to dermand it.

Employers laid of workers by the millions, and a lot of these workers made more staying home and being safe than they did waiting tables, tending bar or cleaning hotel rooms. And while they were home, nobody trashed them, grabbed their asses or demanded they smile to get a tip — all while not making enough money to survive.

Those workers whose jobs didn’t go away faced nasty comments about keeping their masks on, served people who refused to wear masks, were denied tips (remember, most tipped employees are paid less than $2.50 an hour and often work less than 25 hours a week at this job, so they’re forced to work two or more jobs). Many of them have two or more roommates.

Women face sexual harassment from bosses and customers alike, but they can’t quit. It’s akin to indentured servitude.

This is how business treats human beings when workers have no power to make things better. The dismantling of worker portections that took decades to put into place began under Ronald Reagan, when he broke the air traffic controllers’ union, and conditions have only worsened since. One of the reasons we don’t have a comprehensive and humane immigration policy is because big business doesn’t want it to happen. Businesses hire undocumented immigrants becauase it’s easy to abuse them. They live in fear of being sent back to the hell they came from, which likely is even worse than what they’re experiencing.

Business wants control of its workers lives.

Back when my grandparents worked in the textile mills of New England, children worked alongside their parents in the factory. Mill owners liked having children there because their small hands could reach into the machinery and clear jams. A lot of children lost all or parts of their hands when the machinery started up again. My grandparents witnessed this. My grandmother went to work in the mill when she was 7; my grandfather was 10. Companies provided housing, which was pretty substandard, and many had company stores that charged prices just high enough to keep workers in debt so they couldn’t just pack up and look for better paying jobs.

Today, credit cards do the same thing. We’re not paid enough to make ends meet, so when we need a car repair or a tooth fixed, we have to charge it. Then we have that monthly payment, so it’s even harder to make ends meet. So, we accept the offer to transfer our balances to a lower-interest card — except the bank leaves $1,000 on the old card. Now you have another payment to make. It’s all done to keep us in debt. It’s deliberate. Just look at the ads for apps that help children learn about credit. Get ’em hooked while they’re young.

Look at what happens to people who don’t have a credit rating. You can’t even get a job without one. You can’t rent an apartment or buy something in installments. You can’t get a health insurance policy through Affordable Care Act marketplaces without jumping through a remarkable number of hoops. I know because I helped someone do it. It took weeks. If you pay all your bills on time and save up to buy your car with cash, you don’t exist.

Thanks to the pandemic, workers who were laid off by the millions found better ways to make a living. There’s the bartender who went to work for the wine distributer and tripled his income, plus got benefits like paid time off and access to health insurance. There’s the line cook who decided to open her own catering service, the photographer who opened a small gallery …

How many times have you heard someone say waitstaff should just quit complaing and get a better job? You know, like that’s an easy thing to do when you can’t go to college or trade school because you’re working 70 hours a week and you can’t schedule a job interview because your work schedule changes every week.

Well, these workers got some time off to work on their dreams and now your favorite restaurant can’t find staff to work part-time, with no benefits and a shitty schedule, even when they offer $15 an hour.

Workers aren’t lazy, they’re just doing what was suggested to them — getting better jobs.

When employers offer a living wage, full-time work, benefits and a somewhat predictable schedule, they’ll have all the workers they need. If they can’t offer these things, they don’t deserve to be in business. Workers are not here to subsidize your dream.

When will someone stop him?

His affiliation with convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein didn’t stop him.

For three and a half years, we have watched as the creature currently squatting in the White House has dismantled norm after norm after norm.

He has surrounded himself with sycophants, and disposed of all whose loyalty rested first with the nation and its people. He has fired people who won’t stoop to his cruel ways.

It isn’t just him, of course. He has allies and co-conspirators, all of whom have dispensed with societal and governmental norms in a naked power grab.

The Republicans in the Senate have been happy to follow him down the path to fascism, filling seat after seat with incompetent judges loyal only to the fascists on the right — hundreds of them, thanks to Mitch McConnell and his minions.

The object, of course, has been to take over the judiciary so they could own all three branches of government.

We got back the House of Representatives, but it means little when the Senate is pandering to the most unstable, the most purposely cruel person ever to inhabit the Oval Office.

And now we have a deadly pandemic raging out of control. Those of us who take it seriously haven’t seen our families in four months, and God only knows how much longer it will be.

And because of the inaction from Washington, we are trapped here. Our passports are useless because no other country will have us. Mexico is finally grateful for the wall. Canada has closed its border. The European Union has told us to keep out.

Meanwhile, 140,000 Americans are dead and no one knows how long it might be before we can get a handle on it because nobody will do anything about him. The House impeached him and the Senate shrugged it off. He blatantly cashes in on his office and reaps profit from his position, in defiance of the law, and still nothing happens.

When he said he could shoot someone and get away with it, he was right.

Each revelation of his misdeeds starts with, “Maybe now somebody will do something,” but nothing happens.

Now his niece, clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump, has written a book about how he came to be who he is, and it reveals even more horrendous information. It sold nearly a million copies on its first day out.

I remember him as a real estate magnate in New York. I remember hearing about how he made sure his late brother’s children were disinherited after his father’s death — including a very sick baby named William, whose health insurance was cut off.

I remember the Central Park Five and how he has yet to apologize for calling for the death penalty for these five — who, by the way, were innocent of the attack on a woman who was jogging in the park.

Last night, everyone was focusing on how, during an interview with Rachel Maddow, Mary said that, of course, she had heard him use the N-word and utter anti-Semitic slurs.

We have 140,000 Americans dead from a lethal pandemic that is raging out of control as he tries to think about how he can make money off it, and the numbers are still rising, and people are screaming that he used the N-word.

Yes, he’s a racist. And people of color are dying in greater numbers because of his racism. People of color are still dying at the hands of police.

And now, it will be poor children — disproportionately children of color — and their teachers who will die has he tries to send them back to school so he and his minions can pretend things are back to normal in time for the election.

And still, no one with the ability to do something to remove him from power will act.

What will it take? We know 140,000 dead won’t do the trick. Will it take a million dead? Two million? Will it take the utter destruction of the economy? The crumbling of supply lines? Will we have to sink to civil war like Syria and Yemen?

When will somebody do something about him?

To love each other, we must seek justice for everyone

Demonstrators in Minneapolis demand justice after the murder of George Floyd by four police officers who ignored his pleas for almost nine minutes.

I’ve seen a meme on Facebook this morning, posted by several friends, calling on us to love one another.

But as sweet as it seems, it just calls on us to agree to disagree, and that will never contribute a thing to the justice oppressed people are seeking.

“We’re one race—the human race. You want to support President Trump? You do you. It’s your choice. You want to support Biden? Fine… also your choice! You want to believe in God? Okay, believe in God. You want to believe in magical creatures that fly around & sprinkle fairy dust to make life better? Awesome… you do you.

“BUT stop thrusting your beliefs on others & not being able to deal with the fact that they don’t have the same exact mind-set as you. Having our own minds is what makes us all individual and beautiful.”

I have a problem with this — a big problem.

The entire thing (it has several more paragraphs) seems sweet, but it isn’t. It offers a pass to racists and bigots.

“Just do you …” means I’m not going to challenge your beliefs that people of color are stupid or lazy, that poor people don’t deserve more than slave wages or that they don’t need a decent place to live or healthy food and clean water, that immigrants belong in cages because they came here seeking safety and perhaps a better life for their children — the same thing every one of our ancestors came here seeking.

“Just do you …” means I’m OK with your bullying demonstrators and legislators by carrying a military-grade assault weapon around and demanding we reopen the economy in the midst of a deadly pandemic because you want a haircut.

“Just be you …” means you’re OK with cops killing unarmed black people and then looking to justify it by saying, “he had pot in his system,” or “he was arrested for breaking and entering six years ago …” None of these things is a capital crime, and everyone deserves a trial, not summary judgment and execution.

“Just be you …” means you’re OK with the 1 percent grabbing all the stimulus money and leaving small-business owners desperate enough to feel they have to open up or starve.

“Just be you …” means you’re privileged enough not to be experiencing these horrors.

We need to be talking about inequality.

We need to talk about how we love and support people who are forced to work low-wage jobs or starve in the middle of a pandemic.

We need to talk about those who are fine with children, stolen from their parents and held in filthy cages, are being lost in the system or dying from preventable causes.

We need to talk about the number of unarmed people of color shot and killed by cops, who then face few, if any, consequences.

We need to talk about people who are marching for their very lives are being doused with chemical weapons (tear gas is a chemical weapon that’s banned in war by multi-national treaties) and shot with rubber bullets.

We need to talk about poisoned water in Flint and other cities.

Yes, the meme is sweet and feel-good, and it’s privileged.

Those of us who have enough food and water, who can feel safe walking or jogging pretty much anywhere, can feel this way and feel good about calling to love everyone.

But to love everyone, we have to advocate for those who aren’t privileged. I don’t feel like pointing that out is “thrusting an opinion” on anyone. People are dying because of inequality. Love can only solve these problems if we who have privilege act to secure what we have for those who are oppressed.

My faith calls me to do that. What about yours?

A month into isolation …

For the first time in many years, the Himalayan range is visible from India, as the shutdowns caused by quarantine clear pollution worldwide.

Isolation, Day 29: It’s hard to believe I’ve been home for four weeks.

I still have plenty to do every day, thanks to the water disaster in my garage, the fact that the big mower is broken and won’t be fixed for another two weeks (we’re using the reel mower, which is great exercise) and the beginning of gardening season. Plus, I still have about a quarter of my granddaughter’s wedding quilt to finish, if the cats will let me work on it.

Around the world, there are reports of pollution being reduced, the air and water clearing, because we’re not out driving, rushing around to buy more stuff, much of it utterly useless. I have hope that we’ll realize there are more important things in life than consuming just to consume.

I’m doing OK except for the moments of utter panic, when I realize how serious this is and how unprepared we are to face it.

Republican friends all think I’m just blaming the current occupant of the Oval Office, but it started way before he ever schlumped into office. We as a society believed we were so smart and knew so much science that a pandemic like the 1918-19 flu couldn’t happen again, even though scientists warned us it was not just likely, but absolutely certain to happen again

But our policymakers knew more than the scientists and, starting with Reagan, we cut funding to public health and the CDC. We denied millions access to care in the name of profit, and allowed tens of thousands of people to die unnecessarily. We cut spending on public health so rich people could get more tax breaks and amass more and more and more money.

Both Republicans and Democrats did it, and now we have a presumptive presidential nominee in the Democratic Party who vows he will not allow Medicare for all to happen, even while 70 percent of Americans want it, and we’re being told that if we don’t vote for this deeply flawed old white man — a man who refuses to apologize for the way he treated Anita Hill or his support of welfare reform and other policies that have proven destructive — that WE’RE the problem.

Since 1980, even the Democratic Party leadership hasn’t believed in Democratic Party ideals of strengthening labor, building up public infrastructure, of government funding of scientific research, of doing things for the common good instead of just for profit. Even the Democratic administrations attacked workers’ rights, refused to take profit out of essential services like health care and education — in fact, they helped the process of de-funding essential services, slashing the social safety net and cutting taxes on the rich.

And now you want to criticize me for saying this nominee is so deeply flawed it may be impossible for him to defeat the most corrupt, the most ignorant, the most despicable man ever to set foot in Washington.

You say I have to get in line to vote for someone who won’t even begin to work on climate catastrophe, which is unfolding before us in the form of global climate change and the unleashing of pathogens like the novel coronavirus because of the way we have encroached upon the habitats of animals we once rarely encountered but now eat.

This candidate is a man who went silent at the beginning of the pandemic, while Bernie Sanders had encouraging words for us and pushed for policies that would help more of us survive.

I’m not saying I won’t vote for him. I waver between saying, OK, I’ll hold my nose and do it, and saying I’m only going to vote down-ticket — although I’m not happy with many of my choices there, either.

I’m seeing people attack me because I think Biden won’t be able to win in November, and I do think he will lose, even if I do cast my vote for him.

The moment Sanders suspended his campaign, I started seeing threatening messages from moderates, demanding we all get in line and not complain about our only choice being this 1960s-era Republican.

I was a Democrat in the 1960s, when the party platform called for universal health care, before Reagan came alone and made “liberal” a dirty word and raised greed to the level of a religion.

I left the party several years ago, when my resolution to include an immediate wage hike to $15 so those making minimum wage could survive on a full-time job, was changed to a raise to $10 an hour over five years. I walked out and never looked back.

This month at home has given me a lot of time to think about where we need to go as a nation, and it isn’t in the direction of do-nothing moderation.

We need to be bold. We need to take the reins away from the fascists and moderates and build a society where everyone can thrive. I will support nothing less, and neither should you.

If we can move Biden to support Medicare for all, a living wage and free tuition for community college, I will be happy to vote for him. Otherwise, I will make no promises, even though I’m likely to be frightened enough by the prospect of President for Life Trump to cast my vote for the slightly-less-bad alternative.

Thing is, I’m not the problem here. The Democratic Party, the Republican Party and all their ultra-wealthy controllers are. Our corporate overlords have stacked the cards against us again.

Yes, this is real, and yes, it’s political

The novel coronavirus is a threat. It is real. It is not being exaggerated to harm the current administration.

The novel coronavirus is a real thing.

COVID-19 can kill you and it’s likely to kill a million or more people in the United States.

These are facts, not some made-up fantasy to defeat the current occupant of the Oval Office.

It is not safe to gather in groups or to travel. If you’re in a high risk group, you need to be at home. If you’re not at home, you need to wash your hands with soap and hot water often and avoid touching your face. Hand sanitizer does not work as well as washing with soap and hot water, so quit hoarding it.

It didn’t have to be this serious here, but the current administration took no steps early on to mitigate the spread. The current administration, in fact, denied the seriousness of this pandemic and turned down testing kits that could have tracked the pandemic’s path and slowed the progress of the virus.

But, no. Instead, the current occupant of the Oval Office pretended nothing was wrong and kept claiming that everything was OK, assuming his followers would believe him.

I have seen denials of the seriousness of this as recently as yesterday, and I have answered each claim that it’s no worse than the flu with the fact that it is 10 to 20 times more lethal.

These claims are often followed by appeals to not make this political.

Well, here’s the thing: when politicians cut funding for public health for 40 years, shit happens.

Funding for public health (national, state and local health departments, research efforts and response personnel) has been cut by every Republican administration — especially this one — since Ronald Reagan because for some reason the science deniers tend to affiliate with the Republican party, and Democrats have lacked the spine to stand up and fight.

Politics could have prevented this, but Americans wanted to believe Reagan’s attacks on government. Remember when he said the most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”? I remember it clearly.

Government — politics — is there to mitigate disasters like this on behalf of the people it serves. Except Republicans have perpetuated the lie that government is bad in every instance. So, our infrastructure crumbled, and public health was part of that infrastructure.

Now we have a government that lies every day about what’s happening, and tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who shouldn’t die, will.

If testing had begun in earnest two weeks or a month ago, we would know where we stand. But people who are showing up in the emergency room with symptoms of COVID-19 are being sent back home with no test, unless they have traveled to China.

If you think the virus isn’t in your community because there have been no confirmed cases, that’s because there are no test kits, so it’s not possible to confirm cases. That’s one way to make the total look lower than it actually is, which makes it easier for this administration to lie about the spread of the illness.

The illness is in your community. People are carrying the illness into public places and it’s spreading like wildfire because we insist on listening to the most dishonest administration ever to exist in Washington.

Let me repeat: The illness is in your community already.

If you’re going out into public places because you don’t think you’re at high risk, you’re risking infecting people who are at risk.

When you go into a restaurant, you’re asking wait staff that likely have no real access to health care and no paid sick time to take the risk that you’re not carrying the virus.

The reason that waiter has no access to care, no paid sick leave and a $2.35-an-hour wage is all about politics as well. Again and again, Republicans have refused to pass legislation that would fix any of this, and Democrats have yet to get enough spine to stand up and rebel against it.

This disaster could have been mitigated much more effectively than it has. Look at how South Korea has dealt with this. Testing is available everywhere and people are staying out of public places. In the end, their mortality rate will be a lot lower than ours. We’re going to look more like Italy, or even Iran, where the mass graves can be seen from space.

All of this is happening at a time in my city is struggling with its hospital having been taken over by a for-profit corporation. HCA has laid off large numbers of CNAs and other support staff — especially housekeeping, which is the department that cleans your room — and cut back on nursing staff as well. Nurse-to-patient ratios are dangerously high and getting worse as nurses quit in disgust. The nurses who remain are fighting to establish a union so they can demand improvements in patient safety.

And, yes, this is political, too. We have no laws mandating safe nurse-to-patient ratios. We have no regulations regarding how many cleaning supplies must be on hand to guarantee patient safety. There is no law mandating that patient safety has to come before profits because Richard Nixon signed that away in 1973.

We are in this mess because of the dishonesty and utter lack of leadership of the current administration, and because of decades of politically motivated cuts to public health to funnel ever more money into the pockets of the wealthiest and the military.

So, let’s be clear about this. We have to make changes — serious changes — to our system. We need to send the current crop of do-nothings home in November — well, those of us who survive that long, anyway — and elect people who will start to rebuild our public health systems.

The truth is that each one of us stands a small chance of dying from this, but we likely all know people who will die. The death rate is about 3.4 percent, but the infection rate could be as high as 70 percent. These are the real numbers.

So, yes, this is a real danger and yes, politics could have made it better. Instead, politics has made it far, far worse than it needed to be.