Another fucking tank

Updates

  1. Originally published, February 13, 7:31 pm.
  2. I had given the wrong name of a location. It is the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, not Veterans Hall. Corrected below, February 15, 7:47 pm:

Gratuitous guns

I found another fucking tank on display. This one (figure 1) is on display at the American Legion post in Plum.
IMG_0092
Fig. 1. Plum Borough (originally Township), Pennsylvania. Photograph by author, February 13, 2020.

I have updated the map (figure 2).
[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=1K1CjgWPOH71L1UsUSHs00ubbu-jYnWux&w=640&h=480]
Fig. 2. Gratuitous guns map.

I don’t make it out to Plum very often and this is well outside the area of Mon Valley I have associated with white supremacism where most of the munitions to be found on the map are located. It’s a bit of a surprise. As I look at the map in figure 2, the three outliers now where I’m less certain that racism may be a factor are at the Veterans Hall Soldiers and Sailors Memorial (Corrected February 15, 2020) near University of Pittsburgh (known locally as “Pitt”), Monongahela (which is still in Mon Valley but at some distance upstream from the other sites), and Plum. I don’t get to either of the latter two areas often and I don’t know them. So I don’t know what’s going on with them.

But I’m deeply suspicious about the rest of these sites, including in South Park.


The tussle over Medicare For All in Nevada

Healthcare

So what does it mean for the Nevada Culinary Workers Union to vehemently oppose Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All?[1]

It can’t mean they’re opposed to healthcare as a right extended to all because that is a goal they claim to support:

“Our union believes that everyone has the right to good health care and that health care should be a right, not a privilege,” said Geoconda Argüello-Kline, the group’s secretary-treasurer, adding that the union had already negotiated its own health care plan for “what working people need.” . . .

The future of union-negotiated health care plans has been a major point of contention surrounding single-payer plans like the one Sanders and Warren have backed, and has split union leaders. Opponents of Medicare for All have argued that such a system would boot union workers off their hard-won insurance plans, with no guarantee that a single-payer system would be as good.[2]

But it can’t really mean they’re protecting their members because Medicare For All would not exclude their members. This opposition is to a plan that has yet to pass through the congressional meat grinder. Which is to say they don’t even know what they’re opposing.

So this opposition can only mean one thing: The union wants to maintain control over their members’ healthcare, presumably to leverage it as a benefit of union membership:

The Culinary Union, which provides health insurance to 130,000 workers and their family members through a special trust fund, strongly opposes Medicare for all on the basis that it would eliminate the health insurance they have negotiated for over several decades. Health insurance provided by the Culinary Health Fund is considered to be some of the best in the state, and the union even opened a 60,000-square-foot state-of-the-art health clinic a couple of years ago for its members.[3]

It’s great that the union has done all this. But when the problem is defined as quality (that is, not Medicaid) healthcare being accessible to people regardless of what jobs they have, the union’s answer is clearly not an answer.

Megan Messerly, “In new flyer, Culinary Union warns members Sanders would ‘end’ their health care if elected president,” Nevada Independent, February 11, 2020, https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/in-new-flyer-culinary-union-warns-members-sanders-would-end-their-health-care-if-elected-president

Caitlin Oprysko, “Nevada culinary union lays into Sanders supporters after health care backlash,” Politico, February 12, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/12/bernie-sanders-nevada-culinary-union-114687


  1. [1]Megan Messerly, “In new flyer, Culinary Union warns members Sanders would ‘end’ their health care if elected president,” Nevada Independent, February 11, 2020, https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/in-new-flyer-culinary-union-warns-members-sanders-would-end-their-health-care-if-elected-president; Caitlin Oprysko, “Nevada culinary union lays into Sanders supporters after health care backlash,” Politico, February 12, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/12/bernie-sanders-nevada-culinary-union-114687
  2. [2]Caitlin Oprysko, “Nevada culinary union lays into Sanders supporters after health care backlash,” Politico, February 12, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/12/bernie-sanders-nevada-culinary-union-114687
  3. [3]Megan Messerly, “In new flyer, Culinary Union warns members Sanders would ‘end’ their health care if elected president,” Nevada Independent, February 11, 2020, https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/in-new-flyer-culinary-union-warns-members-sanders-would-end-their-health-care-if-elected-president