The Erickson Report, Page 1: Five Things Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Five Things Noted in Passing

We start this time with Five Things Noted in Passing. Every time I pull out five items I think worth noting but which aren’t going to get a lot of time. So let’s go.

A survey released in September by the Commonwealth Fund found that 58 percent of US small business owners, "small" being defined as fewer than 500 employees, support Medicare for All.

As the Commonwealth Fund pointed out in its overview, small businesses, which make up 99 percent of US employers and create 66 percent of new private-sector jobs, have been harder hit by rising health care costs than large corporations, because they don't have the same economic clout in negotiating with the private insurance industry. Which is likely why, when the survey asked small business owners which of eight issues was the biggest challenge facing their business, "Cost of providing health care coverage to employees" came out on top.

So despite the claims of the nanny-nanny naysayers, small businesses have much to gain from a single-payer system - and many of those owners know it.

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Fun fact, from a calculation someone did: If you came to America in 1619 and made $1 million every day for the next 400 years, and put it in a chest in your backyard, today you would have a few hundred million dollars less than Jeff Bezos.

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Here's something to brighten your day.

The UK's first Chick-fil-A is going to close just six months after it opened.

The Oracle, a shopping center located in Reading, England, decided not to extend Chick-fil-A’s lease beyond a six-month pilot period. A spokesperson for the mall said management had decided it was "the right thing to do," following community backlash against the fast food chain’s history of support of anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

Chick-fil-A tried some CYA, insisting that the company never intended for the Reading location to be open for more than a limited time and trying to imply the non-renewal was a mutual decision. The company claimed that having "pop-up locations" was part of a "long term strategy" to "expand our international presence" - but could not provide any plans for any future such "pop-up" sites.

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In the wake of Tweetie-pie's abandonment of the Kurds in northern Syria, Frontier Alliance International, a nonprofit Christian organization that provides medical aid in the Middle East, planned to hold an event titled "A Night of Prayer for the Kurds."
However, the event was abruptly canceled by the hotel where it was scheduled to be held.

The administrator of Frontier Alliance International, Charlene Struebing, said hotel staff had said "they’ve gotten a lot of security concerns and they couldn’t accommodate enough security. I think it’s more related to people protesting our event than it was anything we were doing."

Considering that a DC police spokeswoman said that it had not "received any information regarding potential security threats or concerns with this event" and that who the hell would be protesting a prayer event makes me suspect there was another factor at play: the fact that the event to pray for the Kurds was to be at Tweetie-pie's DC hotel.

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A bit late but still definitely worth noting. According to the US Energy Information Administration, in April, for the first time ever, utility-scale renewable energy generated more power than coal. Renewables - hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass - provided 23% of total generation, with coal at 20%.
That may not persist month after month because coal power generation varies seasonally, but the clear trend can't be denied.