It’s the “program” that’s cynical. If someone else, say a non-profit, were to run a program like this (though even then it should have meaningful retraining programs, not beginning coding classes), then I’d be with you. But Ivanka Trump is part of the administration - both the cause of the shit we’re in right now, and the one entity with the resources and reach (and the mandate) to actually do something about the problem - and all she’s giving is platitudes.
If you don’t see the parallels with Marie Antoinette and “Let them eat cake,” then you aren’t looking hard enough.
Would anything different change their minds? Because that’s been tried, and it didn’t work.
This is bringing back memories of Norman Tebbit (Margaret Thatcher’s enforcer).
I never want to remember Norman Tebbit.
In the aftermath of the 1981 riots in Handsworth and Brixton, Tebbit responded to a suggestion by the Young Conservative National chairman, Iain Picton that rioting was the natural reaction to unemployment:
I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.
As a result, Tebbit is often misquoted as having directly told the unemployed to “get on your bike”, and he was popularly referred to as “Onyerbike” for some considerable time afterwards.
Or maybe people are correctly noting that someone who has never interviewed for a job isn’t the best judge of what it takes to interview for an entirely new job in our current lockdown environment.
Oi! So “onyerbike” is roughly equivalent to the “get a job” dismissal?
I do love a good turn of phrase and appreciate the history lesson! thanks, mate! ta!
ETA: Rereading your post, I see “get on your bike” is the dismissive and “Onyerbike” is a nickname?
Also, the timing seems about right, is that where the line in the Queen song “get on your bikes and ride…” comes from?
I bet if we said “Find something new!” to the Capitalist shareholders as a solution to the lockdown, we’d cause them to go into cardiac arrest, providing new job opportunities in the health field.
It is especially ironic because there are only about 65,000 coal miners in the US. A program to help them would be simple. How many unemployed are there right now that should “find something new?”
Makes for a pithy statement: “Ivanka Trump is a VEP”. Get the word out and we may be able to make it a common descriptor for all of that sort.
“Betsy DeVos is a VEP”. Yep, I like it!
"President ranting on screen about crazy racist stuff? Pandemic running amok without strong leadership? Banned from other nations because we can’t get our shit together?
