In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. joined a group of 1300 city sanitation workers, civil rights leaders, the faith community and worker’s unions march for economic justice in Memphis. Together, they faced all who sought to suppress their free speech that day. They won the moral battle, and the following day, April 4th, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated. Maybe that should tell us who we are dealing with here, lest we continue to delude ourselves that “they” are “like us”.
Like the unified voices of the people’s movement four decades ago, our unified middle-class needs to follow the lead of Wisconsin and fight back. Union busting is an arena populated by assholes, thugs and bullies and is built on lies, fear-mongering and deceit. And lots of money. A campaign against unions is un-American, a vicious assault on individual workers and a war on the truth – a war without honor. The only way to bring down a union of people is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten, and always (in some form or another) attack. The law only serves to suggest loopholes, maneuvers and define strategies such as pitting the agenda-mongering media, bought-and-paid-for politicians, media-supported companies and state governments against workers. All of us “workers” – i.e. people with jobs – are essentially on our own, with no financial backing and no 24 hours a day news program for support. We are reliant on our own strength, intelligence, resourcefulness, and willpower alone for strategy.
The greatest starting pitchers had at least one Unfair pitch, maybe two. Some great pitchers, like Whitey Ford and Spahn, never had an Unfair pitch but an assortment of excellent pitches instead. The game has changed a lot since those days. But, as one pitching coach has said, “the game never changes to help pitchers.” That’s why today’s pitchers have been forced to evolve from predators to jackals. “Pitchers today don’t out-stuff hitters,” Buck Showalter, the Baltimore Orioles manager, says. Pitchers today are con men, pickpockets, masters of deception. Their weapons are small pitches: cutters, splitters, circle changeups.
No team in baseball today has a greater number of successful deceptive pitchers than the Philadelphia Phillies. They have brought together four of the best starting pitchers in the game: Roy (Doc) Halladay, a 33-year-old two–time Cy Young Award winner; Cliff Lee, 32, and also a Cy Young winner; Roy Oswalt, 33, with 150 career wins; and the 27-year-old Cole Hamels, a World Series hero three years ago. Before they have even thrown one pitch for the same team, they are being hailed as the best four-man rotation in baseball, maybe the best ever. They are being compared with the great staffs in baseball history: the New York Yankees in the 1930s; the Cleveland Indians in 1954; the Orioles with their four 20-game winners in 1971; and the Atlanta Braves in the 1990s. As soon as Lee rejoined the team last December, the Phillies immediately became everyone’s favorite to win this year’s World Series.
Entire story in today’s NYTimes
Home from work on a mental health day, I’m having the misfortune of seeing Indiana US Representative/Silverback Gorilla Mike Pence hooting about the paltry ($6 billion) budget impasse that they will SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT OVER. The House GOP – made up of litters of like-minded chimps elected last fall via Tea Party support – is using the budget resolution riders to pursue broad policy goals. Their huge beef(s): Gutting the healthcare reform law, and stripping Planned Parenthood and the NPR radio station of their federal funding. Not kidding.
“It’s morally wrong to take the taxpayer dollars of millions of pro-life Americans and use it to fund organizations that provide and promote abortion–like Planned Parenthood of America.”
AND YET, It’s “morally right” to make ME fork over MY tax dollars to support wars, torture, wars, line the pockets of multi-billion dollar corporations who pay not one penny in taxes, for Blackwater murdering and molesting an marauding, all against MY will.
How about this: The millions of “Pro-Life “Americans can continue to have THEIR tax dollars spent on wars and killing people and us pro-choice folk have OURS spent on giving women reproductive rights and affordable healthcare? Why is MY voice being ignored, Pence?
Now, House Majority Whip, Eric Cantor, a senior member of the House of Representatives, is posturing and puttering, saying perhaps the most preposterous, the stupidest thing ever said by a sitting leader of the majority party in the history of the world! He just showed complete, abject ignorance of what every 6th grader in America knows about how a bill becomes law!! He said that if the Senate did not act on HR1, that it would become “the law of the land”. WHAT. These psychopaths are just making up shit as they go along! Screw the Constitution, screw legality, the down-the-road effects, screw all your constituents except The Tea Party coots and the Kock Bros. THAT’S THEIR constituency. I can’t wait to see whether Cantor bothers to follow this rule with the “Government Shutdown Prevention Act”. Because, according to the Constitution – and according to Schoolhouse Rock – for a bill to become “law of the land” it has to be passed by the Senate and the House and be signed by the President. Therefore, the Government Shutdown Prevention Act is unconstitutional, on its face. Gosh, the Tea Party patriots are gonna be outraged by this brazen spitting on the Constitution!
Folks, it’s a bloodless coupe happening right before our eyes, their control over both parties now complete. They have gained the necessary legal and logistical means of control over the angry mob if need be. They have the means of causing massive suffering on the masses while continuing to wallow in peace and luxury, behind their iron gates or on the moon. Wait no longer for that Corporatist Utopia, it’s upon us! I take back everything I once said about open-mindedness, anyone who votes Republican is either in league with these assholes or is just plain stupid.
Police and onlookers look on in helpless horror at jumping factory workers
Thinking about The Triangle Factory Shirtwaist fire is hard. It’s not easy to deflect the images of the images of the young women leaping or dropping from windows, their skirt hems aflame. Harder still is accepting the abjection that has eroded the souls of so many Americans, that would allow them to be indifferent to the possibility of this happening again today. History is always anathema to authoritarians. I’ve always believed what George Orwell said, that “He who controls the past, controls the future”. But that was 62 years ago. Today, we have a lethal combination of dumbed-down Americans and the money grubbers who have been rubbing their hands together, waiting for the day that Americans would have gotten so stupid, the tribulations of their grandparents so far removed, that they are primed for the bilking of a century. Lack of historical context, plus percolating racism via the first black president (the post slave emacipationism “how dare a black guy have it better than me”) has brought this about. Stupid, yes. Racist, yes. Bu they are also victims, pawns who themselves have been brutalized by the system. For 25 years, they have been systematically primed and primped to do their bidding and willingly work to empower the same system that has fucked them over. They aren’t starving, but without manufacturing jobs and a seriously fractured sense of community, there’s a sense of hopelessness, diminished expectations. The conservatives have been lying about “unions” for so long, the American workers themselves have actually bought the lies of corporate America. They have been so successfully enfeebled, that they no one ever really expected them to stand up for themselves. 100 years ago, but those of us with immigrant parents or grandparents, the 1911 fire at the Triangle factory fire in New York City still dwells in our collective memory.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company at 23 – 29 Washington Place was in many ways a typical sweatshop: poor, mostly immigrant workers paid low wages, working excessively long hours in unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Triangle’s abysmal conditions included; inadequate ventilation; flammable textiles stored throughout the factory; scraps of fabric 6 feet deep on the floors; patterns on tissue paper hanging above the tables; no sprinklers; lighting provided by open gas fixtures; and no extinguishing tools or emergency exit plan. The company’s workers were mostly young women, some as young as 12, primarily immigrants from Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe. They worked 14-hour shifts during a 60-hour to 72-hour workweek for an average wage of $6 a week.
The victims of the Triangle fire were not anonymous. They were the workers who had gone out in the so-called “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” a few months before, the strike that led to the founding of the first industrial union with a predominantly female membership, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). When the Triangle women walked out, activists in the suffrage crusade – including some obscenely wealthy women, J.P. Morgans and Vanderbilts- the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) – which was made up of progressive, upper-middle class white women – joined them, helping them picket, post bail and ward off hired thugs. It was a rare moment of sorority, where women rich and poor, WASP and immigrant, Jew and gentile, Republicans, Democrats and Socialists, United. Most of the employers settled with the ILGWU. A few of the biggest firms held out, including Triangle. Triangle Factory owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck would not sign. Part of the new contract in other factories was for workers to have Saturday afternoons off. Triangle workers put in a full day on Saturday.
On a Saturday a few months later, this happened: (WARNING: May cause trauma to those with feelings). [click to continue…]
Snopes.com: “The definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation”. Snopesed (verb), Snopsing (noun) Derivation: the online urban legend reference site: Snopes.com where you plug in keywords to reveal basic fallacies and/or half-truths inherent in a forwarded email. Usage: to indicate the validity of a suspect story: “It sounds fake. You should snopes it”. To question the origin of a forwarded email using red flag key words that initiate a “Snopsing” (“Important! Send this to everyone you know!”), or the dubious attribution of quibbles and witticisms to celebrities (often Kurt Vonnegut, George Carlin or Julius Caesar), and dire warnings and predictions that cause alarm in the well-meaning. My mom is the one who taught me the importance of “Snopsing”. She never sends out a fact-based email without “Snopsing” it first. She did once, and it led to the most odious of Vallow indignities: the debunking by my brother (the original Encyclopedia Brown). For my mom, a medical doctor and a stickler for facts, this led to harsh self reproach: “I KNEW I should have Snopesed it!” Believe me, no email has been propelled into the cybersphere from her imac unSnopesed since.
Because I spend most of my free time riding my horse and consuming sugar free jello, it is obvious that a certain question has been weighing heavily on my mind. On this week’s Snopes It! I ask the experts at Snopes.com if it’s true that…...JELL-O is made from the hooves of horses!
Answer: FALSE! JELL-O is NOT made from the hooves of horses! But before you can say “wahoo! Bring me a puddin’ pop!”, consider that this debunking led to an even grimmer revelation:
Claim: JELL-O is made from bones and hides.
Status: True.
Origins: JELL-O is made from gelatin, an animal product rendered from the hides and bones of animals. The production of gelatin starts with the boiling of bones, skins and hides of cows and pigs, a process that releases the protein-rich, collagen from animal tissues. The collagen is boiled and filtered, dried, and ground to a powder. Because the collagen is processed extensively, the final product is not categorized as a meat of animal product by the federal government. [click to continue…]
Beware lip balm. Most are terrible, some purposefully addictive as to make lips worse, some delicious but out of fashion, i.e. Dr. Pepper by Lip Smackers. The world’s best Lippen-pfflegestift is from German company, Effol, founded in 1906 to provide healing and hoof ointment for the agricultural community, for which horses were the backbone. Not cheap but worth it, you can buy Effol lip balm at equestrian supply stores where a .5mil tube ranges in price from $3.95 to $4.50. A buttery, non sticky, non glossy treat for your kisser with SPF 20 and a barely there tinge of vanilla.
Scott Walker, Wisconsin Governor/hypocrite/shit for brains/champion of the rights of teachers? In making his case for The budget-repair bill, which would strip most collective-bargaining rights from 175,000 public-sector workers while imposing immediate benefits concessions, Walker sought to highlight the plight of a one such teacher. Megan Sampson was named an Outstanding First Year Teacher in 2010, and was then laid off from Milwaukee’s Bradley Tech High School. This happened, according to Walker in his horribly written Wall Street Journal op-ed :
“Because her collective-bargaining contract requires staffing decisions to be made based on seniority. Ms. Sampson got a layoff notice because the union leadership would not accept reasonable changes to their contract.”
What the Governor neglected to mention was that the layoffs were the result of more than $33 million in budget cuts made to Milwaukee’s public school system in 2010. Budget cuts. Hundreds of parents, teachers and students protested the cuts at a public hearing last year. Does he think we all have amnesia? DO we all have amnesia? Now Scott Walker wants to cut $900 million in education aid from the Wisconsin state budget. Walker’s “reform plan” calls for a 5.8% pension contribution from government workers and a 12.6% health insurance premium payment. Walker is quick to point out that these apply to him, too. Here’s the problem. Governor Walker’s salary is $137,092 (plus free car and house, staff, etc. but will get to that later), while the starting annual salary for teachers in Wisconsin is just $25,222 (factor in having to pay for stuff the Governor doesn’t have to pay for and pay back the student loan that the Governor doesn’t have to pay back (because he didn’t go), and the teacher’s “shared sacrifice” of bridging the budget gap, like, say, purchasing supplies for students), so it’s kind of hard to believe that many first year teachers will be able to shoulder this financial burden as easily as Mr. Walker. I doubt that Megan Sampson probably is raking in the big bucks at her new gig – a plum job teaching English at Wauwatosa East High School, where, ironically or not, Walker’s 2 teenage sons attend – but she will be asked to bear the burden of Scott Walker’s education cuts and well as the burden of being Walker’s poster child for his political agenda.