paul street on may day:
You know when somebody like...I don’t know, like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or even John Edwards tells you they’re against the Iraq War make sure you ask them why. Are they against it because it’s an immoral and monumentally illegal and brazenly imperialist oil occupation that has killed more than 700,000 Iraqis as well as 3300 Americans and is part of a larger U.S. project of global dominance? Or do they think that the only thing wrong with the war is that it isn’t working.
(...) I really liked those chalk body outlines that one of you did last night to bring home the needless death of 3300 U.S. troops. But let’s not forget the 700,000 or more Iraqis murdered by this criminal war.
(...) If you go back and look more closely at the struggle for shorter working hours you’ll find something interesting. You’ll find that workers wanted more time so that they could participate in the great “democracy” that the United States purported to be. They knew very well that time is a democracy issue. Democracy takes time. It takes time to study the issues and their historical context and meaning. It takes time to disentangle the endless lies of the power elite and its servants. It takes time to cut through all the propagandistic self-serving know-it-all bullshit of the bosses, teachers, newscasters, textbook writers, advertisers, candidates, political consultants, bureaucrats, professors and other professional liars and thought coordinators.
(...) This was complete bullshit. They acted in accord with FIXED intelligence – with COOKED intelligence designed in advance of the war to justify an invasion they had already decided to launch. We also got the big democracy promotion lie claiming that the real reason to invade Iraq was to spread freedom and democracy. That is a complete fairy tale. The last thing U.S. policymakers want to see in Iraq is real freedom and democracy and independence since the last thing they want to see is that country free to make whatever deals it likes with whoever it wishes in regard to the remarkable petroleum resources under their soil.

winning the eight-hour day (and more holes in the neoclassical picture):
Winning the eight-hour workday took years of hard struggle, beginning in the mid-1800s. By 1867, the federal government, six states and several cities had passed laws limiting their employees' hours to eight per day. The laws were not effectively enforced and in some cases were overturned by courts, but they set an important precedent that finally led to a powerful popular movement.

may day:
THE EFFORT to win “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will” became a crusade for U.S. labor in the years after the Civil War of 1861-65.
(...) “The way to get [the eight-hour day],” Peter McGuire of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners wrote in 1882, “is by organization...We want an enactment by the workingmen themselves that on a given day, eight hours should constitute a day’s work, and they ought to enforce it themselves.”
(...) Everywhere, workers joined the campaign. Historian Philip Foner describes workers smoking “Eight-Hour Tobacco” and wearing “Eight-Hour Shoes”--as products produced in shops that already had the shorter working day were known--and singing the “Eight-Hour Song”:

We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours.
We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill:
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.

(...) MAY 1 was a huge success. About 200,000 workers went on strike across the country, and nearly that number won shorter hours just by threatening to strike. The heart of the eight-hour day movement--and the political center of the left in the U.S.--was Chicago. On the first day of the strike, some 80,000 strikers and supporters--almost one in every six people living in the city at the time--paraded down Michigan Avenue.
(...) As he was led to his death, August Spies called out: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”
(...) “If you think that by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement...the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil in want and misery expect salvation--if this is your opinion, then hang us!” Spies said. “Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”