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.
Showing posts with label may day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label may day. Show all posts
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
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.
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.
immigration:
After the Swift & Co. raids, whole cities rallied to take in abandoned children, and the news couldn't ignore wives begging ICE for word of their husbands' fate for months without response. So ICE learned to keep the raids small but frequent and harsh, to strike at small towns and farmlands. Now, ICE agents burst into homes in early morning hours to roust sleeping families and drag parents away from cringing, terrified children. People who's "crime" of entering the U.S. without a visa is subject to a $50 fine are dragged off to private prisons for being in the vicinity of ICE sweeps for felons. Farmers in North Dakota are handcuffed and helplessly overlook vacant fields after thirty-six ICE agents cart away thirteen workers at gunpoint. Rumors persist of bicyclers dragged away and ICE raids on public busses. Two hundred children wear prison uniforms and languish in cells 23 hours a day at the T. Don Hutto facility in Taylor, Texas.
(...) Not surprisingly, in the two months leading up to this year's May Day protests, the detentions have intensified. Armed, warrantless home invasions have left hundreds of families shattered. People have been hauled out of pizza joints, and "Latino-looking" shoppers at a Chicago mall were lined up against a wall at gunpoint, while white shoppers walked away. The Department of Homeland Security's notorious raid and deportation program, Operation Return to Sender, brags that it has imprisoned 18,000 people since its inception eleven months ago.
(...) According to Dave Schmidt of Se Se Puede Coalition, "This bill incorporates some of the most odious elements of the Sensenbrenner Bill. It's a step backwards. It still has the criminalization element of the Sensenbrenner bill. The people hear it's from the Democrats, and they think it's the best they can get. But it's a common thing in Latin America, people really think pretty radically. The answer, if you don't want people dying in the desert, you allow a humane immigration policy that allows people to work humanely." Si Se Puede Coalition is coordinating a march from San Diego State College to Presidio Park on Tuesday.
(...) It allows broader use of indefinite detention--imprisonment without a sentence--for lack of government paperwork than proposed in the 2006 Sensenbrenner proposal, and a fifteen-year prison term for misuse of identification. And the sweeps won't end if the bill is passed: the Gutierrez-Flake bill provides for building twenty more detention facilities, and a total of 20,000 beds.
(...) "People are forced to emigrate for lack of work. Otherwise, they will die. Fourteen men were rescued last December trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Senegal to New York City in a 50-foot boat, in search of work. Every other week we hear of the death or injury of a construction worker in New York, because the bosses don't follow safety rules. Any guestworker program is bullshit, it's not acceptable. We demand full legalization for all who are here." The May 1st Coalition New York is marching from Union Square to the Federal Building and immigration center at Foley Square.
After the Swift & Co. raids, whole cities rallied to take in abandoned children, and the news couldn't ignore wives begging ICE for word of their husbands' fate for months without response. So ICE learned to keep the raids small but frequent and harsh, to strike at small towns and farmlands. Now, ICE agents burst into homes in early morning hours to roust sleeping families and drag parents away from cringing, terrified children. People who's "crime" of entering the U.S. without a visa is subject to a $50 fine are dragged off to private prisons for being in the vicinity of ICE sweeps for felons. Farmers in North Dakota are handcuffed and helplessly overlook vacant fields after thirty-six ICE agents cart away thirteen workers at gunpoint. Rumors persist of bicyclers dragged away and ICE raids on public busses. Two hundred children wear prison uniforms and languish in cells 23 hours a day at the T. Don Hutto facility in Taylor, Texas.
(...) Not surprisingly, in the two months leading up to this year's May Day protests, the detentions have intensified. Armed, warrantless home invasions have left hundreds of families shattered. People have been hauled out of pizza joints, and "Latino-looking" shoppers at a Chicago mall were lined up against a wall at gunpoint, while white shoppers walked away. The Department of Homeland Security's notorious raid and deportation program, Operation Return to Sender, brags that it has imprisoned 18,000 people since its inception eleven months ago.
(...) According to Dave Schmidt of Se Se Puede Coalition, "This bill incorporates some of the most odious elements of the Sensenbrenner Bill. It's a step backwards. It still has the criminalization element of the Sensenbrenner bill. The people hear it's from the Democrats, and they think it's the best they can get. But it's a common thing in Latin America, people really think pretty radically. The answer, if you don't want people dying in the desert, you allow a humane immigration policy that allows people to work humanely." Si Se Puede Coalition is coordinating a march from San Diego State College to Presidio Park on Tuesday.
(...) It allows broader use of indefinite detention--imprisonment without a sentence--for lack of government paperwork than proposed in the 2006 Sensenbrenner proposal, and a fifteen-year prison term for misuse of identification. And the sweeps won't end if the bill is passed: the Gutierrez-Flake bill provides for building twenty more detention facilities, and a total of 20,000 beds.
(...) "People are forced to emigrate for lack of work. Otherwise, they will die. Fourteen men were rescued last December trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Senegal to New York City in a 50-foot boat, in search of work. Every other week we hear of the death or injury of a construction worker in New York, because the bosses don't follow safety rules. Any guestworker program is bullshit, it's not acceptable. We demand full legalization for all who are here." The May 1st Coalition New York is marching from Union Square to the Federal Building and immigration center at Foley Square.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
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.”
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.”
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