All The Power To The Top

It should come as no surprise that when Republicans gain power, as they have in Indiana's and New Hampshire's legislatures, they try to take away make it so that workers have even less say about their work conditions. We have a bad economy, and it's a golden opportunity for them to return to the Gilded Age.

Never mind that more than 285,000 residents are looking for work and that public schools are trying to minimize harm to students from a $300 million, two-year budget cut. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and his allies in the state legislature have decided that their No. 1 priority this legislative session is to enact a so-called right-to-work law that research shows will lower the average worker’s wages by $1,500 a year.

Now The Serpent Was More Subtil...

There's truth to the metaphor of politics as professional wrestling. Christopher Hitchens was a heel. He was a bad guy who went out in the public and insulted them and his opponents and he drank too much. He made all us liberals mad, but he was compelling to read because he could put together words wittily.

But there are great dangers to following advice because it is well-written and clever, and ignoring the costly implications. That's one of the lessons of the Book of Genesis. Hitchens used his clever way with words to encourage us to go invade that country, and that invasion opened up floodgates of death and human misery in a land already miserable. Better we had not listened to him.

Who Made That Butterball For You?

Butterball Turkeys get killed, cleaned and wrapped in plastic for you in a small town near the Arkansas River, not far from Fort Smith. Women in their 60s, who have worked all their lives there, get paid $11.40 per hour. That's about $24,000 per year.

It is not easy work. Turkeys need to be stunned and dispatched and gutted. Someone has to cut the oil gland out of the tail. Necks and gizzards and livers have to be cleaned and stuffed into a cavity. During a six-week period that begins in October, the line runs seven days a week to process fresh turkey. It is a period people in town simply refer to as “fresh,” and it is grueling.

“It’s a long battle when we’re working fresh, but I at least got some bills paid and Christmas money,” Mrs. Farmer said. “I just sit there and hum and sing and talk to my friend Willie. We get through it together.”

...snip...

Joshua Freeman, 34, recently lost a race for mayor. He is in the bar business, in part because turkey farming did not pay enough. His father got out of the business after 15 years, he said, because Butterball kept requiring improvements just as the family got close to paying everything off and realizing profits.

“It was like working for the company store,” Mr. Freeman said. “You could never get ahead.”

via New York Times

if the NYT blocks your view, just go into the URL box, and delete everything after the ".html" and hit enter.

hat tip to Arkansas Blog

Historical Image of the Day

Ghost dancers, late 19th century

Reagan by Eugene Jarecki

It's available through Comcast On Demand, as an HBO Documentary.

Union Busting For Dummies

Historical Image of the Day

George Whitfield, preacher of the Great Awakening, Brought the movement to America in 1738.

campaign ads

Via Ezra Klein, you can see a Mitt Romney ad.

And then watch Ronald Reagan's 30-minute ad for his successful 1966 run for Governor of California.

Historical Image of the Day

Back to a place where I have time to do the images again.

This week's set will be on American religion.

Methodist camp meeting, 1839

No Coasting in 2012

Dave Brockington is right to be worried about Obama in 2012.
Unemployment is bad. And it is downright terrible among those who do not have college educations. These voters tend to vote Democratic. Plus, the Republicans who have taken over the key state of Florida are suppressing the very votes Obama needs to win. Ohio is moving to suppress the youth vote, too.

Moreover, when people lose their homes due to foreclosure, that can create confusion about their voting addresses--which is another opening for Republicans to contest the eligibility of people to cast ballots.

Citizens United has burst a dam for money to buy nasty campaign ads, that will drag him down.

There needs to be a serious effort by every progressive-leaning person to reach out to everyone, to have conversations over coffee, at the watercooler, at the lunch truck convince other voters that Obama shares their values and needs their vote.
Oh, yeah, same goes for the progressive candidates running in primaries for Congress.

More needs to happen that just that--but at the very least, progressives need to get Obama to win.

Changes

Starting today, I will be doing a lot of my blogging at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. This site will still remain active. For one, I am keeping the historical images over here. And other things as well. But a lot of my more substantive posts will be at LGM.

Historical Image of the Day

Pro-Medicare button, 1965

Decoration Day

I was going to write a longer post about the origins of Memorial Day, but I have no right to do so when David Blight does it instead:

The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.


Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished.

I will only say to you that rather than think of this holiday as a general "remember the soldiers" day, recall the valiant soldiers of the Union in the Civil War be they white or black and whether they fought to save the Union or to end the institution of slavery.

And if you feel like waving the bloody shirt a bit today, well, who could blame you. 

Historical Image of the Day

Government poster promoting Social Security, 1936

Historical Image of the Day

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act of 1935

Pollitt on French Sexism, Racism, and Hypocrisy

Katha Pollitt unloads on French hypocrisy over Strauss-Kahn's rape of the hotel maid, finding it shockingly depressing that French women are reacting just as awfully as French men.

Of course, the French (and a lot of Europeans at large) are complete hypocrites when they say bad things about America given their own history of racism, colonization, and inequality, not to mention excuses for rape. And it's when she moves beyond DSK that she delivers my favorite line:

A word about race: for decades, France, you've prided yourself on your lack of racism. But really what that means is you like African-American jazz musicians and writers. You're actually quite racist toward your own ex-colonized immigrants of color, most notably Muslims from North Africa. The way you talk about Muslim immigrant women, you would think France was a gender-egalitarian paradise for everyone else, and the biggest feminist issue was whether or not to ban the burqa.

Best thing I've read today. 

Environmental Causes to Lower Crime Rates

One of the recession's biggest surprises is the continued drop in violent crime. Via Drum, it seems likely that one major reason is that children no longer suffer from lead poisoning:

....There may also be a medical reason for the decline in crime. For decades, doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent and delinquent. In 1974, the Environmental Protection Agency required oil companies to stop putting lead in gasoline....A 2007 study by the economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes contended that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half of the decline in violent crime during the 1990s in the U.S. and might bring about greater declines in the future.

While not the only reason suggested, it is quite telling. The larger lesson is that environmental regulations that supposedly cause business money almost always pay for themselves in the long run. And as Republicans want to tear down each and every one of these regulations to return to the Gilded Age, I for one expect this period of time to be a sort of high point in protecting our children from environmental hazards. Future generations of Americans may suffer from the hellish hazards of lead poisoning as workers do in China today (global capitalism--it's all benefits!!!) and as Chris Sellers has explored in his superb work on the rise of environmental health science and the suffering of white lead victims in the Progressive Era, Hazards of the Job.

Zelaya's Return

Much to my surprise, former Honduran president Jose Zelaya has returned to his nation, nearly 2 years after Latin America's first coup in 26 years. It seems that President Porfirio Lobo has worked to lessen tensions in his nation after his post-coup election, implementing the changes in the Constitution Zelaya hoped for and now letting him back in the nation. Given this has happened quietly, I'm sure the Honduran elites are on board with this and feel they control the process. Zelaya's return allows Honduras to return to full membership in the OAS and receive increased foreign aid, desperately needed in this very poor country.

Why Guestworker Programs Don't Work

A commonly stated solution for the problem of undocumented immigration is to implement a guestworker problem. Immigrant rights activists routinely note the fundamental problem with this--workers have no rights. The bracero program of the mid-twentieth century saw migrant workers suffer all sorts of abuse. Guestworker advocates say that such abuses couldn't take place today. That's just flat out not true. Mike Elk:

Last year, the leaders of the U.S.-based foreign labor and supply company Global Horizons were indicted in what the Department of Justice considered the biggest human trafficking case ever brought by the federal government. They were charged with holding 400 Thai guest farm workers in the United States against their will in conditions that essentially amounted to slavery.

The workers were given guest visas to work in the United States under the H-2A visa program. They were kept under brutal conditions under armed guard in Hawaii and forced to live in substandard conditions in hot shipping containers "with no carpet, beds, furniture, indoor plumbing, kitchen or air conditioning," according to federal investigators. They were under constant threat of violence from gun-toting guards, and on one occasion a guard told the workers they would be shot if they tried to escape.

Several company officials have already pleaded guilty in plea bargain deals and several others are expected to stand trial. In 2006, when the workers' maltreatment was discovered, the Department of Labor also debarred Global Horizons from participating in the H-2A agricultural guest worker program for the mandatory three years; it issued an additional three year debarment in 2009. Last week, a judge upheld the three year debarment after Global Horizons appealed it.

I don't know if you believe in the power of the modern government to regulate farms so that worker abuse doesn't happen. With our severely hampered and underfunded government, I absolutely do not. After all, what regulations in this country are properly followed? Food safety? Labor? Environmental? None of the above. Even under Democratic administrations, employers and polluters are in control of the regulatory process.

Moreover, our farms are in out of the way places. How many readers  have visited farms with migrant workers? Even among progressive groups, how many are active on these issues. There are some, such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina and the PCUN in Oregon (sadly, the UFW is basically defunct). But even these worker rights groups and unions are heavily underfunded, under reported in the press, and have virtually no power to stop farm employer abuses. 

Guestworker programs will lead to more abuses like this one in Hawaii. These must be opposed as part of any immigration legislation.

Historical Image of the Day

Head Start program, Queens, 1965