Reader Comments: Trump Says Shut It Down, House Goes Limbo; The Race to Be Speaker; Lots of Cartoons; It Could Have Been Me by Holly Near; Indigenous Peoples’ Day Resources; more....
"Strikes are so in right now. First it was the writers, then the actors, now the auto workers. Everybody’s striking for a bigger piece of the pie, or at least one that outpaces inflation. The case being made by these admittedly disparate unions is one of inequality. Why should executive pay continue to skyrocket alongside profits when the rank and file aren’t seeing the same sort of benefit? It becomes a pretty salient argument when you see how much the guys and gals at the top are earning.
"Over the past three or four decades, CEO pay has absolutely exploded. The average CEO makes more than 399 times the average worker. That strike anyone else as obscene? Keep in mind, the CEOs in the aforementioned industries are anything but average.
"David Zaslav made half a billion dollars over the last five years for being the big brain behind renaming HBO’s streaming service Max. Writer’s want a living wage and actors, the people who make the content you watch, want to keep their image and likeness rights from being devoured by AI. Reasonable asks from a guy with a nine figure compensation package. There was a lot of gossip about studio execs trying to starve the writers and actors out but now that the content hose has been kinked for a bit the bosses are starting to get a little sweaty.
"In the case of the UAW, the workers are simply asking for a degree of parity. The CEOs of the big automakers gave themselves, or rather their compensation committees granted, 40% raises over the past five years. The UAW is asking for the same consideration. It’s hard to plead poverty when the suit in the C-Suite, who couldn’t tell a rivet from their elbow, is getting a 40% bump. For the moment labor seems to have leverage over capital, let’s see how long it lasts."
Maybe what we really need is an extradjudicial ruling on why an unelected, non-answerable entity like the Federalist Society and an un-elected, non-answerable Catholic extremist like Leonard Leo is allowed to have any authority at all over the composition of the Supreme Court.
We are asked to rejoice. And yes I agree! But no one seems to be considering if he will live to pay the price. He's not in good health, overweight, aging and facing immense stressing events. He can't find peace with any of it. Nor should he.
Interesting, but as a pragmatist, I often wonder how the theory creates a structure, most are rigid, not flexible (which helps lead to their demise). An ongoing debate, certainly.
And sometimes we WIN some! Congratulations to the graduate workers at the University of Maine.
"The graduate workers union will represent about 1,000 graduate assistants, research assistants and teaching assistants who make up a large percentage of the teaching and research workforce across the system’s seven campuses, according to the Maine AFL-CIO, which announced the certification on Friday afternoon. It is affiliated with the United Auto Workers.
“Today, after years of discussion and months of organizing, we are thrilled to announce that we have won our union,” said Remi Geohegan, a second-year Ph.D. student and teaching assistant in the Graduate School of Biomedical Science and Engineering at the University of Maine. “The University of Maine administration did the right thing by agreeing to recognize our union through a majority sign-on process, and the majority has spoken. Based on the strong support that exists across campus, and among faculty, legislators and community leaders, we are excited about the very real prospect of beginning negotiations for a strong first contract.”
Great piece, overall but please let Jessica Max Stein and all know that the IWW was the Industrial Workers of the World, not the International Workers of the World
Housing activist Glyn Robbins had an opportunity to spend six months working and researching alongside his counterparts in New York City and discovered the rich history of housing co-operatives there. He also discovered the role of left wing Jews in creating them and their enduring legacy.
To put it simply, blaming Democrats (or the left) for the right’s behavior — or for Trump possibly getting re-elected — is relying on a false paradigm. Elections don’t hinge on rational responses to policy minutiae in a vacuum. Everything passes through media of some sort, and the right’s sources of information are dominated by a top-down, antidemocratic movement that seeks to enrich itself and entrench corporate power at any cost. After all that has been revealed about Fox over the last year, we know this to be true, yet some people like to pretend it never happened! As far as the left’s behavior is concerned, the worst and very non-representative examples of overzealousness from someone on social media or elsewhere will always be cherry-picked and blown out of proportion.
As a commenter mentioned below, there is a name for this assumption that Democrats are responsible for everything Republicans do: “Murc’s Law.” According to David Roberts, who is quoted in the post:
This is not some quirk, it is central to reactionary psychology. Every fascist (and fascist-adjacent) movement ever has told itself the same story: our opponents are destroying everything, they’re forcing us to this, we have no choice but violence.
It could have been me, but instead it was you
So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can work for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can work for freedom I can too
Students in Ohio two hundred yards away
Shot down by a nameless fire one early day in May
Some people cried out angry "You should have shot more of them down!"
But you can’t bury youth my friend... youth grows the whole world round
It could have been me, but instead it was you
So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can die for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can die for freedom I can too
The junta broke the fingers from Victor Jara’s hands
They said to the gentle poet, “Play your guitar now if you can!”
Well Victor started singing until they shot his body down
You can kill a man but not his song when it’s sung the whole world round
It could have been me, but instead it was you
So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can sing for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can sing for freedom I can too
A woman in the jungle so many wars away
Studies late into the night, defends a village in the day
Although her skin is golden like mine will never be
Her song is heard and I know the words and I’ll sing them 'til she’s free
It could have been me, but instead it was you
So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can live for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can live for freedom I can too
"Workers of the World, Unite! Songwriter and union activist Joe Hill (executed in 1915) steps into a 21st century tavern, updating his legacy with new songs and stories and bringing a message of hope for our troubled times."
On Saturday I had the good fortune to see the premiere performance of The Joe Hill Revival at Brooklyn Art Haus in Williamsburg. I went knowing almost nothing about it but its name, and I had no idea what to expect. I was blown away. It's a musical pageant with a very talented cast portraying Joe Hill, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and others, singing the tale of Joe's martyrdom and the struggle of the IWW. I loved everything about it, the songs, the dancing, the dramatic way the story is presented, you name it. And if you've never heard of Brooklyn Art Haus, its brand-new, fyi.
