Farewell summer. Let's have our first links of the fall...because live from Bullshit Mountain, it's Saturday afternoon!
16 Amish found guilty of hate crimes in beard-cutting attacks
Some good news out of California where the anti-union Proposition 32 is losing support:
Likely voters are divided on Proposition 32 -- which also would ban union and corporate contributions to candidates and their committees and government contractor contributions to elected officials -- with 42 percent saying they would vote yes, 49 percent no and 9 percent undecided, the poll shows. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
The margin of error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
The Chicago teacher's strike is over. It worked. The Verizon strike is over. It worked. Strikes work. Workers should have them more often. When I say that strikes work, I don't mean that unions get each and every last thing they ask for. That's an unrealistic goal in any negotiation. I mean that strikes allow unions to get things that they would not get without a strike. This is primarily because a strike adds a very powerful stakeholder to the outcome of the negotiations: the public. When negotiations involve only workers and management, management is often able to simply say "fuck off." Management can wait them out—workers will run out of money and start starving long before their managers do. If managements feels that they can save money in the long term by telling workers to fuck off with their contract demands, they will do it, even if it means taking a financial hit in the short term. This is the cold logic of capitalism. Absent any direct incentive, management will always take a dollar out of workers' pockets and put it into their own, if they can. A strike, though, acts as a check on that imbalance of power by inviting a very powerful third party to the table.
When I say that strikes work, I don't mean that unions get each and every last thing they ask for. That's an unrealistic goal in any negotiation. I mean that strikes allow unions to get things that they would not get without a strike. This is primarily because a strike adds a very powerful stakeholder to the outcome of the negotiations: the public. When negotiations involve only workers and management, management is often able to simply say "fuck off." Management can wait them out—workers will run out of money and start starving long before their managers do. If managements feels that they can save money in the long term by telling workers to fuck off with their contract demands, they will do it, even if it means taking a financial hit in the short term. This is the cold logic of capitalism. Absent any direct incentive, management will always take a dollar out of workers' pockets and put it into their own, if they can.
A strike, though, acts as a check on that imbalance of power by inviting a very powerful third party to the table.
WASHINGTON — Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, did not violate House ethics rules when she contacted the Treasury Department in 2008 to set up a meeting on behalf of top executives from a bank her husband owns stock in, a special investigator announced on Friday.
The father of a rape victim referenced in an attack ad against Democratic Attorney General hopeful Kathleen Kane called the ad a lie and called on Republicans to withdraw it. “The advertisement says that Kathleen Kane made a plea bargain in a rape case that a judge says wasn’t tough enough. I know that’s a lie, because it was my daughter that was the victim in the case,” he wrote in a letter provided by the Kane campaign. PoliticsPA will not publish his name in order to respect the privacy of the family.
“The advertisement says that Kathleen Kane made a plea bargain in a rape case that a judge says wasn’t tough enough. I know that’s a lie, because it was my daughter that was the victim in the case,” he wrote in a letter provided by the Kane campaign. PoliticsPA will not publish his name in order to respect the privacy of the family.