What we are witnessing right now in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and other states is the final battle against the last bastion of union strength in this country. With the aggressive onslaught aimed at public employees and their unions that Republican governors have unleashed in recent weeks, it’s long past time for politicians calling themselves...
The overstated celebrations and commemorations of the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth, with their razzle-dazzle of Super Bowl tributes and marathon deifying in Simi Valley, are fitting tributes to a president whose public relations guru, Michael Deaver, was a pioneer of this same kind of flim-flammery. But the Reagan Centennial’s flashy hagiography masks a...
It took decades of inaction, repression, and neglect to produce the mass demonstrations we’re seeing in Egypt. The only real surprise is that something on this scale didn’t happen years earlier. The gospel of deregulation, privatization, and coddling ruling elites with tax breaks and subsidies, while starving the workers and the poor of basic...
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Municipal Workers
Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his life fighting for the collective bargaining rights of municipal workers in the city of Memphis. The garbage collectors who were striking were responding to unsafe conditions (a worker was crushed by a truck), a sub-minimum wage, non-existent benefits, zero bargaining rights. Mayor Henry Loeb beat the workers down...
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