labor

No-no-no more Bill McKibben, please. He is capitalism lite, loving each climate change bubble of CO2, nitrous oxide and toilets a flushing as part of COP 21. Can he stay home and teach? Do we need parading after parading of the usual suspects – Naomi Klein, Billy-boy, Prince Charles, Mark Ruffalo, Björk, David Bowie, Coldplay, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, Colin Firth , Emma Thompson  Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow ou encore Nathalie Portman  Sean Penn, Leo Dicaprio.

“You’re retired, aren’t you?” the 29 year old says to me today, while I am with a friend, 62, who used to be my board president over at United Cerebral Palsy, just one of several jobs I’ve been sacked from by the Controllers – this time, unfortunately, by two insecure, anti-male-in-the-workplace self-described Jewish women who could not square that I was smarter than they were-are and that I had a passion for representing my people, clients living with severe disabilities, developmental and intellectual and psychological.

Finished the first draft of a book about my commentary looking at the belly of the beast from the lower intestine up at the unending gluttony of Capitalism. It feels good, and I am ready to send it to the publisher, after a fellow dissident — John Steppling — looks at it, and, I hope writes a bang up introduction to inculcate some magic from my muses. As always, though, being hyper precarious in this rot gut society, I can’t see much these days as worthy of celebratory zeal to the point of letting my guard down.

Candidates for public office, especially at the state and national levels, are never asked this central question of politics: “Since the people are sovereign under our Constitution, how do you specifically propose to restore power to the people in their various roles as voters, taxpayers, workers and consumers?”

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
— Jay Gould

In 1975 the people of Vietnam successfully ended one of the longest and bloodiest anti-colonial wars in world-history – defeating the US, the world’s biggest imperial power, after 20 years of struggle.
Barely forty years later the Vietnamese regime signed off on the US-Japanese dominated Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement (TPFTA), which essentially converted Vietnam into a vassal state.

Here I go again – the at-will piece of human detritus that I am, according to Oregon’s great employers, twice now, non-profits, sacking me because I pushed the state’s vocational rehabilitation careerists outside their pathetic Little Eichmann lives by pushing for my clients – adults with developmental-intellectual-psychological disabilities – to get as much out of the state’s bureaucracies that are filled with middling folk who do not give a shit about people.

Here’s an experiment to try this holiday weekend. Quiz your friends, family and acquaintances on the meaning of Labor Day. You might be surprised by the answers you hear. To many, the true meaning of Labor Day has been unfortunately lost―it’s merely a three-day vacation weekend, unless you work in retail, in which case it is, ironically, a day of work and “special” sales.

Last Saturday, August 22, around 10,000 citizens went down to the streets of Helsinki to protest against the governmental austerity measures. Does this come as a surprise if Finland just elected a billionaire businessman as prime minister?

It was to be expected, and nothing more clearly illustrated the gap between the uncaring rich and the 99 per cent.