labor

Note: adjunct faculty and full-time historian, Harvey Whitney, short interview below story!

Taxation for what, for whom, for them, for gutted and eviscerated communities via nihilism vis-a-vis the entire casino capitalism and its banksters …?  
NPR rarely hits it right, but while working at my “other” job with developmentally disabled adults, I heard this piece on a singer-doctor-multilingual social justice thinker. It was okay, for NPR, but the interview accidentally culled a piece around new urbanism, the poor, the greenie weenie, Coder creeps I rail against ALL the time.

Working people around the world are in worse straits than they have been for decades.  Unemployment is rampant and real wages are stagnant.  Young people entering the job market face an uncertain future and a lack of understanding on how to change that.  In the most capitalist nation of them all – the United States — the future only looks bright if one is a member of the shrinking but ever-richer ruling elite.  Education is being attacked on all levels by the privateers and those who invest in their economy built on destruction and despair.  Claiming to be held hostage by right-wing pro-cor

There is a de facto redefinition of “the economy” when sharp contractions are gradually lost to standard measures. The unemployed who lose everything…easily fall off the edge of what is defined as “the economy” and counted as such. So do small shop and factory owners who lose everything and commit suicide. And so do the growing number of well-educated students and professionals who leave…all together. These trends redefine the space of the economy. They make it smaller and expel a good share of the unemployed and poor from standard measures.

Act 1
Setting: Restaurant, where four middle-age friends, who have known each other since their university days in the early 1970’s, meet for lunch.
Professor: Should we share a bottle of wine?
Lawyer: Why not! There’s no time clock, clients or deadlines.
Social Worker: (smiles). We can afford it!
Doctor: No doubt … we’re drawing pensions, Social Security, and annuities. Medicare covers our medical bills. Mortgages are paid up.

Strikes by labor have a way of bringing individuals’ consciousness to the foreground. This is especially true when the primary work of the workers on the picket line  is serving the public. Teachers, police, firemen, public works and transit workers fall into this category and, when they strike the public feels the difference. In the place I live—Burlington, Vermont—the transit system drivers have been on strike for two weeks.

Under the leadership of New York City’s progressive new mayor Bill de Blasio a settlement has been reached between a discrimination suited filed by the Vulcan Society (representing minority firefighters) and the city over the use of racially based civil service tests that favored white applicants.

This week sees yet another make or break conference for the interminable Doha Round of World Trade Organization talks, writes network member Conor Cradden. This time it’s in Bali, and on the agenda (yet again) is breaking the deadlock about multilateral trade regulation (for a quick guide to what’s going on see this piece on the Guardian website).

“What do you know about Winsted’s firemen?” my mother asked me one day when I was eleven years old. “They jump into fire trucks and go put out fires fast,” I replied. “Well, you should also know,” she added, “that they’re volunteers and they risk their lives for the townspeople.”

I’ll flip the classroom on this post, putting down my response to another middling post from that middling thing called, Inside Higher Education, this on-line blog advertising sheet, DC-based (first problem) and one that is just a hotbed of behind-the-times (second knock against it) and failing to really know  the on-the-ground (third, knock) reality of school, community, real faculty and, well, the non-dominant white male/female perspectives (4th knock), the ones bred and enabled on that east coast (another knock) where we have seen a galaxy of pain put upon us, the 80 percent, by