labor

Shoot, yeah, ending another quarter teaching at another college, here in WA state, and, whew, of course the Chomsky’s and Giroux’s and Hedges of the world DO NOT get it.
Think of faculty in the trenches, working with youth, in my case, a whole load of high school students in a community college swap program called Running Start. We take juniors and seniors out of their high schools, they take college courses, and they get high school credit AND college credit.

An article appeared in the The Nation not long ago offering a defense of the so-called “sex industry”—which includes, as the author notes, a number of services ranging “escorting, street hustling, hostessing, stripping, preforming sex for videos and webcams.” Rather fortuitously, there’s no mention of sex trafficking, which is a substantial part of the industry.

Jeff Drones for Dildos Bezos . . .  The TakeOver . . . The End Times . . .  Useless Collective Consumerism . . . The Empire is Daft and Dangerous!
Oh, hell, I’ve been challenged to write some positive stuff on the DV blog, like, what, five straight blogs in a row that are all hopeful, positive, about the real heroes and heroines and hard-working people who never get their day in the limelight, day in court, or 15 petrabytes of fame.

Over the decades various administrations, seeking to improve their economic record, monkeyed with economic statistics to the point that the statistics are no longer meaningful.
According to Friday’s (March 7) payroll jobs report, the US economy created 175,000 new jobs in February. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have at a good price.

Recent developments at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington and St. Michael’s College (in neighboring Colchester, VT.) provide prime examples of a fundamental problem in post-secondary schooling in the United States. At UVM, three unionized units of the faculty and non-faculty workforce have contract talks looming. For only the second time since the three units have been unionized, the contracts are up for negotiation at the same time. As they have in the past, the UVM administration is warning of layoffs and other cutbacks as they prepare to negotiate these contracts.

Here, a few column inches below my preface — the short article, on organizing, tied to, well,  the wimpy American broke-back mentality that we have to ask for fairness, beg, negotiate with felons, murderers, the corporate elite and their wannabe followers and side-lined thugs.

For most people, it is probably taken for granted that what they decide to eat; if they have a beer with dinner and relax with a cigarette or a reefer afterwards; whether they exercise, engage in sports, or live like a couch potato; whether they ride a bike to work or drive a car; and whether they will undergo invasive medical procedures or opt for homeopathy is a matter of choice. People will assert that they have sovereignty over their corporeal selves.

It’s an old axiom – “If an extraterrestrial (we used to say ‘Martian’ but we know what is in store for Mars – terraforming, toxic bombs of sulfur, microbes and viral, self-replicating bots, Avatars of purple epidermis and femurs as long as an NBA star’s jump shot) were to just drop into a city or plop right down in the middle of a Congressional hearing …  or land into a football stadium two minutes before halftime … or light into some Lazy Boy with the nuclear family watching TV, well, you get the idea – that Martian or extra-galaxy being would be blown away by our species.

“The premise of democracy, if it’s to be taken seriously, has to focus on youth, which become the ultimate symbol of the future.” H. Giroux

A recurrent theme in this administration is often spellbinding rhetoric followed by … well, very little in the way of follow-through programs. Lately, there has been the inequality issue. Taken up once more in the State of the Union (SOTU) address, the remedy proposed was an increase in the minimum wage. Yes, it needs to be raised but to focus on it alone simply evades the complexities to be navigated to confront the challenges of inequality.