Sharon Smith, author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States, has written a new introduction for a forthcoming Spanish edition of the book, which expands on the history through the last decade. It appears today on Socialist Worker in English, with the permission of the publisher.
May Day 2014
we want to feel the sunshine
we want to smell the flowers
we’re sure that god has willed it
and we mean to have eight hours
we’re summoning our forces from
shipyard, shop and mill
eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
eight hours for what we will
New Study: Charter Schools Hurt Poor Kids
Adopting a “school reform” agenda that encourages privatization actually makes the problems worse, according to a new study.
“In pushing these efforts, politicians, rightwing think tanks, chambers of commerce, and, most of all, the American Legislative Exchange Council are actually creating the very problem of failure in the school system they claim their privatization plans will help address.”
Read about it: Scathing Report Finds School Privatization Hurts Poor Kids – In These Times.
Remember Ludlow!
From Trish Kahle:
Remembering only the massacre at Ludlow obscures the vital fact that a group of coal miners–most of them immigrants–managed to organize a strike across racial and ethnic lines, and brought southern Colorado to the brink of revolution. It also obscures the tremendous courage with which miners and their families faced down the power of capitalism and the state–and conceals the role socialists and other radicals played in organizing the strike and rebellion. Finally, it sidelines the incredible–and immediate–solidarity expressed by other workers with the strikers in the Colorado coalfields.
Read More: The story of the Ludlow miners | SocialistWorker.org.
A Reminder from Chomsky: It’s the Institutions that Matter
Tim Donovan has an interesting piece over on Salon encouraging the Left to keep our focus where it matters.
He includes this quote from Noam Chomsky.
When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine. Benevolent, friendly, nice to the children, even nice to their slaves. Caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything, but in their institutional role, they’re monsters, because the institution is monstrous.
Read the article: Noam Chomsky was right: Why the Koch brothers are obscuring the real enemy – Salon.com.
100 Years After Ludlow
“Flags of truce were shot out of hands; women running in the sunlight to rescue their children were whipped back with the hail of a machine gun; little girls who plunged into a shed for shelter were followed there with 48-caliber bullets; a gentle Greek, never armed, was captured running to the rescue of those women and children dying in a hole, was captured without resistance, and after five minutes lay dead under a broken rifle, his skull crushed and bullet holes in his back, and the women and children still dying in the hole.”
What sort of ruthless band of savages or totalitarian police state could possibly have perpetrated such a crime?
Why, it was the Colorado National Guard, of course.
Read about it: The Ludlow Massacre: Never to be forgotten! » peoplesworld.
First Singalong is on May Day at FEED
The first Key City Singalong will be held on Thursday, May 1st, 2014 from 7PM to 9PM at FEED Arts Center, 259 S. Schuyler Avenue, Kankakee.
Bring your voice, your old songbooks and whatever instruments you’d like. I am told there will be refreshments.
First Videos from Labor Notes 2014
Labor Notes 2014 in Chicago was an incredible weekend of inspiration and activism. This was my first Labor Notes, and I hope to make in an annual ritual. Highlights, for me, were the Friday afternoon Chicago Labor history tour (conducted by the ILHS), the Saturday afternoon STOP Staples protest, and (of course) the Friday and Saturday night Folk Music singalongs, spearheaded by members of the Seattle Labor Chorus and Anne Feeney.
How could I forget to mention the incredible and boisterous impromptu singalong in the Crowne Plaza lobby into the wee hours of Sunday morning with young Wobblies and Occupy kids from Portland, Chicago and the Twin Cities?
Labor Notes has the first videos from the conference posted on their site now. I’m looking forward to more.
Need an inspiration fix? Here are a few video highlights for those who couldn’t make it to the record-breaking 2014 Labor Notes Conference—or those already ready to relive it.
See them here: First Videos from the 2014 Labor Notes Conference | Labor Notes.
Our Lives Literally Aren’t Worth 57 Cents to the Corporations
Elizabeth Schulte reports on the toll from corporate negligence at GM.
FIFTY-SEVEN cents. That’s what it would have cost General Motors (GM) to change a faulty part to blame for crashes that have killed at least 13 people.
The calculation comes from a 2005 internal company document obtained by congressional investigators, who provided the evidence for an April 1 congressional hearing on GM.
Read More: Their lives weren’t worth 57 cents to GM | SocialistWorker.org.
How We Almost Went To War In Syria
In a report that has been largely ignored or repressed by our corporate media, Pulitzer Prize winner Sy Hersch unravels the truth of those sarin gas attacks against innocent children that almost took us into war in Syria.
A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’
Read the full article at London Review of Books: Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line · LRB 6 April 2014.