Waiting for the Pinkertons

Corporate media is slowly deigning to acknowledge what’s going on in Madison. The NYTimes has an article about how the police refused to remove the Capitol protesters (but despite giving the “background” neglects to mention that Wisconsin’s budget crisis was wholly manufactured by Gov. Walker’s intemperate tax cuts and giveaways to corporations). Paul Krugman writes about how tax cuts for the rich (and rich alone) have impacted children in Texas. (Apparently private charities aren’t stepping up as promised.)

In the WaPost, Robert J. Samuelson has a thoughtful history of modern labor that completely leaves out the union fight for job security (corporate competition and cost-cutting doesn’t sound so scary if you don’t think about all the jobs lost or shipped overseas by American labor hating CEOs and thuggishly anti-union boards of directors). Samuelson also neglects to acknowledge union concessions, an omission so glaring as to invalidate his highly specious conclusion:

The result is a dilemma that transcends partisan union-bashing. Striving too hard to protect existing wages and benefits will stimulate more political opposition, and not just from Republicans (see Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York). But sacrificing too much may trigger a revolt from angry rank-and-file members. Private-sector unions couldn’t solve this dilemma; they never reconciled past successes with future survival. So Big Labor became Little Labor. If public-sector unions fail, Little Labor could become Mini Labor.

Mini-labor, in case you’re wondering, would mean the end of overtime, paid vacations, sick days, minimum wage, etc. — freeing employers to schedule employees in bizarre and heartless ways (it would be much more efficient if McDonald’s could schedule workers to come in at breakfast, lunch and dinner hours only for a total of six hours a day, seven days a week). No overtime also means when things get busy as they do in agriculture, your shift could lengthen to 12, 16 or even 20 hours, again with no days off, not even to attend church.

And let’s not forget that without unions kids could work long hours too.

These bastards aren’t breaking unions, they’re breaking America.

Live stream of the Capitol occupation (that’s not a small crowd and those aren’t pot-smoking hippies)

Even Forbes knows Walker’s lying

Boing Boing diagrams the relationships between the Kochs and Walker

Glenn W. Smith on the arrogance of the rich

Driftglass on the Sunday morning anti-union talk shows

A flash back to the good old days of my early childhood

More on Anonymous vs the Kochs (if breaking the internet hurt them more than us, I’d take a hammer to my modem in a heartbeat but unfortunately, the net is about all we’ve got left) [PW on Anonymous and the corporate media's noncoverage]

Hurting the economy in the name of ideology

Fish Wrap

Links to more photos

Gov. Bridgefail with more on how to make things worse [how much worse? read this]

Roy Edroso on how offensive it is of the unions to do in Wisconsin what the Kochs paid for on the national level

Weigel on accusations v reality

Avedon Carol with still more

And City Pages is saying there will be a rally in downtown Minneapolis today at 4 pm.

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More:

The more some Republicans trash the First Lady’s anti-obesity campaign, the more other Republicans think twice (and still others refuse to think at all)

An economy so bad the birth rate is dropping

More reasons to ignore the Daily Beast (now with more Howie the Whore!)

Clarence Thomas equates attacks on his sleazy personal finances with an attack on the Supreme Borks themselves

It’s not shocking that Roger Ailes broke the law, but his getting caught has shocked the establishment

Obama shields mercenaries from war crimes prosecution (because the establishment covers its own ass always)

Another FDL Book Club interview with authors of a book about how the rich got richer at everyone else’s expense

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Interesting how they finessed my favorite part of the Oscars. I love listening to the applause while they show pictures and clips of industry biggies who passed away in the last year. For almost everyone who’s not an actor, the applause was my only clue of who was good or popular or both.

Not this year. They had Celine Dion singing live and that stopped the applause. Nicely done (the distraction, not the overwrought singing) but I miss the applause.

In all honesty, I had my back to the TV most of the night, but even so it wasn’t hard to tell that Hollywood was even more full of itself than usual this year. The harder they try to make the Academy Awards into good TV, the more they fail. My solution would be to hold the Oscars and the Razzies at the same time. Nothing makes success look good like standing next to failure.

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Etc.:

Synthetic pot popular in Annapolis (the Air Force Academy has already introduced Sharia-style penalties for imbibers)

Harper Collins unilaterally declares ebooks dead after 26 library checkouts (which serves the public good how, exactly?)

More Firefly rumors

What happens if you leave your car door open in the winter (I have never seen anything like this)

Blue Ribbon Bacon Fest (check out this video on how to make perfect bacon, and no, that’s not how I used to cook bacon)

No commenting on Titian at the Strib

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Frank W. Buckles, R.I.P.

The last American victim of the worst war, he is survived by a 109-year-old Aussie and a 110-year-old British woman.

• killing unions
• remember the days of slavery
• suppressing labor