Category: Class War

It’s all your fault

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Taj Mahal palace in India

No such thing as systemic problems, it’s all about character flaws:

Whether you’re rich or poor, Republicans believe that’s on you.

Findings released Thursday by Pew showed that most Republicans think rich people are largely responsible for their socioeconomic status. They also feel the same way about poor people.

Fifty-seven percent of GOP voters said that a person is rich because “he or she worked harder than others,” while just 32 percent attribute it to advantages they enjoyed. The results are almost completely flipped among Democrats.

Overall, 51 percent of Americans said that people are wealthy due to advantages in life, while 38 percent said it had more to do with hard work.

What Whole Foods meant by ‘non-organic’

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Swamp Rabbit was complaining about the weather, a pointless and self-defeating exercise. “This here winter is like a roller coaster ride, with temps up to fifty-something one week and a blizzard the next. How we gonna eat if you can’t get out the swamp to rob no supermarkets? Ain’t nothin’ but cold cuts in this shack, and they’s even worse than wieners.”

“Things are tough all over,” I said, trying to warm up by the wood stove. Then I grabbed the laptop and read for him the headline from a PRWatch story — “Whole Foods Agrees to Stop Selling Produce Grown in Sewage Sludge” — and some of the text:

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) broke the story that the $12.9 billion-a-year natural and organic foods retailer Whole Foods Market had a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it comes to “conventional” — or non-organic — produce being grown in fields spread with sewage sludge, euphemistically called “biosolids.” Certified organic produce cannot be fertilized with sewage sludge, which is the industrial and hospital waste and human excrement flushed down the drains and later — in some cases — spread on some crops.

Since this story broke, nearly 8,000 activists and PRWatch readers have sent emails to Whole Foods executives asking the company to require its suppliers to disclose this information and to label produce grown in sewage sludge so that customers can make informed decisions.

Mario Ciasulli, a semi-retired engineer and home cook living in North Carolina whom CMD profiled in December 2012, blew the whistle on Whole Foods’ don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy. As soon as he found out that shopping at Whole Foods was no protection against this potential contamination unless he could afford to buy only certified organic produce, he worked extensively to engage Whole Foods on this issue…

“You mean they was growin’ my carrots in hospital doo-doo?” Swamp Rabbit said.

I explained to him that it’s the same all over. You don’t even want to know where your food comes from unless you’re well off enough to buy ‘certified organic’ at farmers’ markets or places like Whole Foods, which is run by ultra-rich right-wing vegan John Mackey and frequented by many liberals who probably didn’t know that “non-organic” or “conventional” produce at Whole Foods often was “grown in sewage sludge.”

“Damn,” the rodent said. “Make sure you steal organic this time, and if you don’t, don’t tell me.”

Punishing us for protesting

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

2011-07-10.Syntagma Protests 033

Yes, this is England. But it will happen here:

Chief constables are shortly to press the home secretary, Theresa May, to authorise the use of water cannon by any police force across England and Wales to deal with anticipated street protests.

The Association of Chief Police Officers says that the need to control continued protests “from ongoing and potential future austerity measures” justifies the introduction of water cannon across Britain for the first time.

The London mayor, Boris Johnson, has already announced a consultation on the introduction of water cannon onto the streets of London ready for use by this summer.

Beyond Vietnam: A time to break the silence

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

There’s a reason why Martin Luther King Jr., the great man whose birthday we celebrate today, was such a threat to the establishment. Not because of the soft-and-fuzzy, non-threatening MLK the media so loves, cherry-picking his legacy to leave only the pacifism, but because of his radical views on social and economic justice. (As he said, “I take the gospel seriously.”)

It saddens me that so many young people seem to have no real understanding of who he was, or why he was so revolutionary. To them, it’s just a day off from school, or a day taking part in public service. But why? And why do so many political pretenders claim his legacy while shunning the hard work of justice? Only the Occupy movement echoes the same moral voice as King’s.

“Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break The Silence” might be the greatest speech of our generation. I can think of nothing that comes close.

Dr. King attacked the military-industrial complex, calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He said war was the enemy of the poor. He was right then. Sadly, he still is.

If you listen to the entire speech, you’ll see how very little has changed since he made it.
Continue reading “Beyond Vietnam: A time to break the silence” →

Chris Christie’s biggest fan still loves him

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Ken Langone Threatens Pope Francis

Paul Krugman notes Chris Christie’s top supporter is the same guy who tried to intimidate Pope Francis out of talking about the rich:

So it was with today’s Times report on the internal recommendations Chris Christie has been getting within the GOP. Quoted at some length was a guy named Ken Langone:

The billionaire Kenneth G. Langone, Mr. Christie’s most devoted fund-raiser and loudest cheerleader, got in touch with him in recent days. Mr. Langone said he told the governor that he must be smarter about those who surround him.

“I conveyed the importance of the decisions he makes about the people around him and their qualification and their competence, including common sense,” said Mr. Langone, who called the politically motivated closure of lanes onto the George Washington Bridge “beyond the pale.”

“It upset the hell out of me,” he said.

Ah, yes — that Ken Langone, who recently tried to bully … the Pope:

Billionaire Home Depot founder Ken Langone has a warning for Pope Francis.

A major Republican donor, Langone told CNBC in a story published online Monday that wealthy people such as himself might stop giving to charity if the Pope continues to make statements criticizing capitalism and income inequality.

Langone said he was worried the Pope’s comments about an “exclusionary” “culture of prosperity” that may make some of the rich “incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.”

Yep. Stop criticizing the rich or we’ll take it out on the poor. Nothing at all like punishing the residents of Fort Lee — and, apparently, in what may be a much worse story, Hoboken — because you’re annoyed at their mayor.

Class war volunteers

~ susie

White House Interns 041998

In case you wondered why people in the political elite don’t have a clue how the rest of us live:

The Obama administration, like previous administrations, allows rich parents in effect to buy résumé-enhancing jobs in the public sector for their upper-class offspring. The sale of public offices to rich families was one of the abuses of the Ancien Régime that helped to inspire the French Revolution. Like that corrupt premodern practice, unpaid internships are an inherently aristocratic institution. If you are in your late teens or early twenties, and you don’t have a personal trust fund or rich parents who can fund your living expenses as an unpaid intern in Washington, D.C., New York or San Francisco, then you are out of luck.

When I say rich kids, I mean really rich kids. We’re talking One Percenters. Even many upper-middle-class parents with professional jobs might not be able to subsidize children with unpaid internships at the White House, Washington think tanks or New York publications and media enterprises.

Because my own parents were not rich, in my twenties I could never have afforded a job as an unpaid or poorly-paid intern at any of the magazines for which I once worked in my thirties as a writer or editor — the New Republic, Harper’s Magazine or the New Yorker. Indeed, it was my unscientific impression that the interns at these publications were much richer, in their twenties, thanks to family wealth, than most of the middle-aged editors and writers. An intern at one magazine had a party for the magazine staff at her two-story Midtown Manhattan apartment.

Unpaid internships have the effect, if not the intent, of providing the children of the super-rich with major advantages over the children of the lower 99 percent in the job market after college. Imagine what a benefit a White House internship is on a résumé. Too bad that benefit is not available to poor, working-class, middle-class or even upper-middle-class Americans, unless they are lucky enough to find an outside sponsor to pay the wages that the Obama administration refuses to pay.

It’s bad enough that elite institutions like magazines and think tanks ration opportunity by discriminating in favor of the sons and daughters of the One Percent by means of unpaid internships. A president who engages in this practice sends a signal to all other employers in the United States: As long as you call a job an “internship” you are free to discriminate against the majority of Americans who were not born into the upper class.

Union vote at Amazon warehouse

~ susie

I can’t find any info about how it went. I hope it passed:

A group of up to 30 Amazon employees at one of the company’s Delaware warehouses will have the opportunity to vote today in an election that could establish the first-ever labor union representation at a U.S. Amazon facility.

The group, which consists of equipment technicians and mechanics, will be voting on whether they want to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. A simple majority — or half of those who vote plus one — is needed to establish the first-ever union shop inside an Amazon facility in the U.S., according to IAMAW spokesman John Carr.

Carr said the voting workers, who make up just a small fraction of the more than 1500 employees at the facility, are not most concerned with the wages they are paid. Rather, they’d like help negotiating for things such as vacation and promotion policies, seniority rules, as well as the possible creation of a safety committee, Carr said.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, the workers have been pulled into what unions call “captive audience meetings,” during which their superiors at Amazon attempt to persuade workers against unionization, according to Carr.