by Cody Lyon

It might also serve Americans to call upon the greater spirits of worker history in this nation and remember too, that it wasn't unions who over time stripped private sector workers of any sense of collective bargaining power over the years, it was instead company hunger for a better bottom line on Wall Street.

John Edwards and Bernie Sanders are about the only politicians discussing it, but what could be the hottest issue in this election is the death of the middle class caused by the "flat-earthers."  So-called "conservatives" and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation's middle class for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America. Through a combination of the "Fast Track" authority pushed for by Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade deals involving "most favored nation status" for dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us into NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we've abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years.

In a "News" story in The Washington Post this morning
"An Estate Tax Twist Reverses Party Roles On Minimum Wage" Staff Writer Jeffrey Birnbaum leads with one of the most disingenuous paragraphs I have read in a major newspaper in awhile:

For years, organized labor has worked hard to raise the minimum wage, while business groups have campaigned to block such a change. This week in the Senate, however, the AFL-CIO is pushing to kill the wage increase while practically the entire business lobby is demanding that it pass.

The minimum wage battle continues, with unions and workers fighting for an entry level raise for honest American workers that has been denied for nearly a decade while the dispassionate empty suits of business, their lackeys in local and national Chambers of Commerce, and the evil lick spittle minions they have purchased wholesale in our government at all levels, make pious pronouncements about the "marketplace" and the peril of allowing the government to regulate wages.

In the meantime, I've been talking to my friend, Jane.

On This Day in 1911, 146 people died in the very building I work in. The result of their deaths was the rapid growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the real beginning of the fight against sweatshops. It also was the beginning of fire regulations in American cities.

The story of the fire and the missed opportunities to prevent it are chilling. But what is more chilling is the fact that America has forgotten why we need unions. Even some unions have forgotten what unions are all about, but I want everyone who doubts the need for unions to remember the events of March 25, 1911.

The title here is the title of an article in Salon reprinted in full in Spiegel Online.  This from the lede:

Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.

The link to that article, and a wealth of information on topic is available from Gulf Reconstruction Watch.

In their attempts to gather information the Salon reporters came across this gem:

(James) Hale says that his union's legislative staff has pressed members of Congress for more information; apparently the legislators were told that they could not get copies of the contracts because of "national security" concerns. [Hale is a VP of the Laborer's Union].

Note that all of the work described is being performed on U.S. military installations throughout the Southeast.  Lack of toilet paper and food an issue of national security?