Martin Levitt — who renounced his 20-year career as an anti-union consultant to write a landmark memoir, Confessions of a Union Buster, in the early 1990s — famously said that union busting is a “dirty business” which is “populated by bullies and built on deceit. A campaign against a union is an assault on individuals and a war on the truth.
As the election returns rolled in showing President Donald J. Trump winning strong support from blue-collar voters in November while suffering historic losses in suburbs across the country, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, declared on Twitter: “We are a working class party now. That’s the future.”
INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana has a somewhat high rate of COVID vaccine refusal, and researchers are investigating whether false information online is planting seeds of doubt.
Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media has an online dashboard, called CoVaxxy, which tracks daily data on vaccine uptake.
It also tracks posts on social media that include certain vaccine-related keywords.
On Jan. 6, 2021, millions watched, horrified, as agitators hellbent on overturning the election results and disenfranchising Black and Brown voters staged an insurrection on the Capitol, fueled by demonstrably false allegations of voter fraud. While there are clear problems with our democracy and voting systems that must be fixed, these issues don’t arise from voter fraud.
Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles. Their voicemail messages often tell you how rarely they check their calls and urge reaching them by email. Good luck getting through the email clutter, filters, and voluminous commercial pitches, etc. More importantly, email exchanges can’t compare with the quick back and forth of personal exchanges on the phone.
Over the past few years, I have become increasingly convinced that a variety of seemingly unrelated political attitudes and allegiances can only be explained by a deep-seated underlying racism. That conclusion doesn’t require us to disregard the complexities that dictate individual world-views and predict their saliency; I don’t mean to imply that individual circumstances are irrelevant–but the racist element is inescapable. History teaches us that previously suppressed bigotries emerge and find expression when people are insecure, financially or otherwise.
After his defeat at the hands of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the 2016 presidential primaries, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders went back to work. Sanders’s supporters were in agony that November as they watched Clinton lose to the worst candidate ever put forth by the Republican Party: “Bernie would have won!” The rest is rancid history.
There are about 2.5 million farmworkers around the U.S., many of them undocumented immigrants working under dangerous and exploitive circumstances without sick leave or healthcare. Despite their status as essential workers, however, many farmworkers are facing an uphill battle to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Estella Cisneros, legal director of the Agriculture Worker Program for California Rural Legal Assistance, says an uneven rollout in California as well as technical barriers have left many farmworkers unvaccinated.
An attorney representing the Arizona Republican Party on Tuesday helpfully admitted outright what has long been obvious to observers of the GOP’s decades-long assault on the franchise: Easier voting makes it harder for Republicans to win elections.
On Tuesday, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Chris Wray confirmed that the agency has not been able to find evidence of people associated with antifa or other left-wing ideologies in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6.
The Biden administration is a single regulatory leap away from green-lighting the logging of hundreds of acres of old-growth forest in Montana. If approved, the U.S. Forest Service’s “Black Ram Project” would authorize commercial harvesting on 3,904 acres in the Kootenai National Forest, including the clear-cutting of at least 579 acres of trees that are hundreds of years old.
INDIANAPOLIS—After some of its members became the targets of booing, jeering and altercations in the House session on Feb. 18, the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus is hosting call-to-action days at the Statehouse.
The IBLC hopes those who were involved with the heckling and ignoring of Black legislators as they spoke from the House floor will be reprimanded and that there will be mandatory implicit bias training for all legislators.
Baltimore is piloting a software program developed by Everytown for Gun Safety that will enable it for the first time to identify patterns of gun trafficking and illegal sales.
Why it matters: If successful, this crime-fighting software — which draws data from multiple systems and connects the dots — could be used to crack down in many cities where gun violence is a big problem.
On Dec. 16, 1965, a group of students — including organizer Bruce Clark (17 years old), Christopher Eckhardt (16 years old), John F. Tinker (15 years old), Mary Beth Tinker (13 years old), Hope Tinker (11 years old), Paul Tinker (8 years old) — wore black armbands to school to protest the war in Vietnam. The school board got wind of the protest and passed a preemptive ban. When the students arrived at school on December 16, they were asked to remove the armband. When the students refused, they were sent home.
With all the media hoopla last week about the Perseverance rover, frequently unreported was that its energy source is plutonium—considered the most lethal of all radioactive substances—and nowhere in media was the NASA projection that there were 1-in-960 odds of an accidental release of the plutonium on the mission.
As Democrats push to include a $15 federal minimum wage in the Covid stimulus package, many media reports have been giving the false impression that it’s an idea far outside the mainstream.
In the wake of John Kerry’s 2004 electoral defeat, the editors of The Stranger, an alternative newspaper published in Seattle, published a wonderful rant. The editors looked at the red and blue election map, and pointed to the (visually obvious) fact that even in the reddest states, cities were bright blue. America’s urban areas comprised what they called an “urban archipelago” that reflected political values and attitudes vastly different from those of rural America.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
INDIANAPOLIS -- New data show a big drop of just over 9% in the number of Indiana students applying for federal student aid this year, and experts say that could mean a big red flag for college enrollment.
The National College Attainment Network tracks the "Free Application For Federal Student Aid" (FAFSA).
INDIANAPOLIS—Sometimes history tries to teach us a lesson.
Economic justice organizers may soon triumph in their fight for a $15 minimum wage. Thanks to their years of effort, President Biden (and every Democratic contender during the primary debates) vowed to hike the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In keeping with that promise, Biden attached a wage bill to his $1.9 trillion COVID relief package.
I know I write too much. I promised that I would try to restrain myself for a day or so from writing and posting my words of wisdom. But after reading my local morning newspaper I had to do something!
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is continuing to work for a private health care benefits company while serving in his elected position, raising questions from a watchdog over the appropriateness of that decision.
On Feb. 16, over 30 drivers circled the Pensacola State College-Warrington Campus buildings for half an hour, laying on their horns. Signs saying “High Risk” and “Betrayal” were taped to their vehicles. This action was led by the Pensacola State College Faculty Association, a chapter of the United Faculty of Florida (UFF). The faculty were protesting the inhumane conditions they have been subjected to by the PSC administration, who have done virtually nothing to protect them from COVID-19 exposure — after unilaterally forcing them to teach classes in person.
The Economist (2/15/20) ran a brief article last year with a startling headline: “Immigration to America Is Down. Wages Are Up. Are the Two Related?” Maybe, the article’s anonymous author answered, at least for the short term.
After a truly revolting episode in the Indiana Statehouse, a recent quote from Sacha Baron Cohen seems particularly apt. Cohen was quoted as saying “If you’re protesting against racism, you’re going to upset some racists.”
Which brings me to what transpired in Indiana’s Statehouse on Thursday.
Oakland, CA—As the Biden administration begins dismantling Trump's anti-immigrant legacy and contemplates reforms to US immigration policy, it will have to take the crucial decision of whether to continue or terminate the H-2A “guest worker” program.
