Labor
Viacom vs. Daily Show
Does the writer’s strike have you down? Miss The Daily Show? Here are some things you can do:
Download Miro.
Watch some classic Daily Show clips here.
Read and watch the official blog of the writer’s strike.
Watch the following YouTube video made by some striking Daily Show writers:
One America
The text of John Edward’s Hanover speech reprinted in full (via Crooked Timber):
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery: “To Build One America, End the Game”
Hanover, New Hampshire
August 23, 2007
This election is unlike any we have faced before. The stakes are higher. And the challenges we face as a nation are greater than at any time in […]
SiCKO
Here is a quote from FOX News:
Filmmaker Michael Moore’s brilliant and uplifting new documentary, “Sicko,” deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity.
And here […]
Employment Rate
Wikipedia lists some problems with the current method of calculating the unemployment rate in the US. These include the fact that 1.5% of the available working population is incarcerated, the large number of people who have dropped out of the work force, “involuntary part-time workers” who would like full-time work, etc. It is also worth […]
Sacrifices
The LA Times reports that one of the leading US Airlines is doing so well that “874 top executives will receive more than $150 million in stock bonuses next week.” As for the 18,000 attendants who gave up vacations and agreed to a 16% pay cut after 9-11 delivered the industry a crushing blow, they’re […]
Free Choice Act
The Employee Free Choice Act passed the house vote, now it is going to the senate. If you are a US citizen, please go here to tell your senator that they should pass this important bill!
Why is this important? The standard method (NLRB elections by secret ballot) are much more prone to coercion by management:
During […]
Sergei & Uncle Walt
Speaking of the Guardian … a piece in the Observer discuses how Walt Disney was a raving McCarthyite:
Disney had a ferocious temper, especially against people he saw as left-wing. He testified enthusiastically before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and detailed what he saw as communist plots to take over Hollywood. He branded some former animators […]
Supervisor
To those 8 million American workers who were recently “promoted” to supervisor. Congratulations!
{unions}
Oligarchy
Having just complained about the Times habit of writing as if the poor didn’t exist, suddenly I find two articles that would make you think the Times was run by commie pinkos! In fact, the first story, about the “The Rise of the Super-Rich” sounds surprisingly like this one from the Marxist journal, The Monthly […]
On the Waterfront
That organized crime controls New York and New Jersey’s waterfront is not news. Elia Kazan’s classic 1954 film On the Waterfront (filmed around Hoboken, where I grew up) depicts the (true) story of one man who took on the mob, but as William Finnegan’s excellent New Yorker story “Watching the Waterfront” (print only) shows, little […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
