After losing her four children and husband to yellow fever

And everything she owned in the Chicago fire four years later, she became a ferocious fighter for the worker.  Mother Jones.  Not really a feminist, she didn't support the need for women to vote:

Mary Jones was ideologically separated from many of the other female activists of the pre-Nineteenth Amendment days due to her aversion to female suffrage. She was quoted as saying that “You don’t need the vote to raise hell!”[9] Her opposition to women taking an active role in politics was based on her belief that the neglect of motherhood was a primary cause of juvenile delinquency.

But having lost all her babies (all under the age of 5 when they died) I can understand her desire to protect the bond between mothers and their children.  She even organized a Children's Crusade to protest mining conditions for children workers.

 

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones begins the “Children’s Crusade.” Accompanied by child mine and mill workers, she walked from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to President Theodore Roosevelt’s home in New York state to protest the plight of child laborers.

Where are these kinds of people now?

News worth pulling your hair out over...

DEAR GOD. WTF?! Top Bush-era GITMO and Abu Ghraib psychologist is WH's newest appointment.

What's inside a Japanese quake grab bag?

American workers got what they deserved

A quote from Bob Herbert's last column for the New York Times:

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Why we need to watch the Japanese radiation leak patterns carefully.

Five myths about the UN.

Farmers Sue USDA Over Monsanto Alfalfa - Again

This is what democracy looks like

We Are Wisconsin from Finn Ryan on Vimeo.

(h/t to mahakal on Facebook)

Athenae* [Scout] of First Draft has a video up

From Wisconsin:



*This was done by Scout for First Draft.

Putting the American worker out of work

Have they really thought through what they are doing? What will happen when nobody in the United States can afford their product? When the middle class has been strangled to death? That they are literally putting themselves out of work?

Via whig at Cannablog:

The politics of food

Are the same the world over. Take what you can get, use who you can exploit, ignore safety and health hazards, get the money:

Today, China does not only produce clothes, electronics and toys, but exports a variety of food items. I challenge a garlic consumer, just to take this one example, to go to the market in Dubai, Muscat, Beirut, London or Los Angeles to test this theory. We all buy the same garlic made in China, packaged in 3, 5 or 6 counts in purple mesh bags, that bear the "Super" tag, followed by the number 3 or 5 or 6.

These innocuous labels carry the "Product of Global Farms" label in Arabic or English (or any in other language), along with a price bar code, although they are all from the same origin.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this "garlic" phenomenon since it is a function of supply and demand. Yet, something is amiss when exporters flood markets on the backs of cheap labourers [workers who suffer "gulaosi," in Chinese "to be literally worked to death,"] and importers, who fling safety records out the window for immediate financial gains.

Working conditions in many countries - and not just in Asia - are poor and labour laws are either non-existent, or inadequately drafted.

In truth, manual and increasingly technical labourers everywhere, are expendable although periodic calls to address dire conditions are made after every confrontation. Often modest modifications are introduced after illegal industrial actions result in work stoppages.

Still, for all the promises made by managers to eliminate sweatshop work conditions, few trade unions are created to protect workers from outright exploitation.

Know where your products come from. Buy locally and seasonally if you can. Be aware.

Guess who supports Chinese sweatshops and low pay?

We do. (My bold): (updated: forgot link)

In a historically unprecedented visit, influential Chinese scholar and labor-law expert Liu Cheng arrived in Washington, DC, to garner support from US legislators and labor leaders for a law that is pending not before the US Congress but before the National People's Congress (NPC) in China. Liu Cheng has been a key adviser to the drafters on a labor-law reform bill currently working its way through the Chinese legislative process.

His visit is part of a behind-the-scenes battle that is raging worldwide over reforms in China's labor law. On the one side are Wal-Mart, Google, General Electric (GE) and other global corporations that have been aggressively lobbying to limit new rights for Chinese workers. On the other side are pro-worker-rights forces in China, backed by labor, human rights, and political forces in the US and around the world.

Liu Cheng's visit to Washington was part of that international support campaign. He warned in an interview that support for the new law within China is not enough. "Some National People's Congress representatives are influenced by the employer lobby. Although the principles of the amendments are secure, there may be concessions on the details, so we call for help."

[snip]

On December 8, shortly after last year's elections, Democrats Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, George Miller, Barney Frank and 28 other members of the House of Representatives introduced legislation calling on Bush to express public support for the workers' rights and protection provisions in China's draft labor law and repudiate efforts by some US corporations and their representatives in China to limit new rights for workers.

This legislation properly places the focus on the actual role of US corporations in China. Their action is part of the broader effort by a Democratic-controlled Congress to take the policymaking initiative away from the Bush administration.

The exposure of corporate opposition to expanded labor rights for Chinese workers has also generated outrage among labor organizations and their allies around the world. Inside China, leaders of the ACFTU have been fighting efforts by companies to restrict unions' role in setting new employer policies.

Want to fight back? Scare the corporate world with these words: Want less, buy less, use up, recycle, repair.