98 Comments

I just checked and wonkette wrote a cookie 18 minutes ago, sigh

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You can’t change your looks. You can change the way you dress.

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Thanks babber! I’m planning a gammon steak with pineapple

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I suspect it's because Smedley Butler was one of the few people that the veterans they wanted to use to enact their coup would actually follow, as he was almost universally respected by said veterans. The plutocrats saw the respect, but probably never bothered to ask why he was so respected by the men...

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"A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker's wages or stretching workers' hours."

But corporate capitalism can and does justify those things, in the name of Almighty Profit.

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Minimum wage is a jobs program for the rich.Employers want to hire the best candidate available. Low pay means low-skilled job applicants. The lower the pay, the fewer expectations hiring managers have for applicants. If a job were to pay $6.25 an hour, the person hiring would expect the least attractive applicants, non-highschool graduates, ex-cons, etc. Force employers to pay more and the applicant pool fills with more attractive candidates, highschool graduates with references and no criminal record. Obviously the company is going to hire the most skilled and most trustworthy employee available. The non-highschool graduates and the ex-cons just got priced out of the market, same with the immigrants and all the other people who would gladly have some level of income versus nothing.

There are government credits and tax benefits for companies that hire ex-cons and other low desirability job seekers, but that's just another case of government creating the problem then "fixing" it with tax dollars. It all ends up being a whole lot of waste. But that's government for you.

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Domestic workers, mostly black women, were excluded. An example of using CRT for analysis of why.

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The browser might not, but I certainly do.

And that, dear friends, is why I urgently need to lose weight.

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I was one of those child farmworkers in the 70s, when Illinois farmers relied on high school students to detassle corn. We took those jobs because it was next to impossible to get paperwork for underage retail work. The second we hit 16 we were outta there. We made 75c an hour (minimum wage was $1.62 at the time) , for 10 hours standing on the back of a machine in 90 degree heat pulling the tassels off corn. You learned FAST to wear heavy long sleeve shirts or you went home with your arms cut to ribbons.

I never thought about it in those terms before.

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Nice to see Dr. Domhoff cited. Studied under him at UCSC. Books like "The Bohemian Grove" bring politics and sociology together in a fascinating way. He helped make me the radical I remain today.

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"most trustworthy employee available" is doing a lot of work there. if we raised the minimum wage it's not like all of these more qualified potential employees will materialize out of thin air. there is a limited labor pool based on population so paying the least among us more doesn't price anyone out the labor pool, it just makes the bottom of the labor pool be able to live with dignity. we could continue to pay people less and then subsidize the company's ability to do that by giving food stamps and medicare to people who work full time, but isn't that wasteful to the taxpayers and insulting to the person who is working full time but still can't afford to eat?

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They say in Harlan CountyThere are no neutrals there.You'll either be a union manOr a thug for J. H. Blair.Which side are you on boys?Which side are you on?

A little labor history: John Henry Blair was the sheriff and mine-owners' shill of Harlan Co. Kentucky during the bloody and bitter effort by Harlan Co. coalminers to unionize. Blair and his thugs - including US soldiers - murdered a lot of union organizers in the 1930s. But the miners did unionize, and it changed the lives of mine workers and other heavy laborers forever. Which is why in 1980 Harlan was solid blue and rejected Reagan the union-buster. (Southeastern border of the state, near the arrow.) https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Through 2000, Harlan was still blue-collar, white, and Democrat, voting for Al Gore. But coal is mostly gone now, and Harlan voters don't really remember the fight their grandparents won at such cost, or how precious that victory was. Southerners love to talk about history, and the value of their heritage, but they don't really mean it. So today Appalachian coal counties are deep Trump country. To see the shift - Harlan chose W in 2004 - here's a great website: https://www.wlky.com/articl...

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Last day of school for my sis-in-law (elementary special-ed) and nephew (fourth grade), both in NYC public schools.https://media3.giphy.com/me...

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Tru dat, but worse in Japan. They just passed a "guidline" that working people over 80 hours a week is bad. Suicides ramping up and all. I know there is some of that here too. Salaried folks in the wrong company with the wrong leaders will be worked to death.

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My father, born in 1919, worked in the furniture factories of Grand Rapids in his early teens.If he stayed after for two hours to scrape out the paint booth, he got an extra nickel.Can't imagine how toxic that must have been.

So the elite could surround themselves with the finest available everything.And stripped Michigan of all of its old growth timber to make that possible.

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