Full Moon

According to the lunar cycle: just happened, on the 19th.

Judging from behavior: the full moon would seem to be permanent. And this was another routine week—of mass, and other, murders that were not caused by guns. This time around, it's people who hear voices in their heads, or play games with toddlers, that kill people.)

Days later: this.

In the narrative that's been settled, such things just happen: Act of God, Nothing To Be Done, and so on.

For some time, Digby has been doing "Dispatch From Taser Nation" posts. This week's incident: tasering of a deaf 12-year old.

And Pierce last week wrote of "the casual cruelties we no longer notice," from the 107-year old man killed by a SWAT team, to vulnerable elderly losing homes to shady tax lien operators.

No matter how many mass murders or other grotesque events there are, nothing slows the war against the poor.

There's this, from Clever Sister: Michigan lawmakers approve bills for drug testing the unemployed, and requiring community service for anyone receiving public assistance.

Sen. Vincent Gregory, D-Southfield, said it didn't make sense to make someone — such as a single mother, for example — have to pay child care costs because of state-required community service. He offered an amendment — which ultimately failed — that would require the Department of Human Services to pick up child care costs while parents performed community service.

CS adds, "Will kids die when left alone?"

With the right's success at state levels and in controlling the House, eagerness to hurt the poor is in newly high gear. It's an agenda being served by the "balanced" coverage of news like the House's vote to defund food stamps. Digby's rundown of the cruelty and lies, includes Dan Froomkin's noting—

Everyone is concerned when there are a lot of people getting food stamps, but the problem is that they are hungry, not that they are being fed.

The GOP argument boils down to a nonsensical: When people are hungrier, we should feed them less. It shouldn't be treated as if it makes sense. But it was.

As David Atkins goes over the stats—

SNAP provides families with an estimated 22 million children with resources to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet. This represents close to 1 in 3 children (29 percent) in the United States. Almost half of all SNAP recipients are children (47 percent), and an additional 26 percent are adults living with children. ... Forty percent of all SNAP recipients live in households with preschool-age children (ages 4 and below).

Over 70 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with children. In 2011, SNAP provided an estimated $51 billion in benefits to families with children, over half of which went to families with preschool-age children.

And so on. One can only agree with Atkins' conclusion, that—

This is not a rational disagreement about public policy. This is a gulf of basic decency, a demand by fearful people for the sacrifice of innocents to sate a perversely sadistic form of cosmic justice.

Interestingly, most people demanding the starvation of children so that billionaires can buy more yachts call themselves Christian. Perhaps they're reading a Biblical translation that calls for blood sacrifice of innocents so that the rich may enjoy more fruits of Mammon. I missed that part in my copy.

Wednesday morning, I caught this on NPR—

"We should reform the food stamp program so we can get the aid to those who need it most in their hour of need, without the kind of rampant waste and abuse that you see," said Rep. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas.

It's not clear that waste and abuse really is all that rampant, but when House Republicans talk about the problem, they are most likely thinking of Jason Greenslate.

Greenslate is an unemployed San Diego surfer dude seen in a using his Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP card, to buy sushi and lobster. The story from correspondent John Roberts was reportedly circulated to GOP lawmakers.

The report shows Greenslate heading to the automated checkout counter and paying with his food stamp card. "Two hundred dollars a month, and you just go like, boom," Greenslate says on camera. "Just like that, all paid for by our wonderful tax dollars."

In reality, the vast majority of SNAP recipients either work or are children, disabled or elderly. Greenslate is the exception, rather than the rule. He's been described as the new welfare queen — a caricature used to push welfare reform in the '80s and '90s.

Indeed, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor describes the new House food stamp bill as an extension of welfare reform.

What, instead of a Cadillac-driving welfare queen, the cheat is all of a sudden a white guy? Or is the missing racist bait trumped by California ?

It may just be another example of the laziness granted the propagandists. After all, their base needs no consistency of narrative; Balance will ensure the memes are broadcast to everyone else, and the GOP is once more given cover for its war against the poor.

With the typical SNAP recipient being a working single-mother—employed by Walmart or McDonald's, at pay making her eligible for food stamps—Jason Greenslate is very much an outlier. Yes, NPR noted that, while it dutifully disseminated the "welfare reform" meme. And the Greenslate audio is a more obvious attention-getter than a bunch of boringly real statistics.

The audio is from Fox. I had expected to learn next that Greenslate is on a think tank payroll, but under California rules, he has been an eligible recipient. Media Matters looked at how Fox set this up and inserted it other media before the House vote, and some very knowledgeable readers responded with perspective on who typically receives SNAP. A commenter also linked to the San Diego Union-Tribune's coverage of the local surfer dude story, including remarks by a Greenslate relative (who happens to have written this book).

But never mind the facts: the GOP's white surfer dude story is "out there." Which, in observance of "Cokie's Law," makes it worthy of heavy coverage.

Hunkered In A Bunker

From a few months back, but fitting for Labor Day: Sam Seder's interview with Rich Yeselson, about this article.

Yeselson highlights the historical memory being lost: of how strong organized labor once was—in numbers and in daring—and how hard labor's opponents needed to work to reverse things. The rise of labor came in the decade after the 1935 passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which itself was a response to increased worker militancy. By 1945

... union membership quadrupled from almost 3.6 million to more than 14.3 million workers. During this period, American labor dominated the daily life of much of the nation and drew the obsessive concern of politicians and the press. Even some Southern states had union membership percentages in the high teens—statewide numbers that would be among the highest in the nation today but were among the smallest then. In a six-month period in 1937 alone—the year of the great sit-down strike at General Motors (GM) in Flint, Michigan—the CIO signed up two million workers in a nation with a population of about 130 million.

Organized labor made a no-strike pledge during the war. As the fight ended, wartime production levels decreased, along with workers' hours. An anticipated end to wage and price controls prompted further worry about inflation. The whole situation made Americans, whether in unions or not, fearful of a return to the Depression's economic conditions.

The American labor movement responded to these uncertainties with the greatest strike wave in the history of the United States. It started almost immediately after the war and continued right through 1946. Clerical workers walked out at the citadel of capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange. About 68,000 textile workers struck in the East, while 35,000 oil-refinery workers struck across seven states. In the Northwest, 40,000 lumber workers struck. In the Midwest, it was 70,000 Teamsters. In Oakland, a strike that started at the loading docks of two downtown department stores spread quickly to include 100,000 workers who effectively halted the city’s commerce and services for two days—the most dramatic general strike of several during the period. 100,000 workers who effectively halted the city’s commerce and services for two days—the most dramatic general strike of several during the period.

At the end of 1945 and into the next year, was the UAW's 225,000 member strike against GM (which Walter Reuther "used as an effort to bring European style co-determination to American labor-management relations"); 350,000 mineworkers struck in spring 1946.

All in all, about 10 percent of the entire American workforce withheld their labor in 1946. There were about 5,000 separate work stoppages involving about 4.6 million workers. ... To imagine this kind of union militancy today is to imagine 14 million workers striking in a single year.

1946 also saw midterm elections: Republicans won, under the slogan "Had enough?" Big majorities in both houses opened the way for them to create new labor laws, with backing from corporations and smaller business, the Federal Reserve Board, and the publishers of most major newspapers. In Congress, Republicans also had perfect allies in Dixiecrats eager to rid the South of unions and to forestall all moves toward civil rights.

Thus the paradox that at the high-water mark of its power and size, the labor movement generated an even more powerful backlash from the nation's power elite, which was augmented by an obsessive determination from the white South to make its region as union-free as possible. Southern elites, led by their nearly unified bloc in both houses of Congress, feared an ongoing alliance between labor and the first signs of a sustained African-American civil-rights movement, fueled by the return from the war of African-American soldiers newly emboldened to seek justice. The CIO, observing the same phenomenon, hopefully launched "Operation Dixie" in 1946, a well-funded effort to organize throughout 12 Southern states. Southern elites ruthlessly race-baited, red-baited, and intimidated poor black and white workers. Operation Dixie failed dismally, only making the Southern bloc more determined to stop unions in the region. Ira Katznelson, the great historian and political scientist, has called this implacable opposition of the South to African-American rights and the labor movement "the Southern cage."

Passage of Taft-Hartley would shift the balance in numerous ways. The overall insidious effect, Yeselson finds, was that

... Taft-Hartley bureaucratized labor unions. Unions required more and more lawyers—and more and more union stewards adept at labor law—to untangle the welter of laws, board decisions, judicial decisions, and contractual obligations that now ensnared the modern labor organization. This pervasive legalistic framework made the labor titans increasingly cautious, and it drained the energy and creativity out of the members and their rank-and-file leadership—the idea was to wait for the lawyers to tell them what would fly before the NLRB or the courts.... Taft-Hartley unmistakably signaled that anti-union political, economic, and cultural elites could contain both the leaders and their ranks. The bill shaved a risk-taking edge off labor that, perhaps, it didn’t realize it needed until subsequent moments of institutional crisis, like Ronald Reagan's firing of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981.

By the 1960s, says Yeselson, Taft-Hartley had been so effective that "even with its deep penetration in the workforce at the time, even at the apex of LBJ’s enormous Democratic congressional majority, labor could not repeal a comma of it."

"Fortress unionism" is Yeselson's concept of where private sector unions need to focus their energies now: defending regions and industries that remain unionized; strengthening locals and enhancing member education and activism; building coalitions with progressive groups; investing in "alt-labor organizations."

In the end, it's up to workers.

...union growth occurs when working-class activism overwhelms the quotidian strictures of civil society, forcing political and economic elites to accept unionization as the price of civil peace. During episodes of massive union growth, the workers don’t confine themselves to the careful strategies of union staff—they disregard them, and force the union to play catch up....

Yeselson notes the successful tactics Justice for Janitors used in a number of cities: going over the heads of cleaning subcontractors by targeting the real employers, commercial real estate owners.

There's another good Majority Report segment: Sarah Jaffe at the end of last year, as New York fast food workers held their first walkouts. It's a valuable history, with Jaffe suggesting the issues of low-wage adult workers are similar to those of earlier assembly line workers, prior to being organized and forcing those jobs to pay living, ultimately middle-class, wages. In this instance, housing activists saw so many of the working poor trying to subsist on depressed wages paid by local franchisees of powerful national companies.

Robert Kuttner has a good summary of these issues and possible strategies, in his rundown of recent actions around the country.

Kuttner's aticle is among Digby's list for reading, and taking encouragement.

All In A Day's Work

An incident not long before Labor Day, 2013. Elementary school bookkeeper uses kindness to prevent heavily armed intruder from shooting up the place; someone who in another media context could serve as one of those leeches who laze around as public employees.

Obama's Lincoln Memorial speech was in commemoration of a political event where organizers kept elected officials away from the platform. It was fine on history

...we would do well to recall that day itself also belonged to those ordinary people whose names never appeared in the history books, never got on TV. Many had gone to segregated schools and sat at segregated lunch counters. They lived in towns where they couldn't vote and cities where their votes didn't matter. They were couples in love who couldn't marry, soldiers who fought for freedom abroad that they found denied to them at home. They had seen loved ones beaten, and children fire-hosed, and they had every reason to lash out in anger, or resign themselves to a bitter fate.

He concluded with the usual dream world rhetoric: work hard and you'll succeed, as we are a country full of good people, like "that successful businessman who doesn't have to but pays his workers a fair wage and then offers a shot to a man, maybe an ex-con who is down on his luck..."

And this kind of thing is so routine now as to be considered a fine standard—

That tireless teacher who gets to class early and stays late and dips into her own pocket to buy supplies because she believes that every child is her charge -- she's marching.

Teachers "dipping" into the pocket—and fundraising, and corporate sponsorship— it's merely expected that education should be financed this way.

And after all, the message machine is happy enough with assuming a single mother needing to work three jobs is "uniquely American."

After noting the current president's fine rhetoric for a day, the pundits are no doubt relieved to get back to cheering on an attack against Syria, and a Grand Bargain with Obama's fine friends across the aisle.