Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
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Mexican agricultural laborer topping sugar beets8d29109v

So the mission of the department is… and I quote, ‘to foster, promote and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States’. They're supposed to enforce labor laws, they're supposed to enforce workplace safety standards. They're supposed to be an advocate and protector for working people and poor people in this country. And they have done under the leadership of Lori Chavez Deamer the exact opposite. It's so unfortunate because every federal agency is going through this, right? But the Department of Labor. That touches more people than the the nerdy labor reporters that pay attention, that touches everyone 'cause work touches everyone. Your workplace safety and the labor laws that are supposed to protect you. That is an issue for every person here. And seeing this agency just completely abandon most of us… Everyone who wouldn't fit in on a German propaganda poster from the 1930s. It's really frightening.

Kim Kelly, author of, "Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor", (Atria Books) host of "Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing" podcast at workerorganizing.org, speaks with This Is Hell! to discuss her writing at The Baffler, "A Piece of Work: The Department of Labor’s anti-immigrant turn betrays its history."

We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell! from Patreon.Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon.

 


Sep 14 2020
Aug 27 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is also, paradoxically, the drink.

There’s a funny thing that happens when tyrannical rulers train their populations to accept untimely and unnecessary death as an everyday occurrence: the populace becomes ever more likely to rise up en masse and put their lives on the line battling those hired to police them and, eventually, making their way to the throats of the rulers. The same mistake the French and then the US military and its civilian chess-masters made throughout their colonial misadventures in Indochina are being made on the streets of every major and minor city in the world.

The people will win. Even against the other people, because the other people are worshipful tools of the tyrants. Against the cops, because we vastly outnumber the cops, and they seem to be nothing more than a subset of the worshipful tool people anyway. Against the military because, in the last analysis, even the military is divided between worshipful tools and real people. And once we get past all these tools, we’ll win against the rulers, because the only thing protecting them will be their technology, and they need people to make that technology work. And, being the people, we have those people on our side.

In short, the more they take from us, the less we have to lose. And when the people have nothing to lose, the people can’t lose.

The evil idiots who presume to be in charge of everything crossed the line ages ago. This week in Milwaukee they shot another unarmed, entirely innocent black man in front of his children, partially paralyzing him. In Glasgow, Scotland, a Ugandan refugee starved to death. The Greeks have been dumping refugees alive into the sea. Oh, and the death count from Covid-19 under Donald Dump’s distracted negligence is over 175,000. They’re coercing people to choose to work during the plague or be forced out onto the street. They’re dumping refugees in the desert to die. They’re putting as many poor people as they can into prisons and jails. They’re cutting down the few forests that aren’t on fire, depriving indigenous peoples of homes and livelihoods. They’re letting the food supply decay in the ruins of Iowa, as farmers go without aid, a policy of massacre-by-negligence which seems to have begun with the Dick Cheney administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Crops are failing, empires are... read more

Aug 26 2020
Aug 25 2020