Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Second rate reporter says what?

So many bastards, so little time.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

You are here: Home / Organizing & Resistance / Don't Mourn, Organize / Late Night Labor Day Open Thread

Late Night Labor Day Open Thread

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While we’re technically still in the Labor-Day window, I want to recommend Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post on “Anti-Labor Day“:

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned here before the profound effect of spending my most formative childhood years in a place that was sort of a monument to capital’s war on labor. LaGrange, Georgia, in the early 1960s was a textile company town ruled economically, politically & socially by the Callaway family, proprietors of Callaway Mills. People there still talked—whispered, really—about the anti-union violence that occurred there a generation earlier…

To be clear, the National Guard in LaGrange and other textile towns wasn’t just breaking strikes: it was evicting workers from their (company-owned) homes for any hint of union activity. It was state-sponsored class terror, and it succeeded.

Things didn’t changed much in LaGrange in the generation after the Uprising of ‘34 was crushed. As a particularly clear sign of anti-union animus, the public schools in LaGrange began class on Labor Day each year. While I was living there, Callaway family scion “Bo” was elected to Congress in the Goldwater landslide of ‘64 as an segre- gationist Republican. Two years later his views on civil rights almost certainly cost him the governorship of Georgia as a write-in campaign denied Callaway a popular majority against arch- segregationist Lester Maddox, who was subsequently elected by the legislature on a party-line vote. Two years after that Callaway patriarch Fuller stunned LaGrange by selling out his mills to the South Carolina-based Milliken empire….

… And a much more upbeat, hopeful Boston Globe article on today’s celebrations in Lawrence, the home of “Bread & Roses”:

Looking for a sign that labor still has the ability to fight?

Consider a ceremony planned for Monday as part of the 30th annual Bread & Roses Heritage Festival on the Campagnone Common in Lawrence. Laying a wreath at the 1912 Strikers’ Monument will be a group of Market Basket workers.

“The biggest parallel that I see is the ability of a broad cross-section of workers at Market Basket to remain together over the last eight weeks,” said Robert Forrant, a University of Massachusetts Lowell history professor who will speak at the festival on comparing the Market Basket struggle — which ended Wednesday — to the nine-week strike of 1912.

“The owners never anticipated that the workers would hold fast to such a degree, and the same thing was the case in Lawrence in 1912,” Forrant said. “When the Bread and Roses Strike started, mill owners were quoted in the Lawrence newspapers the second day of the walkout [as saying that] everybody would be back to work in a couple of days and it would all be over.”

In both cases, the owners were wrong….

Reader Interactions

31Comments

  1. 1.

    srv

    Des Moines Register choses to have the President of the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation to emote today

    Most Americans realize that Labor Day is about celebrating workers and their contribution to our free society, but that won’t stop union bosses from stealing the spotlight to push their own agenda.

    Despite this, there is still much to celebrate this Labor Day. Workers from across the country have made substantial gains for workplace freedom.

    In America’s newest right-to-work state, a growing number of workers from across Michigan are joining the fight to protect their right to work from union bosses. In Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court upheld in entirety Gov. Scott Walker’s public-sector unionism reforms, commonly known as “Act 10,” which grants right-to-work protections to most Wisconsin government employees.

  2. 2.

    Bill D.

    Note the last line of Kilgore’s post:

    The 1930s and 1960s [as they played out in Georgia] live on, and the worship of the Golden Calf of capital has a grip on the Bible Belt as strong as sin.

  8. 8.

    Major Major Major Major

    Spent my labor day recovering from last night’s seizure, should get discharged in the morning. Can’t wait to get this catheter out of my arm.

    So uh, anybody hiring some part time web engineers/librarians, since I forgot to budget for having a seizure?

  11. 11.

    PurpleGirl

    AL: Thanks for Collins’ Bread and Roses. I love the march mode it gets into. I also like a version done by Joan Baez and her sister, Mimi Farina. And I didn’t remember to play it today.

  13. 13.

    Bobby B.

    Unlike the extermination of American Indians, destroying unions is still acceptable and continues daily. Maybe after unions are gone we’ll see some kind of “Little Big Man” movies.

  14. 14.

    Anne Laurie

    @PurpleGirl:

    I haven’t seen JC updating us on the baby and momma’s statuts.

    I half-figured putting up a new post would magically (murphy-cally) spark an update from Himself!

  19. 19.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Violet: Pretty much everything came down to “eat better, exercise more, drink less, and get different parents” as far as we can tell. And I’m not really slacking in either of those three departments… under a lot of stress lately though. Who knows. Thanks for the good feelings all.

    ETA: Personally I think it was all the above plus a recent spate of sleep deprivation due to stress..?

  20. 20.

    Violet

    @Major Major Major Major: Yeah, stress can really do a number on you. Maybe incorporate some simple stuff–walking or yoga poses or meditation. I just read this fascinating article. Apparently you can increase your testosterone by 20% and lower your cortisol by 25% just by doing the V for victory pose for as little as two minutes. Cortisol is the stress hormone so maybe that would be a simple thing to try?

  21. 21.

    Suzanne

    @Major Major Major Major: I started having seizures about six years ago after a period of intense sleep deprivation, and was told that that was most likely the cause. Getting better sleep and Tegretol have kept me seizure-free for over five years.

  22. 22.

    sharl

    From the Department of the Entirely Unsurprising:

    Eric Cantor to Join Wall Street Investment Bank

    By Dana Cimilluca @danacimilluca

    Eric Cantor plans to join boutique investment bank Moelis & Co., as the recently deposed House majority leader embarks on a new career on Wall Street.

    – Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

  29. 29.

    Sherparick

    Of course the response of the owners and investors in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, to shift investment to the even more anti-union, racially divided, South with its well established tradition of political violence and state sponsored terror. By the way, if you needed another reason to hate golf, Calloways moved on to golf from textiles.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Golf_Company

  30. 30.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    Thanks for the link on Market Basket. I was in Manchester last month for business, working at the Currier Museum. EVERYONE I met said how they would not shop there until the gentleman running the chain was re-instated. They would go in to see how the stores looked — apparently empty shelves, and most of the offerings low quality — and then they would leave without buying anything.

  31. 31.

    mack

    Nearly a hundred years later, it’s not much better in LaGrange. I owned a house and business there, but before that, I worked (briefly) at Calloway Gardens, the resort in nearby Pine Mountain. Employees were treated like dirt. I was no never so glad to leave a place in my life.

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