“A writer’s notebook is not a diary. Writers react. Writers need a place to record these reactions. That’s what a writer’s notebook is for. It gives you a place to write down what makes you angry or sad or amazed, to write down what you noticed and don’t want to forget. A writer’s notebook gives you a place to live like a writer.” - Ralph Fletcher
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
The striking Chicago Teachers Union helped thrust teachers unions into the national spotlight, with union-buster Democrat Mayor Rahm Emanuel reminding us that, these days, Republicans and Democrats frequently converge on both education policy and labor-unfriendliness.
Kristin Rawls
(Source: truth-out.org)
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and other league officials have put themselves in a terrible negotiating position with the National Football League Referees Association, who are currently locked out while negotiations on their basic agreement continue. The fix they’ve put themselves is this: They’ve pretended that the men they put in officials’ uniforms are competent while we can clearly see they are not.
The NFL likes to call these men “replacement officials,” just as during the 1987 players strike they called the phonies they stuffed into team uniforms “replacement players.” These men “replaced” no one; the players and the officials are still NFL employees as they negotiate a new contract, even while the work stoppage goes on, and when they return, the so-called “replacements” will be gone. Their only purpose, both in 1987 and now, is to undermine a union’s bargaining position. So let’s call them not by the soft, vague euphemism which the NFL chooses but for what they are: scabs. If this lockout serves no other purpose, it at least educates fans on some basic tenets of collective bargaining.
Allen Barra
(Source: The Atlantic)
As tens of thousands of people descended upon the state Capitol Saturday, organizers of the effort to remove Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker from office announced they have collected more than 105,000 signatures on recall petitions.
(Source: wauwatosa.patch.com)
#OccupyOakland organizer Cat Brooks told Reuters on Friday the goal of the Nov. 2 action was a total general strike. “We mean nobody goes to work, nobody goes to school, we shut the city down,” she said. But representatives from the Peralta Federation of Teachers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union both said their organizations wouldn’t call a strike for their members.
RT @USRevolution_v2 The End of the American Dream? I think so… How sad -
(Source: charlesbivona.com)
Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before that storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31.7. New Orleans teachers used to be represented by a strong union; now the union’s contract had been shredded, and its forty-seven hundred members had all been fired.8 Some of the younger teachers were rehired by the charters, at reduced salaries; most were not.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, pg. 5.
(Source: naomiklein.org)
…until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping, as those who went before us did, that the rich will always protect themselves at our expense, we are doomed to a 21st century serfdom.
Chris Hedges, “Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand”
(Source: truthdig.com)
