Russ Feingold talks to Rachel Maddow about what's happening in Wisconsin

empowering u.s. workers...! wow...! what a concept...!!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

NOW, we're TALKING'...

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The perfect recovery would necessarily be 100% jobless ... Human costs of generating profit would be entirely eliminated

since "discovering" joe bageant, i've been continually amazed at how closely our views track with each other... there's been a not-so-fantastic scenario playing out in my mind lately where the board of directors and the senior management of a major corporation are discussing business strategy... the gist of the discussion is this... "we really don't want any damn employees... they're nothing but a cost drain not to mention they're a pain, always whining and causing trouble... is there any way we can just get rid of the lot of 'em...?"

joe bageant...

Paying the workers in society to produce real wealth costs money. Capitalists hate any sort of cost. It represents money that has somehow escaped their coffers. So when any behemoth corporation hands out thousands of pink slips on a Friday, Wall Street cheers and "the market" goes up. No ordinary mortal has ever seen "the market." But traders on the floor of 11 Wall Street, people who've deemed themselves more than mortal by virtue of their $110 Vanitas silk undershorts, assure us the market does exist. No tours of the New York Stock exchange are permitted, so we have to take their word for it.

In any case, in the money economy, eliminating costs, even if those costs happen to be feeding human beings, citizens of the empire, is sublime. That is why economists in the tertiary economy can declare a "jobless recovery" with a straight face. By their lights, the perfect recovery would necessarily be 100% jobless. Human costs of generating profit would be entirely eliminated.

it was only a little more than twenty years ago that people were considered to be an organization's most important resource... no longer... people as a "factor of production," as a cost to be minimized or eliminated, has trumped all respect for the dignity of labor, of the essential worth of using one's ability or skill to provide a livelihood for one's family...

fortunately, it's not true everywhere, at least not yet... in argentina, for instance, taxi driver is still considered a worthwhile and dignified career... i've met numerous taxi drivers, solid, middle-class family men, proud of their profession and respected by their friends and neighbors for the work they do... look at taxi drivers in the u.s... it's seen as a dead-end job, about on a par with flipping burgers at mac and don's...

our entire way of life is swirling the bowl but we can't rouse ourselves enough from our favorite tv programs to notice...

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If corporate senior management was truly honest...

they would say that they don't want any employees... employees are fundamental irritants, lazy, no-good, lying, worthless sacks of shit that suck up company resources, generate customer complaints and only serve to reduce the amount of money that could otherwise find its way into the pockets of the execs...

when i worked for united airlines, the not-so-funny joke was that the senior execs were in the eternal search for the airline version of the mcdonald's cash register, something so simple that any idiot could operate it, preferably an idiot that would work for minimum wage and not insist on belonging to a union... if you've flown recently, you can see that, with electronic booking, ticketing, online check-in, and airport electronic check-in kiosks, the airlines have surpassed themselves... the "any idiots" are now us, the passengers... the airline employees are only there to prevent serious meltdowns...

the cartoon below is perhaps the best representation i've seen lately of the realities of organizational life... make no mistake... this reality is not restricted to large corporations, the private sector or the united states... it applies around the world to organizations of all stripes... thankfully, there are exceptions but they are pathetically few and far between...

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Our destitute working class

chris hedges is a staunch defender of unions...

while i would be the last one to say that unions haven't had a hand in our economic collapse and aren't guilty of pursuing their own self-preservation without regard for the effectiveness or profitability of the organizations who employ their members, i also know that systematic union genocide leaves ordinary employees defenseless against what is increasingly clear are the insatiable predators that constitute our corporate state... i also have little doubt that those predators have waged and are waging a ceaseless campaign to rid their world of those pesky unions who might, just might, affect their precious bottom line...

Our destitute working class is beginning to grasp that Barack Obama and other elected officials in Washington, who speak in a cloying feel-your-pain language, are liars. They are not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. Treasury or jobs from being exported. The gap between our stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities and fatuous academic and financial experts, as well as oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are reaching out to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is being fused with right-wing populism. And once this takes hold, a protofascism will sweep across our blighted landscape fueled by a mounting personal and economic despair. Take a look at Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” It is a good window into what awaits us.

“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out,” the philosopher Richard Rorty warns in his book “Achieving Our Country.” “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

Whoever rides to power on the back of this rage will swiftly broker a deal with corporations and corporate overlords. But by then it will be too late. Dissent will become a form of treason. The security state will be quickly cemented in place. The bankrupt liberal class, which abandoned the working class and the fight for basic civil liberties, will be reviled, discredited and impotent. America will develop its own peculiar form of Christian fascism.

Obama, entranced with power and prestige, is more interested in courting the elite than saving the disenfranchised. The president, when asked to name a business executive he admires, cited Frederick Smith of FedEx, although Smith is a union-busting Republican. Smith, who was a member of Yale’s secret Skull & Bones Society along with George W. Bush, served as John McCain’s finance chair. I guess Obama is hoping for some cash. And Smith has a lot of it. He founded FedEx in 1971, and the company had more than $35 billion in revenue in the fiscal year that ended in May. Smith is rich and powerful, but there is no ethical system, religious or secular, that would hold him up as a man worthy of emulation. Those who make vast profits at the expense of workers and the common good are not moral. They are not worthy of adulation. They build fortunes and little monuments to themselves off the pain and suffering of [other] people... . Jesus called them “vipers.”

there's plenty more to the article, much of it, i'm afraid, i'm in complete agreement with, not because i think it's a good forecast, but because i see a lot of it playing out in front of my very eyes...

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"All jobs take skill - and intelligence - and experience"

i've focused many of my professional efforts on enhancing, supporting and empowering the inherent dignity and worth of those who do the real work in our society... i've been increasingly drawn to the work of barbara ehrenreich as someone who shares the same values... here, thanks to the unknown candidate, is a clip from the recent documentary, the american ruling class...

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The American workplace - one of the most repressive in the developed world

i remember an anecdote told by a world-class guy about his experience with the japanese national director of quality... he asked my friend what was the difference between the united states and japan... he knew immediately it was a loaded question, so he played along and said, "why, no, tell me..." the japanese smiled and this is what he said...

"japan has the most regimented, repressive society of anywhere in the world, and the united states has the freest, most tolerant society in the world... in japan, the workplace is the freest, most open, most employee-friendly in the world, but in the united states, the workplace is the most repressive, most rigid, least employee-friendly imaginable... why IS that...?"

yeah, why IS that...?

barbara ehrenreich writing in alternet...

With the Employee Free Choice Act heading toward a Senate vote, conservative columnist George F. Will has suddenly developed a tender concern for workers' rights. The act "strips all workers of privacy," he fumed in the Washington Post last week, and will repeal "a right -to secret ballots -- long considered fundamental to a democratic culture ..." As Will sees it, the unions are backing the act out of sheer desperation: Since they can't seem to win a fair fight for workers' allegiance, they want government to take away the workers' rights and help herd them into union membership.

OK, now let's leave Will-land and enter an actual American workplace. Are you punched in? Good. The first thing to notice is that you've checked your basic civil rights at the door. Freedom of speech? Forget about it: Some employers bar speech of any kind with your fellow employees. I saw this firsthand at a chain restaurant and a Wal-Mart store. Wanna work? Zip your lips.

How about those privacy rights that Will so concerned about? Nada -- they don't exist outside of Will-land either. You probably had to pee in a cup to get your job in the first place, which constitutes a very intimate chemical invasion of privacy. In most states, your purse or backpack can be searched by the employer at any time; your emails and web activity can be monitored.

Right of assembly? Sorry, you don't have that either. In my experience, most managers see a group of three or more employees talking together as an insurrection in the making. Shut up and get back to work!

barbara ehrenreich, imho, hits the nail precisely on the head...

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