Today in Labor History September 2, 1921: The Battle of Blair Mountain ended on this date in 1921, with the U.S. government bombing striking coal miners by plane, the second time the U.S. government used planes to bomb its own citizens (the first was in the Tulsa riots, earlier that year). The Battle of Blair Mountain was one of the largest civil uprisings in U.S. history and the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. The uprising lasted 5 days and involved 10,000-15,000 coal miners confronting an army of scabs and police. The battle came as mine owners tried to crush attempts by coal miners to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields. From the late 1800s, mine owners forced workers to live in company towns, where rent was deducted from their wages and they were paid in scrip, which was accepted only at the overpriced company stores and was worthless everywhere else. The work was very dangerous and safety equipment and precautions were minimal. The mine owners had a long tradition of using private detectives and goons to spy on workers, infiltrate their meetings, rough them up, and block any attempts to unionize. The battle began after Sheriff Sid Hatfield (an ally of the miners and hero from the Battle of Matewan) was assassinated by Baldwin-Felts agents. Much of the region was still under martial law as a result of the Battle of Matewan. Miners began to leave the mountains armed and ready for battle. Mother Jones tried to dissuade them from marching into Logan and Mingo Counties, fearing a bloodbath. Many accused her of losing her nerve. The miners ignored her and a battle ensued between miners and cops, private detectives, scabs and eventually the U.S. military.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #coal #mining #strike #union #BlairMountain #WestVirginia #matewan #police #PoliceBrutality #massacre #PoliceMurder #Riot #MotherJones

"As the sea grows warmer, marine heat waves are more likely to tip temperatures past the threshold at which coral, kelp, and other marine life can survive."

A collapse of the ocean food web would be disastrous on a global level.

#ClimateChange #MotherJones #Ocean

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/08/how-heat-shattering-ocean-temperatures-impacts-fisheries/

If they're Taco John's Potato Olés... maybe.

#motherjones #utah #potato #shale

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/05/utahs-suicide-pact-with-the-fossil-fuel-industry/

Black Republicans Aren’t Happy With DeSantis About Florida’s New Teaching Guidelines on Slavery

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/07/black-republicans-arent-happy-with-desantis-about-floridas-new-teaching-guidelines-on-slavery/

#MotherJones #BlackRepublicans #DeSantis #FloridaTeachingGuidelines #Slavery #Education #Politics #News

https://invidious.0011.lt/watch?v=gZ8cNwyUtQI

#SCOTUSsucks #USAShitShow
#voting #votingrights

A decade of #votersuppression

#MotherJones #AriBerman 23 June 2023

Mike Pence Fled for His Life on January 6. He Still Won’t Call Trump’s Actions Criminal.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/07/mike-pence-donald-trump-january-6-jack-smith/

#MotherJones #MikePence #January #DonaldTrump #CriminalActions #FledForHisLife #Politics #News

Listen to your Mother:

Don't date scabs!

#MotherJones #union #scab #WorkingClass #LaborHistory

> A Black-led urban agriculture effort coincided with—and even preceded—the explosion of farmers’ markets in posh white enclaves, but these rumblings received little notice from the broader food world.
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/11/joel-salatin-chris-newman-farming-rotational-grazing-agriculture/
#MichaelPollan #JoelSalatin #ChrisNewman #TomPhilpott in #MotherJones #OmnivoresDilemma #FoodMovement

The Radical Life of #MotherJones

Her autobiography ends with the words:

In spite of oppressors, in spite of false leaders, in spite of labor’s own lack of understanding of its needs, the cause of the worker continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, giving him leisure to read and to think. Slowly his standard of living rises to include some of the good and beautiful things of the world..... The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands.

#union #labor

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/12/the-radical-life-of-mother-jones/

Today in Labor History July 10, 1894: The Pullman Rail Car strike was put down by 14,000 federal and state troops. Over the course of the strike, soldiers killed 70 American Railway Union (ARU) members. Eugene Debs and many others were imprisoned during the strike for violating injunctions. Debs founded the ARU in 1893. The strike began, in May, as a wildcat strike, when George Pullman laid off employees and slashed wages, while maintaining the same high rents for his company housing in the town of Pullman, as well as the excessive rates he charged for gas and water. During the strike, Debs called for a massive boycott against all trains that carried Pullman cars. While many adjacent unions opposed the boycott, including the conservative American Federation of Labor, the boycott nonetheless affected virtually all train transport west of Detroit. Debs also called for a General Strike, which Samuel Gompers and the AFL blocked. At its height, over 200,000 railway workers walked off the job, halting dozens of lines, and workers set fire buildings, boxcars and coal cars, and derailed locomotives. Clarence Darrow successfully defended Debs in court against conspiracy charges, arguing that it was the railways who met in secret and conspired against their opponents. However, they lost in their Supreme Court trial for violating a federal injunction.

By the 1950s, the town of Pullman had been incorporated into the city of Chicago. Debs became a socialist after the strike, running for president of the U.S. five times on the Socialist Party ticket, twice from prison. In 1905, he cofounded the radical IWW, along with Lucy Parsons, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and Irish revolutionary James Connolly. In 1894, President Cleveland designated Labor Day a federal holiday, in order to detract from the more radical May 1st, which honored the Haymarket martyrs and the struggle for the 8-hour day. Legislation for the holiday was pushed through Congress six days after the Pullman strike ended, with the enthusiastic support of Gompers and the AFL.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #railway #strike #union #EugeneDebs #socialism #anarchism #IWW #massacre #SCOTUS #prison #GeneralStrike #boycott #afl #haymarket #conspiracy #MotherJones #LucyParsons #BigBillHaywood #Revolutionary

by #AbbyVesoulis in #MotherJones:

"Saturday’s ruling is the first time a federal court of appeals has allowed a ban on gender-affirming care to take effect. The ruling deviates from other recent federal rulings on this type of care. As my colleague Madison Pauly recently noted, a federal judge struck down an Arkansas law banning gender-affirming care for kids in late June, pointing to evidence that 'the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients.' Judges in Florida, Indiana, and Kentucky have also granted temporary injunctions in the last few weeks that will keep some kinds of gender-affirming medical care available to trans minors while court challenges continue to progress. (The Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals, which just allowed Tennessee’s ban to temporarily take effect, said Saturday it will issue a final ruling on the pending Kentucky ban when it renders its final appeals decision on Tennessee’s ban.)"

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/07/tennessee-ban-gender-affirming-care-trans-minors-hormones/

#Tennessee #GenderAffirming #ban #LGBTQIA #LGBTQ #LGBT #AntiTrans #hormone #healthcare

by #NoahLanard in #MotherJones:

"Schultz told this sob story as part of an effort to stop his workers from joining a union. But his telling ignored how his own family was sustained, especially in this trying period, by the gains of organized labor, in the form of post-war New York’s relatively abundant public housing. The two-bedroom unit the Schultzes called home in Brooklyn’s brand new Bayview Houses, built for families who made too much to qualify for other public housing developments, was the product of a New Deal–era partnership between leftists (many of them in the labor movement) and liberal elected officials who’d embraced their views in the wake of the Great Depression. Schultz and fellow elites have rejected that alliance as they cast unions as relics rendered unnecessary by their personal benevolence. Today, a faded plaque bearing the name of Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr.—whose father, a senator, helped pass America’s most important piece of labor legislation—is about the only sign that the city was once proud of the complex."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/howard-schultz-starbucks-union-busting-buffalo-brooklyn/

#Starbucks #union #workers #labor #HowardSchultz #UnionBusting #PublicHousing #NewDeal #Buffalo #Brooklyn

by #JuliaMétraux in #MotherJones:

"Many states report having people with severe mental illnesses in restrictive housing, despite research clearly demonstrating that, as the UN guidelines suggest, solitary confinement often exacerbates the symptoms of psychiatric disabilities.

"Even in the most progressive states, the power of a governor’s veto can still squash efforts at reform. As in Connecticut, lawmakers in California experienced this first-hand in 2022 when Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed the Mandela Act, which would have placed new restrictions on solitary confinement. But they are trying again."

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2023/07/california-could-soon-reform-solitary-confinement-unless-gavin-newsom-intervenes/

#Connecticut #NedLamont #California #GavinNewsom #SolitaryConfinement #prison #incarceration #UnitedNations #UN

by #TomPhilpott in #MotherJones:

"[P]igs can also pick up influenza strains that circulate among birds, whose viruses aren’t well adapted to infecting and spreading among people. Humans don’t have the receptors in our throats and noses that avian flus can easily attach to. Our isolation from avian flus is what makes them dangerous—since our immune systems rarely encounter them, we have little innate ability to fight them off. Enter pigs. They can catch flu strains from birds (often carrying them without symptoms), mash them up with genetic material from human-adapted flus, and create novel varieties capable of flummoxing human immunity and generating pandemics. That’s why virologists call hogs 'mixing vessels' for novel influenza strains."

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/06/tightly-packed-poultry-and-pig-farms-could-be-incubating-the-next-deadly-flu/

#pigs #swine #birds #poultry #farm #avian #influenza #flu #pandemic

by #SamanthaMichaels in #MotherJones:

"Across the United States, the police fatally shoot more than 1,000 people every year, representing nearly 5 percent of all homicides—a higher death toll than from mass shootings. Some of these cases make national news, but most don’t. Even less attention is paid to the families left behind: thousands of people, disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and Latino, who must navigate not only their grief, but the stress of protests and the press, not to mention agonizing questions of how to seek accountability from the officers who killed their loved ones."

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2023/06/after-the-police-kill-your-loved-one-who-can-you-lean-on/

#PoliceShooting #police #shooting #violence #PoliceBrutality

Some protest and socialist folk history of the US. Good listening for this morning.

Ani DiFranco & Utah Philips - Fellow Workers album
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kCoLdav2wdgI5FQjfvNuJa0dKSPJECMME

#music #picketline #folkmusic #socialism #union #motherjones

#Trump and #DeSantis Are Competing to Show Who Hates #Immigrants the Most – #MotherJones

#The DeSanctus speech was just a rehash of all the things I did."

"In defiance of the #Constitution, both Trump and DeSantis have pledged to end the guarantee of birthright #citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/06/trump-and-desantis-are-competing-to-show-who-hates-immigrants-the-most

by #AriannaCoghill in #MotherJones:

"The groups—the Chica Project, African Community Economic Development of New England, and the Greater Boston Latino Network—argue that by accepting legacy students, Harvard is denying admissions to qualified students of color who’re less likely to have a familial tie to the school."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/07/harvard-legacy-admissions/

#LegacyAdmissions #AffirmativeAction #Harvard #HigherEducation #education #SupremeCourt #SCOTUS

by #MaddieOatman in #MotherJones:

"If [...] each household used its grill for an hour on the 4th of July, then we’d get a calculation like this:

"(56.425M gas grills*5.6 pounds of CO2) + (38.85M charcoal grills*11 pounds CO2) + (9.25M electric grills*15 pounds CO2 ) = 882 million pounds of CO2

"That’s roughly as many emissions as burning 2145 railcars of coal, or running one coal-fired power plant for a month."

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2015/07/your-grills-smoky-truth/

#BBQ #grilling #FourthOfJuly #IndependenceDay #pollution #smoke #carbon #emissions #ClimateCrisis #ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #climate #environment

by #PemaLevy in #MotherJones:

"The ruling doesn’t necessarily stop at LGBTQ discrimination. It opens the door for discrimination against people based on their race, religion, sex, national origin, and disability. Drawing a line between free speech for people with anti-LGBTQ views and for those who oppose interracial marriage, interfaith marriage, or simply any activity by people of a disfavored group is likely to be impossible. This came up repeatedly during oral arguments, during which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked whether a photographer offering nostalgic photoshoots with Santa could restrict his service to white children to preserve a vintage vibe the photographer might aim to capture. The lawyer for the web designer, Kristen Waggoner, conceded not only that his discrimination might be allowed, but also that Supreme Court itself would be forced to draw such lines. During the hearing, Justice Sonia Sotomayor similarly wondered whether a web designer with eugenicist views could refuse to make a disabled couple’s a wedding website."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/06/supreme-court-gay-wedding-website-colorado/

#discrimination #LGBTQIA #LGBTQ #LGBT #SupremeCourt #SCOTUS