Under Bush unemployment has risen to 5.7%. Companies have received tax breaks for shipping jobs to sweatshops overseas. People who are still employed are working harder than ever for the money. Millions work and work and work and still can’t afford healthcare. They are losing their homes. Food prices, gas prices and the cost of living has surged as wages have not, making it harder for the average American to make it from week to week. Bush’s labor department offered employers tips on how to avoid overtime pay. With time running out on the Bush White House, it is fast-tracking a secretly written rule—long sought by the business community—that could increase workers’ exposure to dangerous chemicals and toxic substances on the job and tie the hands of future administrations trying to improve workplace safety. His labor department has sabotaged labor unions. This Labor day, any of you working class republicans who are going to vote for McCain better think twice. The Bush administration has brought us to where we are today, and a McCain administration would most assuredly be MORE OF THE SAME. Like Barack Obama said……ENOUGH!!!

The history of Labor Day:

As the Industrial Revolution took hold of the nation, the average American in the late 1800s worked 12-hour days, seven days a week in order to make a basic living. Children were also working, as they provided cheap labor to employers and laws against child labor were not strongly enforced.

With the long hours and terrible working conditions, American unions became more prominent and voiced their demands for a better way of life. On Tuesday September 5, 1882, 10,000 workers marched from city hall to Union Square in New York City, holding the first-ever Labor Day parade. Participants took an upaid day-off to honor the workers of America, as well as vocalize issues they had with employers. As years passed, more states began to hold these parades, but Congress would not legalize the holiday until 12 years later.

On May 11, 1894, workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago struck to protest wage cuts and the firing of union representatives. They sought support from their union led by Eugene V. Debs and on June 26 the American Railroad Union called a boycott of all Pullman railway cars. Within days, 50,000 rail workers complied and railroad traffic out of Chicago came to a halt. On July 4, President Grover Cleveland dispatched troops to Chicago. Much rioting and bloodshed ensued, but the government’s actions broke the strike and the boycott soon collapsed. Debs and three other union officials were jailed for disobeying the injunction. The strike brought worker’s rights to the public eye and Congress declared, in 1894, that the first Monday in September would be the holiday for workers, known as Labor Day.

The founder of Labor Day remains unclear, but some credit either Peter McGuire, co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, or Matthew Maguire, a secretary of the Central Labor Union, for proposing the holiday.

Although Labor Day is meant as a celebration of the labor movement and its achievements, it has come to be celebrated as the last, long summer weekend before Autumn.

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I don’t know how I came across this, but I did. Funny how the internet tubes lead you here and there. These are comments from Dick Cheney at a 2000 debate with Lieberman.

MODERATOR: Your question, Mr. Secretary. You and Governor Bush charge the Clinton-Gore administration have presided over the deterioration and overextension of America’s armed forces. Should U.S. military personnel be deployed as warriors or peacekeepers?

CHENEY: My preference is to deploy them as warriors. There may be occasion when it’s appropriate to use them in a peacekeeping role, but I think the role ought to be limited, a time limit on it. The reason we have a military is to be able to fight and win wars. And to maintain with sufficient strength so that would-be adversaries are deterred from ever launching a war in the first place. I think that the administration has, in fact, in this area failed in a major responsibility. We’ve seen a reduction in our forces far beyond anything that was justified by the end of the Cold War. At the same time we’ve seen a rapid expansion of our commitments around the world as troops have been sent hither and yon. There was testimony before the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the Armed Services Committee that pointed out a lot of these problems. General Mike Ryan of the Air Force with 40% fewer aircraft, he’s now undertaking three times as many deployments on a regular basis as he had to previously. We’re overcommitted and underresourced. This has had some other unfortunate effects. I saw a letter the other day from a young captain stationed in Fort Bragg, a graduate of West Point in ‘95 getting ready to get out of the service because he’s only allowed to train with his troops when fuel is available for the vehicles and only allowed to fire their weapons twice a year. He’s concerned if he had to ever go into combat there would be lives lost. It’s a legitimate concern, the fact the U.S. military is worse off today than it was eight years ago. It’s a high priority for myself and Governor Bush to rebuild the U.S. military and to give them good leadership and build up the forces.

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I’m a bit surprised and sad this post is even necessary, but a visitor pushed Holocaust denial in a thread, and though we addressed it there, it seemed wise to address it in its own post as well. What exactly does one say to a Holocaust denier, assuming he or she is even remotely sincere and not merely a provocateur? I was thinking it might be akin to talking to someone who holds a geocentric view of our solar system, but even that falls woefully short, because it doesn’t encompass the bigotry, the rejection of overwhelming documentary evidence, and the potential real world impact. Holocaust denial may be the ultimate combination of intellectual dishonesty, willful ignorance and irrational rage.

As Columbia University President Lee Bollinger put it to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (emphasis added):

In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a “fabricated” “legend.” One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

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The US government is on a A-burning platform- of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large’scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

Mr Walker’s views carry weight because he is a non-partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often described as the investigative arm of the US Congress.

More at the Financial Times

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He was emperor at the apogee of the Aztec civilization, the last to complete his rule before the Spanish Conquest. But Ahuizotl’s tomb has never been found. No Aztec ruler’s funeral chamber ever has. But Mexican archaeologists believe that has finally changed.

Using ground-penetrating radar, they have detected underground chambers that could contain the remains of Ahuizotl, who ruled the Aztecs when Columbus landed in the New World.

The find could provide an extraordinary window into Aztec civilization at its peak. Ahuizotl (ah-WEE-zoh-tuhl), was an empire-builder who extended the Aztecs’ reach as far as Guatemala.

Accounts written by Spanish priests suggest the area was used by the Aztecs to cremate and bury their rulers. But no tomb of an Aztec ruler has ever been found, in part because the Spanish conquerors built their own city atop the Aztec’s ceremonial center, leaving behind colonial structures too historically valuable to remove for excavations.

One of those colonial buildings was so damaged in a 1985 earthquake that it had to be torn down, eventually giving experts their first chance to examine the site off Mexico City’s Zocalo plaza, between the Metropolitan Cathedral and the ruins of the Templo Mayor pyramid.

More at YahooNews

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H/T to my friend Cheri for this post.

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

Mike Thomson worked in national radio, television and newspapers. He presented the Breakfast show on the former Radio 5, worked as a reporter for Sky News and World Service Television and wrote regularly for The Daily Mail, The Independent and The Observer. Mike joined Today in the mid 1990’s as a reporter and covered stories across the globe.

Mike has won a number of prestigious awards throughout his career. These include: The Texaco Award for ‘Industrial Journalist of the Year’ in the early 1990’s; A Gold Sony Award in 2002 for Best News Programme: Document; The Day They Made it Rain ; (Which he wrote and presented for Radio 4) Shared a Sony Silver Award in the same year for his contribution to Today’s coverage of the race riots in northern England; and won another Sony Gold Award in 2003 for Best News Coverage following his reports for Today on the latest famine to hit Ethiopia.

You can listen to this series at the BBCRadio site.

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