Noam Chomsky: May Day

Zuccotti Park Press, a project of Adelante Alliance, a Brooklyn-based immigrant advocacy group, is releasing Occupy, a new book by Noam Chomsky, on May Day.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called “Law Day” — a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

Read more . . .

Report: American Corporations Are Adding More Jobs Overseas Than They Are At Home

With the nation’s unemployment rate still above eight percent, millions of Americans are looking for work, and the country’s biggest corporations are hiring. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, however, many of those corporations are adding jobs overseas at a faster pace than they are at home. Even worse, others are cutting their domestic workforces while adding jobs in other countries at a rapid pace.

Read more . . .

AFGE: Applauds House Effort to Lift Civilian Workforce Cap

. . . Under the Defense Department’s co-called “Efficiency Initiative,” the number of civilian employees has been capped at 2010 levels, yet there has been no comparable cap on the contractor workforce. This has encouraged managers to use contractors instead of civilian employees, even though privatization is more costly and also violates the law.

Read more . . .

When They Say Government They Mean You

I’d like to talk about government. The conservative [i.e., reactionary]/corporate propaganda machine has turned “government” into a bad word. Conservatives [i.e., reactionaries]  portray our government as some kind of enemy of the public. We have all heard the scare stories about the harm done by meddlesome regulations from intrusive big government programs run by government bureaucrats.

Let’s step back from reacting to the word as we hear it today and think about what the word really means.

Read more . . .