Federal troops, U.S. Marshals, Pinkerton agents and railroad executives pose in the
midst of the Pullman Strike, June-July 1894.
The Panic (otherwise known as the depression) of 1893 did what all economic downturns have done: hurt businesses who then take out their losses on the workers. For the Pullman Palace Car Company, that meant cutting already low wages of its unskilled and semi-skilled workforce by 25 percent. The bosses did not, however, reduce rents in the company town of Pullman, near Chicago. By 1894, even as they continued to put in 16-hour days, workers had become desperate, unable to feed themselves or their families adequately. They sent a group to speak to company president George Pullman. He not only refused to meet with them, but ordered them fired for their audacity. About one third were at the time represented by the American Railway Union, whose president was Eugene V. Debs, who would later become a five-time candidate for the presidency on the Socialist Party ticket.
A solidarity boycott was organized. with ARU switchmen refusing to attach Pullman cars to trains and walking off the job. Eventually, 250,000 workers for 29 railroads in 27 states struck, snarling traffic across the country, except in the South, where the ARU had few workers. Although Debs repeatedly urged calm, violence arose. The Illinois governor send militias into several Illinois cities. After the locomotive of a U.S. Mail train was overturned, the Cleveland administration issued a federal injunction mandating that the union, its leaders and supporters stop supporting the boycott or risk firing and jail. This did not have the desired effect and the president sent several thousand U.S. Marshals and 12,000 U.S. troops to quell the strike. Consequently, 30 workers were killed and 57 injured. Generally, public opinion was against the strike and supportive of the effort to crush it, as were most of the national media, Republicans and eastern Democrats, the American Federation of Labor and the railroad brotherhoods of skilled workers.
Ultimately, the ARU was disbanded and Debs was tried, with Clarence Darrow as his lawyer. He wound up with a six-month prison term. He wasn't a socialist when he went to prison. But while there he read some works by Karl Marx and soon became the best known American socialist for the next 30 years.
Two new studies published over the weekend in Nature Climate Change Jonathan Webb of the BBC reports.:
Specifically in the Southern Hemisphere where fewer measurements have been made, a team of researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California investigated long-term warming in the top 700m of the ocean.
They wanted to compare published warming rates, based on the sparse temperature data recorded directly from southern waters, with what could be predicted based on more detailed observations in the north, together with climate models and precise sea-level measurements. [...]
By combining these calculations, the scientists found that the rate of upper-ocean warming between 1970 and 2004 had been seriously underestimated. That inaccuracy is specific to the Southern Hemisphere, but is big enough, the scientists suggest, that global upper-ocean warming rates are also "biased low" - to the tune of 24% to 55%. [...]
Meanwhile, at depths greater than 2km, temperatures appear relatively stable - at least as far as changes can be detected.
That was the outcome of the second study, in which a team from the California Institute of Technology made thorough use of the vastly improved data coverage that has been delivered by the Argo programme of remote, floating probes.
These devices started to be deployed in 1999 and there are now more than 3,600 of them adrift in our planet's oceans.
Argo "floats" only record temperatures down to about 2km beneath the surface, so the Caltech researchers used that information to calculate the overall amount of heat absorbed by the upper 2km of the oceans (approximately the top half).
Then, by subtracting that quantity of heat from the total ocean warming indicated by satellite observations of sea level, they estimated how much the deeper half of the ocean (below 2km) had warmed up.
The result: once the high level of uncertainty associated with the calculations was taken into account, there was no change detected in the deep. [...]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Why the Right is pissed at Bush re: Miers:
Nothing here that hasn't been said in one form or another elsewhere, but this is the root of the problem with Miers:
Bush and Rove have spent the last five years doing everything in their power to hide the true conservative agenda from the American people. We get shit like "Clean Skies Initiative", "Healthy Forrest Initiative" and "Death Tax". Heck, Frank Luntz has written a whole manual on how to use language to hide the plain-English definition of their policies.
Furthermore, Bush has done everything to hide the costs of their conservative ideology -- passing budgets that exclude budget items like the cost of the war and so on.
So after five years of sitting in the shadow, waiting for the president and Republicans to trumpet conservative principles to high heaven, he delivers, instead, two stealth candidates. This was supposed to be their "coming out" party, and yet Bush refuses to let them out of the closet. Republicans are losing ground with the American people, as the public becomes increasingly intimate with the side effects of Republican mis-governance. The last thing they need is the last fictions of the conservative agenda, masked by rhetorical devices and Friday-afternoon disclosures, trumpeted for all to see.
The conservative agenda is not a dominant ideology, otherwise they wouldn't be so loath to give it to us unvarnished. It is a minority ideology. Yet the conservative yahoos don't get it. They think they're in the majority and can't fathom why Bush won't let them party out in the open.
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Tweet of the Day
At the rate they are going, in 10 years, ISIS & Ebola will have killed 11 Americans. MORE MEDIA COVERAGE NOW!!
— @Wolfrum
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, a 3rd armed teacher accident.
Greg Dworkin notes the Republicans sowing panic over Ebola. The Senate outlook remains stable. Why the growth ≠ raises.
Gideon sends us Gregory Daddis' op-ed pondering the meaning of modern war. In SCOTUS news, denial of review of the marriage equality cases. Wind energy seems like a winner for KS, right? But the Kochs don't make money from it, so, no. How about a little Noam Chomsky? "America hates its poor." David Purdue's outsourcing past, but being a CEO hasn't been about "job creation" in a long time. Philly cancels teacher contracts. And steal their pensions.
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