Gabriel Furshong at The Nation writes—‘It’s Time to Get Pissed Off’: In Montana, a Labor Standoff Has National Implications:
For the past 38 years, Randy Tocci, 58, has worked at the Imerys talc plant in his hometown of Three Forks, Montana, a quiet community of 2,000 residents just a few miles from where the Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson rivers converge to form the Missouri. As lead maintenance warehouseman and president of International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Local #D239, Tocci considers himself a lifer at the company.
Yet, despite increasing profits, the French-owned corporation recently banned all union workers from the job site and posted a security detail at the company gates. The lockout began on August 2, six days after Imerys announced revenue of $2.6 billion (an 11.9 percent increase) in the first half of 2018 and the same day union members voted 28-7 to reject a contract that would have reduced overtime pay, frozen pensions, and eliminated health insurance for new retirees.
Tocci (pronounced toss-ee) and his colleagues were livid. “When you’re helping make the company millions of dollars,” he told me, “there’s no reason for them to take away benefits that have been in place for decades.”
On Labor Day, he delivered a fiery speech from the back of a pick-up truck to a large crowd gathered at the picket line. “We’re tired of this crap!” he shouted, planting one cowboy boot on the wheel hub and pointing toward the mill. “It’s time to get pissed off, to stand up for these workers, and make ’em open those gates!”
It’s been 38 years since the last labor lockout in Montana, a state that went for Trump by more than 20 points and where the once-powerful labor movement has long been in decline. Nevertheless, a 35-worker local is suddenly winning bipartisan support, and their fight against a $4.2 billion corporation has become a flashpoint in a close election that could determine control of the US Senate. [...]
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“If [media people] have the capacity to think freely and understand these types of things, they’re going to be kept out by a very complicated filtering system—which actually starts in kindergarten, I think. In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on—because they're dysfunctional to the institutions. I mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could ask questions like this. So by the time you’ve made it to Bureau Chief or Editor, or you’ve become a bigshot at CBS or something, the chances are that you’ve just got all this stuff in your bones—you’ve internalized values that make it clear to you that there are certain things you just don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think about them anymore.”
~~Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power (2002)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—Republican introduces legislation to reopen the bank casino:
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation managed to pass with one piece that forces banks to be somewhat responsible for their lending, a provision that requires lenders to retain five percent of the residential loans that they make. That's supposed to make banks less anxious to secure risky loans, bundling up that risk, and selling it off as securities. You know, the practice that created the whole massive casino that wrecked the global economy.
Unsurprisingly, that requirement has proven too onerous for the banks to be able to live with. So, of course, they've got their Republican lap dogs primed to try to repeal it.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: We are once again Under the Cloud of a Mass Shooting.TM Could the Russians notch their belt for it? @DemFromCT has weekend news & a look ahead to the election. Trump's layabout "presidency." Ukraine warned us. Republicans made sure we “missed” it.
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