Chicago Teachers Strike Links, Sunday Evening Edition

So the latest news, as of Sunday evening, is that the Chicago Teachers Union strike will continue into this upcoming week. I'd been collecting strike links since my last linkfest on the topic, holding off in the hopes that they would become moot. -- Well, no, not moot: the issues are bigger than the particular, and some of these links address the larger issues. But less pressing: links to be saved for another time. Since the strike is continuing, however, here is some more reading on the issue.

• In the last link roundup I was waiting for a longer report from Charles Pierce on the CTU strike. He's now written it.

• Paul Street, Striking Neoliberalism in Chicago (via)

• Eric Zorn on why teachers, justifiably, don't want to be judged on student test scores. (via the Facebook page of a striking teacher)

• Fran Spielman suggests some lessons that Mayor Emanuel could learn from the strike. (via ibid)

• Yet another testimony from a Chicago public school teacher

• Richard D.Kahlenberg asks the optimistic question Can the Chicago Teachers’ Strike Fix Democratic Education Reform? in.... The New Republic. Even the Conservative New Republic realizes that neoliberal education reform is a crock!

• John Cook offers a simple, radical solution to the problem. I wouldn't actually agree with this proposal -- although I do think it would solve the problem. But maybe if we start talking about it it will put some fear into the right people.

• Rich Miller points out that, at least at the start, parents are supporting the CTU. (Obviously this can change, and that's something to worry about. Still, worth knowing.)

• This is the claim which the link backs up with data:

Chicago salaries for the first several years of experience are relatively average – or even slightly above. But, they do trail off at higher levels of experience and eventually fall behind. Remember though that comparable salaries would be generally insufficient for recruiting/retaining comparable teachers in a higher need setting.

The same blog has a pre-strike post on the problem with the proposed method of teacher evaluation that (in all honesty) I haven't had time to read yet, but which looks quite interesting.

Best of luck to the CTU as the enter week two of the struggle. Solidarity!

(Incidentally, in case anyone wants to read all my link-round-ups on the strike, I just made a new tag for my blog which will (among other things) allow you to do that.)

"They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking, That's against their interests."

Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street...

The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care... It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

-- George Carlin

More links on the Chicago teachers strike. (Update: links added.)

• Diane Ravitch, Two Visions for Chicago’s Schools. (This, and many the links in this post, are from Ravitch's blog, which I again recommend to people interested in the strike.)

• The headline reads: "Director of Private School Where Rahm Sends His Kids Opposes Using Testing for Teacher Evaluations". Because Emanuel sends his kids to a good school, of course, where they know what good education is. Y'know, what Emanuel doesn't want for the kids who just go to public schools.

• Corey Robin, Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Because They Hate Teachers.

• Erik Loomis, Why I Support Public School Teachers

• Oh, and those charter schools that the Owners (to use Carlin's word) like so much? They just teach kids to past tests, which doesn't actually educate them; it doesn't even help them with other tests they don't specifically teach for). As Dean Baker put it, "If Emanuel is advocating increased use of charter schools he is either unfamiliar with recent research in education or has some motive other than improving student performance."

• Greg Palast profiles a teacher who was fired, and then rehired at a charter school... for $41,000 a year instead of $70,000. As Palast writes:

Education is no longer about information and learning skills. It's now about "triage." A few selected by standardized tests or privileged birth will be anointed and permitted into better and "gifted" schools....

So that's the program. An educational Katrina: squeeze the teachers until they strike, demolish their unions, and drown the students.

Chicago's classroom war is class war by another name.

A class war, it should be stressed, equally on the students and on teachers. On behalf of the Owners, who want Obedient Workers: the teachers now, the kids when they grow up.

• Susan Miligan points out that the so-called "accountability" that the so-called reformers are pushing through is ludicrous, unfair and wouldn't be done to any other profession. (She doesn't add that it's just as bad for kids as for teachers.)

• Jan Carr on how the point isn't just to make money for the 1%ers who write the tests (although it's that too), but making sure kids aren't taught critical thinking.

• Liza Featherstone (who I think I went to high school with, if she's who I think she is) on who's really hurting the kids.

• Sarah Jaffe calls out "liberal" pundits opposing the teachers. (via) But my favorite bit in the piece is this last quote from Dean Baker:

The main determinants of childrens' performance continues to be the socioeconomic conditions of their parents. Those unwilling to take the steps necessary to address the latter (e.g. promote full employment) are the ones who do not care about our children.

Poverty and inequality hurt kids the most -- including their education. The fantasy of mainstream liberals is that a good education can substitute for a decent society, so we can have opportunity without actually promoting social justice. But it's just false. Good schools depend on good societies. And we decided against having one of those a couple decades ago.

• Jersey Jazzman has a good sketch of what he calls the "narrative" of the teachers (which, as he says, also happens to be true) -- a counter-narrative to the "they're lazy and greedy and afraid of reform" bit that the mainstream media uses. (Link via; Jazzman's own follow-up here.) Here's the core of it:

In every country in the world, poverty impedes educational success. Our biggest education problem is that more of our kids are in poverty than any other developed nation. When America's public school teachers get kids who are well-fed and healthy and live in stable homes with parents who have good jobs, those kids do better in school than any other children in the world.

But a group of people who do not teach (or taught for a short while and not very well) have decided to blame teachers - teachers! - for all the problems in our country. They say that "choice" will save our schools, but the "choice" they offer is between underfunded, crumbling public schools and corporatized, autocratic charter schools that they admit they will never serve all children. These schools cherry-pick their students and then falsely claim they have the secret for success. Their inability to educate all students proves that public schools are not the problem - poverty is.

Why do these people sell this snake oil? Three reasons:

1) Many of them are looking to make money - a lot of money - off of education. They want to do to our schools what they did to our military, turning them into a bunch of Haliburton Highs.

2) They want to finally and completely break the unions. Once the teachers fall, it's all over for the middle class.

3) They need a scapegoat. Teachers didn't create these problems: the corporate titans of Wall Street did. These plutocrats are now paying a gang of carnival barkers a big bunch of money to blame teachers - teachers! - for the problems they themselves made.

Click through to read the rest for a version with supporting links, plus some additional commentary.

• So far as I can tell, Harold Meyerson's cri de coeur "If Labor Dies, What's Next?", with a publication date of September 13, was written before the strike -- it makes no reference to it -- but it's obviously quite relevant to the situation.

• Charles Pierce* has apparently been in Chicago today. I'm awaiting a longer piece from him; all we've got are these two brief 'uns so far. (And the latter is a bit cranky and unpolitic, I think.) But he gets the basic point well enough:

I am not flexible about this. If you want to look tough at the expense of public-school teachers, you are a snob or a coward, or perhaps both.... If I have to read one more smug, Ivy League writer from Slate talking, as the big strike goes on, about public-school teachers as though they were unruly hired help, I may hit someone with a fish.

* Note to self: Charles Peirce is the 19th century pragmatist philosopher; Charles Pierce is the contemporary political commentator. "Ei came before ie" is the obvious mnemonic here. Still, this pairing of worthwhile writers is not a dyslexic's best friend.

***

I have too much work to do, I can't keep doing this. But it does feel like the CTU is currently on the front lines of the class war against most of us. I'm not necessarily optimistic -- there are too many lies about them being told in the mass media. But I wish them the best, and hope they win. They have my admiration, my respect, my support, my solidarity.

Which side are you on?

They Say Up in Cook County, There Are No Neutrals There: You'll Either Be a Union Man, or a Thug for Emanuel

Update: links added, towards the end. Update 2: Kept adding throughout the day. Will probably stop when I go to bed -- I have my own classes to teach & can't keep this up. Still, it feels like the most important story in the nation right now.

More links on the Chicago strike:

• Rick Perlstein, Stand against Rahm! (via):

So though this may change if the strike turns lengthy and disruptive, Chicago isn’t seeing its teachers as greedy. They’re seeing them as a vanguard in the struggle against what might happen to the rest of the middle class next if they don’t speak up.

Word.

• Mark Naison, guest post at Diane Ravitch's blog: "The union, in this instance is far better advocate for the children of Chicago than the mayor."

• Same blog, this time Diane Ravitch herself: the evaluation method that Emanuel wants to put in place on the Chicago teachers "is junk science. Bunk science. Just another club with which to knock teachers, wielded by those who could never last five minutes in a classroom". (In general, Diane Ravitch's blog seems like a good place for pro-strike links & commentary.)

• Ok, one more Ravitchy link:

The real difference between the CTU and Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not money.... The real differences are about the corporate reform agenda. The mayor wants merit pay, more charters, evaluation of teachers by test scores, and all the other components of the national corporate reform agenda. But little noticed by the national media is that none of these so-called reforms works or has any evidence to support it.

She then links to this Washington Post story, which has more links, for evidence. (Damn reality and its well-known liberal bias!)

• David Dayen, The Chicago Teachers Union fight is a National Fight

• 5 Facts About the Terrible State of Chicago Schools (which the Union wants to fix) (via)

• Corey Robin gets into it with an overpaid bloviator tut-tutting about how much Chicago teachers make. (And who gets his facts wrong. But hey, reality's biased!)

• And always remember: we have it on the authority of law professor M. Todd Henderson that $400,000 a year doesn't go very far in Chicago. He certainly doesn't send his precious darlings to public schools. I trust he supports the strikers, right? Right?

• Adam Kotsko, The Long Game (via). Excerpt:

Take, for instance, education reform. We all know that the entire enterprise is a joke from an educational standpoint — the “school choice” movement has consistently failed to deliver the promised results. This would be a decisive objection if the goal of education reform were to improve education as such, but we are long past the time when market structures used to have to justify themselves for extrinsic reasons. Here as everywhere, the point isn’t to impose market-based reforms because it will deliver better outcomes, but simply because education will then be a market. Unequal outcomes are a feature, not a bug — the “school choice” system is designed to reward the most talented while leaving the mediocre behind.

• Sally Kohn, Standing up to Rahm (from Salon -- not to be confused with Salon's Stand Against Rahm (first link at the top of the post)), via a striking teacher on facebook. Excerpt:

Prior to going on strike for the first time in 25 years, the Chicago Teachers Union won “concessions” including that the school board would provide textbooks on the first day of school. Teachers have previously had to wait up to six weeks into the school year for instructional materials to arrive. And the union wants to limit class sizes, which are the largest in the entire state of Illinois. These aren’t the demands of greedy thugs. These are the demands of teachers who want to teach....

Notice that no one is pushing charter schools in wealthy communities because public schools there are thriving. In other words, the school district I grew up in is still a good school district — not because of unions or vouchers or high-stakes testing but because of taxes. But in poor neighborhoods and inner cities across the United States, students are struggling because their communities are struggling — conditions only made worse by the recent recession. The teachers and teachers’ unions who work in these districts to try to help are part of the solution. Poverty, homelessness and the dramatic funding cuts to social services that help needy families, as well as the cuts to public education, are the problem. And we can’t expect teachers to do more and more when conservative austerity measures are giving poor kids and their schools less and less. Teachers are advocates for their students. Teachers’ unions are advocates for teachers.

• Sabrina Joy Stevens, The Real Stand for Children (via):

Pop History Quiz: Do you know how children ended up off the factory floor and in classrooms?

Unionized adults.

The Chicago Teachers Union is standing, as unions have long stood, for the rights of ordinary people -- including kids. Stevens explains more.

• David Sirota, The Bait and Switch of School Reform (via the previous). He points out three self-interested motives of the so-called reformers who just happen to be wealthy wall streeters: first, pure profit (they're selling what reformers want us to buy, e.g. standardized testing services); second, a distraction from the fact that the real problem in education is poverty and inequality, and if we really wanted to fix the schools we'd have to fix that (which no one in power in this country has any interest in doing), and third, that it's yet another front in a long war on unions.

• Micah Uetricht, Strike for America, includes some interesting information about the local political background (and on-the-ground reporting).

• Brian Leiter on his blog:

There is only one problem confronting urban public schools, and it has nothing to do with the schools or the teachers, contrary to all the blather by idle-rich busybodies and the intellectually feeble politicans who do their bidding. The primary problem with urban public schools is that they largely serve a population that lives under conditions of economic hardship, sometimes grotesque economic hardship, with all the attendant problems of poor nutrition, physical safety, availability of adult supervision after school, and suitable environments and incentives for school work. That, of course, is why suburban public schools in affluent communities--with unionized teachers who are no different than those in the urban schools--always do better on measures of academic performance and outcomes. If you don't have to worry whether there will be food for dinner, or whether you will be mugged, or if anyone will be available to take care of you, or whether you'll have a quiet place to work, it turns out to be easier to do well in school. It's got nothing to do with the teachers, and everything to do with the environment. (Here and there, fabulous teaching makes a difference, but you can't make policy around atypical cases.)

• A profile of Karen Lewis, head of the CTU. (This link, and the next few, via Leiter.)

• Freddie deBoer, Making a Job Worse Is a Brilliant Strategy for Attracting the Best Talent:

People believe that we are suffering from a lack of talent and drive in our teacher ranks. As you all know, I don’t agree, and I find the empirical evidence far, far more indicative of student-side demographic effects causing poor educational performance. But suppose the other side is correct. How the fuck are we going to fix a talent deficit when the self-same people work relentlessly to make teaching a less attractive profession? There’s a simple reality facing any talented, driven young graduate who is considering teaching as a profession: you know that our media and our politicians are always going to want to make your job worse....

The reality is that you can’t be pro-education and anti-educator. Not just in the sense that you shouldn’t be, ethically, although I certainly believe that. I mean the notion that you can say that you care about education while working relentlessly to attack our actual teachers is nonsensical. If you want to attack our teachers as “overpaid,” OK. Go ahead. But you don’t get to pretend that you give a shit about education. (italics in the original)

Also, in his earlier post also at Balloon Juice:

Do you think that teaching should be a high-status position that carries with it a decent wage and the chance for meaningful pay raises? Or do you want to continue the relentless assault on the profession? That is the essential question at stake here.

• Stephanie Simon and James B. Kelleher give some context on education reform.

• Jim Nichols has a whole 'nother round up of links, only a few of which duplicate the ones I've posted here. Maybe I'll add a few below.

• Kevin Lee, a Chicago teacher, on why he's striking (at Ravitch's blog):

As teachers, we notice signs when a student is homeless — and we buy clothes for the student. We see students who are pregnant from rape (typically a mother’s boyfriend). For many students, the school lunch is the only meal of the day. And we have a lot of students who aren’t officially homeless, but are bouncing between the couches of relatives and friends and during the school day are worrying about where they are going to sleep that night. I have had the student who is distraught one day in class because a friend was in the hospital from a shooting or killed.

I can’t even remember all the names of students in the school where I teach who have been murdered. The awful thing is that I don’t even consider the school that I work at one of the most impoverished in Chicago.

America: land of opportunity! We're number one!... at, er, figuring out ways to educate starving, homeless children so we can pretend they have a decent shot at the American Dream.

• And Dave Steiber, another striking teacher, writes here. (Via Nichols)

• Karynthia at Alas: On being a CPS parent & siding with the striking teachers

• Written before the strike, but relevant to it: Dana Goldstein, Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Excerpt:

[Regarding] the idea that teachers can completely overcome poverty[,] There’s a reason, I think, why this ideology is so attractive to many of the wealthy charter school founders and donors Brill profiles, from hedge funder Whitney Tilson to investment manager and banking heir Boykin Curry. If the United States could somehow guarantee poor people a fair shot at the American dream through shifting education policies alone, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to feel so damn bad about inequality—about low tax rates and loopholes that benefit the superrich and prevent us from expanding access to childcare and food stamps; about private primary and secondary schools that cost as much annually as an Ivy League college, and provide similar benefits; about moving to a different neighborhood, or to the suburbs, to avoid sending our children to school with kids who are not like them.

The fact of the matter, though, is that inequality does matter. Our society’s decision to deny the poor essential social services reaches children not only in their day-to-day lives but in their brains. In the face of this reality, educators put up a valiant fight, and some succeed. The deck is stacked against them.

You'll either be a union man, or a thug for the Austerity State of the 1%.

Which side are you on?

Solidarity!

I just wanted to shout-out my support (little as it means) to the Chicago Teacher's Union in their strike. And most especially to my old, dear friend PJ Karafiol, whose op-ed on the strike can be read here. (Reasonable, persuasive, judicious, and far more even tempered than I could probably manage in similar circumstances. Just like PJ.)

Oh, and in case anyone to the left of Ayn Rand, or Paul Ryan -- but I repeat myself -- has any doubts on this issue, Ryan is with Rahm Emanuel. Kind of all you need to know, really.

What's sad is that it's not instantly clear what side the other candidates will be on. Hell, Emanuel was Obama's first chief of staff. Maybe Obama thinks the teachers should just work for free.

I wonder how Obama's going to dodge this one. Side with Emanuel, and you side with Romney and Ryan against teachers. Side with the strikers... and, well, he might side with working people (and kids!) against austerity. Can't have that, can you?

So come on, Obama. Which side are you on?

But, mostly, screw national politics. Someone is standing up for something important. Solidarity!

Links:
More info on the stakes and issues can be found here and here.
Support the strikers here. Or just order them a pizza.

What They Said, a.k.a. Which Side Are You On?

I've been meaning to post about #occupywallstreet since I first heard of it. But I haven't found anything particularly original to say. So, for the moment, I've given up that search, and will simply say What They Said:

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

What they said. Keith Olbermann read the document in its entirety on the air if you're more for audio/visual.

No, it's not what I would have said how I would have said it. (The footnote about how "these grievances are not all-inclusive" is about 15% cute and 85% ridiculous; I think the whole animal rights/factory farming bit was a mistake to include; and so forth.) But it doesn't matter. What matters is the movement, the overall thrust of the matter. As Kevin Drum (as anodyne and mainstream a liberal as you can find in the left-handed blogosphere) put it: Keep Asking Yourself One Question: Whose Side Am I On?

Or, as Pete Seeger sang years ago: Which side are you on?

I assume you've all seen the links, so I won't bother to include too many. I will, however, point out that Greg Mitchell's blog at The Nation is the best source for updates I've seen (via Gerry Canavan). And here is Zunguzungu's most recent link list on OWS (most of which I haven't read, but Zunuzungu's rep as one of the best linkbloggers around is well-earned). But I did particularly like this 50 best signs collection. (If any of those signs bother you, go (re)read the Kevin Drum essay.)

Alasdair Grey famously quoted (from Dennis Leigh) that one should "work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation". Until occupy wall street, I was finding it impossible to do that.* And I think I'm not alone. If they were to accomplish nothing else (and they already have: they have changed the national conversation in ways unimaginable a mere month ago), I am deeply grateful to them for that.

__________________________
* Two days after the occupation began -- although before I'd heard of it -- I wrote:

I myself see no possible hope on the horizon. Oh, we can fantasize about some massive citizen campaign changing things. While we're dreaming, though, I'd like a few million dollars, and a pony. Seems just about as likely. I think that 2009 may well have been this country's last chance to change course.

Maybe OWS won't be that "massive citizen campaign": but maybe it will, in which case that moment of despair came even after it had already begun. (Hey, can I have my few million dollars now? You can keep the pony...) Perhaps -- just perhaps -- our eucatastrophe has begun. If not, it is at least a bit easier to imagine hope now.

Leaping from Death by Fire to Certain Death Below: Two New York Tragedies

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: you can read about it here, talk about it in this thread, or listen to a good radio report from today's Democracy Now! here.

In brief, a sweatshop factor in New York caught fire; 146 people, mostly poor immigrant women, died. The deaths were caused in large part by the fact that exit doors were chained, on the theory that workers would otherwise steal from their employer. In other words: women burned to death in a building because they'd been locked in by their employer.

It was a major scandal at the time, leading to a lot of reforms; a lot of the fire codes you see can be traced back to the Triangle fire.

But what struck me today, listening to the Democracy Now! report while driving to work, was the detail that some of the women leapt to their death from where they were trapped on the 10th floor.

Sound familiar?

While all the murders of 9/11 were equally criminal, I must admit that the ones that touched me the most emotionally -- tied, I suppose, with the deaths of the firemen who raced into the building to help those inside and died -- were those who leapt to their death from the top of the World Trade Center. Something about the sheer horror of that act was incredibly palpable; the images of those falling bodies, shown on TV, were among the most horrifying of all those shown in that horrifying time.

And I suspect I wasn't the only one for whom those deaths helped symbolize the sheer, unthinkable evil that would cause such a thing.

Well, it's worth remembering that it's not only murderous religious/political ideologies that can do that. Other things can too.

It would be nice and simple to chalk it up to the greed of the owners of the factory; but while they were fully morally culpable, their reform would not have solved the issue: as long as such a practice was legal, any given virtuous capitalist will simply be driven out of business by a less virtuous one.

No, what caused those deaths were the evils of unregulated capitalism -- that, when not held back by law, will burn women and children to death if there's profit in it.

And, of course, law is not enough: to sustain those laws, we need political counterweights to the ever-increasing power of money in our politics.

We need organizations who fight for the poor -- or, rather, which enable the poor to fight for themselves.

What the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory needed was a union.

Laws to regulate capital, and unions to balance its political power: or a foe ever bit as evil in its deeds (albeit not in its motives) as any other we face will burn us all alive.

In the memory of those who died, let's fight for that.