Supporters of a bill that would make union organizing simpler gathered in front of a Home Depot store in Kansas City last week, protesting the company’s opposition.

Nearly 150 people from various labor, religious and community groups showed up in support of the Employee Free Choice Act,
Opponents of the legislation contend it takes away the secret-ballot election Proponents counter that the current system heavily favors employers,we do believe we have a right to have input into the working conditions, benefits and pay,

Labor bill supporters clash with Home Depot - Kansas City Star

Screw the autoworkers.
They may be crying about General Motors bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won t spoil Jamie Dimon s day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders – led by Morgan and Citibank – expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.
Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama s Car Czar - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.Here s the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replaced by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM s stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.

So what s wrong with seizing workers pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it s illegal.

Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don t even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren t asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM?

As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys? You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who ve already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama s point-man in winning banks endorsement and campaign donations by far, his largest source of his corporate funding .

If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat s plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.

It doesn t make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car.

Greg Palast » Grand Theft Auto: How Stevie the Rat bankrupted GM

Alex Pang:

Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment. Tinkering is a bit like jazz.

Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

The counterculture is one important influence on tinkering; so is computer hacking, with its casual contempt for established authority, deep respect for arcane technical skills, and refined love of imaginative jokes.

Consumption encourages you to just react; the more thoughtlessly the better. Tinkering forces you to reflect, to learn from your experience, to think about why something has worked or failed, and to consider the possibilities before you.

Tinkering to the future

Youtube Video
Starbucks’ nasty labor practices make the company look an awful lot like Wal-Mart. The National Labor Relations Board has repeatedly found Starbucks guilty of illegally terminating, harassing, intimidating, and discriminating against employees attempting to unionize. Starbucks has settled five labor disputes in the last few years in New York, Minnesota, and Michigan, spending millions on legal fees to avoid exposing their anti-worker ways. And Starbucks has led the charge on a so-called Employee Free Choice Act “compromise,” which would require 70 percent of workers to sign union authorization cards instead of the much more manageable 50 percent initially proposed by this legislation.

We’ve known for a while where Starbucks billionaire CEO Howard Schultz stands on unions. After all, it was Schultz who once said that if workers “had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.” While Starbucks pretends to be pro-barista, claiming to offer workers decent wages and health insurance, these “progressive” policies are less substantive than the company’s frothy milk-based beverages. The reality is, as Liza Featherstone has noted, Starbucks insures a lower percentage of its workers than Wal-Mart.

Less than 42 percent of Starbucks’ 127,000 baristas in the U.S. are insured by the company, whereas Wal-Mart insures 47 percent of its employees. To make matters worse, Starbucks offers its workers wages similar to those earned by Wal-Mart employees, and Starbucks does not guarantee workers set hours. Instead, the company follows an Optimal Scheduling policy that requires baristas to make themselves available 70 percent of open store hours just to work full time in any given week. This means that low-wage earning baristas do not have time to take a second job. Moreover, it precludes tens of thousands of Starbucks employees from working the 240 hours per quarter needed to qualify for the company’s health insurance.

What do Stabucks and Walmart have in common?

A French publishing company, Les Editions de Minuit, has brought criminal charges against a professor in Argentina for making Spanish translations of classic works of philosophy available for free on the internet, including Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In February, Les Editions de Minuit filed a complaint which was then sent to the French Embassy in Argentina and, probably because of multilateral law enforcement treaties, the Argentina Book Chamber brought legal action against Professor Horacio Potel.

Ironically, Les Éditions de Minuit began as an underground publishing company in Paris in 1941, as part of the resistance to the German occupation of France. The Nazi occupiers controlled all media and publishing and, therefore, Les Éditions de Minuit’s founders were fighting against state control of information.

Argentine Professor Attacked for Sharing Philosophy Classics Online : northxsouth : free software news from latiN AMErica

We are currently living in a historical moment which will define and shape digital rights and information freedom on the internet for generations to come. It’s one of those rare moments where the issue is black and white and where the two opposing camps can be identified without over-simplifying the issue. On one side, there are those fighting for the information revolution’s culture of sharing, co-operation and the public commons. On the other side is a powerful, industry cartel who would stomp out the commons to salvage proprietary information that they can buy and own.

It’s for this reason that the global free and open source software community has been paying close attention to specific battles which could have significant ramifications within this overall conflict. Right now, one of those battles involves a website operated in Sweden called The Pirate Bay. The website’s founders Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm & Carl Lundström have recently been found guilty of criminally providing “assistance to copyright infringement.” They were sentenced to one year in prison and have been fined $3.62 million USD. Their website, like hundreds of thousands of other websites, provides a search interface for files available using the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, designed by Bram Cohen of San Francisco, California in 2001.

The trial against The Pirate Bay has highlighted a number of important issues related to digital freedom. It has shined a light on the corruption between corporate lobbyists and the judicial systems that decide the public’s fate — just after the trial ended, the defense found out that the judge, Tomas Norström, is a board member for a Swedish association which has lobbied for stronger copyright laws and also belongs to a couple other copyright-oriented organizations. The defense has filed a request for a new trial based on the judge’s conflict of interest.

Why the free software community cares about The Pirate Bay : northxsouth : free software news from latiN AMErica

truth in advertising

--timball

40 Gorgeous Vintage Tobacco Advertisements // WellMedicated

Roger Dobson:

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity

Roger Dobson:

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity

Every install fest is free of charge in every location and they also include lectures, presentations and workshops.

FLISOL 2009: Hundreds of cities in 18 Latin American countries to host install fests! : northxsouth : free software news from latin america