Fast food workers across the planet strike today

There is a workers' uprising after all, two weeks after May Day.

From New York City to Nigeria and New Zealand, fast food workers will strike and protest on Thursday to demand higher pay and better working conditions — in a global day of action with unprecedented reach for the industry.

Workers and labor organizers across the globe have united in a campaign that aims to advance workers’ specific demands in each country, while also showing solidarity with the US-based push for a $15 hourly wage and workers’ right to unionize without fearing retaliation.

[...]

Rallies and sit-ins will take place in 33 countries and 150 cities — a list that is growing by the day, organizers said. The action is reaching countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, some for the first time, in addition to Europe and the Americas. In some locations, strikes and rallies in solidarity with US workers will continue on Friday.

In the US, thousands of workers are expected to strike in St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City among others — where they will demand the right to organize and a doubling of their wages from the current $7.25, the federal minimum wage.

If I were advising any Democratic politicians who had a goal of expanding the electorate six months from now, I would say: "Get out to the streets in front of a Papa John's or a Mickey D's today".

The global day of protest comes on the same day McDonald’s employees in California, Michigan, and New York filed class-action lawsuits against the hamburger chain – which serves an estimated 68 million customers daily in 119 countries - alleging the company is making employees work off the clock, refusing to pay overtime and even charging employees to have their uniforms cleaned.

“We’ve uncovered several unlawful schemes, but they all share a common purpose – to drive labor costs down by stealing wages from McDonald’s workers,” Michael Rubin of Altshuler Berzon LLP, the lawyer who filed the California suits, said in a media statement announcing the suits. “These McDonald’s workers have courageously stepped forward to shine a light on these illegal practices, and already we’ve begun to hear from several co-workers with similar wage theft claims.”

Refusing to pay in full the already poverty-level wages of their workers.  Counseling them to apply for public assistance (a cue taken from Walmart).  Record profits, lowest wages in the nation, and the broadest gap between what their employees and their top management earn.

Yeah, I'm not lovin' it.  That's a supersized order of revolution.  Make mine a combo, with some economic and social justice, please.

The gasps turned into shrieks

Conservative extremism is still death-rattling; it's just doing so a little louder than before. This was the scene yesterday in front of City Hall at lunchtime, just before council members convened to move forward on Houston's equal rights legislation.

Mayor Annise Parker and supporters of her proposed nondiscrimination ordinance announced a compromise Tuesday in hopes of deflecting controversy over a small provision that had dominated discussion on the measure.

A paragraph specifying that no business open to the public could deny a transgender person entry to the restroom consistent with his or her gender identity had outraged conservatives. Church and Republican political leaders have used the clause to claim the ordinance "provides an opportunity for sexual predators to have access to our families."

This 'sexual predator' bullshit is a transmogrification of the Xtianist, homophobic paranoia associated with conservatives having to potentially share a urinal or a stall with a TP (not a Tea Partier).  That and swastika cakes dominated the anti-HERO message before city council yesterday, and well into the night.

There may be some wavering, quivering CMs after yesterday's show of force by the local Talibaptists -- in which case you can shore up support by calling or e-mailing yours here, this morning -- but I expect this little fire to die out shortly after the vote is taken.

One more thing: the white face to the left of the bullhorn in the photo above -- white hair, grinning -- is that of Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart.  The man who cannot get the county's votes properly counted.  The same man who cannot tally the county's early votes and post them to the website on time, as his predecessor was consistently able to do, is out of the office at a hate rally.

Please remember the name of his worthy challenger, Ann Harris Bennett, in November.

Update: Kuff has a good roundup of developments that include protests from the various caucuses within the Immoral Minority.

Update II: Postponed for two weeks.  Like others, I believe that justice delayed is justice denied.

The last gasps of conservative extremism

They're dying hard, but they're still dying.

-- Keep in mind that Donald Sterling isn't a racist.  He told Anderson Cooper so.

"He's got AIDS!" Sterling said loudly at one point, cutting off Cooper as the interviewer attempted to cite (Magic) Johnson's accomplishments after Sterling asked, "What has he done, big Magic Johnson, what has he done?"

Sterling changed course briefly during the interview to call Johnson "a good person," but resumed his criticism.

"He acts so holy," Sterling said. "He made love to every girl in every city in America, and he had AIDS, and when he had those AIDS, I went to my synagogue and I prayed for him, I hope he could live and be well. I didn't criticize him. I could have. Is he an example for children?"

He's not a homophobe, either.

-- Lindsey Graham has decided he'll try to outlaw women's reproductive choice again. He's being primaried from the right, naturally.

The South Carolina Republican is organizing a group of his colleagues to speak in support of a bill that would federally ban abortions after more than 20 weeks of pregnancy, legislation that has the support of 41 Senate Republicans and has already passed the House. Graham is centering this legislative push on the May 13 anniversary of Kermit Gosnell’s conviction for killing infants that were born alive.

[...]

Graham introduced his abortion legislation in November and after a recent lull, the South Carolina Republican is ramping up activity alongside the Gosnell anniversary and — perhaps coincidentally — his own Senate primary in June, where he is trying to avoid a run-off by accruing 50 percent of the vote.

Because it's not whether you win or lose, it's how TeaBaggeringly thuggish can you act.

-- Ann Coulter got served, over and over again, on Twitter.  What she has also made a mockery of is the Republican urban legend of voter "fraud" (sic), the elaborate, well-established nationwide effort to intimidate minority voters from the polls.  Ann Coulter, you should be reminded, got away with actual voter fraud.

For more info and the complete documentation of Ann Coulter's well-documented voter fraud in Florida, and most likely in Connecticut as well, see BradBlog.com/CoulterFraud. (Here's a version of the full story, in one article, as it stood as of mid-2008.)

If you'd like more information on actual and apparent voter fraud by other very high-profile Republicans (none of which would have been prevented by the purposely disenfranchising polling place Photo ID schemes the GOP has been pretending are needed to stop "voter fraud"), please see the list included at the bottom of this article from just before the 2012 Presidential election.

Finally, for the record, please note that while a recent, non-partisan study of election fraud related offenses documented in all 50 states from 2000 to 2012 found just ten (10) cases of the type of voter fraud that could have possibly been deterred by polling place Photo ID restrictions, there have been zero (0) calls by high-profile Republicans for the prosecution of Ann Coulter for the crime of actual, very well documented felony voter fraud that she absolutely committed.

-- It's not just Coulter, of course, that is completely immune to hypocrisy.  An ability to grasp even the most rudimentary irony is required if you're going to be a Republican these days.

For example, you have to be terribly concerned (to the point of, you know, outrage at your income tax rate) about your grandchildren's future because of the federal debt... but not about global warming, because that's a hoax.  Which is why it costs so much to combat it.

The largest, most-consistent money fueling the climate denial movement are a number of well-funded conservative foundations built with so-called "dark money," or concealed donations, according to an analysis released (in December of 2013).

The study, by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle, is the first academic effort to probe the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the climate denial movement.

It found that the amount of money flowing through third-party, pass-through foundations like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital, whose funding cannot be traced, has risen dramatically over the past five years. In all, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations from 2003 to 2010.

Meanwhile the traceable cash flow from more traditional sources, such as Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, has disappeared.

The study was published  in the journal Climatic Change.

Liberals like Al Gore invented global warming, you see, in order to make money off of it.  They make much more money off the climate change "fraud" (sic) than Charles and David Koch make from polluting our air and water.  After all, the Kochs have only spent $67 million fighting global warming since 1997.  That's chump change.  Literally.



I mean, if it was a bigger deal, they would have spent more on it, right?  Created more jobs.

This sort of alternate reality delusional behavior is, as you know, everywhere you look.  Benghazi, Obama's birth certificate, death panels... on and on and on.  Climate change just happens to be the place where there is the most at risk and the most money involved.  The battle fronts in the Republican War on Earth include fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline, among others.

 It would be nice if we could just laugh it off.

After claiming on Sunday that human activity does not cause climate change, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) suddenly found his ignorance credentials under attack by potential rivals for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

“Now that Marco’s thinking of running for President, he doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry. “To those of us with long track records of ignorance on this issue, he seems a little late to the rodeo.” 

Yeah, Texas Republicans.  Ignorant, arrogant, and built to stay that way.

And there's no place like my adopted hometown of Houston that better illustrates Upton Sinclair's words: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

That said, Ted Cruz's grandson and Pat Robertson's great-grandson will someday blame this on teh gayz or something. Or else they'll claim it's a sign of the Apocalypse. But, sorry, there will be no god magically rapturing you out of your flooded home, either.

It's times like these when I'm even more glad that I never had any children.  Because if I had, I would definitely be concerned for their future... having to live with so many stupid people.