One of the satiric photos making the rounds.

I heard on the radio this morning that 1,400 police officers took part in an operation to shut down Occupy Los Angeles.  When I got online I saw the now-familiar images of riot police dragging away unarmed campers. Heavy equipment was hauled out to remove protesters who fled into trees. Meanwhile, on the other coast, a massive show of police force resulted in another crackdown on illegal camping in Philadelphia. That raid on Occupy protesters resulted in injuries, including one induced by a police horse.

I’m becoming accustomed to these excesses of police force and to the outrage I feel as a result. But this morning, when I heard the sheer number of police involved in the effort, it suddenly struck me what a complete recklessness of public resources goes into these operations.

Imagine, instead, if 1,400 police officers were deployed to clear a neighborhood of violent crime. I used to live in a neighborhood in Detroit that had far worse problems to overcome than tents going up without permits. Friends and neighbors were beaten, burgled, kidnapped, raped, and gunned down. I remember the first time I was there when drive-by shooting occurred on my block. The shooter missed the mark. My roommates—two people who are paragons of virtue and have a deeper sense of civic responsibility than almost anyone else I know—just went about their business. “Should we call the police?” I exclaimed.

They shrugged.  “If you want. I mean, it’s not like it will hurt anything to call them,” said one.

“It’s really unlikely they will come out, though,” said the other.

At the time, I was naively shocked. But I learned that it was true. Even when the criminals don’t miss their mark, the police take an extremely long time to arrive. When my elderly co-worker was beaten and robbed right outside the office, it took so long for the police to arrive that it she eventually decided it was more important to go to the hospital than to sit around and wait. Even when an officer met her there, she wasn’t able to file any paperwork. Instead, she had to take off work to go to the precinct the next day, where she filled out forms that would clearly never be viewed by another person—except for the insurance company. She needed a copy of the form to prove to the insurance company that she really had been robbed and thus needed replacement medication.

You might think that the police are just too overwhelmed to respond. That would be a charitable view. At one point, my neighborhood was suffering from a stunning string of breaking and entering. Almost every day, another home was broken into. In fact, my own home was entered by the burglar, but my neighbor saw him and ran in to chase him out. With another neighbor, they attempted to catch him as he ran down the street, but he escaped. The spree went on for weeks until, foolishly, the burglar broke into the home of our state representative. Suddenly, when Mr. Big Name (who was actually a good guy) called to report that he was the victim of a crime, the police took a series of unprecedented steps. These might seem like ordinary and routine steps if your main interaction with police comes from watching crime shows, but I assure each of these action represented a minor miracle. They included:

1. Police officers returned the victim’s call!
2. Police officers came to his home—at a time they arranged to be convenient for him—to take evidence. They even took fingerprints!
3. They assigned police to solve the crime.

Within two days, they caught the culprits and the string of burglaries stopped.

I know for a fact that in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oakland, Portland, New York, Denver, and the other cities where police have turned out in force to break up protesters, there are neighborhoods suffering from a lot of violent crime. Just like my neighborhood in Detroit (and my neighborhood was not hardly the toughest neighborhood you could live in), people are trying to raise families, eke out a living, and enjoy life. But every day, they face the risk of physical harm befalling them or their families. These are good communities, and they shouldn’t have to deal with this level of crime.

So when I hear that 1,400 police officers are dispatched to break up the heinous crime of camping without a permit, it shows me who the police are really working for. The people who give the orders, from the mayor on down, don’t have to live with the consequences of taking resources out of poor neighborhoods and into political repression. If they cared about the average citizen the way they care about the people who work in the financial districts (who often live in suburbs instead of in the cities themselves), they would put the riot gear on the shelf, get out into the communities to talk to people,  and then they would set to solving crimes as if the people who live in the city—and not corporations—are actually people.

Related Links:

Pepper Spray Cop

To which I reply: really?

So we are going to let them meet in secret because they don’t have enough backbone to meet in light of day? Don’t you think that if we can’t trust them to say what they really think in the open, that they are exactly the sort of people we shouldn’t trust behind closed doors?

I don’t claim to be the country’s biggest patriot, but even I am willing to accept the criticism of my peers if I think that speaking my mind will help put my country on a better footing. And if I really believed that I had the chance to do something important for my country at the risk of losing my job, I would certainly do so–and my prospects for entering some other lucrative line of work are not nearly so good as those who sit on this super committee. If they really believe that holding the line or compromising is the best thing for the country, let them say so openly and face the music.

When I pulled back the worm bedding, this is what I found.

Two winters ago, J & I made a foray into vermiculture. We keep the worm bin in the basement, where we alternate layers of shredded newspaper with food waste. The worms plunder their way through this bin, leaving behind one of the richest manures on earth.

Throughout the winter, whenever I notice that something I’m storing in the basement has gone bad, I chuck it in the bin. (I store turnips, cabbages, squash, onions, potatoes, and other items in the basement over the winter.) In late winter this year, all the potatoes sprouted like crazy. Many of them were small and not worth saving, so into the worm bin they went.

Harvesting worm castings is a tedious job. The method is to make a bunch of little piles in the bright sunlight. The worms bury deep into the piles to avoid the light. You take the castings from the top and sides, then wait for them to bury still deeper and again scrape around the edges. But truthfully, you never avoid getting a bunch of the worms along with the castings—at least I don’t.  I tend to put the task off, but today I figured I better take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to get the job done.  When I dumped the box onto a tarp, I found the most amazing thing.

The potatoes I had tossed in months earlier, had thrived in the worm bin. With no leaves for photosynthesis, these potatoes had somehow multiplied like crazy. The worms didn’t seem to be eating them at all, but they did seem to eat all around them. Many of these potatoes came out of the bin shiny and clean (though not the ones in the photo here), except that they were covered in worms that were not eating them. None of the potatoes had gotten very big—most were smaller than my pinky, but some of them grew in sizable clusters.

How did the potatoes grow without photosynthesis? None of the potatoes still had the sprouts that had caused me to pitch them in the first place; they were not even trying to get to sunlight or set roots. And why did the worms leave them alone? Was the potato growth simply able to outpace the pace of the worms, or did the worms avoid eating them for a reason? And why didn’t these potatoes begin to decompose anyway, even without the worms? They were in a moist, sometimes wet, place for more than six months, I’ve seen potatoes rot under much better conditions, even in the ground.  I have to wonder if there is some sort of symbiotic relationship going on. If anyone has any knowledge about this, I would love to know more!

Huge crowds gathered to send off the body of the man who gave voice to their struggles, the young immigrant Joe Hill.

At vigils and rallies to save the life of Troy Davis, participants marched with images of the innocent man covering their own faces. When asked to identify themselves, they would state "I am Troy Davis." (photo credit: Isaac Silver)

Just before the falsely convicted labor troubadour Joe Hill was shot by a firing squad in Utah in 1915, he wrote to a friend that people should not mourn his death, but instead organize. The slogan “Don’t Mourn, Organize!” has been a labor rallying cry for almost a century now. Tonight is the first time I’ve understood that when Joe Hill wrote those lines, they meant something much deeper than a rallying cry.

Asking his friends and family not to waste one moment for their private griefs, asking them to instead pour all their energy into the struggle for justice, this was not a small request. It was a very big thing to ask of the tens of thousands who came to meet his body when it was brought to Chicago and the millions who had fought for his release from every corner of the globe. Working people lost someone they held dear, and they lost faith in a system they held dear. Surely, they deserved to mourn for these losses. Surely, it was too much to ask them not to mourn.

Troy Davis has just been executed by the state of Georgia. There was no physical evidence in the trial, he was convicted solely on the testimony of eye witnesses. Seven out of the nine witnesses have since recanted their testimony. One of the remaining witnesses later told friends that he was the actual killer, and new witnesses have come forward to verify that claim. A number of the jurors have testified that they would not have convicted him if they knew then what they know now. Even the former warden who oversaw previous executions pleaded for a stay of execution.

This case has earned the sympathy and outrage of millions across the globe. Last night there were vigils all over the country and all over the world to support Troy Davis. Hundreds of thousands of us have signed petitions, made calls, urged others to speak out. We have written letters and sent faxes. We have joined organizations and donated our money to try to save this man. And still Troy Davis is lying dead right now.

Like Joe Hill, Troy Davis has urged us to stay focused on the struggle, and on the fact that we are all Troy Davis. This fight to save one life is actually a fight for all of our lives. Until we end the death penalty, we are letting down each and every Troy Davis. We are letting down each other. And if we start to mourn, how will we ever stop? It feels crass to suggest that we immediately seize on the momentum we have built in our efforts to prevent this death. It feels too hard to say we shouldn’t take time to heal ourselves before gearing up to prevent the next death.

But “I am Troy Davis” is not just a rallying cry. “Don’t mourn, organize!” is not just a rallying cry. They give us difficult tasks, and rewarding ones. They are to be lived out in what we decide to do from this very moment forward.

Glaser is the founder of a writers’ group I used to attend. When she released The Enemy We Know (the first book in a mystery series themed  on the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous), I seized the opportunity to ask her a few things about her writing, her personal life, and her decision to self-publish.

You share a number of characteristics with your protagonist, Letty Whittaker. You are both recovering alcoholics and psychotherapists living in Northwest Wisconsin. What are some of the challenges  of writing about a world so close to your own?

At first it was difficult for Letty to find her own voice. The Enemy We Know is the second book I wrote in the series [even though it’s the first to be published]. In the draft of the first one I wrote, she came across very bland. I had to separate myself from wanting to let people know I wasn’t her. I was too cautious. It took awhile to develop her, but it was just a matter of continuing to write.

It helped to give her a dysfunctional family, because my own family is pretty functional. And I added in more obvious differences in our lives.

Do you ever worry that, because you and Letty have such a similar background, readers will also assume that your family is dysfunctional?

A little, but my family truly doesn’t care about it. The thing I worry about the most is that people would assume my parents are like the ones in the book. They are light years from that. But my family is confident enough in who they really are that I didn’t have to care too much what anyone would think.

Was there anything about recovery that you were able to sort out by writing it down through Letty?

[Laughs] I probably have a few homicidal tendencies. But no, nothing really. I am far enough away from being new to recovery that nothing came up. If my sobriety was newer I might have been caught up in that tangle more during the writing.

What’s been the best or most surprising aspect of having your work in the public sphere?

It feels weird to know that somebody out there might reading something I wrote. I hope it feels even weirder, I want more people reading it! [Laughs] It’s hugely gratifying to have taken the time and effort to get a book into the hands of readers. And I’ve gotten such good feedback from those who contact me. It makes it worth it.

One surprising thing is that I like self-publishing as much as I do. I always wanted to be traditionally published. I felt it was the only legitimate route. I put every effort into it and I came close. A couple times I came very close. Self-publishing was Plan B. Now that I’ve done it, I see that the flow of self-publishing works much better with my personality and I wish I would have done it sooner.

I like having control over the process. I loved my agent when I had one, but I always wanted to have my little fingers in her pie as she wrote to publishers on my behalf. And I would have had even less control as the process went on if I had been published by a major house. They would have chosen the cover, the title. I don’t care so much about the cover, but I do want to be able to name my own kid. And the reality is that all the work I do as a self-published author to promote my book is work I would have to do anyway.

Right now with e-publishing, I’m just glad I have the rights to my own book. No one knows what is going to happen in the publishing world in the next ten years, so I’m glad to have control of the process until everything shakes out.

The hardest thing about being self-published is that don’t have as much time for writing. It’s hard to promote a book and write at the same time. Hard, but doable. Another hard thing is being in the in between spot when you have the book all ready to go, but it hasn’t totally taken off yet and started selling. I find I can get obsessed with checking Amazon. How many have I sold? What’s the rank? That kind of thing.

What is something unique that you want to bring to your readers?

My primary goal is to entertain. I love the mystery genre. I truly want people to be able to escape and relax.

Having said that, as an overarching goal, if anyone is ever concerned about their own drinking and reading my book makes them feel safer about looking at that, it would be wonderful. But I don’t have any sort of moralistic goal.

Speaking of morals, why do you think we find stories about murder so entertaining and relaxing?

People always will be drawn towards stories of good versus evil. Mysteries satisfy that. It’s ordinary people coming up against evil and triumphing. There’s a justice to it. Everyone’s life is complicated. Everything is gray tones and nothing is black and white. But in a mystery we know who the good guy and bad guy is.

An image of Jesus as Prince of Peace, which was a title I heard frequently as a child.

When I was a little girl, certain words were forbidden in the home. They included all the ones you might expect, along with another four letter word: hate. We were not allowed to say that we hated anyone. We were also never permitted to say that we wished someone were dead—no matter who or why. My parents’ Christian faith told them plainly that hatred of other humans was just wrong. (But don’t take their word for it, just read pretty much anything in the New Testament. Probably lots of other religions have figured this out too, but Christianity is the religion I grew up with and that shaped my personality the most.)

The lesson stuck. But recently, I had started to wonder if my childhood was radically different from other Christian homes. I’ve felt inundated lately by hateful speech and actions. Transgendered people assaulted in public restaurants, a massacre at an open-air meeting in Arizona, ministers burning Korans or cheering for the death of gays and soldiers. Closer to home an acquaintance of mine believes Democrats should leave the United States so he won’t be forced to endure their presence and a relative hopes every last [epitaph for Muslim] is killed by our army. “Nuke them all,” he says.

And so, when my radio alarm clock gave me the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. soldiers, I frankly didn’t want to get up to engage with the world that day. I was sure that the minute I got online I would be deluged by people gleefully reacting to this loss of human life. I thought that anyone like me who genuinely believes that the we should never hate or wish for anyone’s death would be overwhelmed in a sea of celebratory vengeance.

I was wrong.

I have 209 friends on Facebook, and of those that referenced bin Laden’s death, nearly all of them approached the matter with a somber and reflective tone. There were many wishes for peace. There were many calls to action for us all to be peacemakers. Some were in fact relieved that he had been killed, but even then felt unable to rejoice over a human death. Beyond my circle of friends, I’ve seen many well-written commentaries by public figures that reflect on the belief in forgiveness, or on the political reality of our country’s own murderous flaws. And even the mainstream media has seen fit to make a few of these voices heard.

Apparently, we peace-lovers have been here all along. Perhaps this is where we begin to make a call for peace heard more clearly and consistently with our relatives, our friends, our role models, our leaders and even — especially — ourselves. You in?

Andrew Breitbart’s Affront to Democracy and Attack on Students’ Right to an Education

Statement by Judy Ancel

I am Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. While my university prepares its response, I feel compelled to answer the attacks by Andrew Breitbart on my character. I am speaking as an individual and certainly not for UMKC. I am speaking out of my strong lifelong commitment to educating working people to better understand the world they live in. Labor education is a vital part of anyone’s education. All Americans, especially our youth, need to understand the contributions working people have made and make in building our communities and nation. Labor education gives them the skills and vision to make a better world.

My students and I are outraged at Mr. Breitbart’s invasion of our classroom and his attempts to intimidate us and my colleagues at the university. Mr. Breitbart’s chop shop manufactured videos from 30 hours of classroom recordings that were posted for the course, “Labor, Politics, and Society,” on the university’s Blackboard system. Presumably these were delivered to him by a student, in possible violation of the University Standards of Conduct and the Federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. These videos were recorded for the use of students enrolled in this course, and for them only. Breitbart disassembled the material, and reassembled it; arranging them to give the appearance that instructors of the class advocate violence. This is in fact the opposite of the position both instructors took in class. Any examination of labor’s past would be incomplete without discussion of violence, (which for the most part was directed at workers) and analysis of its roots. At no time did my co-instructor, Don Giljum, nor I advocate violence.

There’s no doubt that Breitbart’s attacks are politically motivated, part of a broad agenda to weaken unions and the public sector as well as public education. His fabrications have been exposed numerous times in the mainstream media. Yet he and his echo chamber at Fox News continue to cause great harm to educators and other public servants.

On April 18th Breitbart announced his intentions on Fox News Sean Hannity show: “We’re going to take on education next, go after the teachers and the union organizers.” It is possible that his attack on the University of Missouri and labor education is his first assault.

Breitbart is a master of taking quotes out of context, deletion of what doesn’t serve his purpose, and remixing to achieve totally different meaning. For example he has me saying:

o Breitbart’s version: “Violence is a tactic and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.”
o The real version: After students had watched a film on the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King, they were discussing nonviolence. I said, “One guy in the film. . . said ‘violence is a tactic, and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.’ . . . “ The class proceeded to discuss and debate this.

Thus Mr. Breitbart’s editing has literally put words in my mouth that were not mine, and they never were mine.

Breitbart leaves out a crucial statement by Don Giljum in order to make it appear that he advocates violence. Giljum said, “I’m not sure as a tactic today the type of violence or reaction to the violence we had back then would be called for here, and I think it would do more harm than good.” A student then says “and it just legitimizes their dirty tricks.” Giljum agreed with him.

There are a number of other instances of very creative editing including:

o A change of clothes by Don Giljum from one sentence to another
o The insertion of a sentence by me about crisis situations taken from an entirely different class about how governments use crises to launch big unpopular changes. This is inserted into my lecture on collective bargaining to make it appear that I am advocating that unions provoke crises in the workplace. I have never advocated that. In fact I make sure students understand the limits of union and individual action under both law and the union contract.

o Making it appear that Don advocates sabotage when his point was about the sad state of labor law and the decline of the right to strike.

These videos are no idle prank. They do real harm. Both Don and I are receiving threats and ugly and scary messages. There are death threats against us on Breitbart’s blog.

These videos are an attack on higher education and its mission to working adults, putting labor education programs at risk. They create fear and have an enormously chilling effect on freedom of thought and expression. They seek to undermine the academic freedom that is required to study, better understand, and hopefully improve our conditions of life. Sadly, they have already shattered the very positive atmosphere of trust and openness that we worked so hard to create in this class. One of my students told me, with some discomfort, “My boss watches Fox News.” Our students’ identities have been compromised. Their right to privacy has been breached, and none of us gave permission for these videos or our images to be placed on the internet. Another student wrote me, “The classroom provides a safe place, or a ‘free speech zone’, where it’s natural that, at times, those of us not used to discussing these topics make inflammatory statements, radical sounding claims etc. that are a part of thinking through the issues and emotions surrounding them. It seems to me that a classroom can be a healthy place to do so, because of the ground rules that are set: everyone gets a chance to speak, respect for opposing views is expected and so on.”

And of course these posted videos are an attack on the rights of working people and on anything that is public, including public universities. The right of workers to have a voice in their workplaces and in their economic lives is a human right recognized by freedom-loving people around the world. Education about how to best make those rights a reality should be part of every school’s curriculum, certainly in our universities. Yet this attempt to marginalize it and make teachers and students afraid to discuss it is the antithesis of all we stand for.

These attacks on me, my colleague, and the students in my course are an affront to democracy and must be challenged by citizens, workers and students, or else they will continue.

*****

Thus ends Ancel’s commentary. Now it’s your turn. Leave a comment with one thing you’ve heard or read today, but edit it selectively so that it means something else entirely. It’s fun and easy!  (Give us both the original and edited version, and please keep it rated PG.)

4,340.

50,000. That’s how many died from occupational-related illnesses such as black lung. Somehow, it’s so difficult to imagine the death of 50,000 people that it’s almost an easier number to read than 4,340. Yet if you consider that’s 136 human lives ended every day, you can start to wrap your arms around the idea. That’s my entire high school graduating class. It’s the size of a small church community. It’s the number of people who show up for a controversial issue at the town council. And it’s every day.

4,000,000-12,000,000. That’s the number of non-fatal workplace injuries, such as paralysis, brain trauma, and amputation. It also includes smaller but life-altering injuries such as torn rotator cuffs, 3rd-degree burns, and crushed hands.

A new report from the AFL-CIO Department of Safety and Health outlines these statistics and breaks the information down by state, industry, and sector. Page 85 of the report shows how long it would take for OSHA to actually inspect all the work sites in a given state with current level of staffing. If you are lucky, you live in the best case state of Oregon, where you could expect an inspection sometime in the next 23 years. But if you live in Florida, well maybe some of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will get to work in a place that’s had an inspection, because it will take OSHA about 240 years to get around to it.

Has anyone else noticed that workers are starting to stand up and say “Enough!” The unions fought hard for OSHA, and now we all need to fight to make it an agency with more teeth. Nothing would be a more fitting tribute to the men, women, and children who are dying on the job every day.

Related Articles

• Tomorrow April 28 Is Workers Memorial Day (iflizwerequeen.com)
• OSHA Saves Lives: Trench Collapse Edition (scienceblogs.com)

This cake has the texture of fruit leather. The flavor is okay.

Molasses Spice Cake:

2.25 C Flour (I used 1.25 C whole wheat flour, and 1 C white)
1/2 t salt (I skipped this)
1 t cinnamon
1/4 t each: cloves, nutmeg, cardamom
1/2 t ginger
1/4 C molasses (I increased to 1/3 C)
1/2 C honey (I decreased to 1/4 C)
1 t vinegar
1/2 C applesauce
1 C milk

Mix dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl combine the wet ingredients. Fold in the dry ingredients. Bake 25-30 minutes in a 9″ square pan (I used a round pan) at 350 degrees. Use cream cheese or lemon frosting (I omitted frosting)