Reading List June 26, 2013

Who needs those pesky worker protections anyway? There's little focus on this but it certainly makes work life that much harder now, especially in Right To Work states (HA!).

From the Better Late Than Never Department:
This is a huge load off of my mind. I was so worried about the sexual assault epidemic in the military but apparently, it's not so bad and it's easily explained.

This is the reality of the SCOTUS decision on voter registration. I first voted in 1992 in my college town of Rome, GA. Fast forward a decade (plus)  and this certainly would have been my story.

#IStandWithWendy What an amazing act of courage! And what an amazing display of asshattery for the Texas Legislature to try to sneak #SB5 through after midnight. Of course Texas has been trying to turn back the clock for years... to 1850.

And speaking of screwing American workers, let's look at Hostess to see how it's done.

• Unionized Hostess workers made major concessions, taking pay and benefits cuts. That money was supposed to be reinvested into the company. It wasn't.
• As the company was struggling, its CEO pay skyrocketed, and as it was going into bankruptcy, Hostess pushed to give $1.75 million in bonuses to top executives.
• Hostess claimed it had to close plants because workers went on strike, but in fact, the company was already planning to close nine bakeries and wasn't telling which ones.
• Hostess stole its workers' pension money to fund itself and still went bankrupt.
• And, as Media Matters points out, "while the AP story claims that "workers" are blaming the company's woes on mismanagement and a failure to adapt to evolving consumer tastes, this has actually been the opinion of informed and objective third parties."

Reading List June 16, 2013

Edward Snowden Had a Breaking Point, Where He Decided to Risk It All to Fix This Country -- What's Yours?
Sometimes the smallest action can have the greatest impact. All it takes for change to occur is for one person to speak up and then another to join with their voice. What Snowden did was controversal but he had courage to act on his beliefs.

And speaking of the need to speak...

Courtesy of http://www.bradleymanning.org/ and http://iam.bradleymanning.org/

The Dangers of Corporations Controlling National Secrets
A topic worth looking at, why do we have private corporations who are not answerable to the people of the United States doing so security work on our behalf?

Keep Families Together

I've often said behind every politicized issue, there are human lives at stake. Gay marriage isn't about property rights or religion, it's about people wanting to make a commitment to each other. The same can be said of immigration reform. In many cases, it's about keeping families together. Children who have only known life in the United States needing a parent who has been deported.

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The video of a mother talking to her children through a border fence just breaks my heart. Immigration reform isn't some political football that gets kicked around, these are peoples' lives. People who's lives deserve the same respect as any other. We're too willing to break up families of the marginalized in this country, either through deportation or criminalization, and it has to stop.