Troy Davis Must Die

I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes
That's what I learned in school...

Doin' What I Think I Should...

Troy Davis yesterday, Occupy Wall St. today.
But not every day for the next few months. Not even most of today. For the usual reasons. So it goes.

We're all part-time bodies upon the gears.

Freedom is Slavery.

The professor handed out the Catechism of the Knights of Labor and asked us for our reactions.
Gladys, an older woman, an immigrant from Latin America recounted her first experience with employment in the United States: she worked in a factory in Midtown Manhattan, she was obviously scared to give the exact location and name when pressed by our professor, but she had been exploited, paid less than minimum wage, told to work for 6 days a week, her employers had taken advantage of the fact that she had little grasp of the language at the time and that she knew even less about her rights within this system. She was nearly in tears with the whole class turning in their seats to listen to her in the corner as she described what she went through as slavery.

"But could you quit that job? You did get paid, correct?" The professor pressed.
"Slaves could not quit, they did not have that choice, you were free to leave, right? You could take another job if you found it?"

Gladys responded that yes, she did eventually escape that place, once she had learned enough and could find an employer that could use her language as an asset, rather than a shackle. She was clearly shaken by our teacher's seeming dismissal of her experience to prove what seemed like a semantic point.

"Ah, so you were not a slave then, strictly speaking. See, that's the difference, slaves could not choose to stop working, if they did, they would be beaten. Freedom, free labor means you work or you starve. That is the definition of freedom, in a capitalist system at least."

What a fucking asshole. But good point.

*Update*
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/britain-may-contain-up-to-60-million-slaves-201109134294/
I love these people.

Thinking Back

I don't put much stock in the conspiracy theories, but for everything else progressives and dissenters who don't subscribe to them put at Bush's feet, you'd think they'd be a little more inclined to believe them once the death count in the war on terror reached 2,977 people.