Remaining Jobs Made Miserable by AI Boss

Proof News provides an excellent investigation into AI's replacement of lower-level management jobs in the hospitality industry, while making work life miserable for housekeeping crews now under the constant surveillance and pressure of their new bloodless bosses: www.proofnews.org/hotel-housek...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) May 19, 2026 at 6:03 AM

"A President in a Corporate Prison Called the White House"

A must watch primer below on the current political reality among "Democrats."  From Raw Story:

In an extended interview with Middle East news network Al Jazeera, consumer advocate and repeat U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader suggested that President Barack Obama is not supporting the labor movement because “they have nowhere else to go” except for Democrats.

“If he doesn’t stand up for those millions of workers, we might as well call him a president in a corporate prison called the White House,” Nader said, likening Obama’s “playing” of labor unions to the stretching of an elastic band.

But this time, Nader said, the band may be just about ready to “snap.” Should that happen, it could kick-start a “popular revolt” in the U.S., he added.

This video is from Al Jazeera, broadcast Monday, March 21, 2011.

Three Koch Bros. Governors Back Off Union Eradication Plan

Mitch "Red Menace" Daniels' announcement yesterday that he and his legislative goon squad would ease back is a sign that the wingnuts have overplayed their hand--or that Daniels and Co. can now proceed with the public school eradication plan while appearing as compromising moderates.  I suspect the latter.

From FireDogLake:

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, responding to the flight of Democratic lawmakers from the state House, denying Republicans a quorum to pass union-busting bills, asked Republicans in his party to stop work on the bill, allowing the Democrats to return and operations in the legislature to continue.

Daniels told reporters this afternoon that he expects House Democrats will return to work if the bill dies. It would be unfortunate if other bills are caught up in the turmoil, he said.

He will not send out state police to corral the Democrats, the Republican governor said.

The Democrat (sic) minority has right to express its views, he added.

The governor clung to his view that this is not the year to tackle right to work.

Daniels has basically held this position for a while, that he didn’t want to bring up the “right-to-work” bill this year. He would rather see Republicans in the legislature work on his education reform and criminal justice reform proposals.

That doesn’t mean Daniels is some big union supporter, however. He has said he supports the policy, but he just doesn’t want it to go forward at this time. In 2005, Daniels de-certified all public employee unions in Indiana, so he’s well ahead of Scott Walker in terms of union-busting. He has, in fact, called public employee unions the most powerful special interests in America today. So let’s not be fooled by this kinder, gentler approach from a potential Presidential candidate.

But it’s significant to see Daniels pull back so quickly from the fight. Rick Snyder in Michigan and Rick Scott in Florida are two other Republican Governors who backed away from any Walker-style plan to take away public employee collective bargaining rights. The polling shows antipathy toward these kinds of plans. And even Republicans follow the polls sometimes. . .  .

Wisconsin's Hosni Walker Jamming Websites Inside Capitol?

From Think Progress:

According to pro-labor protesters in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker (R) may be taking a page from former Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak and cutting off internet access to key protest organizers within the state Capitol building.


If you are in the Capitol attempting to access the internet from a free wifi connection labeled “guest,” you cannot access the site defendwisconsin.org. The site has been used to provide updates on what is happening, where you can volunteer, and where supplies and goods are needed to support protesters. Administrators of the website were notified on Monday that the page is being blocked. Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate says that the site was put on a blacklist typically used to filter out pornography sites so that protestors inside the Capitol could not access this key site.

Former Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Charles Hoornstra said that, if Walker is blocking the website, it could be a violation of state and federal laws concerning free speech laws. The accusation by the Wisconsin Democratic Party accompanies an accusation by the Teaching Assistants Association that Wisconsin state authorities cut off wifi access to a room they had taken over as a headquarters inside of the Capitol. . . .

The Latest Excuse In TN to End Teacher Rights and TEA: Evolution and Gays

In the current all-out assault triggered nationwide against teachers and other workers, the old lies used by the corporate reform crowd have been supplanted by the truth, especially in Tennessee where the spineless TEA has gone along with every miseducative notion in the Business Roundtable playbook. The enemies of democracy and the public space, however, see their privatization agenda waning, however, because the American people are sick and tired of their public schools being ruined by ideologues with dollar signs in the eyes.  That and every deforming reform on the list has been proven ineffective where tried or too risky to be endorsed by science and research.

So now every idiot reason that can be dreamed up is broadcast as the rationale for crushing teachers in Tennessee.  Now the reason for taking away workers' rights:  TEA likes homosexuals and Darwin. 

Who put the John Birch Society in charge of education policy in Tennessee?  Was that Haslam?

This can be stopped if Tennesseans show show that volunteer spirit and volunteer to call their legislators, write letters, and make their voices heard above the ignorant hate of the wingnuts.

. . . .Although teacher pay in Tennessee is below the national average, tea party and anti-tax leader Ben Cunningham said he attended Wednesday's hearing to support the bill because he believes collective bargaining leads to higher taxes. "The TEA is invariably in favor of higher taxes and bigger government. They are a political organization," he said.

The bills surfaced when lawmakers reconvened Feb. 7 from a three-week recess. But the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, FACT, Eagle Forum and Professional Educators of Tennessee -- a small conservative alternative to TEA -- quietly laid groundwork. PET and the School Boards Association held a forum on the issue Feb. 10.

In its 2011 "Legislators Guide to Issues," the Center for Policy Research -- which proclaims its views as "free markets, individual liberty, limited government" -- calls for allowing schools and teachers to opt out of salary scales and encourages performance pay for teachers.

Fowler said conservatives are rallying behind the bills because they "have been frustrated with positions taken by the NEA and TEA -- more so by the NEA." These include, he said, support for the "Darwinian view of evolution."

Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, charged last year that TEA advocated a "homosexual lifestyle" -- which TEA chief lobbyist Jerry Winters angrily denied in a hearing.

TEA declines labeling the bills an attack by Republicans in general. Winters cites its agreement to a controversial measure that passed last year with heavy GOP support requiring 50 percent of a teacher's annual evaluation to be based on student performance measures. TEA also says it is willing to talk with Gov. Bill Haslam about his tenure-weakening proposals unveiled Thursday.

But Winters did say the 51,000-member TEA is under assault by conservatives. "The fact that the tea party and the Eagle Forum and some of these far-right, out-of-the-mainstream groups are supporting this ought to send a message to the citizens that this is not about education, it's about politics." . . .

The Education Reform Fig Leaf Is Finally Stripped Away

I worked as a Tennessee teacher for almost 20 year before coming to higher education, where I have taught for the past dozen years or so.  Never would I have imagined when I left Tennessee schools in 1996 that 15 years later I would be watching a full frontal attack waged to eliminate or neutralize collective bargaining, job security, due process, and the last shreds of academic freedom of Tennessee teachers.  But then, it’s not just in Tennessee or just teachers, for this war is being waged on workers in the public or private sectors in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, and elsewhere.  This crusade is inspired, funded, and directed by a handful of billionaires who are guided neither by political allegiance nor moral compass.  These oligarchs, rather, see workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain as the final stumbling block to the creation of a corporate state that is unimpeded in its aspirations for social control and unrestrained greed and, thus, unchecked by either labor laws or considerations or workers' rights. 

Pitted now against this billionaires’ campaign on teachers in Tennessee is the tepid and weak-kneed Tennessee Education Association.  This is the same TEA that I remember from my time as a Tennessee teacher, the professional organization that we joined for the liability insurance coverage, not any anything significant they did for teaching.  As easy as TEA was to roll in those days, the big difference now is that TEA is even friendlier to “education reform” than it was in the 80s and 90s.  Back then, at least there was some modest and low-key protestation when Governor Lamar Alexander installed the Career Ladder Program, which left teacher salaries so low that I and many of my Career Level III colleagues back then worked part-time in the evenings so that we could afford to buy a house or take our families on a vacation.

Today the TEA is a weaker version of the reform-friendly national organization, NEA, which has been regularly bad-mouthed by the Bush and the Obama Administrations any time they raise a finger against the never-ending reforms that move our schools closer and closer to privatization and to what Diane Ravitch calls more “test and punish” school programs that benefit corporations much more than they do children.  Much to the chagrin of those of us who believe that 25 years of more and more testing should be enough to show that it doesn’t work to make schools or children better, both the NEA and AFT have decided that compromise with the “reform agenda” is the only way to maintain a seat at the feast where billions are served by the Feds and by the corporate foundations to those who are polite and wait their turn.  Just one quick example:  this past summer Bill Gates became keynote speaker at the AFT Convention after passing across the table an “innovation fund” grant worth several hundred thousand dollars that helped AFT, in fact, stage their convention.   But I digress.

In terms of support from teacher organizations for the corporate education agenda, it was the vocal support by the TEA that pushed Tennessee’s Race to the Top application over the top, so to speak, so that Tennessee ended up with $500 million in federal money, even as other states couldn’t convince their teachers that charter schools, more testing, and test score based evaluation is good for public education. The TEA has actually embraced the reformer-friendly teacher evaluation scheme that the corporate reformers demanded, despite warnings (Letter Report) by the National Research Council and other top researchers regarding the dangers of using students’ value-added test scores to make high stakes decisions about teachers or children.  The TEA, in fact, has yielded to every major demand that is on the corporate education agenda, including lifting the cap on charter school expansion and relaxing standards for replacing faculty and staff in schools listed for federal turnaround efforts.

Even so, there doesn’t seem to anything that can satisfy the demands of the extremists now in charge of corporate education reform in many states, including Tennessee and Wisconsin.  Appeasement clearly has not worked, and the war that is now being waged in Wisconsin and elsewhere on teachers and other workers shows an insatiable hunger that cannot be satisfied by more attempts to preserve a place at the table as the chair is being pulled out from under every teacher’s professional organization across the nation.  One can make a strong argument, in fact, that the Obama Administration’s early embrace of the Bush education agenda has encouraged the Far Right to move farther right faster, thus opening up public education to threats that are now shocking in their ferocity, velocity, and callousness.

The pending anti-teacher bills speeding through legislative committees in Nashville, Columbus, Trenton, and other state capitols have finally stripped away the fig leaf of “reform” that has previously tried to cover an otherwise naked attempt to achieve corporate control of K-12 education.  The harsh measures against teachers, children, and their schools have never been about real achievement or real accountability or real choices or even real “economic competition in the global economy,” per the mantra of the Business Roundtable.   The great majority of the increasingly-draconian reforms have deformed our schools, in fact, as they serve to mask takeover and control strategies that have placed a stranglehold on teachers and principals and school boards who work in pressure cookers as they strive to achieve the unachievable that gets even more so with each testing season. 

When Gerald Bracey, David Berliner, and a handful of other researchers and educators began saying 10 years ago that NCLB was designed to created failed schools, most people wrote them off as nuts.  Now that understanding of the impossible Adequate Yearly Progress targets is common wisdom among school board members, parents, and, yes, even some politicians who see that Adequate Yearly Progress has always meant progress toward dismantling public schools.  Teachers of poor children have known this in their souls since 2002, but most of them have been so busy trying to perform the impossible that they have not had the time or energy to look inside the political realities that have driven these deforming reforms. 

The NCLB chimera with its social justice and civil rights packaging has disguised for too long a monstrous assault on the most vulnerable that leaves achievement gaps gaping as more of the test and punish reforms turn urban teachers against their students, whose scores will determine if their teachers keeps their jobs. We are reminded, finally, at this late date that NCLB represents the vehicle for the realization of the Reagan education agenda for replacing public education with “free market solutions.”  Not new, not a conspiracy, just an agenda forgotten in all the lovely rhetoric about not leaving children behind.  A soft padding for a hard fist, which exactly describes the corporate KIPPs and the KIPP knock-offs that will replace the urban public schools unless citizens decide otherwise. 

The problem now for the corporate reformers is that the takeover of public education is not happening fast enough, as Americans are sick and growing sicker of the years of strong-arm tactics that have left their children hating school, stressed out, and less prepared for the tests of living—or for competing in the global economy, which was, indeed, exported by the oligarchs some years back as they declared new education disasters.  And thus the bare-knuckled actions of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and the radicals of the Tennessee Legislature, which finally make the naked realities impossible to ignore any longer.  

As the backward social and economic agendas of the anti-democratic corporate oligarchs can no longer wait for their failing reforms to provide the final death blows to end of public education and collective bargaining, so neither can the teachers, parents, and children wait on the sideline to see our workers’ rights and our human rights stifled by the enemies of the public space, which is the only laboratory for democratic living.  For even as the teachers have waved through the entire corporate education reform agenda in Tennessee, for instance, these sacrifices have done nothing, obviously, except to escalate the animosity and thuggish attacks on teacher job security, academic freedom, due process, and collective bargaining of Tennessee’s, Wisconsin’s, or New Jersey’s professional corps of dedicated advocates for children who educate the 20 percent of our population that represents a hundred percent of our future, as David Tyack reminds us. 

Teachers and parents and students can’t wait any longer to reclaim what has always been theirs, had their energies not been subverted for the past 30 years by phony and endless disaster drills dreamed up by manipulative corporate technocrats.  Now is the time to focus all that determination, that fortitude, and that resolve, which heretofore has been wasted on trying to mollify the enemies of the public space—and to reclaim the public space that remains ours even as it has been stolen away by the abusers of power.  The time for sitting on the sidelines is over— the oligarchs must take their money and leave us to get back to the business of working to create a more perfect union, rather than colluding to perpetuate a caste system of haves and have nots. Enough. No mas.

   

Our Egypt

Wherever brothers and sister join together to rebuke repression, social injustice, and the abuse of power, the spirit of Cairo lives.  Today it breathes strongly in Wisconsin, sending a fresh air into Michigan and Ohio, Indiana and New Jersey. 

When the Oligarchs led by the Koch Brothers and Grover Norquist made this fateful decision to actuate their movement to crush working people's rights, they made a tragic error in their crusade to make the world safe for unrestrained greed and criminal abuse of the environment. 

The oligarchs have fanned the coals that have been burning deep in the souls of the American people since the banksters of Wall Street and their paid stooges in Washington staged the Heist of the Century in 2008, leaving the country in turmoil.

Now the fire is lit, and it burns with the same determined intensity that sent the thug, thief, and murderer Mubarak into retirement.  This murderous assault on American values of fairness in the work place will not stand.  The Kochs and Norquist have severely overplayed their hand, and now they have been called.

From Stan Karp:

Unions aren't to blame for Wisconsin's budget
Ezra Klein, Washington Post, 2.18.11
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/02/unions_arent_to_blame_for_wisc.html
Let's be clear: Whatever fiscal problems Wisconsin is -- or is not -- facing at the moment, they're not caused by labor unions. That's also true for New Jersey, for Ohio and for the other states. There was no sharp rise in collective bargaining in 2006 and 2007, no major reforms of the country's labor laws, no dramatic change in how unions organize. And yet, state budgets collapsed. Revenues plummeted. Taxes had to go up, and spending had to go down, all across the country. Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame home buyers, or home sellers. But don't blame the unions. Not for this recession.

ON WISCONSIN: Live Reports From Ground Zero for Labor Rights
http://www.thenation.com/blog/158668/wisconsin-live-reports-ground-zero-labor-rights
 
WI Protests – Students Fuel Round The Clock Hearing
http://theuptake.org/2011/02/18/wi-protestsround-the-clock-hearing/
Students testify at a Wisconsin legislative hearing about why Senate File 11, an anti-union measure, should not be passed. The hearing has been going on round the clock for more than 90 hours so the state of Wisconsin is forced to keep the Capitol building in Madison open to protesters

Wisconsin union fight trickles into N.J.
“I support Gov. Walker,” Christie said.
http://blogs.app.com/capitolquickies/2011/02/18/wisconsin-union-fight-trickles-into-n-j/
 
Wisconsin is America's Egypt
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=87224&id=1590202857&fbid=1704092974064
Photos of the Wisconsin protests

Walker's War on Workers in Wisconsin Won't Work

Updated 7:11 pm

Walk out. Sick out. Stay out. Shut down Walker's "business."

Join the global push against the dictatorial corporate state.  Report from Democracy Now:

This from TPM:

 Gov. Walker (R-WI) now says he and Republican state legislators are willing to make some changes to their legislation rolling back labor rights in the state -- but so far not major ones or ones that "fundamentally undermine the principle of the proposal." 

Tell the wobbly Hosni Walker to go straight to Hell.