You Don’t Get Me. I’m Part of the Union

I remember the song “You Don’t Get Me, I’m Part of the Union," by the Strawbs, from my high school days. My father often told me of the early days of union organizing in the rock quarries in the St. Louis area. In the early 30’s my dad worked with my grandfather who was an organizer for the Crushed Rock and Gravel Workers’ Union, Local 1. It was often pitched warfare between unions and management. There were often riots and violence when miners struck, with management armies, deputies and National Guard troops shooting down striking miners. Mother Jones, a famous United Mine Workers organizer and supporter of all things labor, is buried with striking miners who where killed in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois off Highway 55 as one goes north from St. Louis up to Litchfield, Illinois. I’ve traveled to the Union Miners Cemetery, said prayers for the workers buried there and all workers and left a rock on Mother’s grave as a promise to remember the sacrifices which have given me the life I have today. As I walked the cemetery grounds, family members of the miners buried there drove by. I went over and introduced myself and told the guys what I was up to and asked if there were anyone in particular they wanted me to pray for that day. We talked about family and unions and went our separate ways. Republicans have declared war on unions. The first shot fired in The Republican War on Christmas was President Reagan’s firing of all the members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Please understand, the firings had nothing to do with the legality or illegality of any public employee union strike but, manifested a deep visceral Republican hatred of any union at any workplace. All over the country, public employee unions are under attack by Republican Governors and Republican legislatures to cut off the collective bargaining rights of millions of employees. Now, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is about to pass from any ability to protect union members’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, which allows unions to organize in workplaces. [More . . . ]

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Catholic Bishops Hunt More Sharks on Mississippi with Screeds against HHS Contraceptive “Mandate”

Catholic bishops are having conniption fits over a recent HHS regulation which requires employers which provide health insurance to employees to have coverage which includes contraceptives. The HHS regulation is comparable to 28 states which have laws which also require insurers to have such coverage as part of their policies. The regulation, as do many states’ laws, explicitly excludes purely religious institutions from its purview but, schools, hospitals and foundations among others would be included. Many critics of the regulation call it a “mandate” but, the requirement is only imposed as to those employers which voluntarily provide insurance coverage as an employee benefit. If the employers chose to not directly provide insurance coverage to their employees as a benefit, they would have no requirement to provide the contraceptive coverage to which the bishops and other religious groups and employers object. If the institutions covered by the new regulation were to instead provide a cash benefit to an employee equivalent to the cost of health insurance for that employee and their dependents, there would be no conflict between the regulation and the “conscience” of the respective religious institutions. The employees then would be free to exercise their individual informed conscience as to what coverage they would then purchase, if any, from the health insurance exchanges which must be set up by next year under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Some employees might instead choose to pay the new fines under the ACA and keep the difference in cash they obtained from their employer. All I see here is more anti-Obama rhetoric by neo-conservative Catholic Bishops much as was ado about nothing over the supposed threat of the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). Even before President Obama took office we Catholics were bombarded with scares and flares of inflammatory rhetoric about how the first thing President Obama would do as President would be to sign FOCA into law. Post cards were laid in pews, to be signed and after strident sermons against FOCA, to be sent to Washington opposing FOCA. Just as there is now no "mandate" regarding the choice of employers to provide any particular benefit, no such bill even existed at the time of the scares and flares. It was all shark control on the Mississippi. The whole shibboleth about "religious freedom" is a stalking horse for the neo-conservative bishops to inflame independent Catholic voters into supporting Republican candidates with their votes and reward the wealthy contributors to the Church which have taken over donations to the Church after the masses' rebellion against the clergy sex abuse scandal in the US and abroad. Religious freedom is not threatened by the recent Obama administration's guidelines about employer's voluntary benefits to employees. Religious freedom is threatened by the neo-conservative Catholic bishops' adherence to a world view which only supports Republican candidates and wealthy contributors.

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Oklahoma legislator introduces “Every Sperm is Sacred” provision into proposed law

According to Raw Story, an Oklahoma legislator has tried to draw attention to a proposed new law by proposing a modification that would make every sperm sacred.

A pro-choice Democratic legislator has taken a novel approach to fighting an Oklahoma “personhood” bill. According to the blog Jezebel, State Senator Constance Johnson of Oklahoma City has introduced a measure that calls to mind the famous Monty Python “Every Sperm is Sacred” sketch from the 1983 film “The Meaning of Life.”

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Depression as an adaptation?

For anyone who has been depressed, it is difficult to conceive of depression as something ever useful. Depression immobilizes people, and the core symptom is anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. From the perspective of depressed people, these add up to a living hell. The World Health Organization estimates that depression is the fourth leading cause of disability in the world, and that it is projected to become the second leading cause of disability. I recently finished watching a "Great Courses" video lecture series called "Stress and Your Body," featuring Robert Sapolsky, who described the strong correlation between stress and depression. He indicated that lack of outlets, lack of social support and the perception that things are worsening are precursors to depression. In an article titled "Is Depression an Adaptation?" psychiatrist Randolf Nesse terms depression "one of humanity’s most serious medial problems." Nesse also argues, however, that many instances of depression are actually adaptive. How could this possibly be? Nesse explains: [More . . . ]

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Iran’s nuclear bomb

At Truthout, Retired Republican House and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren indicates that he is seeing so much toxic warmongering aimed at Iran these days that it makes George W. Bush look like a pacifist:

For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence, which had guided US policy during the cold war, and which the US government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran. . . . Whether it is sources in Tel Aviv, sources in Washington, or both, that are feeding Iran stories to the US news media is unclear. Whoever they may be, they are playing much of the press - The Washington Post and CBS News are standout examples - like a Stradivarius. In Pentagon-speak, this is known as "prepping the psychological battlefield."

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