On January 11, 1912, mill owners in Lawrence, Massachusetts began shorting the pay of their already destitute workers.

The resulting strike was massive and quickly became a national sensation.

The city and states responded with extreme violence and authoritarianism.

The workers responded with solidarity.

Join me for a brief history of one of the most significant strikes in the history of American labor.

"We want bread and we want roses, too"

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This episode starts with with some Alan Watts followed by some more thoughts about the election and the Democratic Party and then slides smoothly into a discussion about work, freedom, and liberty...

We have, essentially, been co-opted into a system which requires us to rely on involvement with industrialized mass-production for our own basic survival. How many people truly want to work as I defined it? How many of us do it simply to “earn a living”?

Modern work does not “build character”. Modern work destroys bodies, minds, and souls.

Modern work fractures families and friendships and community. And the time left over for most of us is insufficient to salve those wounds. Modern work is, quite simply, a particularly brutal madness which must end if our claims of caring about human happiness can be taken seriously in any way at all.

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It looks like Biden won. It's good if Trump is gone.

But Biden is not our hero. 

We have to fight them even harder now.

So, what exactly is it that we are chasing when we talk about choice? Is it freedom?

Because Freedom is, in fact, exactly what the establishment politicians are pushing at us when they talk about ‘choice’.

For them, being able to choose between multiple options equals freedom.

This idea seems to many to be intuitively correct on its face; if we can choose between twelve different brands of running shoes then that presents more freedom than being forced to buy the one brand on the shelf.

We even have an all encompassing term for this - Freedom of Choice.

Choice is supposed to confer upon us freedom, self-determination, and personal sovereignty.

I am going to make the argument that choice, especially in the context of our health insurance system, does not always equal freedom and that the very concept of choice itself, as we normally understand it,  is quite often nothing more than a myth.

This is a Tribunus Plebis Podcast Special Edition episode...

I’ve tried to be reasonable… I’ve tried to be kind… I really have…

I was not planning on even talking about the first presidential debate, but the insanity, the foolishness, and the abject cruelty kind of exposed the raw nerves.

Biden is the same milquetoast goober as he was 6 months ago and Trump just highlighted his own ignorance, lack of empathy, and caustic cruelty.

The Demagoguery, the hate, the rhetoric, and the vitriol... all things we've written about and talked about at Tribunus Plebis, were on full display. 

These words and actions cause real harm.

Donald Trump is evil.

F**k Trump.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RIP) passes away opening a seat for yet another Conservative justice and a right-wing Supreme Court for the rest of my life.

Dems continue to stumble.

And for our Big Idea segment I dive into systemic problems and the faults inherent in relying on individualistic solutions to solve those problems rather than systemic solutions.

Happy Labor Day, everybody!

This is an episode I have wanted to do for a long time and I hope all of you will listen and learn a lot about Mother Jones and a little bit about the early labor movements in the United States!

Mother Jones, born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland is one of this countries great labor heroes and her life and accomplishments are sadly ignored in our broader history and culture.

Please take a few minutes to learn a little bit about this amazing women who survived, and was forged in, famine, disease, and inferno before becoming one of the great organizers of labor in this country.

"Mother Jones had, in her heart, radical socialist beliefs. 

One of her true gifts that sometimes seems to go a little overlooked was her ability to take somewhat esoteric socialist or anarchist ideas and express them in a digestible format to an audience which was often uneducated and illiterate.

Miners might not have understood the different theories of value, for example, but they sure understood record profits for ownership and literal starvation wages for the workers.

They understood heated mansions on the coast and uninsulated shacks in the snowy company towns.

They understood, with the simple clarity of those with a will to survive, that the owners demanded shoddy supports in the shafts, which often led to fatal cave-ins, to save money.

They understood, perhaps most of all, that when they lost friends and family in the shafts, because of those shoddy supports, that the mine operators complained only of the lost productivity and the hassle of replacing the dead workers.

When Mother Jones walked into town with her black dress and tightly buttoned lace collar to converse with her boys, these are the things she talked about."

In this episode we touch on some news and updates on two of our previous subjects - attacks on the Post Office and Social Security.

I even took a few minutes to dump on the evil Chamber of Commerce before discussing the real damage that Trump is doing to American workers and the recent and upcoming Supreme Court decisions which are making everything even worse.

That is followed up with my thoughts concerning equivalence, bias, and truth in the media and my own podcast and blog.

These attacks on the United States Postal Service go far beyond just a neoliberal, sociopathic drive to destroy. The real goal here is for Trump to disenfranchise as many voters in blue and swing states as he possibly can and get re-elected. Currently this is his most likely track to another 4 years in the white house because he has failed in virtually every single policy, negotiation, and action that he has taken.

Trump is also attempting to destroy Social Security through a barely veiled bribe via payroll tax deferrals.

PLUS, we discuss memes and the art of internet propaganda.

The United States Postal Service is under attack and we must do what we can to save this essential service and even expand it, both in its traditional role and even further to include postal banking amongst its services.

Ranked Choice voting is probably the simplest and easiest to implement intra-system change that has a legitimate shot in being used in this country to fundamentally alter the power dynamics of our political shitshow. Listen in for an easy primer in how this very simple system works.

The White House's 2018 plan to reorganize the government (the postal section begins on page 68)