(Enlarge.)
The sturdy, manly worker in overalls is holding a scroll marked "Demands legislated in the Union hall." There is a sun marked "IWW" rising behind him. He's looking askance at "POLITICS/The Great HOCUS-POCUS GAME" behind which hides a short pot-bellied man in a top hat, spats, a big dollar sign on his shirt, and strings on his fingers connected to puppets who are saying "Vote your power into my hands"/"I'll do your fighting for you"/"Vote and be saved." The capitalist puppeteer is saying "I don't think he's wise to the game yet."
It's a 1916 cartoon from Solidarity, to which the caption is added: "How little things have changed."
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A post at Vodkapundit said the MI union initiative wasn't faring so well in the polls.
I'm donning my top hat and tails today as usual.
Yeah, professor, you and all the other scabs & capitalist dupes at UW oughtta take this flier to heart!
There will be a meeting at 1:00PM outside the cafeteria to sing "Solidarity Forever" & "Whose Side are you on?"
12 string guitar to be provided.
Yes, nothing has changed.
Still got fools like Cookie the Commie who buy into that shit.
I guessed it was the Wobblies even before I scrolled down to the text.
I Won't Work?
I Want Whiskey?
Doesn't that also work if the pot-bellied dude is a Democrat?
My 13 year old daughter was wondering who would win yesterday. I told her she was living in late stage democracy - an oligarchy where managed democracy allowed total power without the appearance of it, as I heard it put somewhere a week or two ago. Apart from distinctions about who the man behind the curtain really is, I figure this cartoon is accurate. My daughter's eyes glazed over about the time I said the word oligarchy. For reasons I haven't felt that I could defend for many elections now, I voted this morning anyway.
You can be sure Barry's people didn't hand that out.
PS Saw on Breitbart, as usual, the Romster's last rally was to an overflow crowd, Barry's to a half-empty venue.
A manly Democrat!
Well some things certainly HAVE changed!!
In California, a 50 year old private sector employee is very unlikely to have any kind of pension provided by his work, and yet he is the highest taxed citizen in the nation at that income. A public sector employee can retire at 50 with 90% of the highest income they could manipulate through overtime, etc in their last year. This often allows them to actually retire with over 100% of their salary for life with full Medical coverage as well. The private sector worker gets neither after working their whole life to pay for the his public sector counterpart. The fat guy behind the sign today is a unionized public employee.
Is Obama supposed to be the dancing clown marionette on the far left?
I'm donning my top hat and tails today as usual.
I made a ne'er-do-well polish the pickle forks on my Auburn breezer for a plug nickel.
Then I popped a champagne cork into the Philistine's eye!
Straight from the Progressive Era that gave us "Fightin' Bob" LaFollette.
Ralph Chaplin aka Bingo for Solidarity (1916)
Ralph Chaplin was associated with Mother Jones and the WV coal miner strikes.
In 1917 Solidarity's soul mates won in Russia. How did that turnout for the workers?
Revenge.
I like how the union guy is portrayed as a "sturdy, manly worker in overalls," and the union people today bear no resemblance to him. They are more likely to be out of shape women and scrawny un-masculine "men".
Did the union members ever look like him?
I thought it was a comment on politicians taking away power. In other words, the guy behind the curtain are the wealthy Democrats.
The picture could just as easily be, in modern times, of a coal miner confronting a Goldman Sachs NYC banker. A inside the Obama circle banker, with fingers in a half dozen Green Energy deals and Obama Admin real estate scams after being "made whole" in the bank Bailouts with China IOUs -after the banker personally lost 1.4 billion in leveraged default swaps.
And a Goldman Sachs guy part of the war on coal, gas, oil, and nuclear power - knowing the Obamites prefer wind and solar.
The brawney, heroic IWW semi-commie worker of days gone by WAS the coal miner. That industry was the font of the IWW.
And todays coal miner for Romney may have had IWW forebears. While the Goldman Sachs banker may have had forebearers in Russia, the Pale of Settlement, and Western Europe that helped finance the Soviet Union and get power there before coming to the USA.
Obama is best described as throw back to the IWW. The Bourbons "never learned anything and never forgot anything." So too, Obama and his minions like Jarrett. Like so many lefties, Jarrett doesn't let her political philosophy get in the way of making money, as a slum lord in her case.
According to the documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago housing projects operated by real estate developers and Obama financial backers Rezko and Allison Davis. (Davis is also Obama’s former boss.) Jarrett was a member of the Board of Directors for the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation along with several Davis and Rezko associates, as well as the Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization, an organization that worked with Rezko and Davis.
(According to press reports, housing projects operated by Davis and Rezko have been substandard and beset with code violations. The Chicago Sun Times reported that one Rezko-managed housing project was "riddled with problems — including squalid living conditions…lack of heat, squatters and drug dealers.")
Amazing! Some people never get the word. Apparently that guy has been living in a cave since 1917.
Some people are still dredging up the old Party line, "bourgeois democracy is a fraud, we need a worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat."
Next we'll see some guy handing out copies of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
The private sector worker gets neither after working their whole life to pay for the his public sector counterpart. The fat guy behind the sign today is a unionized public employee.
Yet, magically, we voted Jerry Brown into office. He obviously thinks the state is doing just fine. Despite that CA gets its energy primarily from natural gas electric generation plants, which have a low carbon footprint, he wants 30% of the CA energy to come from renewables. Renewables does not mean zero carbon footprint, such as through hydro or nuclear, it means Solar and Wind. This is a massive burden on an already burdened state.
Then there is the high speed (oh, to keep it within costs low speed) rail project, that will cost upwards of $100B to build, takes longer to go from point "A" to point "B" than flying.
That hasn't stopped the guy from trying to get more money with a sales tax, because there isn't enough money for schools.
And, as bagoh20 points out, much of the public sector unionized pay is insane. Nurses up at UC Davis medical center making vastly more than professors in many cases. As an example, a full professor at UC LA in 2011 was making $80K, but the highest paid nurses are making $170K.
In San Jose, the AVERAGE firefighter salary is $150K, and LEO salaries are similar. These folks voted to kick out the young recruits rather than take a pay cut. On top of police officers salaries, the city is putting in 40% more to keep the pension afloat.
So you may say, well, some people made bad decisions, fix it. The problem is there is no way to fix the bad decisions for already retired people! It's the law they will have their pensions adjusted upwards 3% above inflation for the rest of their lives, which are estimated to be to 80 for a retiring police officer (by actuaries for the pension fund).
It's insanity.
Irony. The liberal progressives need to look up what it means. Don't all liberals vow to fight for you? And actually the whole cartoon is actually a damning of the usual D voter. The voter being told I'll do this, and this, and that for you. And the democrats worried that someday their pigeons will wake up to the scan being played on them.
Look with your eye's and not your expectations at the cartoon again.
My daughter's eyes glazed over about the time I said the word oligarchy.
They probably glazed over before then, you just didn't notice.
13-year-old's eyes glaze over really fast when a parent talks, I've noticed.
Our school district just fired a second grade teacher for illegally growing marijuana in her house with her husband.
She was ratted out by her 17 year old son, whom they had kicked out of the house. Ha!
Her salary was $93,000.
"I thought it was a comment on politicians taking away power. In other words, the guy behind the curtain are the wealthy Democrats."
The guy behind the curtains is big money, i.e., a plutocrat, and the paper marionettes he manipulates from behind the screen are the various "opposing" parties, all of whom promise to fight for their respective constituents while all really serving the puppet master.
In short, it really is the same as it ever was.
"How little has changed."
So true, the left hasn't had a new idea in over 100 years. There are new fashions however, academics and progressives, most of whom have never sweated in a field or shop, imagine themselves as wearing overalls.
Unions really were about the working guy once upon a time. They outlived their usefulness and became a bloated bureaucracy like most useless government agencies.
Lesson for democracy not learned.
My dad worked for the railroad when I was a kid in the '50s. The RR union put out "Labor", a newspaper which formed part of my political education. Their cartoonist was John Baer, and his cartoons were like that one-- the capitalists even had cigars & top hats, the honest workman was in overalls. It's a great nostalgia trip, seeing that one!
It was all part of my early political education, much of it good. (A particular hero of "Labor" was Al Gore SENIOR, a better man than his son, a genuine populist.
obese mayor battles obesity by backing tax on businesses that sell her soda:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/us/richmond-calif-savors-role-as-soda-tax-battleground.html?ref=us&_r=0
"Unions really were about the working guy once upon a time. They outlived their usefulness and became a bloated bureaucracy like most useless government agencies."
It's hard to be certain of your meaning from your phrasing, but I'll go ahead and point out that unions are not government agencies.
This is not to deny that in many cases union leadership has not served their members well.
I'll add that unions are as necessary today as ever before, the faults and failings of present day union management notwithstanding.
As long as there is labor, unions will be necessary.
As long as there is labor, unions will be necessary.
Not to worry. As long as there is the chance to make money by monopolizing access to work, someone will take advantage of it. It is the nature of things.
Of course the game has changed. Now instead of three little guys on the "government" stage, the worker has voted in dozens, multitudes even, on a panoramic stage... and they all want money to vote the worker's interests.
If you don't want the $puppetmaster$ to have more power, you don't give him ever more puppets.
"As long as there is labor, unions will be necessary."
Labor needs unions like diesel locomotive crews need firemen.
So crappy Soviet style propaganda still grabs at the heartstrings of true progressive believers among Obama's supporters?
I am a lifelong Republican but I haven't worn a tophat or spats in years!
"So crappy Soviet style propaganda still grabs at the heartstrings of true progressive believers among Obama's supporters?"
I doubt this was given out by an Obama supporter or was intended to inspire Obama supporters. Rather, it was probably meant to remind Obama's supporters that their man is one of the puppets being manipulated by the plutocrats behind the scenes.
I don't know who that is supposed to help... But... That cartoon worker is pretty HOT!
Signed:
Titus's stand-in for the moment.
a 50 year old private sector employee is very unlikely to have any kind of pension provided by his work
Damn, that sucks. Sounds like that guy needs a union.
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