Month: August 2021

AUDIO: On The Rick Smith Show

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March 27, 2006 / Shaun Richman

I Want Candy

When I was younger, my favorite treat at the candy shops in the malls was the red licorice shoelace. I’d tie them into knots and gobble them up before I’d make it to the parking lot. I have been craving
February 17, 2005 / Shaun Richman

Shit In, Shit Out

Harvard President Lawrence Summers is sunk. He’s catching a lot of hell from his faculty and students over some stupid remarks that he made, by way of explaining Harvard’s gender imbalance in the sciences, that suggested that women aren’t as
June 12, 2005 / Shaun Richman

What Campaign Finance Reform?

I received a constituent mailing from my City Council representative Melinda Katz, or, rather, from “Speaker Gifford Miller and Council Member Melinda Katz…Working to Make Our City Cleaner and Safer.” Voters have long been accustomed to incumbents using taxpayer-financed constituent
March 14, 2005 / Shaun Richman

Dan Hennessey Has Died

I was at a Save the Plaza rally when I heard the grim news that one of my former co-workers, Dan Hennessey, had died on Sunday morning. He was hit by a car near his home in Woodside. Apparently it
August 21, 2005 / Shaun Richman

The Column That Never Was

The column that I was hired to write for a certain Queens weekly has been canceled before the first piece was even published. That piece, a critical look at the fall-out from Congressman Greg Meeks’ support for CAFTA, did not

October 22, 2024 / me

The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Entirely Overturn Labor Law

The foundational 1935 labor law protecting workers is unconstitutional, according to major corporations and right-wing zealots who believe they have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn it. In the latest sign that anti-union forces will doggedly press the matter, a federal judge
August 10, 2024 / me

Misjudging Labor

On June 13 the Supreme Court once again sided with a multibillion-dollar corporation over its workers. The case of Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney concerns seven employees, now known as the Memphis Seven, whom Starbucks fired in February 2022 as they tried to unionize their store
September 28, 2023 / me

VIDEO: On Rick Smith Show Discussing Strikes, Biden, Obama
September 12, 2023 / me

Searching for Ludwig Lore

I’m back in FOIA hell. Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If
August 1, 2023 / me

“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”

The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally