Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: May Day Warning: 'We're rapidly returning to the conditions of Ludlow days.'

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: May Day Warning: 'We're rapidly returning to the conditions of Ludlow days.':

May Day Warning: 'We're rapidly returning to the conditions of Ludlow days.'

Ludlow: The striking miners and their families, 1914

BILL MOYERS' blog has an excellent piece on the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow strike and massacre, by Erik Loomis, "US Workers Were Once Massacred Fighting for the Protections Being Rolled Back Today." The headline says it all.

A century later, the bloody incident might seem a relic of the distant past, but the Ludlow Massacre retains a powerful, disturbing and growing relevance to the present. After a century of struggling against powerful interests to make American workplaces safer and corporations responsive to their employees, the US is rapidly returning to the conditions of rampant exploitation that contributed to Ludlow.

The same theme is picked up by Thai Jones, writing in The Nation. He writes, "One hundred years on, the Ludlow Massacre is a starkly contemporary tragedy." Thai's book, "More Powerful Than Dynamite" is the best thing written yet on that period. Here's Rick Ayers' review at Huffington.

BROOKLYN TEACHERS aren't going for it -- Common Core that is. Prospect Heights International HS teachers in Brooklyn are refusing to administer an English Language Arts test Thursday because they believe it is useless to their non-native-English-speaking students. Twenty-six of the school’s 30 teachers sent a letter to Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: May Day Warning: 'We're rapidly returning to the conditions of Ludlow days.':