On this day in 1919, the United Mine Workers (UMW) initiated a nationwide strike of more than 400,000 coal miners, demanding better wages and a 30-hour week. The U.S. declared the strike illegal while the media smeared workers as communists.
U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, the same individual behind the infamous Palmer Raids, declared the strike illegal by invoking the Lever Act, a wartime measure that made it a crime to interfere with the production or transportation of necessities.
The law had never been used against a union before, and in fact American Federation of Labor (AFL) founder Samuel Gompers had been promised by President Woodrow Wilson that the Lever Act would not be used to suppress labor actions.
The strike was subject to Red Scare propaganda: coal operators made false charges that Lenin and Trotsky had ordered the strike and were financing it, and some of the press repeated those claims. Others used words like "insurrection" and "Bolshevik revolution". Because of this propaganda and the Attorney General's injunction against the strike, the UMW called the strike off on November 8th.
Many workers ignored this order, however, and the strike continued for over a month, with a final agreement being reached on December 10th. Workers won a 14% wage increase and the creation of an investigatory commission to mediate wage issues.
The US miners' strikes, 1919-1922 - Jeremy Brecher
:worker
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Iron Man 2 is currently playing on my TV. I'm not really watching it (it's muted), but occasionally I look up at it.
Over and over in this movie one of the smart characters just walks up to a computer and starts hacking it with no preparation or special tools whatsoever. The first time is when Tony hacks all of the TV screens in the Senate to do his "I've privatized world piece" BS, which you could argue could be something he prepped ahead of time - but then later the villain does the same thing to a computer from its own login screen. Every time they do it, as soon as their fingers start clacking the keys (which they do constantly throughout the process, never stopping to wait for something to load or anything like that) a terminal window pops up with their name on it and says something really obvious like "access granted Mr Stark :)" so that the viewer understands what's happening (even though I'm sure the dialogue and context also makes it abundantly clear what's happening).
Is this how people who don't really "get" computers think about people who do? That we just have techno superpowers? Because that's basically what it is.
When Kevin Mitnick was arrested they didn't let him access a phone because they thought he could phreak up a nuclear war