Social Security has become an indispensable part of the American social safety net, but it’s also something we often take for granted. Listen to Rick Smith tell the story of the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Social Security into law, and what it has meant to Americans ever since.
On this day in Labor History the year was 1936.
That was the day that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.
The act was a key piece of the President’s “New Deal” a series of federal programs responding to the ravages of the Great Depression.
Social Security would provide an income for retirees and the disabled, to ensure they did no slide into complete destitution.
On signing the bill, President Roosevelt, known for delivering memorable speeches, addressed the press.
He said, “Today, the hope of many years’ standing in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, had tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what will their lot when they come to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long that job will last. This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 50 million of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old age pensions, and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.”
He went on to say, “The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and inflation. It is, in short, a law that will care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”
Over the past few decades, politicians, have increasingly sounded the alarm that Social Security will not remain viable as the large baby boomer generation retires and draws benefits.
Yet despite those who seek to attack Social Security, it remains a bedrock of the social safety net for millions of Americans.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
https://www.thericksmithshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Screen-Shot-2021-05-26-at-8.28.30-PM.png9281540Brett Pranskyhttps://www.thericksmithshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/logo.pngBrett Pransky2021-08-15 13:56:352021-08-15 14:13:59Roosevelt Signs Social Security into Law
Click the play button to hear Rick Smith discuss “The Silent Parade” – a part of our history that you won’t find in many textbooks.
On this day in labor history, the year was 1917.
That was the day more than 10,000 African-Americans marched down New York City’s 5th Avenue in what is known as the Silent Parade.
The protest came in the aftermath of the July 2, East St. Louis race riot and a number of lynchings in Texas.
Organized by black scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP, the Silent Parade protested lynching and anti-black violence.
Children led the march, dressed in white.
Women, who were also dressed in white, followed them. Men dressed in dark suits, marched behind. It was considered the first major public protest of racial violence in the United States.
Alexis Newman describes the scene as the parade proceeded to Madison Square.
“The marchers carried banners and posters stating their reasons for the march. Both participants and onlookers remarked that this protest was unlike any other seen in the city and the nation. There were no chants, no songs, just silence.”
Some signs read, “Mother, Do Lynchers Go To Heaven?” and “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe For Democracy?”
Protesters hoped President Woodrow Wilson would make good on his election promises to promote rights for blacks.
But Wilson took no action. In fact, he opposed anti-lynching legislation and continued segregationist policies in federal offices.
In an editorial for The New York Age, James Weldon Johnson pointed out, “that their brothers and sisters, people just like them, were “Jim-Crowed” and segregated and disfranchised and oppressed and lynched and burned alive in this the greatest republic in the world, the great leader in the fight for democracy and humanity.”
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
The phrase “politics is theater” is pretty common, especially these days. Our elected leaders spend much more time throwing one-liners back and forth than they do governing, or doing anything that might help working families. And while there is blame to go around for this anti-American behavior, there is no greater perpetrator of criminal hyperbole than the American Right and their corporate puppet masters.
In fact, due to all the curiously well-funded right wing nutters out there, “politics is theater” no longer applies. It’s just too soft a way to describe the nonsense. To characterize it properly, we have to remove the metaphors from the stage, and take them to the pro wrestling arena.
Rick: “[Y]ou gotta look at the the showmanship and go ‘You know – good job. You’ve spent years honing your craft. Now, this isn’t about governing. This isn’t about making lives better. This isn’t about doing any of the things we talk about that need to get done. This isn’t about getting stuff done. This is about […] scoring points.'”
The WWGOP could run a master class in distraction, and while the left has its share of conflict entrepreneurs as well, none are as skilled at deflecting attention from inaction as the modern GOP. Hulk Hogan and Randy “Macho Man” Savage would be proud.
But the problem is, while all of us are watching the show, Americans are dying in massive numbers from a preventable disease, wages have never been lower, and rich people are openly mocking their employees by thanking them for paying for the space rockets workers never wanted and will never ride in.
It’s enough to make people angry for the right reasons, and this is why the rich work so hard to keep shoveling us the wrong ones.
Rick: “[B]ecause that’s basically what our political system has turned into – a Saturday Night Raw.”
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
In previous generations, most working people could retire with dignity due to a trio benefits that became known as “The Three Legged Stool.” These benefits are Social Security, decent wages that allowed people to save, and defined benefit pensions. Today, with wages stagnant for decades and pensions all but a memory, workers are left with very little as they reach retirement age, and are now working longer, often not retiring at all and dying with nothing to leave to the next generation.
Listen to Peter tell us one such story on our weekend call-in show on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York:
Peter: [M]y dad worked for the city of New York human resources administration as a carpenter for over 25 years and he would always walk up to people [at] construction sites in New York City and say, you know “Hey, are you guys in the union? You really need to get union jobs. You need to organize.” And I didn’t fully understand it until he died seven years ago and then my mom was living on his pension and in the last two years she was sick. She was bed bound and that pension – oh my gosh – that pension … saved us.
Rick: [W]hen my grandfather died – he died, I think 12 years before my grandmother passed and she she was able to get his his pension as well and that’s what – that was the difference between her being able to live in her home with dignity and eventually to the end of her life with dignity, because she had that that, that three-legged stool. She had a defined benefit pension from where she worked and from where my grandfather worked. She had social security, and they had saved some money for retirement as well. So they they led their golden years with dignity and respect.
Rick: The sad reality – the sad reality is that three-legged stool has been whacked down to almost a one-legged – just a stick – because they’re going after Social Security whatever chance they get, the ability of workers to save money is has gotten much harder because wages have been stagnant and declining for so many decades, and the defined benefit benefit pension [is] all but gone completely gone.
And the result is a working class that is approaching retirement age on a wobbly stool that will never be able to hold them up, and a working class that is far too often represented by politicians who want to take an axe to that last leg.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
Click the link to hear Rick Smith discuss the corrupt and barbaric practice of convict leasing, which many scholars simply call “slavery by another name.”
On this day in labor history, the year was 1928.
That was the day the state of Alabama outlawed the convict lease system that had been in practice for decades.
Slave masters throughout the South had routinely loaned out enslaved people before slavery was finally abolished.
The convict lease system continued this practice, as the South worked to rebuild in a rush of rapid industrial growth after the Civil War.
African-Americans found themselves increasingly subject to sweeps by local and state authorities that coincided with harvest time or when labor agents arrived, looking to man the coalmines.
Many were convicted on trumped up charges and shipped off to prison.
Once there, they were leased to private industries and dispatched mostly to coal mines near Birmingham.
By 1890, the state profited $164,000 a year.
By 1912, prison mining brought in over $1 million in state revenues.
In the PBS documentary, Slavery By Another Name, Douglas Blackmon and other scholars note that prisoners could be driven in a way that earlier enslaved workers and free labor couldn’t.
Convict labor served to depress wages, curtail union activity, organizing and strikes.
These workers could also be worked practically to death and easily replaced.
Progressive reformers, Socialist Party leaders and UMW District 20 would wage an unrelenting war against the convict lease system for years.
Even the 1911 Banner Mine explosion that killed 123 African American prisoners couldn’t outlaw the practice.
Finally, newly elected Governor Bibb Graves yielded to the public outcry that condemned the practice as a relic of barbarism.
He also ceded to workers demands for jobs.
Graves subsequently put prisoners to work on chain gangs building roads throughout the state, making Alabama the last state to abolish the convict lease system.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
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When Timothy McVeigh was arrested in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, a copy of the racist novel The Turner Diaries was found among his things. The book spins a tale about a violent revolution and the overthrow of the US government, and the eventual mass murder and systemic execution of any and all non-white people. The book published in 1978, and has since become required reading for hate groups, and has also become the source of an uncountable number of violent acts.
Today, The Turner Diaries pales in comparison to right wing media, whether it’s the diet white nationalism of Fox News, or the full flavored hate of NewsMax, OAN, and their copycats.
It can be argued rather easily that today’s right wing hate machine is far more popular, and far more accessible than ever before. While copies of The Turner Diaries were carried under jackets and tucked away in backpacks, Tucker Carlson and his ilk are openly available in every living room in America, during prime time, no less. Attacking the military, railing against the existence of government, whitewashing a violent insurrection … all spewing the same lies, and all on the same page. All hiding behind a free speech argument that none of them actually understand.
If we ignore the open incitement that has become the standard script for right wing outlets, then we risk the inevitable consequences. And when those consequences come, the most likely response will be to say the perpetrators are just patriotic Americans doing what patriotic Americans do. Or at least that’s how Tucker will spin it.
This is not a prediction we enjoy making. But the rage machine is making McVeighs every minute, and our tolerance for it is permission. Again, this is an “I told you so” that we hope to never deliver, as we want nothing more than to be wrong about this.
But we’re not.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
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Through the years, legislators of both parties have created and supported laws that hurt working people. But in American history, few laws have done more damage than the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Click the link to hear Rick Smith tell the story:
On this day in labor history, the year was 1947.
That was the day the despised Taft-Hartley Act became law.
It was a direct retaliatory response to the 1946 post-war strike wave, where millions walked off the job after waiting years for basic demands.
The labor movement mobilized against the slave labor bill through numerous rallies.
The AFL joined the CIO in threatening 24-hour strikes across whole industries in protest, as the bill wound its way through Congress.
11,000 soft coal miners in Pennsylvania walked out in a spontaneous protest strike earlier in the month.
The bill passed over the veto of President Harry S. Truman, who would invoke it a dozen times over the course of his presidency.
Many union leaders hailed Truman as a friend of labor for his 11thhour veto.
Labor party advocates were incensed that of 219 congressional Democrats, 126 voted in favor of the bill.
Practically overnight, the labor movement had been pushed back 25 years.
Taft-Hartley was nothing short of disastrous for the American labor movement.
With the stroke of a pen, the Act criminalized many of the actions key to historic union victories in the thirties and forties.
Jurisdictional strikes, secondary boycotts, solidarity strikes, closed shops and mass picketing were just a few of the most basic trade union activities now outlawed.
The Act helped fire the first shots of the McCarthy Red Scare by mandating that union officers file non-Communist affidavits with the government, later found to be unconstitutional.
The Act also provided the ammunition needed to strangle strikes by empowering the president to easily acquire strikebreaking injunctions.
And it allowed for the rapid growth of right-to-work laws at the state level.
The union movement has suffered ever since.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
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It’s difficult to believe that, in the land of the free, a person can go to jail for giving a speech, and an anti-war speech at that. But that’s what happened. Click the video below and read along as Rick Smith tells the story:
On this day in labor history, the year was 1918.
That was the day Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party gave his legendary anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio.
It was the speech for which he would eventually be arrested, tried and convicted under the Espionage Act.
Though he avoided explicitly criticizing World War I or President Wilson, he made clear his views.
He gave the speech at a park near the jail where Charles Baker, Charles Ruthenberg and Alfred Wagenknecht, three prominent socialists, were being held on Espionage Act related charges.
Debs noted, “it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.”
Debs was defiant.
He unloaded his rage against the judicial system and the conviction of Socialist leader Kate Richards O’Hare for her anti-war views.
He railed against the suppression of Max Eastman’s Socialist press and the ongoing persecution of Socialists Tom Mooney and William Billings.
Debs briefly reviewed the history of wars in Europe and made the following observation:
“The master class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war… the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace…”
For this he was convicted of advocating disloyalty and draft resistance and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
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That’s what Uncle Ben said to young Peter Parker in the Spider-Man stories that we all love so much.
But in the real world, power doesn’t manifest in wall-crawling, super strength, the ability to fly, or shoot laser beams out of our eyes, etc. In the real world, power manifests as wealth, and in today’s America, we have a massive number of super-villains, but no heroes:
Rick: “We have this tool. We’ve got the power. We’ve got the power to do whatever we want. Collectively, we can solve any problem whatsoever, except we choose not to.”
He then brings Superman into the discussion, and compares our wealth class to him. It doesn’t go well:
Rick: “What if Superman – with all the power Superman has – decided that ‘You know what? I want to rob banks instead. I don’t want to use my powers for good. I don’t want to do the right thing. I just want to rob banks.’ That’s basically what our economy has turned into. You have a bunch of really wealthy people out there who think ‘The heck with you guys – More for me!'”
Superman would never buy a $500 million boat, but Jeff Bezos did, just as Lex Luthor would. And therein lies the problem.
To hear the full broadcast, click the player below:
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
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That was the day the Granite Mountain and Speculator Mines in Butte, Montana caught fire, killing 168 miners.
It is considered the worst underground hard-rock mining disaster in the nation’s history.
Just weeks after the United States had entered World War I, the demand for copper had surged.
Granite Mountain, like many of the nation’s mines, operated around the clock to meet war production needs.
In his book, Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917, Michael Punke notes the irony of the disaster, which began as an effort to improve safety.
A sprinkler system had just been installed.
The final task was the relocation of an electrical cable.
The cable was insulated with oil-soaked cloth, sheathed in lead.
Workers lost control of the three-ton cable as they lowered it into the mine and it fell to the bottom of the shaft.
Carrying a commonly used carbide-burning lamp, the night shift foreman accidently ignited the cable as he planned its removal.
The conflagration was virtually immediate and burned for more than three days.
At the time, 415 miners were at work on the overnight shift.
Smoke and gases quickly filled both mines.
With no alarm system in place, those that could not escape succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning.
In 1996, a memorial plaza was dedicated to those who lost their lives.
It details a slice of Butte’s mining and labor history that culminated in tragedy.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
Roosevelt Signs Social Security into Law
History, NewsSocial Security has become an indispensable part of the American social safety net, but it’s also something we often take for granted. Listen to Rick Smith tell the story of the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Social Security into law, and what it has meant to Americans ever since.
On this day in Labor History the year was 1936.
That was the day that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.
The act was a key piece of the President’s “New Deal” a series of federal programs responding to the ravages of the Great Depression.
Social Security would provide an income for retirees and the disabled, to ensure they did no slide into complete destitution.
On signing the bill, President Roosevelt, known for delivering memorable speeches, addressed the press.
He said, “Today, the hope of many years’ standing in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, had tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what will their lot when they come to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long that job will last. This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 50 million of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old age pensions, and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.”
He went on to say, “The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and inflation. It is, in short, a law that will care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”
Over the past few decades, politicians, have increasingly sounded the alarm that Social Security will not remain viable as the large baby boomer generation retires and draws benefits.
Yet despite those who seek to attack Social Security, it remains a bedrock of the social safety net for millions of Americans.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3szHAJ6
Free Speech TV: https://freespeech.org
Political Voices Network: https://politicalvoicesnetwork.com
To support the show, visit https://www.thericksmithshow.com or subscribe to our Patreon Page here: https://bit.ly/2Y7tZdP
The Silent Parade
History, NewsClick the play button to hear Rick Smith discuss “The Silent Parade” – a part of our history that you won’t find in many textbooks.
On this day in labor history, the year was 1917.
That was the day more than 10,000 African-Americans marched down New York City’s 5th Avenue in what is known as the Silent Parade.
The protest came in the aftermath of the July 2, East St. Louis race riot and a number of lynchings in Texas.
Organized by black scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP, the Silent Parade protested lynching and anti-black violence.
Children led the march, dressed in white.
Women, who were also dressed in white, followed them. Men dressed in dark suits, marched behind. It was considered the first major public protest of racial violence in the United States.
Alexis Newman describes the scene as the parade proceeded to Madison Square.
“The marchers carried banners and posters stating their reasons for the march. Both participants and onlookers remarked that this protest was unlike any other seen in the city and the nation. There were no chants, no songs, just silence.”
Some signs read, “Mother, Do Lynchers Go To Heaven?” and “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe For Democracy?”
Protesters hoped President Woodrow Wilson would make good on his election promises to promote rights for blacks.
But Wilson took no action. In fact, he opposed anti-lynching legislation and continued segregationist policies in federal offices.
In an editorial for The New York Age, James Weldon Johnson pointed out, “that their brothers and sisters, people just like them, were “Jim-Crowed” and segregated and disfranchised and oppressed and lynched and burned alive in this the greatest republic in the world, the great leader in the fight for democracy and humanity.”
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3szHAJ6
Free Speech TV: https://freespeech.org
Political Voices Network: https://politicalvoicesnetwork.com
To support the show, visit https://www.thericksmithshow.com or subscribe to our Patreon Page here: https://bit.ly/2Y7tZdP
Politics Isn’t Theater – It’s Pro Wrestling
Commentary, Political ActionThe phrase “politics is theater” is pretty common, especially these days. Our elected leaders spend much more time throwing one-liners back and forth than they do governing, or doing anything that might help working families. And while there is blame to go around for this anti-American behavior, there is no greater perpetrator of criminal hyperbole than the American Right and their corporate puppet masters.
In fact, due to all the curiously well-funded right wing nutters out there, “politics is theater” no longer applies. It’s just too soft a way to describe the nonsense. To characterize it properly, we have to remove the metaphors from the stage, and take them to the pro wrestling arena.
Rick: “[Y]ou gotta look at the the showmanship and go ‘You know – good job. You’ve spent years honing your craft. Now, this isn’t about governing. This isn’t about making lives better. This isn’t about doing any of the things we talk about that need to get done. This isn’t about getting stuff done. This is about […] scoring points.'”
The WWGOP could run a master class in distraction, and while the left has its share of conflict entrepreneurs as well, none are as skilled at deflecting attention from inaction as the modern GOP. Hulk Hogan and Randy “Macho Man” Savage would be proud.
But the problem is, while all of us are watching the show, Americans are dying in massive numbers from a preventable disease, wages have never been lower, and rich people are openly mocking their employees by thanking them for paying for the space rockets workers never wanted and will never ride in.
It’s enough to make people angry for the right reasons, and this is why the rich work so hard to keep shoveling us the wrong ones.
Rick: “[B]ecause that’s basically what our political system has turned into – a Saturday Night Raw.”
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3szHAJ6
Free Speech TV: https://freespeech.org
Political Voices Network: https://politicalvoicesnetwork.com
To support the show, visit https://www.thericksmithshow.com or subscribe to our Patreon Page here: https://bit.ly/2Y7tZdP
The Three-Legged Stool
Commentary, Political ActionIn previous generations, most working people could retire with dignity due to a trio benefits that became known as “The Three Legged Stool.” These benefits are Social Security, decent wages that allowed people to save, and defined benefit pensions. Today, with wages stagnant for decades and pensions all but a memory, workers are left with very little as they reach retirement age, and are now working longer, often not retiring at all and dying with nothing to leave to the next generation.
Listen to Peter tell us one such story on our weekend call-in show on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York:
Peter: [M]y dad worked for the city of New York human resources administration as a carpenter for over 25 years and he would always walk up to people [at] construction sites in New York City and say, you know “Hey, are you guys in the union? You really need to get union jobs. You need to organize.” And I didn’t fully understand it until he died seven years ago and then my mom was living on his pension and in the last two years she was sick. She was bed bound and that pension – oh my gosh – that pension … saved us.
Rick: [W]hen my grandfather died – he died, I think 12 years before my grandmother passed and she she was able to get his his pension as well and that’s what – that was the difference between her being able to live in her home with dignity and eventually to the end of her life with dignity, because she had that that, that three-legged stool. She had a defined benefit pension from where she worked and from where my grandfather worked. She had social security, and they had saved some money for retirement as well. So they they led their golden years with dignity and respect.
Rick: The sad reality – the sad reality is that three-legged stool has been whacked down to almost a one-legged – just a stick – because they’re going after Social Security whatever chance they get, the ability of workers to save money is has gotten much harder because wages have been stagnant and declining for so many decades, and the defined benefit benefit pension [is] all but gone completely gone.
And the result is a working class that is approaching retirement age on a wobbly stool that will never be able to hold them up, and a working class that is far too often represented by politicians who want to take an axe to that last leg.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3szHAJ6
Free Speech TV: https://freespeech.org
Political Voices Network: https://politicalvoicesnetwork.com
To support the show, visit https://www.thericksmithshow.com or subscribe to our Patreon Page here: https://bit.ly/2Y7tZdP
Slavery By Another Name
History, NewsClick the link to hear Rick Smith discuss the corrupt and barbaric practice of convict leasing, which many scholars simply call “slavery by another name.”
On this day in labor history, the year was 1928.
That was the day the state of Alabama outlawed the convict lease system that had been in practice for decades.
Slave masters throughout the South had routinely loaned out enslaved people before slavery was finally abolished.
The convict lease system continued this practice, as the South worked to rebuild in a rush of rapid industrial growth after the Civil War.
African-Americans found themselves increasingly subject to sweeps by local and state authorities that coincided with harvest time or when labor agents arrived, looking to man the coalmines.
Many were convicted on trumped up charges and shipped off to prison.
Once there, they were leased to private industries and dispatched mostly to coal mines near Birmingham.
By 1890, the state profited $164,000 a year.
By 1912, prison mining brought in over $1 million in state revenues.
In the PBS documentary, Slavery By Another Name, Douglas Blackmon and other scholars note that prisoners could be driven in a way that earlier enslaved workers and free labor couldn’t.
Convict labor served to depress wages, curtail union activity, organizing and strikes.
These workers could also be worked practically to death and easily replaced.
Progressive reformers, Socialist Party leaders and UMW District 20 would wage an unrelenting war against the convict lease system for years.
Even the 1911 Banner Mine explosion that killed 123 African American prisoners couldn’t outlaw the practice.
Finally, newly elected Governor Bibb Graves yielded to the public outcry that condemned the practice as a relic of barbarism.
He also ceded to workers demands for jobs.
Graves subsequently put prisoners to work on chain gangs building roads throughout the state, making Alabama the last state to abolish the convict lease system.
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3szHAJ6
Free Speech TV: https://freespeech.org
Political Voices Network: https://politicalvoicesnetwork.com
To support the show, visit https://www.thericksmithshow.com or subscribe to our Patreon Page here: https://bit.ly/2Y7tZdP
Making the Next McVeigh
Commentary, History, Political ActionWhen Timothy McVeigh was arrested in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, a copy of the racist novel The Turner Diaries was found among his things. The book spins a tale about a violent revolution and the overthrow of the US government, and the eventual mass murder and systemic execution of any and all non-white people. The book published in 1978, and has since become required reading for hate groups, and has also become the source of an uncountable number of violent acts.
Today, The Turner Diaries pales in comparison to right wing media, whether it’s the diet white nationalism of Fox News, or the full flavored hate of NewsMax, OAN, and their copycats.
It can be argued rather easily that today’s right wing hate machine is far more popular, and far more accessible than ever before. While copies of The Turner Diaries were carried under jackets and tucked away in backpacks, Tucker Carlson and his ilk are openly available in every living room in America, during prime time, no less. Attacking the military, railing against the existence of government, whitewashing a violent insurrection … all spewing the same lies, and all on the same page. All hiding behind a free speech argument that none of them actually understand.
If we ignore the open incitement that has become the standard script for right wing outlets, then we risk the inevitable consequences. And when those consequences come, the most likely response will be to say the perpetrators are just patriotic Americans doing what patriotic Americans do. Or at least that’s how Tucker will spin it.
This is not a prediction we enjoy making. But the rage machine is making McVeighs every minute, and our tolerance for it is permission. Again, this is an “I told you so” that we hope to never deliver, as we want nothing more than to be wrong about this.
But we’re not.
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Taft Hartley: Dark Money’s Most Successful Attack on Working People
History, NewsThrough the years, legislators of both parties have created and supported laws that hurt working people. But in American history, few laws have done more damage than the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Click the link to hear Rick Smith tell the story:
On this day in labor history, the year was 1947.
That was the day the despised Taft-Hartley Act became law.
It was a direct retaliatory response to the 1946 post-war strike wave, where millions walked off the job after waiting years for basic demands.
The labor movement mobilized against the slave labor bill through numerous rallies.
The AFL joined the CIO in threatening 24-hour strikes across whole industries in protest, as the bill wound its way through Congress.
11,000 soft coal miners in Pennsylvania walked out in a spontaneous protest strike earlier in the month.
The bill passed over the veto of President Harry S. Truman, who would invoke it a dozen times over the course of his presidency.
Many union leaders hailed Truman as a friend of labor for his 11thhour veto.
Labor party advocates were incensed that of 219 congressional Democrats, 126 voted in favor of the bill.
Practically overnight, the labor movement had been pushed back 25 years.
Taft-Hartley was nothing short of disastrous for the American labor movement.
With the stroke of a pen, the Act criminalized many of the actions key to historic union victories in the thirties and forties.
Jurisdictional strikes, secondary boycotts, solidarity strikes, closed shops and mass picketing were just a few of the most basic trade union activities now outlawed.
The Act helped fire the first shots of the McCarthy Red Scare by mandating that union officers file non-Communist affidavits with the government, later found to be unconstitutional.
The Act also provided the ammunition needed to strangle strikes by empowering the president to easily acquire strikebreaking injunctions.
And it allowed for the rapid growth of right-to-work laws at the state level.
The union movement has suffered ever since.
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The Cost of Free Speech: Eugene V. Debs and the Speech That Got Him 10 years in Prison
History, NewsIt’s difficult to believe that, in the land of the free, a person can go to jail for giving a speech, and an anti-war speech at that. But that’s what happened. Click the video below and read along as Rick Smith tells the story:
On this day in labor history, the year was 1918.
That was the day Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party gave his legendary anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio.
It was the speech for which he would eventually be arrested, tried and convicted under the Espionage Act.
Though he avoided explicitly criticizing World War I or President Wilson, he made clear his views.
He gave the speech at a park near the jail where Charles Baker, Charles Ruthenberg and Alfred Wagenknecht, three prominent socialists, were being held on Espionage Act related charges.
Debs noted, “it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.”
Debs was defiant.
He unloaded his rage against the judicial system and the conviction of Socialist leader Kate Richards O’Hare for her anti-war views.
He railed against the suppression of Max Eastman’s Socialist press and the ongoing persecution of Socialists Tom Mooney and William Billings.
Debs briefly reviewed the history of wars in Europe and made the following observation:
“The master class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war… the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace…”
For this he was convicted of advocating disloyalty and draft resistance and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
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The Wealth Class are Super-Villains
Commentary, Political Action“With great power comes great responsibility.”
That’s what Uncle Ben said to young Peter Parker in the Spider-Man stories that we all love so much.
But in the real world, power doesn’t manifest in wall-crawling, super strength, the ability to fly, or shoot laser beams out of our eyes, etc. In the real world, power manifests as wealth, and in today’s America, we have a massive number of super-villains, but no heroes:
Rick: “We have this tool. We’ve got the power. We’ve got the power to do whatever we want. Collectively, we can solve any problem whatsoever, except we choose not to.”
He then brings Superman into the discussion, and compares our wealth class to him. It doesn’t go well:
Rick: “What if Superman – with all the power Superman has – decided that ‘You know what? I want to rob banks instead. I don’t want to use my powers for good. I don’t want to do the right thing. I just want to rob banks.’ That’s basically what our economy has turned into. You have a bunch of really wealthy people out there who think ‘The heck with you guys – More for me!'”
Superman would never buy a $500 million boat, but Jeff Bezos did, just as Lex Luthor would. And therein lies the problem.
To hear the full broadcast, click the player below:
The #RickShow is available everywhere. Check your radio dial or your favorite podcast app, and if you want to catch the TV show, find us on:
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June 8, 1917 – Tragedy in the Mine
History, NewsOn this day in labor history, the year was 1917.
That was the day the Granite Mountain and Speculator Mines in Butte, Montana caught fire, killing 168 miners.
It is considered the worst underground hard-rock mining disaster in the nation’s history.
Just weeks after the United States had entered World War I, the demand for copper had surged.
Granite Mountain, like many of the nation’s mines, operated around the clock to meet war production needs.
In his book, Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917, Michael Punke notes the irony of the disaster, which began as an effort to improve safety.
A sprinkler system had just been installed.
The final task was the relocation of an electrical cable.
The cable was insulated with oil-soaked cloth, sheathed in lead.
Workers lost control of the three-ton cable as they lowered it into the mine and it fell to the bottom of the shaft.
Carrying a commonly used carbide-burning lamp, the night shift foreman accidently ignited the cable as he planned its removal.
The conflagration was virtually immediate and burned for more than three days.
At the time, 415 miners were at work on the overnight shift.
Smoke and gases quickly filled both mines.
With no alarm system in place, those that could not escape succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning.
In 1996, a memorial plaza was dedicated to those who lost their lives.
It details a slice of Butte’s mining and labor history that culminated in tragedy.
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