Chicago Daily Observer

He’s facing the job – too many Americans have turned their backs on what the skilled American Tradesman is doing.

This Labor Day – try and rememember that thousands of people struggled and many died for the right to form Unions. These Unions of skilled trades and industrial workers moved America’s poor in to the great middle class that created the standard of living enjoyed by no other Nation in History.

Let’s not be fooled by the enemies of that standard of living on the political radical Right or the Left. ‘Redistribution of Wealth’ strategies are the latest phoney labor Ponzi scams – stay true to genuine Labor Unions. Real Labor gives people the skills to move to the next economic level and engages in collective bargaining to protect workers rights, health and welfare and above all safety on the job. Labor is not merely a lobbying tool for slick ... Read More...

Scary Headline for conservatives and Republicans, huh? It might be, but then, when the Whigs and Know Nothings of the 1850s flogged the immigration horse, it didn’t work out very well for them. They might be able to tell the Michael Savages and Laura Ingrahams a thing or two about political oblivion.

But then, it is hard to listen when both hands are over your ears and you’re shouting at the top of your lungs.

Dear Alliance for the Great Lakes,

We have been following with great interest your campaigns to keep Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes free of pollution. Particularly, you have been critical of British Petroleum’s increase of pollution accompanying its planned expansion in Whiting, Indiana, as well as identifying municipal pollution as a bacterial source in Lake Michigan.

On August 23, only a few days after BP decided to adjust its refinery application, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of Greater Chicago dumped 220 Million Gallons of untreated sewage into Lake Michigan, to near complete media silence, and no notable reaction from the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

Have you taken a position on the MWRD discharge? Are we going to hold the MWRD to somewhere near the standard we hold private industry when dumping into Lake Michigan?

John Powers
President, Chicago Daily Observer
http://www.cdobs.com

Hard on the heels of the disturbing details of Michael Vick’s hobby came the predictable media outcry about the loss of another role model for young boys. Flashback to O.J. Simpson. The holding up of professional athletes for emulation is a moral affliction American culture seems unlikely to cast off. How many examples do we need? For every Lou Gehrig, there seem scores of cheaters like Sammy Sosa, social degenerates like Dennis Rodman, gamblers like Pete Rose, serial fornicators like Wilt Chamberlain, and adulterers like Kobe Bryant. I leave out the drug addicts, prostitute patrons, and all around insufferable egos.
Yet it is little wonder American boys revere athletes. From too young an age, they are driven by their misguided parents to participate in organized sports. Literally driven. No longer sufficient is the pick-up baseball or football game in the vacant lot at the end of the block. ... Read More...

In the 1980s, the Reagan Era, an attitude slipped into the corporate world, especially with the young people who were pouring into the financial services sector: Greed is good! The purpose of a corporation is to promote the net wealth of the stockholder. CEOs should be rewarded for producing stockholder wealth by huge salaries—more in a day or even an hour—than their workers earned all year.