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Erik Loomis Profile picture
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22 Feb, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I have now completed by Alan Greenspan obituary, clocking it at 3,200 words of contempt for his terrible economics and wonderment that a fervent believer in the radical sex and selfishness cult of Ayn Rand could be given the keys to the global economy.
The fundamental differences between Rand and NXIVM are not entirely clear to me.
Except probably that the NXIVM dude is a better writer.
I now have 27 obituaries in the can to publish at the appropriate time.

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More from @ErikLoomis

Erik Loomis Profile picture
23 Feb
This Day in Labor History: February 23, 1959. The AFL-CIO Executive Council, meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, passed a resolution to create the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, an early attempt to organize the farmworkers at the bottom of the American labor force!! Image
While Americans idealized agricultural work from the Jeffersonian beginnings of the nation, underlying the agrarian myth was very hard work. For Jefferson himself, that work was done by enslaved black labor.
The family farm was a real thing in America of course and was the fundamental basis of free labor ideology that fed northern beliefs about capitalism and was the base reason why northerners opposed the expansion of slavery.
Read 26 tweets
Erik Loomis Profile picture
22 Feb
This Day in Labor History: February 22, 1860. 3,000 shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts went on strike, beginning the nation’s largest strike before the Civil War. Let's talk about it!
Traditionally, shoemaking was a part time job for farmers and fishermen when the season allowed it. Men cut and shaped the leather while women and children sewed the main part of the shoe to the soles.
But in 1852, Singer sewing machines began to be used, deskilling the labor and creating more of a proletariat than a skilled craft labor force.
Read 35 tweets
Erik Loomis Profile picture
20 Feb
JFC the culture war is so weird
I've spent the last few years in my own personal research trying to wrap my head around the various forms of rural and right-wing resentment in the Northwest and it's all just stuff like this. Liberals and the modern right are just on completely different planets.
Liberals: "Here's this new technology that could keep the planet alive."

Conservatives: "Why don't you just come and kidnap my children into sex slavery while you are at it!"
Read 4 tweets
Erik Loomis Profile picture
20 Feb
This Day in Labor History: February 20, 1893. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad went into receivership. This was the first step toward the Panic of 1893, the greatest economic crisis in American history prior to the Great Depression! Let's talk about its impact on workers!
The nineteenth century economy was inherently unstable. With a weak central government and lot of hostility to centralized control of the economy, it did not take much to tank the economy. Booms and busts were common.
In the post-Civil War era, the railroad was the dominant industry.
Read 32 tweets
Erik Loomis Profile picture
19 Feb
This Day in Labor History: February 19, 1910. The Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company fired 173 union members to bust a strike of its drivers, leading to a general strike and general uproar, culminating in an all-too-rare victory for workers in the early twentieth century!!!
Streetcar workers often had it pretty tough in the Gilded Age, making the field one with strong union support from workers.
In 1909, the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees Local 477, the American Federation of Labor-affiliated union for streetcar drivers, wanted to win a contract for the Philadelphia drivers. This was not some radical union.
Read 38 tweets
Erik Loomis Profile picture
17 Feb
This Day in Labor History: February 17, 1992. Graduate students at Yale University went on strike. Time to put aside my animus for elite institutions to discuss graduate school unionization, since this is the strike everyone wants to talk about. So let's! Image
Still, before we get into this, I do have the make the principled point that the focus on the Yale graduate students instead of the many other graduate students who unionize is the same process by which the New York Times only talks about Yale and Harvard. Elites beget elites.
Graduate student unionization has long been controversial on college campuses. Are graduate students primarily students or apprentices?
Read 35 tweets

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