Thursday November 16th 2006 at 7:30pm Mark Damron, General Secretary-Treasurer of the IWW kicked off his presentation with a song, "Who's side are you on." The IWW has a long history of organizing workers in america, and is known for its famous labor songs. Mark started off by talking about the IWW's strategy. The IWW organizes all workers, the IWW does not differentiate by status or by position. If you work for somebody then you are a worker. The IWW is known for its inclusiveness, they organized African-Americans, and Asians, and women when unions like the AFL-CIO would not. The IWW organized unskilled laborers when the AFL-CIO would not. Mark's intent throughout the talk was not to negate the AFL-CIO but to articulate the differences between the strategy of the AFL-CIO and the strategy of the IWW. Since the Reagan years the AFL-CIO has had high-paid lobbyists in Washington while little has been done on the ground to improve the conditions of workers.

One of the main points Mark wanted to stress is that the law protects corporations, the law does not protect workers. When a store is robbed, the police are there in a minute and they get the man at gun point, when your house gets robbed the police are there in an hour with a clipboard and a pen "Has anything of value been taken?" Despite institutional gains by the Labor Review Board and ammending labor relations laws, corporations create loopholes evade regulations that are against their interests. While a worker can not be fired for being black the boss can fire him for being "slow." While a woman cannot be fired for being pregnant she can be fired for being "unproductive." What this means is that government, the courts, law enforcement, these things that are allegedly there to protect workers do not protect them. These institutions exist to protect private property, to protect the rights of the propertied classes as they see fit.

Helen Keller, Mother Jones, Joe Hill, Eugene Debs, Gary Snyder, Judy Bari, Big
Bill Haywood, Lucy Parsons, Utah Phillips, Ben Fletcher, Dorothy Day, Noam
Chomsky - what do all these people have in common?

They were or are involved in what is probably the most radical and democratic
union in North America, the Industrial Workers of the World. On November
16 (Thursday) the Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio will host Mark
Damron, General Secretary-Treasurer of the IWW, who will speak about this
organization's long and innovative history, and its current activities.

Come to the Northwood High Building at 2231 North High Street (2 blocks
north of Lane Avenue). There is ample free parking in the back. The
business meeting (open) is at 7:00 p.m.; program is at 7:30 p.m.

P.S. They also wrote many of the most famous labor songs.

Mid-term ballots are likely to hand over at least one chamber to Democrats on Tuesday in elections overcast by a storm of GOP scandal. The vortex threatens Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State (SOS), who aspires to be Governor while dancing at the eyewall's edge. In Ohio, even lobbyists are gagging on the pervasive sleaze of pay-to-play government and Blackwell mistakenly invests in Diebold shares. Voters have become fed up with corruption in government and their renewed fondness for ethical politics that has been missing for so long may shine too bright a light to allow Blackwell the confidence of their votes .

As the last ballots are cast tonight, Ohioans will confidently track realtime results using voting equipment and Internet reporting systems that Ken Blackwell built to replace the horrors of hanging chads. Will the electorate choke to find that the architect of Ohio's Election Night Results Dashboard is an RNC technology strategist and the political intimate of the Bush Dynasty since the 80s? Will a Strickland voter simply resolve to swallow harder on discovering that his realtime election returns may be shipped to his desktop from the GOP Internet operations center in Chattanooga rather than the Ohio OARnet IT servers in Columbus?