Tula Connell

Good news. Just found out author Jared Bernstein can join us for a short time. Help me welcome Jared, a progressive economist at the Economic Policy Institute here in Washington, D.C. Jared can discuss anything from "guns vs. butter," to "how the capitalists killed capitalism"—and make it understandable. Economics is scary.

Every day, most of us go to work and then come home. Next day: Rinse, repeat. But some U.S. workers go to work and never come home. In April 2005, Donald Wilcher Smith was one of them. The 22-year-old central Texas man was electrocuted at the Sanderson Farms processing plant. This week, his father, Donald Coit Smith, described what it's like to lose his son. I do not possess the capacity to adequately describe the horror that possesses my soul from my son’s death.

If you're a U.S. woman and aren't getting paid for doing the same work as men, it's your fault. If you're a woman and are overweight or smoke, you're personally responsible for contributing to the sinking U.S. life expectancy rate. If you're a woman and you ask for the same pay for doing the same job as your male co-worker, you only have a small window of time to do so.

Here's an idea. Instead of retiring when we turn 65, let's go to work scrubbing tables at the nearest fast-food outlet. Sound good? Not to most of us. But it's a future that U.S. workers increasingly are facing. America's workers aren't just losing their homes in what is misleadingly termed the nation's mortgage crisis.

Just about everyone at Firedoglake (except maybe for the occasional troll) does good deeds everyday—just getting the kids dressed and off to school, or not cutting off an aggressive driver in traffic (who really deserves it), is a deed well done. Tell Congress to vote 'NO' on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. As Jane wrote so well here on Tuesday, Bush and his surrogate mouthpiece George Will are hot for Congress to pass the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

In Lafayette Park, just in front of the White House, more than 70 guest workers rallied in the cold rain to demand fundamental changes in the nation’s guest worker program, which President Bush is trying to expand. They also want a congressional investigation of their former employer, Signal International, a marine construction company they say held them in modern-day forced labor in its Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard.

The workers, who traveled to Washington, D.C., carried signs stating: "I Am A Man."

After the 2006 elections, many of us cheered because several Democrats were elected to Congress who—gasp—supported trade policies that are fair to workers and the environment. We in the union movement oppose the type of trade deals pushed by the Bush administration, but not because we're anti-trade. We want trade pacts that work for working people, not just line the pockets of CEOs.

Dorene, a cancer survivor in Oregon, can't afford health insurance, so she takes part in what she calls "faith-based health care"—she prays she won't get sick. Barbara's son spent a year in Iraq after enlisting in the National Guard. It was the only way he could get health insurance for his wife.

So, Bush's Defense Department gives a massive tanker contract to Northrop Grumman and the European firm EADS. In doing so, it shunned Boeing, which bid on the contract. This action is perverse on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin. In handing out the contract—worth between $40 billion to $100 billion—for the construction of Air Force refueling tankers, the Bush administration claimed that 25,000 jobs would be created in

What is it about teachers that reactionaries don't like? Maybe it's because an educated electorate poses a threat to those who seek to control the public—"Danger: Educated Union Member" is one of our favorite phrases—and so teachers pose an easy target for the antediluvians among us. (Remember John Stossel's ABC trash piece, "Stupid in America"?). The success of teachers' unions also draws particular ire from the anti-education crowd.