Here are several places to commemorate this tragedy on its centennial: The Nation and NPR1 and NPR2 and NPR3 and NPR4.

Here’s from a comment of the excellent Nation article:

All of the rhetoric about dirty theiving unions cannot stand the truth: Corporations will not police themselves when it comes to basic human rights, like the right to go to work and have a reasonable chance of not getting burned to death in a fire. As has been demonstrated over and over and over again, corporations will sacrifice worker’s and even consumer’s lives to profit.

And here is the article’s conclusion:

Given the enormous differences, politically, socially and culturally, between our time and the time of Triangle, it would be glib to draw specific lessons for today from the reformers who pulled some good from the ashes of the fire. But perhaps we can learn from their broad approach. The seemingly technical, incremental reforms that came in the aftermath of Triangle—requirements for sprinklers and fire drills and unlocked exit doors that open outward—were no more the result of modest thinking than the sweeping New Deal reforms like Social Security that came two decades later. Rather, they came out of a shared belief by socialists, unionists and even progressive presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson that the society they lived in was fundamentally disordered, with institutions, rules and customs inappropriate for the needs of the people. The world needed reinventing. But if the spirit of revolution infused the air, so did the practical draw of social engineering and respect, grounded in daily experience, for the importance of even small changes in the conditions of work.

Today, the labor movement and progressives fight one dispiriting battle after another to defend wages, benefits, social programs and government protections from further dismemberment. Even the thrilling mobilization of labor and its allies in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana has remained, so far, defensive—necessary, but not enough even to win incremental advances. We live in a society that simply does not function for an ever-growing part of the population. It is too late to rally around restoring the status quo ante, an impossible and not particularly attractive ideal. Rather, like the social forces fused together by the flames at Triangle, we need to imagine a new way of being, a new set of customs and laws designed for our world of commoditization, financialization and globalization, which has brought so much wealth and so much misery—some new combination of regulation and self-organization. Only by recapturing the spirit of the reformers of a century ago, that the world belongs to us, to make right as we see fit, can we achieve even modest improvements in our daily reality.

For more on the Triangle travesty, see this.

by Joseph Dana and Noam Sheizaf in The Nation

Kind of reminds me of northern whites participating (as guests) in Mississippi in 1964. Changes the dynamic.
Freie Palästina = Free Palestine = الحرية لفلسطين = חרות לפלסט

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has officially issued a new 20-year operating license to the Vermont Yankee nuclear power station, despite opposition from Vermont’s congressional delegation. The NRC voted on the license just before the Japanese nuclear crisis, but the commission delayed issuing the license until Monday. Last week, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont criticized the NRC’s decision:

The idea that we would have a plant of the same design, which in 20 years will be 60 years old, I think is a frightening thought to many people in Vermont.

The final decision on the future of the Vermont Yankee power plant rests with the state legislature.

Amy Goodman interviews Jeremy Scahill.

The Obama administration has really escalated the covert war inside of Yemen and has dramatically increased the funding to Yemen’s military, particularly to its elite counterterrorism unit, which is trained by U.S. Special Operations Forces….

The fact is that the U.S. has been almost entirely silent in the face of Saleh’s forces gunning down their own citizens, which stands in stark contrast to the position that the U.S. has taken on some of the other regimes in the area….

What about the U.S. response to the situation in Libya?

The no-fly zone has always been a recipe for disaster. It was a disaster in Iraq, where it resulted in a strengthening of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The U.S. has bombed Gaddafi’s house. The U.S. is bombing targets that have no aerial value whatsoever. You know, I’m against the U.S. policy in Libya for tactical and strategic reasons. I think that it could end up backfiring in a tremendous way and keeping Gaddafi in power even longer.

And if the United States is going to start intervening in every failed rebellion or insurrection around the world, it’s going to be very, very busy. I think this was a reactionary policy with very little sight of an endgame….

I think this is a classic case of knee-jerk “we need to remain relevant in the world so we’re going to take military action,” while propping up ruthless dictators elsewhere that have conducted the same kinds of operations, or ignoring far worse humanitarian crises and far worse mass slaughter on the part of dictators around the world.

Those companies and others say they’ll bring home billions in earnings—but only if they get a big tax break. Here is the whole story.

U.S. multinationals have more than $1 trillion in profits stashed in overseas subsidiaries. Some of the companies with the most money squirreled away say they’re prepared to bring a big chunk of it home. All they want in return is a temporary tax break that wouldn’t cost the U.S. Treasury anything, since it’s money that would otherwise be kept abroad and not taxed at all. The tax break would actually raise billions of dollars from applying the reduced tax rate to the money that’s been repatriated….

[A group of powerhouses that includes Cisco, Adobe, Apple, CA Technologies, Duke Energy, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Pfizer, and Qualcomm] is seeking fundamental changes in tax law, but if it can’t get them right away, it still wants the tax holiday. Its opening position is that there should be no conditions on how the money is used. [Cisco’s CEO John T.] Chambers argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last October that a repatriation might create as many as 2 million jobs.

But as President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Congress in 1937 about corporate tax evaders:

[F]ailure to pay results in shifting the tax load to the shoulders of others less able to pay and in mulcting the Treasury of the Government’s just due.

As is often the case in Washington, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal—it’s what’s legal: In this instance tax-avoidance systems with such names as the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich. As detailed in a Bloomberg Businessweek investigative story on May 17-23,

Forest Laboratories (FRX), which makes the blockbuster antidepressant Lexapro, sells nearly 100 percent of its drugs in the U.S.—and cuts its U.S. taxes dramatically by attributing the bulk of its profits to a law office in Bermuda. Another story in the magazine last year explained how Google reduced its income taxes by $3.1 billion over three years by shifting income to Ireland, then the Netherlands, and ultimately to Bermuda. Microsoft has used a similar arrangement. Records in the Cayman Islands and Ireland show that Facebook is setting up such a structure too.

In Washington, framing the debate is everything. CEO Chambers and his cohorts

frame the repatriation-tax holiday as something for nothing—jobs for the unemployed, dividends for shareholders, tax payments for the Treasury. But the free lunch isn’t really free. If companies are once again given a big tax break on profits they’ve kept abroad, they’ll be induced to steer even more of their income offshore. That’s a frame that puts the repatriation holiday in a decidedly unflattering light.

Check out this radiation dose chart:

1. Sleeping next to someone = 0.05 microSieverts
2. [Item 1] X 2: Eating 1 banana = 0.10 microSieverts
3. [Item 2] X 10: 1 arm X-ray, or using a CRT monitor for a year = 1 microSievert
4. {Item 3] X 5: Dental or hand X-ray = 5 microSieverts
5. [Item 4] X 2: Background dose received by a normal person over a single day = 10 microSieverts
6. [Item 5] X 4: Flight from New York City to Los Angeles = 40 microSieverts
7. [Item 6] X 25: EPA yearly limit on radiation exposure to a single individual; or maximum external dose from Three Mile Island accident = 1,000 microSieverts = 1 milliSievert
8. [Item 7] X 3: Mammogram = 3 milliSieverts
9. [Item 8] X 1.93: Chest CT scan = 5.8 milliSieverts
10. [Item 9] X 8.6: Maximum yearly dose for a U.S. radiation worker = 50 milliSieverts
11. [Item 10] X 2: Lowest 1-year dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk = 100 milliSieverts
12. [Item 11] X 2.5: Dose limit for emergency workers in life-saving operations = 250 milliSieverts
13. [Item 12] X 8: Severe radiation poisoning, in some cases fatal = 2,000 milliSieverts = 2 Sieverts
14. [Item 13] X 4: Fatal dose, even with treatment = 8 Sieverts
15. [Item 14] X 6.25: 10 minutes next to Chernobyl reactor core after explosion and meltdown = 50 Sieverts