Frances Perkins, Who???

Well, I guess a picture really is worth a thousand words.

From Politico:

While other Republican governors have battled with organized labor over collective bargaining rights and benefit contributions, Maine’s governor has set his sights on a 36-foot-wide mural of the state’s labor history, which includes images of worker strikes and “Rosie the Riveter.”

Gov. Paul LePage has ordered that the mural, in the lobby of the state Department of Labor’s building in Augusta, be painted over to show business leaders that the state is just as friendly to them as it is to workers. “I’m trying to send a message to everyone in the state that the state of Maine looks at employees and employers equally, neutrally and on balance,” he said in a radio interview on Wednesday. “The mural sends a message that we’re one-sided, and I don’t want to send that message.

And I guess the fact that we're talking about a mural, doesn't help.

The mural movement in this country was inspired in the 1930s by the great Mexican muralists Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, who supported the Mexican revolution and leftist causes. In 1932, Siqueiros lived for seven months in Los Angeles, where he painted the incendiary mural "América Tropical," that was so controversial it was painted over soon after he finished it. Rivera's mural, "Man at the Crossroads," commissioned for Rockefeller Center in 1933, was destroyed in the middle of the night because of its depiction of revolutionary figures and events. Not surprisingly, right-wing broadcaster Beck has devoted several shows to attacking progressive murals on New York buildings, including Rivera's "Man at the Crossroads".

Maine Gov. Paul LePage is also very concerned about renaming conference rooms in the Labor Department that now bear the names of Cesar Chavez and Frances Perkins. Just imagine the shame, the sheer horror of naming a conference room after Frances Perkins, the first woman appointed to hold a cabinet post.  No can do.

Wake me up when these folks start concerning themselves with creating jobs, instead of using workers as pawns in their petty, shortsighted political game.

And then there was Rachel Maddow last night, telling us what this is really all about.  After all, art is just well, art.  What it's really all about is perfectly appalling.



And BTW, yesterday Cesar Chavez would have turned 84.  My daughter's second grade class spent part of the day musing on the history of the worker's rights movement.  In Spanish no less, since it's a bilingual school.  But don't worry.  It's a private school, so no tax dollars at work here.  Wonder how Republicans would feel if we had school vouchers, and they were used to this end....