This is how authoritarians behave:
A mural depicting vignettes of state and national labor history was removed over the weekend from Maine’s Labor Department headquarters in Augusta, Gov. Paul LePage’s office said Monday morning.
The 11-panel mural that includes images of worker strikes and “Rosie the Riveter” was moved into a storage facility over the weekend, said Dan Demeritt, the governor’s director of communications and legislative affairs. It will be kept in storage until it can be “transfer[red] to a more appropriate venue,” he confirmed to POLITICO.
Here’s how their spokespeople sound when they try to justify Dear Leader’s censorship:
The three-year-old mural has 11 panels showing scenes of Maine workers, including colonial-era shoemaking apprentices, lumberjacks, a “Rosie the Riveter” in a shipyard and a 1986 paper mill strike. Taken together, his administration deems these scenes too one-sided in favor of unions.
A spokeswoman said Mr. LePage, a Republican, ordered the mural removed after several business officials complained about it and after the governor received an anonymous fax saying it was reminiscent of “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.”
“The Department of Labor is a state agency that works very closely with both employees and employers, and we need to have a décor that represents neutrality,” said Mr. LePage’s spokeswoman, Adrienne Bennett.
Mr. LePage has also ordered that the Labor Department’s seven conference rooms be renamed. One is named after César Chávez, the farmworkers’ leader; one after Rose Schneiderman, a leader of the New York Women’s Trade Union League a century ago; and one after Frances Perkins, who became the nation’s first female labor secretary and is buried in Maine.
And:
Charles Scontras, a labor historian at the University of Maine, said: “Totalitarian regimes erase history as well. We manage to do it by indifference or neglect or for ideological reasons.”
View the complete mural here.
What a maroon! God forbid the LABOR Department have actual… y’know, LABOR UNIONS represented in their building. Mainers ought to recall this guy immediately, if not sooner. I don’t know what you were all thinking to vote for him in the first place. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot.
Out of curiosity, what makes him a tea-partier? I can’t find anything that shows him to be anything other than a bog-standard republican (not that I know what the definition of tea-partier is these days).
You can’t find anything? Really? It only took about 10 seconds to find this: Tea party-backed LePage elected Maine governor.
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