If you don’t have time for the longer articles just yet — you’re bookmarking them and reading them later, right? — Longest Wind Briefs provides some shorter pieces for your immediate consumption.

Trailer Season

I’m not sure if this is a thing but it feels kind of like it is movie trailer season. Basically, everywhere I go someone is telling me about some new trailer that I have to see. There’s the Captain America: Civil Wartrailer, the X-Men: Apocalypse trailer, the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trailer, the trailer for the Independence Day sequel, the Star Trek Beyond trailer, the Harry Potter spin-off trailer. It feels like Superbowls of yester-years.

But there were only two recent trailers that have really gotten me excited. The first is Captain America: Civil War.

To date, the Captain America films have gotten better and better, with more and more heart, whereas the other sequels, with the exception of Avengers, have gotten more lackluster with each increment. Captain America: Civil War promises a complex, adult drama, and moreover, it features the long-awaited first appearance of Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Personally, I’ve been waiting since I noticed a big red blip in Central Africa on the SHIELD world map when Nick Fury brings Tony Stark into the fold in Iron Man 2.

The other trailer was Independence Day: Resurgence.

Jeff Goldblum is signed on. That’s enough. I’m already buying a ticket. Add in the fact that the premise is actually pretty interesting — our world has been advancing at epic speeds with the use of alien technology, but we are TOTALLY not ready for the second invasion — and I’m considering naming my first child after President Thomas J. Whitmore.

FDR on Predatory Practices in the Workplace

The following is an excerpt from my minimum wage research that didn’t seem to fit anywhere but which I found interesting nonetheless.

During an ironically titled Fireside Chat radio broadcast — taking place on an exceedingly warm evening in June of 1938, the President most certainly would not have been found beside a fire — FDR gave one of the most scathing reviews of American economic inequality as the result of the predatory practices of CEOs that I have ever read. This Chat is not quite as quotable as the 1933 speech in support of the NIRA, but there was one section I thought worth quoting in full:

Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000.00 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company’s undistributed reserves, tell you — using his stockholders’ money to pay the postage for his personal opinions — tell you that a wage of $11.00 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry. Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the Nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business executives most heartily disagree.

Depending on how many days per week the typical executive worked during this era, which I will safely assume is between one and seven days, CEOs in America made between 90 and 637 times their lowest paid employee, and that was only after the minimum wage law was passed. We can only assume that there were cases of executives making thousands of times as much as their lowest paid employee in the 30s before the generous 25 cent minimum wage was put in the books.

For those of you who think this is a thing of the past, CNN Money recently determined that in 2013 the chief executives of the largest companies in the USA made about 354 times the wages of the average American worker. We’re not exactly comparing apples to apples but these rates are staggering, especially considering the fact that in 1980 CEO’s made on average only 42 times that of the average worker.

The Killer Mike and Bernie Sanders Sessions

A couple of years ago, I took the wife to the Pitchfork music festival in Chicago. It was hot and we didn’t get to stay long, but the highlight for me was getting my first dose of rapper Killer Mike. Since then, Killer Mike has become a hero of mine, not so much for his music — though I adore his song “Reagan” — but moreso for his concern toward activism and social justice.

The story I heard was that Killer Mike sent Senator Bernie Sanders a tweet commending his progressive views, and the result was that the two sat down to chat at Killer Mike’s barber shop. The discussion was filmed and Killer Mike put the six-part video series on his YouTube channel. I am still trying to feel out Sanders, but I know that Killer Mike is the real deal. The dialogue between the two is one of the more inspiring things I’ve watched this year.