A group, unwilling to disclose its backers or funders has announced it will propose state constitutional amendments that will make the secret ballot sacrosanct. The front guy for the initiative seems to make state constitutional amendments his specialty. He is also a proponent of a proposal on education expenditures that fall into the "sounds great until you look at the details" category.
What they are counting on in this case is not that the amendments would pass. They know that federal law would preempt a state constitutional amendment that tried to trump federal law. Since EFCA and the National Labor Relations Act, which it would essentially amend, are federal laws, the impact of the amendments on EFCA will be nil.
As I write this, a friend's parent is in hospice. Another has just had someone close to the family and to their young child die. And many people I do not know are in the same boat, stalked by sadness, fear, and mourning. There is something truly awful about being in this situation during a holiday as the rest of the world is celebrating. Forever after, that holiday can never be one of unalloyed joy.
It’s a tough world out there for retirement plans. And I use that term to mean all forms of preparing financially for retirement. We have seen individual 401Ks and similar individual plans offered by employers as defined contribution plans tank as the stocks owned directly or indirectly by those plans have lost value.
For companies that have moved to defined contribution plans from defined benefit plans, there is the risk of becoming de facto Enrons. You may remember that Enron workers’ retirement plans were heavily invested in Enron stock. When the company crashed, so did the employees’ retirement security. Today the recession puts many companies – and their employees – in that very situation.
As you are probably aware, most subjects in experiments get paid for their time and trouble, but this is an economic experiment. So, in keeping with the way economics works, we figure that you will derive so much benefit and pleasure for your participation in this experiment that you will have to pay to participate.
And the even cooler thing is, you already have participated and you have paid and will be paying for a very long time for your participation. What? You didn’t realize that you were participating? You didn’t sign any consent form? Not a problem, your government signed on your behalf.
Most of all I want to tell you I am sorry for how short-sighted we were. I thought I was doing all that I could to leave a good world for you to inherit, but it turns out I could have done more.
Many people were scared of the massive changes that needed to happen, and many more refused to move on. But I'm glad to say, that in the end the world made the right decision and that's why you today, way into the future, are enjoying a quality of life that I can only dream of.
I sought to offer both. Even though a bit late, it seemed time to post my thoughts here. To perhaps provoke others to think at a moment perhaps meriting reflection.
The Highway Privatization crowd must have been gnashing their teeth as every other special interest got its stealth Midnight Regulation but nothing for highways. There was the Leave No Pristine Mountain or Stream Behind regulation, euphemistically called mountainttop removal. And sops to the gun lobby. There was taking away federal employee rights to collective bargaining and union representation.
Check
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And still nothing for the highway privatization guys. Until now.
Hey, Joe. Sitting in cushy conference rooms will tell you almost nothing about the plight of working families. Listen! Everything your committee needs to know, they can learn by hanging out in our nation's parking lots.
Trying to determine the largest failure of the Bush Administration is like trying to determine which of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse you would least like to meet.
Was it when the Bush Administration did nothing while New Orleans drowned? Was it the failure to follow up on early success in Afghanistan, and then ignore the country as it fell apart again? Was it the intentional disregard for regulations on Wall Street that has thrown the entire world into recession? Or was it the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq that has bankrupted America and killed tens of thousands?
This is part two of a look at the federal government's century old commitment to be a model employer. The first part looked at veterans. This part looks at the employment of people with disabilities.
In Theodore Roosevelt's Seventh State of the Union Address, he declared that the federal government should be a model employer. That call is one periodically discussed by federal agencies, including the current one. In two posts unbossed considers how this promise is or is not being kept, first, here as to veterans and, second, as to people with disabilities.
Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who chairs the $700 billion financial bailout program oversight panel, offers a sobering view of the prospects for middle class families as they drown in personal debt from housing, health care and other costs attributed to suburban life.
Below you will find the answer key to yesterday's post: So, You Think You Know About the National Labor Relations Act and the National Labor Relations Board.
Labor has been big in the news recently. And the Employee Free Choice Act has been an important union issue. How about testing your knowledge about the current state of union elections and the National Labor Relations Act?
Now that the largest Ponzi Scheme in history has blown up, and the victims are tallied, questions are finally being asked about Bernard Madoff that should have been asked a long time ago. Like "who was minding the store?"
I am deeply troubled by many of the President-elect's choices for his cabinet. These are not the change we need. We've got an anti-family farm, pro-Monsanto guy going to Agriculture, an inexperienced GOP hack going to Transportation and now Salazar to Interior. I am profoundly disappointed in many of the choices Obama is making.
Senator Ken Salazar is not a great choice for Secretary of the Interior. Here is why:
Among the virtues commonly thought of as stereotypically conservative - but which I contend many on the left have in abundance - and that are currently not typical of the Republican Party - and have not been for a long time - was being conservative with one's money.
Hybrids are too often thought of simply in terms of personal vehicles.
They are also penetrating the big vehicle market space. Consider the average delivery truck and all its starts/stops. There is a lot of energy to capture there, which is why UPS is pursuing hybrids. And, as per Walmart and its hybrid trucks, they are hitting the semi-trailer world. There are also efforts to apply hybrids to trash trucks and offer the opportunity to silence those squealing brakes at 5:45 am. Ann Arbor, Michigan, has started to get hybrid buses as is London. And, well, now they're coming to a school system (maybe) near you.
In a special report on Sunday, the St. Petersburg Times reported that US drug companies outsource roughly half of all clinical trials to countries like China, India, Brazil, and Russia. The practice has great potential for errors and abuses.
"In the past three years, the FDA has inspected just eight of the thousands of trial sites in India; and in India, "it is impossible to find anyone running, monitoring or auditing clinical trials who is not on the payroll of the drug makers," reports the Times.
A former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan asks: Do we have the political will to succeed?
When it takes seven bone-jarring hours to drive just 90 miles over war-scarred dirt roads from Kabul to the troubled Helmand Province in southwest Afghanistan, the complexity of the intertwined U.S. diplomatic and military missions becomes clear pretty fast.
What a week it has been in union news. First, we had Republican Senators opposing a bailout for the U.S. automobile industry unless automobile workers agreed to allow their wages to fall to those of non-union workers. One wonders what motivates that position. Or perhaps we don’t wonder. It seems that the key proponents of this position are from southern states that are home to foreign-owned automobile companies. So it is in their interest to take a quasi-hemi-semi-demi plausible position that they know will be rejected, thus giving them what they want - a country in which all cars are made elsewhere or here by non-US companies.
No, this is not a “you should volunteer and do good works” appeal. This is a you should make sure you stick around appeal. This is a people will miss you if you don’t. And your death will tear the heart out of your family and friends.
The news today is that Senate Republicans have voted against the auto industry bailout because the UAW refused to agree to have auto workers' wages cut to those of nonunion workers. I gather that the logic in this demand must be either that auto workers wages are too high, or auto workers are responsible for the woes of the auto industry.
I think there's something to this this logic and we should follow it through to its logical ends.
In a time of year when it can be hard to go into public
without being overwhelmed by Christmas carols, the sound of jingling bells can sicken many of us. And, it is hard for many to associate this season and carols with any form of religiousity due to the mass commercialization of across the spectrum of holidays of Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, and ...
The big question beyond what the hell was Blagojevich thinking: who was "Candidate 5" referred to in the indictment that was being considered a leading contender to assume the remainder of Pres.-elect Barack Obama senate seat and who appears to be a willing participant in Blagojevich's pay-for-play scheme.
The extraordinary hand-wringing over the traditional media's epic failure to warn Americans about the impending economic meltdown belies the enormous problems facing our nation and our democracy.
The Columbia Journalism Review takes some ownership while the American Journalism Review prefers self-pitying and recriminations toward the public for pretending prescient business journalists were "nattering nabobs of negativism."
Rather than dwell on the obvious I'd like to explore what's next.
Climate Change. That is change that we don't want to believe we face, that many refuse to face, but it is change that is occurring, driving many through the stages from denial to determination.
In the face of Climate Change, how much Change can Barack Obama deliver?
And, in fact, does he and the building team for the next Administration recognize the extent of the necessary Change? Change to the Planet? And, that there might exist geoengineering solutions as part of the path toward necessary Change?
You have probably heard about all the stealth regulations literally pouring out of OMB – all with the goal of extending the life of the Bush Administration way past what is supposed to be its death And it’s not only stealth regulations. It’s also Executive Orders. Regs take more effort, because they require compliance with the Administrative Procedure Act. But then they are harder to undo, because that requires compliance with the Administrative Procedure Act. Executive Orders, in contrast, just take a pen and a signature -easy to do . . . and to undo. And time grows short for the almost undead to do their dastardly deeds of darkness.
Yes, it will be an unholy mess that will make it hard for the Obama government to undo. Among the Bushites’ targets are union membership for federal employees, national parks, the environment and more.
This report is likely to be influential in the way healthcare reform is understood and taken.
Our health care system, specifically the employer-based system arose during the Eisenhower administration in 1954. That's a long time, time in which a complex system has grown up based on the bedrock of employer-provided health care, which is built on the bedrock of tax subsidies to the employer and employee.
The World Health Organization announced, Friday, a "tolerable" level of melamine for food products. Ultimately, the number may prove more ceremonial than practical, as what is "tolerable" to consumers is a highly individual determination, enforced with the power of the purse. At least, they didn't call it a "safe" level of contamination.
The tolerable amount of melamine in food a person can ingest daily without “appreciable health risk” is 0.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, according to guidelines set at a World Health Organization meeting in Ottawa this week. The guidance is set at 0.63 mg in the U.S., 0.5 mg in Europe and 0.35 mg in Canada. (Bloomberg)
That from a new report by the Government Accountability Office on releases of genetically engineered crops that have included releases into the human food chain. Of most concern, those crops have included those bio-engineered to include pesticides. This must be a hotly contested report, because it was provided to the agencies in November but only released Friday afternoon, December 5.
It looks as if some auto industry bailout has been approved, much scaled down from the automakers' request. No doubt helped along by the shockingly bad unemployment figures released Friday.
One of the positives, as I see it, is a strong recommendation that executive compensation be limited.
The financial markets have collapsed. The real estate market has collapsed. The auto industry is collapsing. We are already in the longest and deepest recession in nearly 30 years, and there is no end in sight. The entire world is suffering financial turmoil at least as bad as America, if not worse.
Something this big didn't fall from the sky unexpectedly. There were plenty of people who predicted it.
Hell, even I predicted it three years ago and I have little formal training in economics.
From the "What Are They Smoking?" department, this just in: The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, said yesterday that he is "very confident that the food available to customers here in China is high quality and safe." (Also reported here.) The comments by Ed Schafer included no mention of the melamine contamination crisis in China that sickened thousands of infants there.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong reports finding illegal levels of melamine in eggs imported from China. The levels, as high as 4.7 parts per million, are nearly twice the US limit for melamine in food for human consumption (except for a 1 ppm limit for infants). Notably, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with the Food and Drug Administration, has regulatory authority over eggs sold in the U.S.
Smintheus’ post, “In Thrall to Mammon” describes in horrifying detail what happened to Jdimytai Damour, the poor soul trampled to death by a slew of bargain-hunting savages at America’s Favorite Krap Hut, Wal-Mart.
The story has been discussed over coffee tables and elsewhere online.
Think back to the 1970s and 1980s. Disco was in. Nixon was out. Reagan was in. So was polyester. Time marches on. Babies born then are worried about their mortgages and jobs now. But the data FEMA uses to calculate flood insurance is mostly from the 1970's, with its most recent updates from the 1980s. The weighting and assumptions built into FEMA’s model are also decades out of date.
On Sunday The Washington Post published yet another commentary by a former interrogator arguing that torture doesn't "work". This one is by a pseudonymous Air Force veteran who led a team of interrogators in Iraq from March to August 2006. To his great credit, he describes the use of torture as repugnant and unAmerican. He refused to go over to the dark side and instead insisted that interrogations be conducted according to the Army Field Manual.
However his argument that torture should be rejected in part because it's "ineffective" – that is, it produces unreliable testimony and is counterproductive – ought to trouble more people than it appears to do. Sure, we all ought to be able to agree that torture produces a farrago of dysinformation (typically whatever the victim thinks the torturer wants to hear in order to stop the torment). But so what? Is it reasonable to measure torture by the yardstick of "effectiveness"? Would torture be more acceptable if it produced more reliable testimony?
Just one, however. Throughout his presidency Bush has denied that he regrets anything he's said or done, or failed to do. Unlike nearly every other American, he has always expressed a serene – some might say clueless – confidence in the course of his leadership.
But in an interview to be aired on the ABC nightly news, Bush finally confesses to having a regret about something. That's pretty remarkable, you say? Well, not so much perhaps. It's just a single misgiving after all and, predictably, what Bush regrets is that other people were wrong and ruined their own reputations.
Unbossed was founded in 1897 by poor, but honest, immigrants. It flourished during the turn of the century -- marching with the suffragists and helping organize labor unions -- only to wither during the Great Depression.
helping my/your family, my/your community, my/your nation, my/our world find a path toward a 
Consider the average delivery truck and all its starts/stops. There is a lot of energy to capture there, which is why UPS is pursuing hybrids. And, as per 
