One of the cool changes announced yesterday was the new Middle Class Task Force headed by VP Joe Biden. It even has its own webpage, of course, which adds "strong" to middle class.

Changes are popping up all over, including on websites. While looking for information on new developments in pandemic flu at the House Homeland Security website, I decided to see what was up with the DHS Business Opportunities Newsletter.

In some ways, it is clearly still business as usual.

Kristi Burton, the tireless force behind Colorado's Amendment 48, was the toast of the nation's antiabortion elite at the American Life League annual conference Friday. So much so that they even swiped the ballot measure's "personhood" moniker as the confab's title.

It's easy to forget when you do not live in a state bordering Mexico, but a lot of our tax dollars are being spent building a big fence. Given that dollars are tight these days, it might be nice to know if we are getting our money's worth.

It's been big news since yesterday that the number of union members is up over last year, and the percentage of union workers is also up. But what do the figures tell us?

Jerome a Paris' Wind power set to decline under Obama? highlighted how the on-again, off-again federal renewable energy policies have created a boom-and-bust cycle, with 2009 looking to be perhaps a minor bust after 2008's record-setting boom period. And, that this might occur despite the Administration and Congressional focus on renewable energy. And, despite our desperate need to get off polluting energy sources via energy efficiency and clean energy production as quickly as possible.

Yesterday, however, also saw another important item: the wind industry now employs more American's than the coal industry! Wind: 85,000 workers. Coal mining/extraction: 81,000 workers.

And, looking to the future, wind produces more jobs per kWh than coal while producing far (FAR) less environmental havoc.

Whether it is avoiding fatty foods, saving money for the future, or taking cod liver oil regularly, somewhat unpleasant actions today to prevent disaster tomorrow are a struggle against our very nature. This struggle extends from individuals to society, as present consumption and today's concerns too often triumph over a 'discounted' future.

With climate change, this problem is taken to nearly the penultimate extreme. Either we (individually, collectively as a nation, collectively as a global society, collectively intergenerationally) get our act together or we're discounting future into catastrophe.

Now that we have an Administration where scientists will be able to speak about science without fossil fuel lobbyists or 20-something ideologues taking red ink to their science, the US government will be speaking more forcefully about Global Warming. Overshadowed by the President's statement on energy and Global Warming, we have news of a new NOAA report that paints a very ugly and dry picture for a 1000 years out if we don't get serious about our societal spoons of cod liver oil.

When it's miserable outside and dangerous to hit the roads, sit back and enjoy Jon Stewart summing up the state of current Republican contributions to political thought.

Amigos,

On Friday, my long-awaited book, NOTES FOR THE AURORA SOCIETY, was finally published.

Many of you have read excerpts from it over the past few years. Those are located here and here and here.

Two new studies just released caught my eye for what they say about where we are at this moment. One from GAO is an economic snapshot that is worrying, to say the least. The other is a new study on single payer health coverage that is so optimistic, it's actually bouncy.

Being a serial plagiarist may no longer be the professional equivalent of a hair shirt. Look at Vice President Joe Biden. Good thing for ex-Bush administration political operative Tim Goeglein too.

He's been named the top Washington, D.C., lobbyist for Focus on the Family, according to a little-noticed "comings and goings" political column in the Fort Wayne, Ind., Journal Gazette.

Read enough cases involving employee rights and you have to wonder whether employers ever consider the costs to themselves for firing workers. When you see a case like Johnson v. Kmart, No.07-14393 (E.D. Mich. Jan. 7, 2009), you have to conclude that the answer is: No. You’d think Johnson worked for Simon Legree, Inc.

Just over a year ago, unbossed was discussing a Brookings proposal on funding Social Security that seemed to be affecting Obama's thinking. So how did we do?

In his dissent in American Textile Manufacturers Institute v. Donovan, 452 U.S. 490 (1981), Justice Rehnquist argued that Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was unconstitutional essentially because Congress had given the agency so much unconstrained power. When Congress does this it engages in an unconstitutional delegation of power and runs afoul of the nondelegation doctrine. In a law review article last year, Prof. Cass Sunstein, Obama's pick to head the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) seems to agree with Rehnquist that OSHA may run afoul of the nondelegation doctrine.

Denver's March for Life rally at the state Capitol Thursday was as much a witness to an awkward family reunion of marriages of political convenience as a gathering to protest the 36th anniversary of the landmark Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision.

posted with permission of gjohnsit

It seems like all commentary on the situation of America today is put into the context of post-WWII. That's like studying the history of Rome, but ignoring the 500 years of history that happened before Ceasar's armies crossed the Rubicon. If you intentionally limit your vision of the world then you will eventually be caught off-guard by larger trends.

This problem is especially true in the field of economics.

"Workers, do not be deceived: this is the final struggle, that of parasitism against labour, exploitation against production. If you are fed up of vegetating in ignorance and of wallowing in misery; if you want your children to be men getting the profit of their own labour, and not a sort of animal trained for the workshop of the battlefield, sweating themselves to make the fortunes of an exploiter or spilling their blood for a despot; if you no longer want your daughters, whom you cannot bring up and look after as you would like, to become objects of pleasure for the arms of that aristocrat, money; if you want an end to poverty forcing men to join the police and women the ranks of prostitution; finally workers, if you want the reign of justice, be intelligent and arise!"
- Paris Commune bulletin, April 5, 1871

by gjohnsit, posted with permission

"The Commune was a turning-point of decisive importance. It stands at the threshold of the modern age of imperialism. The conditions methods and aims of the proletarian revolutionary movement in the age of imperialism were, so to speak, grandly foreshadowed in it."
- V. Lenin

"It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.

This was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class — shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants — the wealthy capitalist alone excepted."
- K. Marx

by gjohnsit, posted with permission

"To Arms! Citizens, to arms! It is a choice now, as you know, between conquering or falling into the merciless hands of the reactionaries and clericals of Versasilles, or those scoundrels who deliberately delivered up France to the Prussians and are making us pay the ransom of their treachery! If you wish that the generous blood which has flowed like water these last six weeks be not infertile, if you wish to live in a free and egalitarian France, if you wish to spare your children your sufferings and your miseries, you will rise as one man and, before your fearsome resistance, the enemy, who flatters himself he will again submit you to his yoke, will win no more than the shame of the useless crimes with which he has befouled himself for the pasts two months."
- Paris Commune bulletin, May 21, 1871

by gjohnsit, posted with permission

On July 28, 1870, the 200,000-strong Army of the Rhine marching out of Paris to war were sent off by huge, patriotic, cheering crowds. Republicans who opposed the war were accused of having sold out to Prussia. Jules Valles, a journalist and socialist who dared to question the war, was nearly torn apart by a mob chanting "To Berlin! To Berlin!"

The French armies were so confident of victory that they were only given maps of Germany.

By the end of May, 1871, much of Paris was consumed in flames, put to the torch by many of the same people who were singing patriotic songs just 10 months earlier. The River Seine literally ran red with the blood of tens of thousands of Parisians, shot by French soldiers who were taking no prisoners. The French government did nothing to stop this orgy of killing, while the French press compared anyone who resisted to "wild animals" and "appalling monsters."

How could this drastic change have happened in less than a year?

No doubt, you already have your festive plans for observing National Sanctity of Life Day, Sunday, January 18? And far be it from me to rain on your parade, but I do think you should at least give some consideration to Dear Leader's views on this important issue. After all, what was sanctity of life before his reign?

The happy ending to what could have been tragedy yesterday - when the engines on USAir flight 1549 went out - was brought to you courtesy of union workers.

by gjohnsit, posted with permission

In June of 1940, with the victorious armies of Nazi Germany quickly approaching Paris, the French government prepared to flee to Bordeaux. According to Alistair Horne's book, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, before the federal government left Paris they instructed the police chief and the police force under him to stay at their posts until the German troops arrived. At which point he was to turn over responsibility to the German commander.

Above all he was to prevent any and all public demonstrations.

by gjohnsit, posted with permission

A virus broke out in Paris in 1871, and within days most of the city was infected. The French government considered the disease to be so serious that anyone found to be infected was immediately executed.

However, this virus wasn't biological. The virus came in the form of an idea.

That idea had a name: La Commune.

As the post yesterday about the study of firings during union organizing campaigns shows, filing NLRB charges is helpful to unions in building a case that demonstrates how bad things are out there. I ran that post by a very successful union organizer working in a very hard to be union state.

Here are some excerpts from that conversation on why unions should file Board charges and why they are not.

In an interview Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in the Washinton Independent says that 1 in 5 pro-union workers is fired.

If true, that would be industrial carnage on a massive scale. But statistical results are only as good as the data on which they are based, and, in this case, the data are a mess as a result of unions' Avoid the Board campaign.

Score a victory for women and others who have long-suffered lower wages with only narrow legal remedies to fight for back pay.

The November election saw Democratic blowouts all over the place, with even well entrenched Republican federal legislators going down to defeat. But one or two new Republican representatives squeaked into office. One is Glenn Thompson, representing a huge and mostly rural geographic district in central Pennsylvania. This is a district that includes Penn State’s main campus plus several of its branch campuses and a number of other colleges. It includes lots of decaying - once prosperous - industrial towns. And lots and lots of wilderness areas.

So what is life like for this new Republican kid on the block? And what can we expect from him?

The one where workers were in the news constantly and then they got some money and left.

Well, that's not the end of the story.

According to a story just out by Deb Riechmann, from the Associated Press, Cheney says no one saw financial crisis coming - and as a result, Bush is not to blame.

Interesting claim.

by gjohnsit, posted with permission

"I know the pain. We're talking about a police force that is not accountable to anybody."
- Cornelius Hall

On July 17, 2001, the family of Bruce Edward Seward gathered for a news conference where they denounced the BART police. The obviously mentally ill Seward had been shot to death outside the Hayward BART station after Seward had grabbed the officer's nightstick.

Sitting in the news conference, ignored by almost everyone, was an older gentleman. His name was Cornelius Hall, and he had his own reasons to be there.

Hurricane Katrina victims take note. Michael Brown is safe.

A series of wind-whipped wildfires north of Boulder, Colo., have forced the evacuation of more than 11,500 residents — among them vilified ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown.

It's no "Bridge to Nowhere" but budget hawks may have needed a cold shower after The Washington Post reported that Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne renovated his private office bathroom to the tune of $235,000 courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Talk about trickle down economics.

A guest commentary by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship of PBS' "Bill Moyers Journal" posted by permission for your reading pleasure:

As 2008 ends and this New Year begins, with all its fledgling promise despite turmoil and crisis, it’s also that time when the media offers its lists of ten best or worst this and that of the previous year, an exercise that simultaneously entertains and infuriates.

Abstinence-only education takes another hit in a new study that finds that not only do teens who vow chastity until marriage have premarital sex on par with non-pledgers but that they're much less likely to use condoms or other forms of contraception.

We wish all our unbossed readers the best of new years. And we ask of you a commitment to making the best of the opportunities that come your way this year to make this country the best that it can be.