33.2 - Good News: Teamsters Local is a "sanctuary" union; California is a "sanctuary" state

Good News: Teamsters Local is a "sanctuary" union; California is a "sanctuary" state

We've also got some Good News on matters related to immigration.

For one thing, on September 13, Teamsters Joint Council 16, an umbrella group of 27 union locals representing 120,000 workers around the New York City area and in Puerto Rico, passed a resolution declaring itself a "sanctuary union." It will not assist federal immigration agents in deporting its members and will proactively provide trainings, legal assistance, and organize support for immigrant Teamsters.

This followed the deportation of Eber Garcia Vasquez, who had been working as a Teamster for 26 years and was deported despite having no criminal record, reporting in once a year regarding his request for asylum, and doing everything else he was supposed to do.

So much for the "bad hombres" bull, as even some ICE agents are admitting, saying the practice is to arrest and deport people because they can, not because those people are a danger, and doing it even as Jeff "Not a racist, not me, nope" Sessions foams at the mouth about how sanctuary policies put us all in danger from "predators" because "a sanctuary city is a trafficker, smuggler, or gang member's best friend" while he repeatedly lies about a non-existent rise in violent crime, which in fact is at the lowest level in several decades.

But if Jeffykins is that upset about sanctuary cities, he must be absolute apoplectic about California, which on September 16 made itself a sanctuary state. Although the bill as passed is not as strong as the version first proposed, it still is the most wide-ranging such law in the US.

And if that didn't make him pop a few blood vessels, maybe this did: On September 15, a federal judge in Chicago issued a nationwide injunction against TheRump's effort to smack down sanctuary cities by withholding federal funds for public safety programs.

District Judge Harry Leinenweber found that penalizing cities for protecting undocumented immigrants was both unlawful and unconstitutional and that Sessions doesn't have the authority to impose such conditions on the program.

The judge made the injunction national because, he wrote in his ruling, there is "no reason to think that the legal issues present in this case are restricted to Chicago or that the statutory authority given to the attorney general would differ in another jurisdiction."

The decision follows one in California in April, also about the attempt to end aid to sanctuary cities, and a related one in Texas in July; that one addressed a Texas state law allowing police to inquire about a person's immigration status even during routine interactions. In both those cases, as the newest one in Chicago, justice for immigrants prevailed.

Which only makes sense, not only legally and morally, but logically: Police around the country often support sanctuary cities because that allows immigrants to report crimes without fearing retaliation or deportation, which contrary to the bigoted xenophobic ranting of such as Jeff Sessions, actually makes those cities safer.

14.1 - Outrage of the Week: making it harder to protest

Outrage of the Week: making it harder to protest

I said last week that the Outrage of the Week was a teaser because I didn't have time to cover it more fully and that I would make 1st order of business this week. So I'm doing exactly that and our first item is the Outrage of the Week.

I'll start with a quick reminder from last week. I started by referring you to my Rules of Rightwing Debate, number 18 of which reads: "If you can't win by the rules, change them."

I always use voter suppression as a great example of this. The right wing knows it can't win if the mass of the American public votes, so it has been engaged in a years-long effort to make it harder and harder for people to vote at all - particularly the poor, minorities, and the young; that is, the ones least likely to vote reactionary.

But now the rules they are trying to change are quite literally those of the First Amendment.

Faced with outraged citizens and ongoing protests big and small, faced with outraged constituents at town halls, the GOPpers are trying to make it harder and harder to engage in legal protest of any kind.

In the days immediately following the historic protests of January 21, GOPpers in at least six state legislatures were moving to try to block or at least minimize public opposition by criminalizing peaceful protests and sharply increasing penalties for nonviolent civil disobedience. In at least three of those cases they proposed to forgive crimes committed against protesters so long as they were done "accidentally."

The number of states considering such laws quickly grew to eight then to 10 and now stands at at least eighteen: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington either have considered or are now considering such bills.

There are proposals to ban the use of masks, to increase penalties for trespass on so-called "critical infrastructure," which seems to mean some area where the particular state does not want to allow protests, even one that would make heckling a government official a crime.

But others go far beyond that:

Last week, I told you about the proposed law in Arizona that would expose all participants in and organizers of any demonstration where any property damage occurred to racketeering charges, which involve penalties not only of a year in prison but seizure of personal property and assets. That bill passed the state Senate but died in the House, but it is not the only example of trying to financially crush protest.

Michigan is working on a law to restrict mass picketing. This is more aimed at labor unions, but could be applied to any action that is a series. If a demonstration is deemed an "illegal" mass picket, penalties for taking part would shoot up to $1000 per person per day and $10,000 per organization per day. What's most interesting is that it's hard to find a real definition of what makes a mass picket illegal; it seems to come down to if the target of the picket can convince some judge that there are more people picketing than necessary to make the point.

In another tack on the same line, in Minnesota, a proposed bill would allow localities to charge protesters for the costs of policing the protests.

Also in Minnesota, keeping the traffic flowing is more important than the ability to nonviolently protest: A bill there would triple the fine for taking part in a blockade of a roadway from $1000 to $3000 and lengthen the prison term from 90 days to a year.

An early version of a bill under consideration in Indiana called on police to clear any roadway blocked by protesters within 15 minutes by "any means necessary."

That's not good enough for Iowa and Mississippi, where proposals would make blocking a highway a felony, subject to up to five years in prison.

That's nothing, says North Dakota: We would exempt a driver from liability if they injure or kill a protester taking part in a blockade of a street or highway - provided only that it was done "accidentally," as if they hadn't noticed the traffic backup or this large group of people in the road.

That bill failed to pass out of the House by what in a sane world would be the shockingly close vote of 50-41. But meanwhile, Florida and Tennessee have bills with the same "kill a protester, no problem" idea under consideration.

Now, it's important to note that not all of these efforts succeeded or will succeed: A number of them never got out of committee, some others failed to pass, some others got through one house of a bicameral state legislature only to die in the other. Maybe ultimately none of them will pass.

It is also true that a number of these bills, even were they to be passed into law, would not survive a Constitutional challenge.

That doesn't change the fact that these bills have been introduced, considered, debated, supported at least by some. It doesn't change the fact that there is a concerted push to find ways to respond to protests not by embracing their message, not even by considering if they may have a point, but by shutting them down, silencing them by silencing those that would take part in them by threatening them with such severe consequences that they are intimidated from taking part, by, to use a more legalistic term, "chilling" their speech.

And if you have any doubt of that, just remember that Douglas McAdam, a Stanford sociology professor who studies protest movements, notes that this is hardly the first time for this. For example, when the US labor movement became active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of laws were created "to limit or outlaw labor organizing or limit labor rights."

For another example, in the 1950s, southern states responded to the emerging civil rights movement with "dozens of new bills outlawing civil rights groups, limiting the rights of assembly," and more, "all in an effort to make civil rights organizing more difficult," McAdam said.

Even the wild, laughable charges about "paid protesters" are nothing new.

So yes, this is nothing new, rather, it's what you should expect when the voice of the people rises to challenge the reactionaries. It is their natural reaction, their knee-jerk response, to look for ways to shut us up and shut us down, to make us go away.

But the fact that this is not new doesn't change, in fact it underlines, the fact that these bills comprise an assault on the right to assemble. And it doesn't change, in fact it underlines, the fact that they are an outrage.

244.7 - Outrage of the Week: undermining the Postal Service

Outrage of the Week: undermining the Postal Service

Now for our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week. This one is going to require a bit of background.

A couple of times over the past five years or so I have written about the recurring attempts to undermine and ultimately do away with the US Postal Service. We have had repeated waves of claims that the USPS was on the brink of financial collapse, of fiscal disaster, of crushing bankruptcy; it's on the edge, the precipice, of utter failure and ruin.

Nearly five years ago, the New York Times was telling us that "the United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today." In the years since, the drumbeat of impeding doom and disaster has gotten both louder and softer, but it has never stopped.

You might be forgiven if you wonder how this can continue for year after year, how the agency can continue for year after year to be on the precipice without ever falling into the abyss, but that doesn't matter to the true believers in imminent catastrophe - or, more to the point, to those who want to bring on the catastrophe in order to do away with the Postal Service, turning the job over to private profit while destroying one of the biggest and strongest unions in the US, that of the postal workers.

But let's face some facts: Mail is a bargain. You can mail a one-ounce letter, about three sheets - that's six pages of text - anywhere is the US; you could send one from Key West to Point Barrow, for 49¢, an amount that otherwise might get you half a candy bar.

And when I say anywhere, I do mean anywhere. The USPS is legally required to provide universal service and it makes deliveries to over 150 million individual addresses nationwide every week. It has to make mail service available to everywhere - you may have to travel a bit to get to a post box or to where a whole group of mailboxes stand at the end of some rural byway, but mail must be available to everyone. Even if you are way out in the country, even if you are in some neighborhood deemed "too dangerous" for services like taxis, the mail still must be available. That is a requirement which does not exist for the Postal Service's private competitors like UPS and FedEx. They don’t have to do that: They think your address is too inconvenient or too risky or otherwise not profitable, they just don't do it.

At the same time, the thing is that the Postal Service is in a truly weird situation. It is a quasi-governmental agency, run independently but still subject to legal restrictions set down by Congress even though it receives no federal money, no taxpayer money at all. It's entirely funded through the sale of postage and postal services. Despite that, despite contributing not a penny to its support, Congress has a huge say in how the USPS is operated.

For example, in 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act, one of those classically misnamed bits of legislation. Among other things, that bill mandated that within 10 years, that is by 2016, the Postal Service fully fund retiree health benefits for future retirees out to 75 years in the future. That is, Congress was requiring of the USPS that within 10 years it have enough money set aside to fully fund health care benefits for future retirees who hadn't even been born yet. That is a requirement of, a task taken on by, no other agency, corporation, or organization in or out of any level of government in the US. And it's costing the USPS about $5.5 billion a year, an amount significantly larger than the annual deficit that we're told has it perpetually on the edge of collapse.

Despite all that, the Postal Service has not only managed to survive, things were actually looking a little brighter: In February, the USPS was able to report that in the first quarter of FY2016, it posted a net income of $307 million, a reversal from a string of losses.

And now we come to the Outrage of the Week: Something else Congress did a while back was to ban the agency from raising the cost of postage beyond the inflation rate. Two years ago, the Postal Regulatory Commission allowed a temporary hike above that limit, raising the price of a stamp to 49 cents.

On April 10, the price of a stamp dropped back to 47 cents, a two cent drop that will save each of us almost nothing but represents a $2 billion annual loss to the Postal Service. Just at the moment the Postal Service might be beginning to see a glimmer of fiscal daylight through the surrounding darkness, that is the moment that the Postal Regulatory Commission dealt the agency a $2 billion blow by its failure or perhaps unwillingness to extend the temporary hike.

The US Postal Service has been ranked number one in overall service performance of the postal services in the 20 wealthiest nations, it has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency for six years running, and has been ranked the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation. The USPS is proof that even under ridiculous handicaps, government programs can work and work well - and that, along with the fact that it also proves that a strongly-unionized workforce can provide for its members while still maintaining a high level or service, has given a panoply of reactionaries more than enough reason to strive to make it fail.

I don't know if the Postal Regulatory Commission's failure to act is part of that effort or just the result of callous and bone-headed indifference to the impact. I do know that it is an outrage.

Sources cited in links:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/10/mailing-it-in.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2014/05/1602-usps-under-fire-by-those-who-want.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/11/two-cent-price-cut-could-mean-2-billion-headache-for-postal-service/
http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2012/pr12_0930rhbpayment.pdf

244.1 - Good News: Wisconsin "right-to-work" law struck down

Good News: Wisconsin "right-to-work" law struck down

Okay, as always or at least whenever possible, we start with some good news.

Despite their name, right-to-work laws have nothing to do with having a right to work, that is, a right to a job sufficient to provide for you and, if you have one, your family.

Instead, they are state laws - or in some cases state constitutional amendments - that declare that unions cannot require people working at unionized workplaces to join the union or pay dues or pay some sort of fee to the union, but that at the same time those unions are required to have all such free-riders covered by the benefits in the union contract. That is, they have to represent them for free. Such laws or constitutional provisions exist in 26 states and are widely and quite correctly seen as intended to weaken and where possible undermine unions so we can go back to the good old days of the nineteen-teens.

Right wingers defend right-to-work on the grounds that, quoting one, "No one should be forced to join a union or pay union dues as a condition of employment." But what they're really saying, then, is that those people should be able to have the higher pay that union contracts bring, they should have the better working conditions, the paid vacation time, the paid sick time, all the benefits of unions, without having to do anything for them - they should, that is, be collecting free stuff. Which in a slightly different context, would have these same right-wingers calling them lazy welfare cheats.

Gov. Scott WalkAllOverYou

Anyway, getting to the news, when he came into office, Wisconsin governor Scott WalkAllOverYou insisted that he had no interest in establishing a right-to-work law in Wisconsin. He was lying, of course, and in March 2015 Wisconsin became a right-to-work state.

The law was challenged and the good news is that on April 8 it was struck down as violating the Wisconsin state constitution, being a seizure of union property without compensation since now, unlike before, they must extend benefits to workers who don't pay dues.

The down side is that this was a County Circuit court decision, subject to appeal and with Walker by some I have to admit clever politics having pretty much packed the state supreme court with cronies, the future is not bright.

But for now, I will still call it good news, a win for the rights of labor and working men and women, that has pushed the foul and welfare-for-the-rich issue of right-to-work laws back into the public debate.

Sources cited in links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/12/1514205/-Big-blow-to-Republicans-and-Scott-Walker-Right-to-Work-ruled-unconstitutional
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/11/392373328/targeting-unions-right-to-work-movement-bolstered-by-wisconsin

243.2 - Good News: Supreme Court rejects attack on agency fees

Good News: Supreme Court rejects attack on agency fees

That's not the only Good News coming out of the Supreme Court. This, I suppose, could be filed under "dodged a bullet" rather than outright Good News, but even so, dodging a bullet is still a good thing.

The case is Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, in which a couple of self-interested pawns were rounded up by a reactionary law fund out to undermine public-sector unions by filing a suit challenging the practice of "agency fees" in public-employee unions. Under agency fees, unions can require non-members who are covered by union-negotiated contracts to pay a fee to cover their share of the expenses involved in collective bargaining. The principle of such fees for public employees was set down in a 1977 Supreme Court case.

Here, however, the plaintiffs wanted to overturn that ruling, claiming that it violated their right of free speech to have to pay anything for the benefits that the union obtained for them through collective bargaining. That is, they should be able to collect the benefits while others should bear all the burdens and pick up all the costs. In other words, typical right-wingers.

Anyway, what happened is that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the teachers union and added that it was bound by the precedent set by the 1977 case, a decision which, of course, the selfish free riders, backed by the well-heeled law firm, appealed to the Supreme Court.

When oral arguments were held in January, it looked like the court was going to go 5-4 in favor of the greedheads and free-riders. But now, with only eight members, the Court deadlocked 4-4, meaning that the lower court ruling against the union-busters and in favor of public employee unions stands.

This is unlikely to be the end of this issue, but at least for now we see that a Supreme Court lacking Injustice Antonin Skeletor isn't capable of doing the damage it otherwise would.

Sources cited in links:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-deadlocks-over-public-employee-union-case-calif-teachers-must-pay-dues/2016/03/29/b99faa30-f5b7-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_court-1040am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/3/29/1507564/-A-Scalia-less-deadlocked-Supreme-Court-spares-unions-For-now

208.6 - Footnote: White House may endorse plan to remove Trade Adjustment Assistance from bill for fast-track authority

Footnote: White House may endorse plan to remove Trade Adjustment Assistance from bill for fast-track authority

Two Footnotes to that - we're rather heavily footnoted this week - one serious, one just for fun.

The serious one is that another possibility under discussion for how the House will deal with voting on fast-track would be to decouple it from the worker assistance provision and vote for a bill that only includes fast-track authority. If that happened and it passed, it would mean the Senate, which has already passed its own trade package which did include trade assistance, in the position of negotiating with the House for a final package that did not include workers assistance that Democrats have backed for four decades.

The word is that the White House might quietly endorse this strategy - dropping trade adjustment assistance from the bill altogether - in order to get the trade deal done. The NY Times called this "an odd twist" but I find it no surprise: Last week I talked about how for the sake of the TPP Obama was prepared to close his eyes to Malaysia's involvement in the human slave trade - so what's the big deal about the domestic detritus of our deals?

The fun one is that Bloomberg.com ran down how declared and expected presidential candidates of the two major parties stand on TPP. Some were yes, some were no, some were leaning yes, some leading no - and when they got to Bernie Sanders,  it was "Hell, no."

You may not agree with the man's politics - I will admit I agree with a good amount of it, although he's too conservative for me on some things - but you can't say you don't know what he thinks.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/house-moves-to-delay-action-on-trade-bill-for-6-weeks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-11/the-trans-pacific-partnership-is-making-for-strange-political-bedfellows

UPDATE: As I expect you know, the House did have a re-vote on Thursday, June 18, again the day after I recorded the show dammit, on a fast-track bill that was indeed decoupled from Trade Adjustment Assistance. It passed 218-208, essentially the same margin as before.

The bill now goes back to the Senate, where it remains to be seen if enough Senators are willing to sign off on fast-track authority with only the promise that adjustment assistance will be dealt with later as a separate bill. (Fast-track authority, including TAA, passed the Senate with just 62 votes, just two more than the minimum required to overcome a filibuster.)

More on this, obviously, next show.

Sources cited in Update:
http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/245417-house-approves-fast-track-218-208-sending-bill-to-senate
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-19/tpp-fast-track-takes-a-step-forward-and-half-back/6558474

208.5 - Update on fast-track for TPP

Update on fast-track for TPP

Okay, last week I gave what was then the most timely update on the question of Obama getting Trade Promotion Authority, or fast-track, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the massive, still-secret trade deal looking to unite 12 Pacific Rim nations, involving 40% of the world's economy, in a single massive free-trade zone.

Unfortunately, the one thing I couldn't tell you was how the vote on the motion turned out because it was to take place on Friday, two days after I recorded the show. So even though events were moving fast, in a way I couldn't. I had to lag behind.

Ah but now it's this week and in case you've been asleep for the past several days, let me update you.

I mentioned last week that fast-track had become even more controversial in the House of Representatives because of a move to finance extension of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), which is intended to help workers out of a job due to trade agreements, with a $700 million cut in Medicare. The pro-TPP gang tried to finesse the issue by holding two separate votes, one on trade assistance and one on fast-track and we'd have to see how that worked out.

Happily, it didn't. The rules of debate required that both bills, trade assistance and fast-track, pass in order for the package to move forward.

With unions, environmentalists, privacy advocates, consumer groups, health care groups, family farmer associations, civil rights groups, and even church groups pushing for defeat, when the Trade Adjustment Assistance bill came up for a vote on June 12, it went down to a resounding defeat, 302-126. The GOPper leadership insisted on going ahead with the vote on fast-track, even though that was now symbolic. That did pass, by the narrow vote of 219-211.

Corporate media have a storyline ready to explain the outcome: It was all the fault of (gasp-shrink-in-horror) "Big Labor." And they said it in sometimes very revealing language.

For example, USA Today said House Democrats are opposing TPP "for a simple, but not very good, reason. Labor has pulled out all the stops to persuade, cajole and pressure them into killing it," adding later that blocking the pact "would be widely interpreted as the Democrats putting the interests of unions first."

Omigosh how horrifying! How disgraceful! The Democrats - not all of them I hasten to add, but enough - Democrats supported the interests of a core constituency! They put the interests of ordinary working people ahead of those of transnational corporations and international banks! How DARE they!

Remember what I keep telling you about they are not on your side. Sometimes the mask slips a bit, sometimes is slips a little more.

Anyway, what the symbolic vote the fast-track did was give the pro-corporate lobby that is the House leadership a basis to push for a re-vote the next week.

The re-vote never came - or, more accurately, hasn't come.

Instead, on June 16, the House voted 236-189 to put off the vote on trade adjustment aid for six weeks, until the end of July.

The first thing to note is that this makes clear that the corporate lackeys in the House - and the White House - still don't have the votes to get fast-track through. And they want to give themselves time to cajole, confound, and coerce enough members to get the Amazing Mr. O the banker-pleasing power on trade that he wants. In fact, they want to give themselves all the way until the summer recess, which indicates they know this won't be easy.

It also means, by the same token, that despite what happened on Friday, this is not over - fast-track and through it the TPP have been wounded, wounded badly, but this is not over.

Still, there are additional hopeful signs in that some of the other nations involved are getting rattled.

Australian Trade Minister Andrew Robb said things are getting "quite problematic" and it appears the government is close to admitting defeat on the whole deal.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s Foreign Affairs Minister K Shanmugam is saying that US credibility in the Asia-Pacific region is on the line, and you know that when someone resorts to pulling out that line, which always kind of translates in context to "you have to do this stupid thing so that people will believe you when you go to do something else stupid," they are desperate.

What all this means, in sum, is that fast-track, again, is not dead and the fight isn't over - Is it ever? - but fast-track and by that means the entire Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, can be defeated. We can do this.

Sources cited in links:
http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58&id=a16dceb74f&e=73f9e7c46a
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/06/12/3669258/tpp-defeat/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/house-moves-to-delay-action-on-trade-bill-for-6-weeks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/government-pessimistic-over-bigger-trans-pacific-partnership/story-fnu2pycd-1227402046433
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/us-credibility-in-asia/1921082.html

UPDATE: As I expect you know, the House did have a re-vote on Thursday, June 18, again the day after I recorded the show dammit, on a fast-track bill that was decoupled from Trade Adjustment Assistance. It passed 218-208, essentially the same margin as before.

The bill now goes back to the Senate, where it remains to be seen if enough Senators are willing to sign off on fast-track authority with only the promise that adjustment assistance will be dealt with later as a separate bill. (Fast-track authority, including TAA, passed the Senate with just 62 votes, just two more than the minimum required to overcome a filibuster.)

More on this, obviously, next show.

Sources cited in Update:
http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/245417-house-approves-fast-track-218-208-sending-bill-to-senate
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-19/tpp-fast-track-takes-a-step-forward-and-half-back/6558474

Left Side of the Aisle #208

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of June 18-24, 2015

This week:

Good News: Net neutrality upheld in first court case
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/search?q=net+neutrality&max-results=20&by-date=true
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2889656/fcc-passes-net-neutrality-rules-reclassifies-broadband-as-utility.html
http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-wins-early-battle-in-net-neutrality-legal-war/
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/appeals-court-declines-block-net-neutrality-rules-n374001

Footnote: GOPpers trying to prevent FCC from enforcing Net neutrality
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/10/1392153/-House-Republicans-sneak-net-neutrality-attack-into-appropriations-bill
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/11/1344160/-New-poll-Conservatives-overwhelmingly-support-net-neutrality

Good News: SCOTUS will not hear appeal of decision striking down part of North Carolina's draconian anti-choice law
http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/06/15/usa-court-abortion-idINL1N0Z111U20150615
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/supreme-courtnorth-carolina-abortion-mandatory-ultrasound-law
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-15/abortion-curbs-voided-as-u-s-high-court-rejects-north-carolina

Footnote: North Carolina not the only state doing this
http://www.guttmacher.org/
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/supreme-courtnorth-carolina-abortion-mandatory-ultrasound-law
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/15/1391598/-New-Study-Reveals-Americans-Taking-A-Different-Stance-On-Women-s-Reproductive-Choice

Update on fast-track for TPP
http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58&id=a16dceb74f&e=73f9e7c46a
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/06/12/3669258/tpp-defeat/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/house-moves-to-delay-action-on-trade-bill-for-6-weeks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/government-pessimistic-over-bigger-trans-pacific-partnership/story-fnu2pycd-1227402046433
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/us-credibility-in-asia/1921082.html

Footnote: White House may endorse plan to remove Trade Adjustment Assistance from bill for fast-track authority
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/house-moves-to-delay-action-on-trade-bill-for-6-weeks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-11/the-trans-pacific-partnership-is-making-for-strange-political-bedfellows

Our Lovely Little War: new US base in Iraq could be "model" for more
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/06/2076-obamas-lovely-little-war-grows.html
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/06/11/general-new-us-hub-in-iraq-could-be-model/21194718/
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/iraq-barack-obama-us-military-combat-forces-islamic-state-118842.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/11/us-mideast-crisis-usa-congress-idUSKBN0OR2LC20150611
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/kennedy-agrees-to-send-instructors-to-train-troops

Clown Award: Tim Hunt
https://twitter.com/connie_stlouis/status/607813783075954688/photo/1
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0611/Nobel-laureate-resigns-after-controversial-remark-Is-academia-sexist
http://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/33D4FF44-CEF5-45F7-8845-00E5D40525BB/0/Tab11.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/why-are-there-still-so-few-women-in-science.html?_r=1

Outrage of the Week: US sabotages conference on Non-Proliferation Treaty
http://www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2015/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/03/world/nuclear-weapon-states/
http://www.theguardian.com/news/defence-and-security-blog/2015/jun/02/nuclear-disarmament-forget-it
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31010-obama-administration-sabotages-nuclear-nonproliferation-conference#
http://afsc.org/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/23/netanyahu-thanks-us-blocking-middle-east-nuclear-arms-ban

201.1 - Good News: "Fight for 15" movement grows

Good News: "Fight for 15" movement grows

Starting, as I always like to, with some Good News, the movement known as "Fight for 15" continues to expand.

The effort for a living wage of $15 an hour for notoriously underpaid fast-food workers began with a single rally in New York City in November 2012. Since then there have been nine days of coordinated one-day strikes at fast food restaurants - and on April 15 there was the largest day yet: 230 cities across the country were the scene of such strikes.

The movement has grown enough that it has spread beyond the borders of the US: Some McDonald's outlets in Greece, Canada, Brazil, and Hong Kong saw protests by workers demanding higher wages. There were also reports of strikes in Italy and New Zealand.

Perhaps even more significantly, the movement has spread beyond fast-food restaurants to address the needs of underpaid workers across the reach of sectors of the economy where they are commonly found, areas such as health care, retail sales, home care, and child care.

In the words of Kendall Fells, organizing director of the group Fight for $15, which is backed by the Service Employees International Union, the movement has become "something different" and "much more of an economic and racial justice movement than the fast-food workers strikes of the past two years."

While the company would of course deny any connection, it clearly was in response to this movement that McDonald's announced an intention to raise the minimum wage it pays workers at the restaurants it operates directly to $10 an hour by the end of 2016 - and to pay them at least $1 an hour above the local minimum wage starting July 1. Some critics have noted that this doesn't apply to franchises, which are 90% of all McDonald's outlets, but even at that, it means the company is bending, is being forced by circumstances to raise the pay of its workers.

Which then directly relates this campaign to the broader question of the minimum wage itself. Widely, even wildly, popular with the public, raising the minimum is approaching a critical mass of not just opinion but of active concern. Some cities have passed and others are considering a local minimum of $15 an hour and a number of places have already raised their local minimum wage; in fact a majority of states now have state minimum wage levels above the pathetically-low federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

Again, clearly in response to these developments, some retailers - specifically Gap, Walmart, TJ Maxx, Marshall’s, and Target - representing another area of the economy notoriously populated with underpaid workers, have promised to raise their bottom wages to $9 or $10 an hour.

Which, again, some have criticized as inadequate, which it is. But again, it means that the corporations are bending, they are being forced to recognize economic reality. Yes, they will do as little as they can get away with - but that doesn't change the fact that they, along with local and state governments, are being forced to move because millions of underpaid workers have gotten fed up and increasing numbers of them are willing to take it to the streets to say so.

And that is Good News.

Sources cited in links:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/04/15/3647217/fast-food-strikes-2015/
http://www.bignewsnetwork.com/index.php/sid/231993321
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/04/01/3641883/mcdonalds-minimum-wage/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/search?q=minimum+wage&max-results=20&by-date=true

187.1 - Good News: minimum wage hikes

Good News: minimum wage hikes

Let's start the week, as I always like to, with some Good News.

Around this time, a lot of shows will do some sort of re-cap of the preceding year. We're not doing that, but it is appropriate that both our bits of Good News this week concern things we have talked about a number of times over 2014.

Our first bit is that a week before Christmas, the mayor and city council of Louisville, Kentucky reached an agreement to raise the minimum wage in the city to $9 an hour over the next three years and to tie it beyond that time to the Consumer Price Index, that is, the inflation rate, for urban cities in the region.

Louisville thus joins places including Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, and Washington, DC, in raising the minimum wage in that city. In each case, they did so by overcoming the opposition of businesses and business leaders who continue to claim that giving the lowest-paid workers even a small raise will lead to major job losses and economic doom no matter how many times experience has shown that claim to be untrue.

For one example, when the small city of SeaTac, Washington, about 12 or 13 miles south of Seattle, raised its base pay to $15 per hour in 2013, employers were up in arms. But now, just a year later, the Puget Sound Business Journal reports that references to the increase produce nothing more than a "shoulder shrug."

In fact, 2014 has been called by some "the year of the minimum wage." It was, certainly, the year that the work of the preceding years began to pay off.

Besides the cities that have acted, 13 states, including some deep red ones, passed minimum wage increases in 2014, with the result that over 1.5 million American workers got a raise as of January 1.  Another 1.4 million workers in New York state saw a raise on that day because of changes passed in 2013 and more than a million others saw their wages hiked because their states link the minimum wage to inflation. All together, at the start of the new year nearly 4.5 million American workers got a raise as a direct result of the campaign to raise the minimum wage.

As of January 1, 2015, 29 states and Washington, DC, have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage.

What has happened is especially happy because these increases have come as the result of an active campaign spearheaded, as we here have noted several times, by low-age workers particularly in the fast-food industry joined by colleagues working for places like the notoriously anti-union Walmart who have staged a series of lightning strikes and public demonstrations calling for a wage of $15 an hour.

These improvements have come, that is, as the result of worker power arousing a public conscience generating a force that the corporations could not overcome and the politicians, or at least enough of them, dared not oppose. And that is good news.

One last thought: If 29 states and DC have minimums above the federal level, that means that 21 states and the feds still apply the federal minimum wage, which is a puny $7.25 an hour. Just to remind you how low that is, working at that pay full time, that is, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, gives you a gross income of $15,080 - which is $650 below the federal poverty level for a family of two and close to $9000 below the poverty line for a family of four.

Which should also indicate to you that even with the increases, these new minimum wages are not enough. Just reaching poverty level for a family of four, again working full-time, year-round, requires a wage of at lease $11.47 an hour, which most of these increases do not reach and will not reach even over the next few years.

If 2014 was the year of the minimum wage, let's see if we can make 2015 the year of the living wage. Now, that would be really good news.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2014/12/18/louisville-city-council-approves-hour-minimum-wage/20622297/
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-12-29/minimum-wages-to-increase-in-several-states-cities-in-2015
http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage-chart.aspx
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/dignity-4
http://familiesusa.org/product/federal-poverty-guidelines

184.2 - Good News: More local governments recognize workers' rights

Good News: More local governments recognize workers' rights

On another front, more and more states and cities are picking up where the federal government has failed to act and are recognizing the need for greater protection and respect for the needs of workers, particularly low-wage workers. The bad news is that this is necessary at all, that we are more and more becoming a low-wage, part-time nation, but the good news here is that, again, more states and municipalities are recognizing their responsibility to do something in response.

On November 25, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the Retail Workers Bill of Rights, the country’s first-ever legislation aimed at improving life for retail employees.

Retail chains that have 11 or more locations across the country and employ 20 or more people in San Francisco will now have to provide their workers at least two weeks’ advance notice of their schedules. Failure to do so will mean having to give those workers additional “predictability pay.” Disrupted lives due to shifting schedules posted on short notice have become a major complaint among particularly (but not exclusively) part-time workers, some of who won't even know if they will work a shift until they show up that day.

The San Francisco measure will also require employers to improve the treatment of part-time employees, give current workers the opportunity to take on more hours before the company hires new people, pay "on-call" people whose shifts are canceled, and give part-time employees the same starting wage as those working full time in the same position and access to the same benefits.

And a week later, on December 2, the Chicago City Council voted 44-5 to pass fast-tracked legislation to raise the minimum wage for workers in the city from the current $8.25 an hour to $13 an hour by 2019, with the first hike, to $10 an hour, to come in 2015.

Part of the reason this is happening is that, in another bit of unfortunately-necessary but still Good News, low-wage workers are getting fed up themselves, fed up enough to ignore retaliation and the prospect of getting fired, and are taking to the streets.

For one example: Friday, November 30, marked the third consecutive year of protests and strikes against Walmart. The protests, under the banner of  "$15 and full time" - that is, a $15 an hour minimum wage and full-time work for anyone who wants it - were led by OUR Walmart, a union-backed worker group, alongside community and labor groups in different cities.

Thousands of Walmart employees and labor union members protested at 1,000 Walmart stores across the country. At least 11 workers and supporters were arrested for blocking traffic outside a Walmart in Chicago.

The actions come after a week in which workers walked off the job in 10 states, employees in Los Angeles staged a fast, and workers in D.C. orchestrated a sit-in where the associates wore masking tape over their mouths to protest of Walmart “silencing of employees who complain about working conditions."

Dan Schlademan of Making Change at Walmart, a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union which supports the campaign, said he expects the number of strikers to be in the hundreds by the end of the day. That number is small compared to Walmart's total work force, but do not forget that just a couple of years ago, it would have been unthinkable for it to happen at all.

Sources cited in links:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/11/26/3597287/san-francisco-retail-bill-of-rights/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/02/chicago-minimum-wage_n_6255436.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/28/walmart-black-friday-protests_n_6237208.html
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/11/29/3597575/thousands-of-workers-protest-walmart-they-stole-our-thanksgiving/
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/11/26/3597311/walmart-fast/

Outrage of the Week: Time and teacher-bashing

Outrage of the Week: Time and teacher-bashing

Finally for this week, we have our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week..

You may have already heard about this or seen something about it, it has been in the news, but there may be some aspects you don't know.

This week, the outrage starts with the cover of Time magazine for November 3. It portrays a judge's gavel about to smash an apple alongside the text "Rotten Apples: It's Nearly Impossible to Fire a Bad Teacher."

Which, right off the top, is a problem because it's not "nearly impossible" to fire a bad teacher - you just have to have an actual reason and give them a hearing.

Media watchdog FAIR says that the cover, insultingly depicting the teaching profession as full of "rotten apples" that deserve to be smashed, might make you suspect Time "is doing some good old-fashioned teacher-bashing." And, the group says, "You'd be right."

A petition drive started by the American Federation of Teachers produced more than 100,000 names in less than a week, demanding Time apologize for the cover.

And here the outrage deepens. Nancy Gibbs, Time’s managing editor, responded in the magazine by claiming that

Union leaders … are charging that by writing about legal efforts to remove bad teachers from classrooms, with the cover line 'Rotten Apples,' TIME has insulted all teachers....

That statement is a blatant lie. The petition specifically objected to the cover, not the stories. In fact, it said that "the cover doesn’t even reflect Time's own reporting" and that the articles themselves "present a more balanced view of the issues."

So for Time to charge that petition supporters - oh, wait, it's "union leaders," I guess no one else signed - for Time to claim that the petition said that writing about efforts to remove bad teachers is an insult is, again, a blatant lie.

But it gets even worse because the petition was too kind to the article.

The article is about a small group of very rich Silicon Valley "tech titan" millionaires who, despite lacking any educational expertise or experience, have decided that they are the ones who can fix America's supposedly broken public schools and that the way to do that is to attack tenure, the system that says that after a certain point on the job, a teacher can't be fired except for cause.

What got this started? What gave them the idea that this is our educational panacea? David Welch, one of these millionaires, says he asked a "big-city California superintendent" how to fix the schools and was "blown away" by his answer, which was "Give me control over my workforce." That is, a guy with power thinks the answer to any problems is to give him more power. I can see why these millionaires identified with that so strongly.

Time does admit that teacher tenure used to be important, noting that before tenure laws,

a teacher could be fired for holding unorthodox political views or attending the wrong church, or for no reason at all if the local party boss wanted to pass on the job to someone else.

But now, apparently, Time wants us to believe that is all in the past. There is no more job discrimination, no one gets fired for their political views or their religion or for being homosexual, or because someone wants to give the job to someone else, or for being a thorn in the side of the bosses, no, that's all in the past! Just doesn't happen any more! So who needs tenure?

But the worst thing of all is that after going on about the supposed "flood of new academic research" backing up the millionaires' attacks on tenure, the article admits in the 27th paragraph of a 28-paragraph story that the methodology involved is at best questionable and may be useless if not downright bogus.

So Time magazine, after drooling and fawning over a bunch of very rich elitists who are going to "repair public education" in an article that did not quote a single teacher or union official but did manage to include comments from a researcher for a "conservative education think tank" and someone from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, an article that never even hinted at the connection between attacks on tenure and attacks on teachers' unions and how the former is just the wedge to attack the latter, after all that, Time gets around to mentioning that the whole anti-tenure enterprise may be based on vapor. And it illustrates it with a picture of a gavel about to smash a supposedly rotten apple.

The whole thing is at best journalistic malfeasance - and an outrage.

Sources cited in links:
http://fair.org/blog/2014/10/24/the-big-problem-with-times-teacher-bashing-cover-story/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/time-magazine-teacher-petition_n_6078092.html
http://time.com/3547832/teacher-tenure-debate/
http://action.aft.org/c/44/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=9270
http://time.com/3533556/the-war-on-teacher-tenure/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2014/11/1812-footnote-there-are-still-battles.html

174.6 - Update: fast-food workers' strike

Update: fast-food workers' strike

Here's an update for you. Last week I said that fast food workers were planning another one-day strike to push for a living wage but it was kind of odd telling you much about it because it was to happen the day after I recorded the show - which meant that it hadn't happened yet when I did the show but would have happened by the time you saw the show.

Well, it's a week later, and it all happened and frankly I think it was terrific. Protests and strikes occurred in over 100 cities, involving thousands of workers at  places like McDonald's, KFC, Taco Bell, Wendy's, and more. There was nonviolent civil disobedience - generally sit-ins blocking traffic - at a number of sites. A representative of Fight for 15, the group organizing the walkout, said nearly 500 people had been arrested or cited - that is, given the equivalent of a traffic ticket without an arrest - during the actions.

This was a country-wide protest: Police arrested 47 people in Kansas City; 27 in West Milwaukee; 19 in New York City; 30 in Detroit; 11 in San Diego; 8 in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania; seven in Miami; three in Denver. Nineteen citations were issued in Chicago; 10 in Indianapolis; 13 in Hartford; 10 in Las Vegas.

Detroit

Now, I will say that there are people who don't think the movement's goal of a living wage of $15 an hour is wise on the grounds that such a wage will encourage more highly-educated people to compete for those jobs, leaving the less educated even further behind. This "argument," I will note, is based on nothing but their own assumptions, one of which is that raising the wages for these low-paid workers, in effect creating a baseline for the prevailing wage in an area, would not affect other wages for other jobs in that same area, raising the wages for more skilled work with higher educational requirements, which would do away with that supposed incentive of more educated people to go flip burgers.

Still, the reason I mention that at all is that even some of those people will admit the strikes have been what one called "a stunning success," saying that, again quoting,

Kansas City

[f]or the cost of a few Super Bowl ads, the SEIU and some dedicated fast food workers have managed to completely rewire how the public and politicians think about wages.

As I noted last week, these strikes have been central to the effort to keep the twin issues of the minimum wage and wage inequality in the public debate even as corporate America, the rich, and many in government, to the extent those don't overlap, would rather not have us thinking about them.

And there is a lot to think about.

According to a survey by the Federal Reserve released last week, the gap between the richest Americans and the rest of the nation widened after the Great Recession, worsening the already-bad  income inequality in the US.

Chicago

From 2010 to 2013, average income for U.S. families rose about 4 percent after accounting for inflation. All of the income growth was concentrated among the top 3 percent of earners, who sucked up 30.5 percent of all income.

Looking at wealth rather than income made it worse: In 1989, the richest 3 percent held 44.8 percent of the net worth in the country. By 2007 that was up to 51.8 percent and by 2013, it was 54.4 percent.

According to a new study out of the Harvard Business School, release September 8, that widening gap is "unsustainable" and will ultimately be damaging not only to the economy as a whole, but to the corporations that depend on it for their profit.

Even so, the same study concluded, the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon and workers will continue to struggle to make ends meet while corporations continue to reap the benefits of that inequality.

Janet Yellen

Although that study doesn't say this, one reason it's unlikely to get better without seeing people in the streets was found in the response of Fed Chair Janet Yellen - Janet Yellen was another of those "great choices" that we were all obliged to love because Obama nominated her and so this is what you get when you do that - Janet Yellen responded to evidence of growing income inequality by calling it a disturbing trend, attributing some of it to the weak jobs market but also to underlying trends like technology and globalization.

Note the passive voice. In other words, income inequality, she's saying, is not the result of conscious decisions by corporate leaders to maximize their profit by squeezing their workers, it's not the result of a decades-long right-wing campaign to contain, undermine, and ultimately destroy unions, it's not the result of any refusals or failures of the Congress and the White House - or the Fed - to address it, it's not, that is, the result of anything anyone actually did. It's all about disembodied "trends" such as "technology and globalization." Forces of economic nature not subject to or driven by human control or direction. It's "a disturbing trend," but hey, what can you do?

That's what you get when you forget that when it comes to the interests of corporate America and our economic elite, people like Janet Yellen are not on your side. Barack Obama is not on your side. The workers in the streets are on your side. And don't you forget it.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/fast-food-protest-arrests_n_5765592.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/fast-food-strikes_n_5768714.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/were-movement-now-fast-food-workers-strike-150-cities-n195256
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/09/07/the_fast_food_strikes_a_stunning_success_for_organized_labor.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/wealth-gap-recession_n_5767320.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/08/wealth-gap_n_5783550.html

Left Side of the Aisle #174

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of September 11-17, 2014

This week:

Good News: "Save the Whales"
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/09/05/us-usa-california-whales-idINKBN0H01YY20140905
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/blue-whale/

Good News: and the beat goes on
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/wisconsin-indiana-gay-marriage_n_5767710.html
http://mic.com/articles/98034/a-federal-appeals-court-just-struck-down-gay-marriage-bans-in-indiana-and-wisconsin
http://news.yahoo.com/appeals-court-invalidates-indiana-wisconsin-gay-marriage-bans-193756415.html
http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/7th%20Circuit%20same%20sex%20marriage.pdf
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/post-doma-9th-circuit-weigh-gay-marriage-idaho-nevada-hawaii
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/hawaii-idaho-nevada-gay-marriage-laws-court-25338944
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-gay-marriage-hearing-20140908-story.html

Not Good News: the string is broken
http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/louisiana-marriage-ban-is-constitutional-federal-judge-rules
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/03/louisiana-gay-marriage_n_5760012.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/03/louisiana-gay-marriage-ruling_n_5761112.html
http://www.freedomtomarry.org/pages/history-and-timeline-of-marriage
http://theweek.com/article/index/228541/how-marriage-has-changed-over-centuries
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

Outrage of the Week: Air Force bars atheist from enlisting
http://news.yahoo.com/atheist-must-swear-god-leave-us-air-force-232153866.html
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlevi
http://www.alternet.org/story/67385/the_evangelical_christian_takeover_of_the_military
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2012/06/the-air-force-and-the-increasing-misuse-of-the-term-religious-freedom.html
http://www.towleroad.com/2013/11/advocate-of-gay-cure-therapy-overseeing-cadet-counseling-at-us-air-force-academy.html

Unintentional Humor: Bill O'Reilly speaks the truth
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/bill-oreilly-jon-stewart-ferguson_n_5764992.html?ir=Media

Update: fast-food workers' strike
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/fast-food-protest-arrests_n_5765592.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/fast-food-strikes_n_5768714.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/were-movement-now-fast-food-workers-strike-150-cities-n195256
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/09/07/the_fast_food_strikes_a_stunning_success_for_organized_labor.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/wealth-gap-recession_n_5767320.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/08/wealth-gap_n_5783550.html

Clown Award: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy
http://blogs.usda.gov/2014/08/29/us-forest-service-asks-how-does-your-marshmallow-roast/
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/09/06/republicans-up-in-arms-over-governments-healthy-smores/20958350/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2014/09/04/gop-leader-mccarthy-to-forest-service-dont-tell-me-how-to-make-a-smore/

173.1 - Good News: fast-food workers campaign

Good News: fast-food workers campaign

We start today, as I try to do whenever I can, with some Good News.

This is kind of interesting Good News, because it hasn't happened yet at the time I do this but will be over by the time you see this.

On Thursday, September 4, workers at places like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and KFC staged a protest walk-out, a one-day strike, in their on-going campaign to secure a living wage for workers in the fast-food industry.

According to Fight For 15, the group organizing the campaign, strikes were to take place in more than 100 cities and some of those actions are to include nonviolent civil disobedience such as sit-ins to dramatize the importance of the issue. What's more, thousands of home care workers are expected to join in solidarity.

The "15" in Fight for 15 comes from the call for a $15 an hour wage. The other major demand is the right to unionize without retaliation for trying to do so.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage for restaurant workers in May 2013 was just $8.74 - which is not a living wage.

The strikes began with just 200 workers in New York City in November 2012 but in the two years since have occurred every few months, including the one pictured, which took place at Union Station in Washington, DC. While the gains for those in the industry have been modest so far, the campaign has made a notable impact in making the issue of the minimum wage one that can't be ignored.

For one example, thirteen states increased their minimum wages by an average of 28¢ an hour at the start of the year and other increases in other states are already scheduled to come into effect.

More recently and perhaps more significantly, in July the National Labor Relations Board ruled that McDonald’s and its franchisees are jointly responsible for violations of wage and labor standards committed by those franchisees. The corporations have always insisted that they bear no responsibility for those violations. Now they can't.

The strikers in Thursday's actions are being supported by the Service Employees International Union.

So it's fed-up workers demanding justice and taking it to the streets to that end: Now, that is good news.

Sources cited in links:
http://time.com/3223048/fast-food-strikes-150-cities/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/02/us-usa-restaurants-strike-idUSKBN0GX07320140902

Left Side of the Aisle #173

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of September 4-10, 2014

This week:
Good News: fast-food workers campaign
http://time.com/3223048/fast-food-strikes-150-cities/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/02/us-usa-restaurants-strike-idUSKBN0GX07320140902

Good News: Texas anti-choice law blocked
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/health/US-Appeals-Court-Upholds-New-Texas-Abortion-Rules-252750191.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-halts-key-part-texas-abortion-law-n192281

Update: US raid on Somalia
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-carries-out-counter-terrorism-strike-in-somalia/2014/09/01/19067e8c-323b-11e4-8f02-03c644b2d7d0_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/range-of-options-to-combat-islamic-state-are-under-discussion-senior-official-says/2014/08/22/f745619a-2a2a-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/02/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSKBN0GS10C20140902

Update: war hawks still at it
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/lawmakers-push-white-house-take-action-islamic-state-risk/

Failing to take violence against women seriously
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-cee-lo-green-no-contest-plea-20140829-story.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/cee-lo-green-pleads-contest-slipping-ecstasy-woman-article-1.1921615
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/08/30/cee-lo-green-pleads-no-contest-in-drugging-case/20954860/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolo_contendere
http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/ceelo-greens-show-canceled-by-tbs-after-controversial-rape-tweets-201429
http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/ceelo-green-voices-controversial-rape-opinion-deletes-tweets-201429

Outrage of the Week: Israel steals West Bank land
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/08/31/rebuilding-gaza-will-take-20-years-group-says/20954997/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/31/israel-west-bank_n_5745498.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/03/international-response-israel-land-grab_n_5758256.html?cps=gravity
http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/charter-destruction-palestinian.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TG0vdzrmt4&feature=youtu.be

Clown Award: Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140821/NEWS/408210325/-1/news11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/28/elizabeth-warren-defends-_n_5733164.html

163.7 - Footnote: Workers rights in US are substandard

Footnote: Workers rights in US are substandard

As a footnote to that, it's not only minimum wage workers who are getting screwed.

According to a new global comparison by the International Trade Union Confederation, an international labor coalition that represents 176 million workers from 161 different nations, the United States ranks in the bottom half of the world when it comes to labor rights.

The ITUC has a five-point scale, with one being the best and five the worst. It's based on a 97-point evaluation of the state of labor rights in each country, ranging from worker-related fundamental civil liberties to collective bargaining rights.

The US scores a four, joining other nations where the ITUC finds “systematic violations” of worker rights. The only country in North or Central America to get a five was Guatemala.

American labor rights and union strength have been waning for decades, a decline that has accelerated of late. Over the past three years, more than a dozen states have put restrictions on collective bargaining for public employees and 19 have taken up anti-union, anti-worker, so-called “right-to-work” laws over that same time.

And just like in the case of the minimum wage, the world is starting to notice.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/survey_ra_2014_eng_v2.pdf
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/05/29/3442519/us-labor-rights-rankings/
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/10/31/2864651/workers-rights-states/

160.2 - USPS under fire by those who want to destroy it

USPS under fire by those who want to destroy it

Okay, they're still at it. They in this case being the people who think that public services, that is, taxpayer-paid, government-supplied services, to the general public or the poor, pubic services in general, are inherently just plain bad and want to destroy them.

They've now taken renewed aim at a perennial target, a target for two reasons, one being that it's successful and has been for a long time: the US Postal Service.

I'm sure you've heard more than once how the Postal Service is on the brink of financial collapse, of fiscal disaster, of crushing bankruptcy; it's on the edge, the precipice, of utter failure and ruin. You might be forgiven if you wonder how this can continue for year after year, how the agency can continue for year after year to be on the precipice without ever falling into the abyss, but that doesn't matter to the true believers in imminent catastrophe - most specifically, Rep. Darrell Issa, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and who on an almost regular schedule introduces bills to "save" the USPS by slashing away parts of it.

He has, for example, proposed eliminating Saturday delivery, closing post offices, contracting out retail services from the USPS to places like Staples, and closing mail processing plants, which was somehow supposed to speed up delivery. And now, he's gotten through the committee he chairs a demand that the USPS end “door delivery” for 15 million postal customers over the next 10 years, forcing them to use banks of so-called "cluster boxes" at curbside.

Opponents say it's a lousy idea, noting that it just can't work in a lot of urban areas where there is no place to put a cluster box, but Issa just responds that it will save money - about $2 billion a year, he says.

And make no mistake, the Postal Service does have and has had financial troubles. Despite continued cost-cutting, a 2.3 percent rise in operating revenue this year, and increased employee productivity, the Postal Service still reported a $1.9 billion loss for the first three months of 2014.

But here's the thing, the thing that is almost never mentioned in media coverage of this. Remember what I said, what, two weeks ago, about the media failing to inform us, about how we are uninformed. malinformed, and misinformed? This is another example.

The Postal Service is in a truly weird situation. It is a quasi-governmental agency, run independently but still subject to legal restrictions set down by Congress even though it receives no federal money, no taxpayer money at all. It's entirely funded through the sale of postage and postal services. Despite that, despite contributing not a penny to its support, Congress has a huge say in how the USPS is operated.

For example, it has banned the agency from raising the cost of postage beyond the inflation rate. In other words, in real dollars, the only way the USPS could increase its income is by expanding its business - the very thing all the plans to, we're told, "save" the Postal Service would prevent by making it hard if not impossible for the agency even to maintain the level of service it provides now.

What's more, in 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act, one of those classically misnamed bits of legislation. Among other things, that bill mandated that within 10 years, that is by 2016, the Postal Service fully fund retiree health benefits for future retirees out to 75 years in the future. That is, Congress was requiring of the USPS that within 10 years it have enough money set aside to fully fund health care benefits for future retirees who hadn't even been born yet. That is a requirement of, a task taken on by, no other agency, corporation, or organization in or out of any level of government in the US. And it's costing the USPS about $5.5 billion a year.

Hey, there's a way the Postal Service could save a hunk of money: Release it from this onerous, totally unnecessary, and utterly ridiculous requirement! But oh, no, we can't do that. Oh, no, what we have to do is cut services and fire workers.

Which raises the other reason the Postal Service is such a frequent target of attempts to cut it down or undermine it. (Remember I said there are two reasons.) The USPS has a strong union which is also one of the largest unions in the US, with something approaching 600,000 members, a union that has secured decent pay, decent benefits, and decent job protection for its members. Which, in case you've forgotten, is what unions are for! So when someone tries to make you resent the pay or benefits a postal worker has, you keep in mind that the issue isn't why they get so much, it's why you get to little. I keep saying this: Make sure you're mad at the right target.

And the one thing that people like Darrell Issajerk hate more than successful public services is successful public services that have strong unions.

Make no mistake, that, at the end of the day, is what the attacks on the Postal Service are about: They are about breaking the union. And if they have to take the entire USPS down to do it, they will.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.news.ruralinfo.net/2014/05/committee-passes-controversial-issa-bill-apwu.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/postal-service-communal-mailboxes_n_5366124.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/10/mailing-it-in.html