Friday, January 30, 2009
Crying for Change from Coast to Coast (1:41 pm)
All over the nation, communities are clamoring to be heard. In this worsening economic landscape, migrant communities are being terrorized by violent raids, families are destabilized, wage earners are jailed or detained, and xenophobic pundits continue to fuel a rising wave of hate crimes against Latinos.
The stakes could not be any higher: Now is the time to make our voices heard, especially after being ignored for so long by those with the power to make a difference. And so we are gathering in numbers in San Francisco and throughout California:
A coalition of groups that has been working with San Francisco’s supervisors, community leaders, social service providers, and faith groups is gathering at City Hall to call for a halt to the raids and for support of fair and humane immigration reform. We will be joining our voices with thousands of others across California and across our country who found hope in the words of our new President Barack Obama during his inauguration speech […] —Choosing Hope Over Fear in Immigration Policy Reform, New America Media, Jan. 21, 2009And on the same day, marching on Washington, DC (with photos):
Over a thousand people are gathered in DC, a day after inaugurating our new president, to demand A New Day for Immigration. —Immigrants March for Reform in DC, RaceWire, Jan. 21, 2009Sending letters from Albequerque, New Mexico:
[C]oncerned New Mexico groups are among thousands of people signed on to a letter to President Obama asking for drastic alterations [in U.S. immigration enforcement policy]. Jo Ann Gutierrez Bejar with the Southwest Organizing Project says even families in Albuquerque neighborhoods feel intimidated by the presence of the Border Patrol. —NM Groups Push Obama for Immigration Change: “End Worker Raids Now”, Public News Service, January 28, 2009Immigrant rights groups are organizing across the nation:
On January 27, the National Network of Immigrant and Refugee Rights will be releasing an “Open Letter to President Barack Obama” to establish a new framework for addressing immigration policy. You can help by circulating it to your friends and by signing the petition[.] —Time to Take... read more
posted by Nezua | start the discussion
Thursday, January 29, 2009
New Report Shows Sharp Union Growth —Despite Unionbusting (1:29 am)
A new report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that union membership rose sharply last year, adding over 400, 000 new union members. But that growth occurred in the face of a wide range of legal and illegal unionbusting tactics and intimidation: Studies of hundreds of organizing campaigns have found that a fifth of all pro-union activists are fired during a campaign, half of all employers threaten to shut down their plant and roughly 80% of employers hire unionbusting consultants.
Even so, as union activists point out, when workers are allowed to join unions, they do. As the AFL-CIO NOW blog observes:
Union membership, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says, is especially valuable to working families as the nation’s economy is in the worst recession in decades.
“Today’s numbers confirm what many working people already know: that if given the chance, American workers are choosing to join unions in larger numbers. Workers in unions are much more likely to have health care benefits and a pension than those without a union; in today’s economy, that’s the difference between sinking and swimming.”
The BLS survey also reports on the union advantage workers receive on payday. In 2008, full-time union workers earned a median weekly salary of $886 while nonunion workers were paid 28 percent less per week, $691.
Some 60 million workers say they would join a union if they had the opportunity. But when workers try to form unions through the flawed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process, employers routinely respond with threats, intimidation, firings and harassment.
Despite that, the anti-union special interests and their media echo chamber are seizing on these new findings to argue that we don’t really need an Employee Free Choice Act. Pro-business U.S. News columnist Matt Bandyk says cynically: “I had always read from supporters that the reason we need the EFCA is because the number of union members in the US had been declining in recent decades, and the bill would reverse that trend. So if unions grow less powerful, we desperately need the EFCA. If unions grow more powerful, we still desperately need it.”... read more
posted by Art Levine | 2 comments
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Funding Birth Control? It’s the Economy, Stupid (1:31 pm)
The $825 billion economic stimulus package is finally taking shape as House committees finalize their contributions to the bill. The good news is that healthcare spending will be a major part of the stimulus: $87 billion has been set aside to help states pay for Medicaid alone.
But one health-related provision was sacrificed to political expediency on Tuesday in an attempt to wrangle Republican support for the stimulus package: Medicaid expansion for birth control.
Medicaid is already the single largest source of public funding for family planning nationwide, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The stimulus provision would have made it easier for states to cover family planning for low-income women who currently make slightly too much to qualify for regular Medicaid.
House Minority Leader John Boehner made political hay out of the provision, claiming that Dems were sneaking in millions for birth control for reasons that had nothing to do with stimulating the economy. He’s dead wrong, as Cory Richards points out at RH Reality Check: Healthcare spending is a tried and true method of economic stimulus and the current bill sets aside billions of dollars for that purpose.
The idea that birth control coverage is less important than any other kind of healthcare spending is absurd. Reproductive rights activists pushed hard for the provision because they believe it would give more women access to family planning.
By law, when states cover birth control through Medicaid, the federal government covers 90% of the cost. The birth control expansion would simply have simply made it easier for states to relax the eligibility criteria to cover more women. Providing more services, to more people, with more money supplied by the federal government is textbook economic stimulus.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama begged House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman to strike the birth control proviso. The expansion didn’t have a chance. By late afternoon, TPMDC was reporting that birth control was gone from the House bill and that the Senate Dems had signaled that it wasn’t coming back in their stimulus bill.
Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality pegs the political dynamic as... read more
posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger | start the discussion
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Human Rights Watch Backs Employee Free Choice Act—Congress to Probe Anti-Union Scheme? (9:05 pm)
On the same day that The Huffington Post broke the news that bankers receiving billions in bailout funds schemed to block the Employee Free Choice Act, Human Rights Watch issued a report endorsing the bill as vital to protecting workers’ rights.
Now campaign reform groups are calling for a Congressional investigation into this campaign finance scheme:
Reform groups are blasting letters to congressional committee chairs and the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, urging an investigation into whether bailout recipients used taxpayer money to benefit political candidates or organizations.
The letter — signed by officials with U.S. PIRG, Change Congress, Public Campaign, Public Citizen and Democracy Matters — builds off a Huffington Post report revealing that employees with at least two bailout recipients participated in a call aimed at drumming up opposition to the union-backed Employee Free Choice Act.
“We’re calling for Congress to investigate whether Bank of America, AIG, or other recipients of billions in bailout money used taxpayer dollars to send ‘large contributions’ to any political organizations,” reads the letter. “Congress has a responsibility to oversee the $700 billion bailout of the financial services sector. That means making sure that these taxpayer funds are used transparently, and in ways that benefit regular people — not special interests.”
In contrast, while best known for focusing on dictators and torture, Human Rights Watch has focused on another kind of dictatorship: the abuse of employees who seek to organize a union, a human right recognized by international charters and U.S. law. Here’s what this respected, non-partisan group announced (via AFL-CIO NOW blog):
US lawmakers should back a proposed law to strengthen protections for workers who are trying to organize a union and bargain collectively, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 12-page report, “The Employee Free Choice Act: A Human Rights Imperative,” details how US labor law facilitates abuses and violates international standards. Human Rights Watch has in the past extensively documented systematic interference with the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively in the United States.
“Weak US labor law effectively denies millions of workers the right... read more
posted by Art Levine | 2 comments
Obama’s Stimulus Plan Signals End of Era (12:17 pm)
Since the U.S. is officially in a recession, and the Congressional Budget Office has predicted the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, just about everybody acknowledges that times are tough. Everybody, that is, except the National Republican Congressional Committee. Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz caught the Republican fundraising operation spouting some embarrassing doubletalk on their website earlier this week, including the proud declaration that “the U.S. economy is robust and job creation is strong.”
In fact, job creation is non-existent. The U.S. economy is losing over half a million jobs every month and even optimistic Wall Street economists expect unemployment to keep rising for at least another year.
Tough times call for unity, and President Barack Obama dedicated much of his inauguration speech to working together to usher in a “new era of responsibility.” Obama’s sentiment is essential—there is no way we can limit the damage of this recession without a massive collective commitment. The problem is, we all know how we got here, as Jose Garcia points out at The Progressive. Reckless bank lending, lax government oversight and insufficient social safety nets combined to saddle consumers with unaffordable levels of debt and directed family savings into completely irrational home values.
“Yes, we all need to pitch in, but above all the private sector and government regulators need to act responsibly,” Garcia writes. The surge in U.S. consumer debt over the past twenty-five years has been accompanied by stagnant wages and deceptive loan contracts. People often rely on credit to meet basic needs, Garcia notes, and bankers routinely do not disclose how much those loans will cost borrowers. Banks rewarded loan officers and mortgage brokers for pushing unaffordable loans, and a recent study by the Center for Responsible Lending revealed that most people do not understand the fine print on their credit cards.
Let’s be clear, then: Collective responsibility means overhauling Wall Street regulations and not holding the plight of working Americans hostage to banker bonuses.
Collective responsibility also means making sure that everyone has an affordable place to live. The Bush administration supported unregulated subprime mortgages and a totally... read more
posted by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger | 2 comments
Monday, January 26, 2009
GOP plays “chicken” with economy in fight over Solis, Employee Free Choice Act (5:59 pm)
Despite rising unemployment and a cratering economy, the GOP has placed a hold on the nomination of President Obama’s choice for Secretary of Labor, the pro-worker Hilda Solis. The issue at stake is the Employee Free Choice Act, which aims to give workers a level playing field by allowing workers to choose a majority sign-up approach, dubbed “card check” by anti-union flacks, for selecting a union — rather than keeping that option in the hands of employers.
But the original Wagner Act in the 1930s gave workers the right to use a majority sign-up process if they so choose, rather than the current election system that allows widespread intimidation by employers.
Studies of hundreds of organizing campaigns have found that a fifth of all pro-union activists are fired during a campaign, half of all employers threaten to shut down their plant and roughly 80% of employers hire unionbusting consultants. Employers are still free under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act to hold intimidating one-on-one “sweat” sessions to legally discourage workers from joining a union. And, as I found out while going undercover to a unionbusting seminar for In These Times, it’s equally legal for employers to just lie about the dire consequences facing workers if they join a union, from closed plants to somehow losing seniority and benefits. That’s the system the Employee Free Choice Act was designed to reform, by increasing penalties for corporate lawbreaking, allowing employees to choose the majority sign-up approach but still retaining the employees’ rights to hold a secret-ballot NLRB election if they want.
Even so, the right wing and the GOP have launched a high-profile smear campaign claiming, falsely, that the bill takes away the right to a secret ballot. Based on that lie, GOP leaders , with the help of an anonymous Republican Senator who has put a hold on Solis’s nomination, are trying to force the Obama administration and any wavering Democratic Senators into backing away from the Employee Free Choice Act. But the Obama administration and leaders in Congress still support the legislation, even if they’re not launching a full-court press to... read more
posted by Art Levine | start the discussion
‘If you’re going to do nationalization, do nationalization’ (2:54 pm)
Bill Moyers had our boy David Sirota on his show Friday, along with Thomas Frank (historian and new Wall Street Journal columnist), and the three dove into the $700 bailout passed last fall and its opaque/grisly aftermath and how Obama/Dems should govern to properly seize this troubled political moment.
Watch their discussion here, it’s worth it. Sirota on our great ongoing transfer of public money to private coffers:
We’ve gotten all of the bad stuff and none of the good stuff of nationalization. Nationalization in other countries means that the government has control over the banks with that money that they put into the bank.
What we have done is simply handed the money over with no mandate to actually change the behavior, change the structure of the banks, change the management of the banks. So my take is pretty simple.
If we’re going to throw this much money — remember, $350 billion is half the bailout. That’s $1,100 for every man, woman, and child in the country. If we’re going to put that kind of money into the banking system, we should get much more leverage.
And on Obama:
I think in a more broad kind of way, people want him to be more embracing, which he is, of the role of government in addressing issues like economic inequality, in addressing issues like income stagnation.
Yes, and yes. Again, the video clip is here.
During Sirota’s introduction, In These Times gets a silent shout-out - as a newspaper. Well, close enough.
posted by Jeremy Gantz | start the discussion
Sunday, January 25, 2009
President Obama’s FOIA Memo Sets a Tone of Transparency (5:59 pm)
Fred Kaplan has a nice column in Slate, noting that one of the most important decisions President Obama has made since taking office was lost in the shuffle and excitement of inauguration week. On Wednesday, Obama issued a memo to the heads of executive departments and federal agencies urging open cooperation with Freedom of Information Act requests.
The memo instructs government officials to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government.”
The Bush administration encouraged federal agencies to protect information and resist FOIA requests, and in 2001 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reassured government officials that the Justice Department would defend those that refused to release documents.
From 1995 to 2001, federal agencies declassified 1.15 billion pages of documents under the Freedom of Information Act—an average of 190 million per year. From 2002 to 2006… agencies declassified 182 million pages in total—an average of just 36 million per year, less than one-fifth the volume.
Since 2001, “many federal agencies have simply ignored the law requiring at least an acknowledgment of FOIA requests within 10 days,” Kaplan writes.
Pres. Obama’s FOIA memo doesn’t create a new law, but it does instruct the Director of the Office of Management and Budget “to update guidance to the agencies to increase and improve information dissemination to the public,” which might ease the process of getting a FOIA request filled.
posted by Mark Boyer | start the discussion
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