News Stories for May 31, 2011
WePartyPatriots.com
Every American dreams of living a life of health and prosperity. This country was built on that very foundation. Prior to the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, however, many wage earners led only a life of sustenance. Workers were pushed to work extremely long workdays for a very low wage. The low bid practice on government contracts exacerbated the problem by bringing in lower-paid workers from outside the local economy who were often unskilled, thus pushing out the local hires. Construction quality was lowered and workers were not living the American Dream. They yearned to be respected and to be considered a productive member of their community. They wanted to embrace the ideals of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
In response to these issues, in 1868, Congress passed the first 8-hour work day. The idea was to nudge the labor market away from stretching out workdays in an effort to get more competitive, to using productivity within a limited set of hours. The push was to move more Americans to a greater standard of living, and this was just a start.
The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 established the requirement that prevailing wages, (or the average locally-paid trade/craft wages and benefits,) be paid to persons employed on public works projects. This Act promoted fair wages to employees and dissuaded migratory hiring. These benefits are still seen today. Furthermore, the Davis-Bacon Act (and the associated Little Davis-Bacon state laws), encourage apprenticeship programs which actively recruit and train young workers to become skilled tradesmen. Because the government bidding process still typically favors low bids, prevailing wage has ensured that these low bid contract employees are well-trained and licensed craft workers. It guarantees that unskilled, illegal, and non-licensed craft tradesmen are not used on public works projects.
Davis-Bacon has recently come under fire for escalating construction costs. It is argued that removing the prevailing wage requirement can save fifteen to thirty-five percent or more of construction costs. This is simply inaccurate and misleading. To begin with, labor costs for the average government construction project are only twenty-five percent of the total construction value. The maximum realistic savings, if salaries were reduced, by say twenty-five percent by rescinding Davis-Bacon, might reach six and one/half percent, (6.5% maximum potential savings). However, even this doesn’t hold water. Numerous studies have shown that the productivity gains of a better-trained labor force and a well-educated construction industry, under Davis-Bacon, more than make that up. Projects tend to be completed more timely, have fewer cost overruns, and higher rates of worker safety. Read the source story here.Green Bay Press Gazette
Julie Jansch saw changes coming for Wisconsin public employee unions, and she worried that her future was slipping away.
So she retired from her job with the city of .
So did Roxanne Selissen. And Lauren Grandaw.
All three women walked away from jobs at the Green Bay Police Department, taking with them a combined 90 years of on-the-job experience.
None had planned to call it quits at this time. But each felt threatened by Gov. sweeping move to curtail benefits and collective bargaining rights for 175,000 public employees throughout the state.
If the new governor could make such major changes so easily, the city workers thought, what would prevent him from going after their pension and robbing them of their retirement security?
"I didn't want to take the chance," Jansch said.
So the police department evidence technician, who earned $40,000 a year, notified the city in March that she was retiring — locking in her pension benefits before any more changes could occur. Read the source story here.In These Times
More than 200 people—many of them janitorial workers—marched, rallied and protested in front of Cub Foods grocery store [last] week in Minneapolis, Minn., to urge the chain to treat their workers better. They’ve been waiting for a year for Cub Foods to come to the table. They’ve petitioned the chain, sent letters to Cub Foods representatives and sent a petition with hundreds of names, organized delegations to store headquarters. But the chain refuses to waiver. Ten people have taken up a hunger strike and are now entering Day 7. They’ve pitched their tents near the store in what is called “Camp Hunger.” They say they’ll continue to fast until Cub Foods responds to their demands for fair wages and improved conditions for the workers who clean their stores. On Monday, the workers and their allies delivered letters nationwide to Supervalu stores, which is the parent company of Cub Foods, demanding a Code of Conduct that would ensure fair treatment. Read the source story here.
Crooks and Liars
Yashwanth Manjunath at Alan Colmes Liberland summed up House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's hostage taking on Face the Nation very well here -- Eric Cantor Doubles Down On Using Disaster Victims As Hostages To Spending Cuts:
Last week Alan mentioned how Eric Cantor is denying emergency disaster relief funds to tornado victims in Joplin, MO unless they are first paid for with politically-motivated spending cuts. Today on CBS’ Face the Nation Cantor doubled down on using the tornado victims as political hostages for spending cuts to clean energy. He compared the situation to that of a family facing an unexpected expenditure.
"Because families don’t have unlimited money,” Cantor said. “And, really, neither does the federal government."-
I could go into all of the different macroeconomic reasons why comparing the budget of the United States federal government to that of a typical American family is one of the most moronic and ignorant analogies ever made, but that is an argument for another day. The much larger issue with Cantor’s comments are the disdain and callousness he is showing towards the Joplin victims, his vile political opportunism, and worst of all, his unbearable hypocrisy. Read on…
As Murshed already pointed out here last week, the one word that immediately comes to mind for this -- heartless. While they were mourning their dead in Joplin today, Cantor's on the television still hostage taking before allowing them some help. I'm not sure how much more that party has to do to prove that they hate the working class in America, but they seem determined to make sure everyone knows it with this callousness. Read the source story here.CNN
The defense bill that just passed the House of Representatives includes a back-door fund that lets individual members of Congress funnel millions of dollars into projects of their choosing.
This is happening despite a congressional ban on earmarks -- special, discretionary spending that has funded Congress' pet projects back home in years past, but now has fallen out of favor among budget-conscious deficit hawks.
Under the cloak of a mysteriously-named "Mission Force Enhancement Transfer Fund," Congress has been squirreling away money -- like $9 million for "future undersea capabilities development," $19 million for "Navy ship preliminary design and feasibility studies," and more than $30 million for a "corrosion prevention program."
So in a year dominated by demands for spending cuts, where did all the money come from? Read the source story here.
Truthout
While Congress bickers and the president dithers, roads are crumbling, bridges are failing, dams are cracking and water and sewer systems are leaking all across the United States. If that's not enough to worry about, the government is threatening to default on the $2.5 Trillion it has borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund and few private employers are offering decent retirement plans.
A simple solution to all of these problems can be found in a secure national retirement system that allows all American workers and small-business owners the opportunity to participate in a tax-free infrastructure fund invested in the bonds issued by state and local governments.
Don't Mess With Social Security
In spite of the constant lies being told by those dedicated to its destruction, Social Security is one of the most successful government program ever created in the United States.
In 1935, the American people entered into a contract with their government to purchase an insurance policy ensuring they did not become destitute when they were no longer able to work.
Today, more than 90 percent of all workers and the self-employed are covered by Social Security and one in six Americans, or more than 54 million, are receiving a benefit. Most beneficiaries are receiving a return on their contributions that is far greater than they would have received if they had invested the same funds in the private financial markets.
It has been a good bargain, a win-win situation. For the oversight of their contributions, workers and small business owner only pay one-quarter of the amount paid by private pension funds to their money managers. Overall, more than 99 percent of the premiums go to benefits and less than 1 percent is spent on overhead.
The only unfairness of the system is the annual cap on contributions ($106,800 in 2011), which requires lower- and middle-income workers and small-business owners to pay a higher FICA tax rate (as a percentage of income) than those who earn more than the annual cap. Read the source story here.
Mother Jones
On Thursday, House Republicans finally unveiled their grand plan for tackling America's jobs crisis and creating jobs for the unemployed. It clocks in at a mere 10 pages, in large type, chock full of slick images. What's missing is, well, any legitimate solutions to lowering the nation's 8.6 percent jobless rate. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote, "It looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan."
The criticism is well deserved. Reading the "House Republican Plan for America's Job Creators" (PDF), released by the House GOP leadership, is an exercise in wonderment: you wonder what the GOPers actually propose. Several of the "Republican Solutions" are a bit vague. "After a systematic review of our visa system, the Congress should undertake prudent reforms," reads one "solution." Another "solution": "We will work to control the federal deficit to assure investors and entrepreneurs that our nation’s elected leaders are finally getting serious about paying off the debt over time." Details? Apparently, the GOP view was, why bother? Read the source story here.
Truthout
Legal procedure professors who taught current members of Congress must be pulling their hair out. Lately their former students sound more like the Queen of Hearts with their threats to execute the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by defunding it and taking away the power of the NLRB's General Counsel to enforce the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
Wild claims – without any basis in fact – are being made that the NLRB has already made a decision that Boeing violated the law and that the NLRB is going on a rampage against "right to work" states. If you listened to Congress' version of events, you would think that the NLRB has become the major threat to the economic life of this country. Think a fire-breathing Godzilla administrative agency smashing businesses with its mighty tail.
Of course, none of this is true. In fact, it is just Plane Nonsense.
Meanwhile, Congress does nothing to discipline the banks and speculators who actually did destroy millions of jobs, savings, lives, and hope for the future. These real villains are not only free but are again being rewarded for risky behavior. Read the source story here.
The Badger Herald
The state’s highest bipartisan budget committee approved a plan from the governor to begin phasing out a program aimed at encouraging students from low-income backgrounds to begin planning for college before entering high school.
Members of the Joint Finance Committee voted to support Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to end the Wisconsin Covenant program, despite objections from Democratic representatives.
The program, which enrolls eighth graders from across the state, ensures that students that follow the covenant’s guidelines and maintain a B average in high school will be able to attend a University of Wisconsin System, private or technical college campus in the state. Read the source story here.
PoliticusUSA.com
A new PPP survey finds that Scott Walker’s actions in Wisconsin have caused Obama’s approval ratings to soar in the state, and made the president Wisconsin’s favorite 2012 choice.
According to PPP, President Obama now has a 52% job approval rating is Wisconsin. The President’s disapproval rating has fallen to 44%. The spread between his approval/disapproval has doubled since the last time the poll was taken. How blue is this state? Obama has more Republicans who approve of his job performance (11%) than Democrats who disapprove (8%).
The problem for the potential 2012 Republican nominees is that the actions of Gov. Scott Walker seem to have seriously damaged the Republican brand in the state. The potential 2012 candidates are very unpopular in Wisconsin. The current frontrunner, Mitt Romney has a 29% favorable rating in the state. His unfavorable rating is 49%. Sarah Palin fares a little better with a 32% favorable rating, but a huge 63% unfavorable rating. After picking a fight with Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan over Medicare, Newt Gingrich has a 15% favorable rating, and a 67% unfavorable rating. Read the source story here.
Firedog Lake
But why is this the case ? When in the past the Democratic party was a staunch supporter of the middle class. Here is a good explanation of what happened by Kevin Drum in Alternet.
The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-’70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.Read the source story here.
Second, American politicians don’t care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early ’90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that’s not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don’t respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that’s not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don’t respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.
Truthout
Despite the denial chorus of the same politicians, financiers, and economists who told us prior to 2008 that our financial sector was fine, the American public is increasingly aware of the truth: American manufacturing is in a state of deep crisis. (And, as I argued in a previous article, the recent small uptick in this sector doesn't change that fact.)
This degree of manufacturing job loss is not inevitable or normal. The US actually enjoyed relatively stable employment levels in manufacturing as recently as the year 2000. Then, thanks to our burgeoning trade deficit, things fell off a cliff.
Neither is there anything inevitable about our poor export performance—which is, by definition, half the cause of that deficit. Over the decade after 2000, America's share of world exports dropped from 17 to 11 percent. But the share of the European Union, home of trade-savvy export superstars like Germany, held steady at 17 percent, despite the relentlessly expanding share of China and the rest of the industrializing Third World. (PDF Source.) Read the source story here.
Talking Points Memo
Republicans are working on multiple fronts to stop President Barack Obama from making companies bidding on federal contracts disclose their donations to third-party political groups.
The chairmen of the House Oversight Committee and the Small Business Committee have introduced legislation that would ban the federal government from collecting or using information about the political expenditures of federal contractors, allowing them to keep their political donations to third party groups secret. Yesterday, the House passed an amendment to the 2012 defense bill which would prevent federal agencies from collecting such data.
Introduced by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Tom Cole (R-OK) in response to a leaked draft of an executive order the Obama administration was considering which would have mandated federal contractors disclose their donations to third-party groups, the legislation is titled the "Keeping Politics Out of Federal Contracting Act of 2011." Read the source story here.
UK Guardian
More than 150 years ago, a disparate group of anti-immigrant, conspiracy-minded Americans became sick of traditional politicians and started a grassroots movement to take political power from the hands of those they no longer trusted. When asked by outsiders what their movement was called, they were ordered to answer, "I know nothing," leading others to call them the Know Nothing party. The movement, however, was co-opted by the traditional parties and undermined by policy disagreements, and many members eventually folded into the Republican party. Some things, apparently, don't change as much as we'd like to believe.
Republican leaders, and the 20-somethings crafting their made-for-television talking points, are apparently counting on the fact that their base still knows nothing, or is at least willing to forget what they do know. Not content to blame the Bush-led Wall Street bailouts on President Obama, or the shoe-bomber reprise on Obama's security and intelligence policies that were nonetheless instituted by his predecessors, Republican thought-leaders like Mary Matalin, former White House press secretary Dana Perino and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani have decided that there is one big thing that just couldn't have happened on the Republicans' watch: 9/11.
Perino started the re-write of history in November, baldly stating: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." Matalin picked up the torch shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab set his crotch on fire, claiming that Bush "inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation's history." Most astonishingly, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani – who made his national political reputation on the tragedy of the 2,752 people who died from a terrorist attack in the city he led – told Americans on Friday: "We had no domestic attacks under Bush." In the wake of widespread disbelief that Giuliani would repudiate the deaths in his own city in an effort to defend an unpopular former president who presided over not one by two attacks by foreign terrorists on American soil – not including the anthrax attacks – Giuliani was forced to admit he did, indeed, remember September 11th. Read the source story here.
Think Progress
The Tea Party movement has begun a disturbing new initiative to rewrite constitutional history in American classrooms.
The Georgia-based Tea Party Patriots group plans to “celebrate” our constitution’s anniversary on September 17 by pushing schools to incorporate lessons from the Idaho-based National Center for Constitutional Studies. This particular organization believes that the constitution was “divinely inspired.” Bill Norton, the leader of the Tea Party Patriot’s “Adopt a School” program, gives seminars around the country for the NCCS.
Glen Beck has praised the center’s founder, W. Cleon Skousen (b. 1913-d. 2006), who in the past made outrageous claims about American slave children being freer than white non-slave children and once called Jamestown’s original settlers “communists.”
“It’s indoctrination, not education. They’re so far from the mainstream of constitutional thought that they are completely indefensible,” said Doug Kendall, director of the Constitutional Accountability Center in Washington, D.C.
This is not the first time conservatives have tried to rewrite history. The notoriously conservative Texas Board of Education has tried to downplay the role of American Indians in American history in addition to trying to distort the history of the civil rights movement. It also attempted to amend the Texas curriculum to say that the civil rights movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities.
Even elected officials such as vocal Tea Party Caucus founder Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) seem to think that it’s OK rewrite American history. While speaking to an anti-tax group in Iowa, Bachmann said the founding fathers ended slavery despite the fact that several were slave owners and that slavery was not abolished until after the American Civil War. Read the source story here.Think Progress
The conservative governors who were elected across the country last November have championed huge cuts to public education spending while resisting efforts to raise revenues from the wealthiest among us. In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder (R) proposed cutting millions of dollars from the public education budget, and this week the GOP-controlled state senate passed a “contentious K-12 budget that cuts $470 per student from school districts.”
Outraged by these cuts, Nathan Bootz, the superintendent of Ithaca Public Schools, wrote a letter to the editor in a local paper proposing an idea that could come out of a Jonathan Swift novel: if Snyder intends on draining funding from public schools, maybe Bootz should convert the schools in his district into prisons to get funding. Read the source story here.
The NY Times
With Republicans in complete control of Maine’s state government for the first time since 1962, State Senator Lois A. Snowe-Mello offered a bill in February to limit doctors’ liability that she was sure the powerful doctors’ lobby would cheer. Instead, it asked her to shelve the measure.
“It was like a slap in the face,” said Ms. Snowe-Mello, who describes herself as a conservative Republican. “The doctors in this state are increasingly going left.”
Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices. They generally favored lower taxes and regularly fought lawyers to restrict patient lawsuits. Ronald Reagan came to national political prominence in part by railing against “socialized medicine” on doctors’ behalf.
But doctors are changing. They are abandoning their own practices and taking salaried jobs in hospitals, particularly in the North, but increasingly in the South as well. Half of all younger doctors are women, and that share is likely to grow.
There are no national surveys that track doctors’ political leanings, but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening from Maine as well as South Dakota, Arizona and Oregon, according to doctors’ advocates in those and other states. Read the source story here.