News Stories for october 11, 2011
Teamsters, in Sotheby's sights, occupy Wall St. Teamster Nation
This is the Sotheby's Economy: A profitable multinational corporation pays its CEO millions while trying to make a few dozen union workers poorer. The company offers no explanation. It's just greed and recklessness.
Sotheby's profit was $127 million in three months. Its CEO, William Ruprecht, took $6 million in compensation from the company last year. Sotheby's wants to cut the pay of 43 Teamster art handlers by 10 percent, take away their retirement benefits and replace them when they leave with temporary laborers. The company made these demands during a 2-1/2 hour negotiating session. Then it threw the Teamsters out of work.
That's why Teamsters from Local 814 were the first union members to Occupy Wall Street back in September. That's why they're still there today.
Sotheby's epitomizes what's wrong with our economy. It's a corporation that feasts off the work of artisans, caters to the top 1 percent and tries to wring every dime from the working-class people within its control. It doesn't create anything itself. It just transfers luxury goods among the thousands who've gotten rich off the backs of millions of working people.
Read the source story here.
KOMO News.com
The Occupy Seattle protest took on a decidedly more mainstream look on Saturday as hundreds of middle class and union members joined the group at Westlake Park on a rare sunny October afternoon.
Witnesses said a few hundred people turned out Saturday afternoon following a call from labor leaders to join the movement.
About 100 police officers were on hand, but the crowd was mostly peaceful, listening to a series of speakers.
Labor union speakers who took the podium said they wanted to show the Occupy Seattle movement that the middle class is behind them.
"Labor stands for the middle class. Labor helped create the middle class, and we’re here to make sure it doesn’t die," said Leonard Smith of Teamsters Local 117.
Read the source story here.
Think Progress
The campaign to marginalize and destroy the growing 99 Percent Movement is in full swing, with many in the media attempting to smear the people participating in the “occupation” protests across the country. However, several of the so-called journalists deriding, and in some cases sabotaging the movement, have paychecks thanks to a billionaire whose business practices have been scorned as among the worst of the financial elite.
As the New York Times has documented, Paul Singer, a Republican activist and hedge fund manager worth over $900 million, has emerged as one of the most important power brokers within the GOP. Now, it appears that the reporters financed by Singer are at the forefront of efforts to tarnish the reputation of 99 Percent Movement demonstrators .
[snip]
As Singer-funded journalists make their best effort to diminish the Occupy Wall Street protesters as confused idiots unable to articulate a clear goal, it so happens that these journalists are funded by a man who epitomizes the crony capitalist behavior of the greedy one percent.
Singer, manager of a $17 billion hedge fund, earned the moniker “vulture capitalist” for buying the debt of Third World countries for pennies on the dollar, then using his political and legal connections to extract massive judgements to force collection — even from nations suffering from starvation and violent conflicts. Singer and his partners have used such tactics in Panama, Ecuador, Poland, Cote d’Ivoire, Turkmenistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to squeezing impoverished countries with sovereign debt schemes, Singer speculates in the oil markets, a practice which can lead to gasoline price hikes here in the United States. The revelation that Singer engages in oil speculation, and also funds Republican lawmakers opposed to oil speculation regulations, was exposed by ThinkProgress using leaked government documents.Read the source story here.
Mother JonesIN 2008, A LIBERAL Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.
Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened, it's not enough to examine polls and tea parties and the makeup of Barack Obama's economic team. You have to understand how we fell so short, and what we rightfully should have expected from Obama's election. And you have to understand two crucial things about American politics.
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.
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.
Read the source story here.
The Maddow Blog
We've known that Karl Rove intends to raise and spend Monopoly money in the 2012 elections, with a $240 million goal, double the war chest from 2010. We've seen that Mr. Rove can pull in that money for his American Crossroads with help from a very few members of a very select club.
We haven't known the intentions of the billionaire Koch brothers, who coordinated with Mr. Rove last time out but who now show signs of going their own way. Politico today reports that the Koch brothers intend to steer at least $200 million into the election:
There have been some signs suggesting how they might divide up the 2012 labor. For instance, during presentations in late June in Vail, Colo., at the latest installment of the twice-a-year gatherings of major donors sponsored by the Koch brothers’ privately owned oil, chemical and consumer products company, Koch operatives signaled they “are going to focus a great deal on the presidential race,” according to someone who attended the meeting.Read the source story here.
Crooks and Liars
In an interview that aired Sunday, General Electric Chairman and Obama job czar Jeffrey Immelt told CBS' Leslie Stahl that the notion that Americans were against big companies was "just wrong."
"I want you to root for me," Immelt said. "Everybody in Japan roots for Toshiba. Everybody in China roots for China South Rail. I want you to say, 'Win, GE.'"
Not only has GE shipped thousands of U.S. jobs overseas, the company also reportedly paid no taxes in 2010. Protesters at Occupy Wall Street and across the country are calling for corporations to be taxed at least at the same rate as individuals.
Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold (D) responded to Immelt Monday.
"Mr. Immelt is not recognizing that you root for corporations when corporations are making sure your jobs stay here in the United States," Feingold explained. "His corporation has had more to do with shipping jobs overseas than almost any corporation in the world. And so, the deal here is we root for corporations and we support them if they're fair to us. And these people who are protesting are recognizing that just about everything that has happened to working people has been unfair in recent years."Read the source story here.
The Seattle Times
Decrying the human toll of the nation's economic and financial crisis, a group of corporate and labor leaders advising President Barack Obama is calling for sweeping and urgent changes in government policies, from liberalized immigration and less restrictive regulations to a more business friendly tax system and greater spending on infrastructure.
In tackling the nation's economic crisis and its stubborn 9.1 percent unemployment rate, the president's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness is putting the names of some of the country's top corporate CEOs as well as the head of the AFL-CIO behind proposed initiatives and policy overhauls sure to please and irritate Democratic and Republican partisans alike.
The council, headed by GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt, will release its 50-page report Tuesday during a meeting with Obama in Pittsburgh. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report Monday night.
Read the source story here.
Think Progress
[...] It is true that the OWS folks don’t have much organization or demands, but while they may act in a superficially anarchical manner, fundamentally they require government to redress the grotesque imbalance in wealth, because there is no other institution that can stand up to the power and wealth of the plutocrats and pollutocrats.
The Tea Party doesn’t merely revile government. If it were up to them, they would they would terminate most of its activities at almost every level. They would be willing to destroy a livable climate — and all science-based environmental standards — if that meant the triumph of their anti-government ideology (see “Michele Bachmann: Let’s repeal clean air and clean water for our children“).
If that wasn’t clear from the climate and EPA debates, it was certainly clear from the debt ceiling debate (see “What if the CO2 Ceiling Debate Were Like the Debt Ceiling Debate“). The Tea Party would let the government default before it agreed to any rational debt reduction strategy (i.e. one that involves even the slightest increase in taxation for the 1%).
And, indeed, the ultimate goal of the Tea Party, however unintentional, is anarchy, since that is the inevitable result of the unsustainable accumulation of wealth by the richest few at the expense of the many, the unsustainable abandonment of the many crucial activities of government, and the unsustainable energy policy we are stuck on (see “Memorial Day, 2030“).
The only way we could avoid collapse is if the 99% can stop the pollutocrat-driven Tea Party. So far, the 1% are “winning.”Read the source story here.
The Washington Post
Conservative activists have created a Tumblr called “We are the 53 percent” that’s meant to be a counterpunch to the viral “We are the 99 percent” site that’s become a prominent symbol for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tumblr is supposed to represent the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income taxes, and its assumption is that the Wall Street protesters are part of the 46 percent of the country who don’t. “We are the 53 percent” was originally the brainchild of Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.org, who worked together with Josh Trevino, communications director for the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, and conservative filmmaker Mike Wilson to develop the concept, according to Trevino.
[...] But there is some tension between the site’s critique and conservative tax policy. Part of the reason that over 40 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes is because of the continual push to lower them — a cause that conservatives have championed. For example, while the Bush-era tax cuts benefited the wealthy, they also lowered taxes at every income level, making it “relatively easy for families of four making $50,000 to eliminate their income tax liability,” as the Associated Press notes. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, similarly, took many lower-income Americans off of the tax rolls, an accomplishment about which the Gipper was quite proud.
Read the source story here.
The Daily News
The Port of Longview and longshore union won an important round in their ongoing battle with the EGT grain terminal Friday, but a decision about whether the union is legally entitled to work there still is months away.
U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton ruled that the port's working agreement with union longshore workers applies at the EGT grain terminal. However, he stopped short of saying it obligates EGT to hire members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
In effect, he kicked the issue down the road, saying the matter should be put to a federal labor arbitrator.
The port and union claimed victory Friday because Leighton rejected EGT's claim that the working agreement had no bearing on its contract with the port to build the $200 million grain terminal on port land.
"It certainly is a high-five moment for the port and the ILWU," port attorney Frank Randolph said.Read the source story here.
Crooks and Liars
Sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster, I love the fact that Chris Hayes is introducing into the national dialog concepts that you don't hear on any other weekend news show. In discussing the Occupy protests and the website We Are The 99 Percent, Hayes notes that in entry after entry, self-identified 99 percenters point to crippling student loan debt.
And it's so very sad and so true. Society tells us that we go to school, get a degree, write our own ticket. We're supposed to be a meritocracy where effort and a little bit of luck puts us on the path to the American Dream: a house, 2.4 kids, dog in the backyard and a nice middle-class life.
That was then. This is now.
That American Dream is dead for the generation coming into adulthood now. The middle class is a dying breed. More and more of us are simply the working poor with little relief in sight. And that's the injustice that the 99 percenters are fighting to right.Read the source story here.
The Hill
Sparking criticism from organized labor, House Republicans have unveiled a spending bill that would block the Obama administration from issuing controversial workplace safety and health regulations.
Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.), chairman of the House Labor, Health and Human Services Subcommittee, has crafted a bill that would block a handful of federal safety regulations and decrease discretionary spending levels. The riders on the regulations have quickly attracted criticism from the Obama administration and the AFL-CIO.
[...] The proposed riders in Rehberg's bill would restrict the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from employer mandates on recording musculoskeletal injuries and developing injury and illness prevention programs, among others.Read the source story here.
We Party Patriots
(This is in the sidebar--about half-way down!)
CEOs are rewarded for slashing jobs, not for creating them. But politicians continue to take their cues on job creation from the corporate blueprint. Union activists know the only way to create good jobs is to throw it out the window. In addition to big public programs that could lift the economy, struggle pays.Read the source story here.
Ask Las Vegas housekeepers. Starting in 2002, they demanded in every contract to cut the number of rooms they clean per hour. The hotels had to hire, and the union wrested a slightly bigger slice of the hotel industry’s enormous profits away from its top brass.
Construction workers enforce work rules that give them breaks and lunch, and demand that people do the jobs they’re trained for, making for higher quality buildings—and more jobs. Nurses demand sane nurse-patient staffing ratios, making for safer hospitals and more nurses on the floor.
Teachers fight to keep class sizes small, leading to better learning and more teaching jobs. Teamsters at UPS push back against excessive overtime, improving their lives and forcing the company to make good on its promise—won in the union’s 1997 strike—to create 20,000 more full-time jobs.
Union struggle pushes corporations to create jobs, even kicking and screaming.
Tea Party Patriots
The Tea Party is reaching new heights of anti-worker effort with the House passage of HR 2587, the “Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act.” The law, according to Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D-MN), allows corporations to bust unions and outsource jobs to keep corporate profits high.
The law is a direct response to Boeing’s desire to leave its union shop in Washington to relocate in the Nikki Haley ran corporate playground that is South Carolina so that it can pay workers the absolute minimum while preventing work stoppages. Boeing officials have admitted to the Seattle Times that their desire to move to South Carolina is to avoid, “a work stoppage, you know, every three years.” While their case is still before the NLRB, Boeing has gone ahead and spent $750 million on a new facility in Charleston, SC. The Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act would allow any corporation who wanted to move its headquarters to a state with less worker protections to do so freely.
The Tea Party has all but decided to abandon fighting for American workers and to work solely for the corporations that funded their political campaigns. HR2587 represents what many critics have been screaming for over a year: In a time when American workers are looking for any help they can get, their elected officials are passing laws to ensure the protections they do have against exploitations are eradicated, paving the way for a return to the mid-to-late 1800s ideals.Read the source story here.
David Sirota, at TruthDig.com
Like most people living through this jarring age of economic turbulence and political dysfunction, you can probably recall a moment in the last few months when you thought to yourself that our lawmakers and corporate leaders are all crazy. And not just run-of-the-mill crazy, a la George Costanza’s parents, but the kind of crazy that makes films like “Silence of the Lambs” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” so frightening.
The good news for you is that you aren’t insane for thinking this. The bad news for all of us, though, is that according to two new scientific analyses, you are more correct in your assessment than you may know.
The first revelation came from Dr. Nassir Ghaemi of Tufts University. In his recent book, “A First-Rate Madness,” he went beyond merely restating the old adage that anyone crazy enough to run for public office probably shouldn’t occupy that office. Instead, the book sheds light on what Ghaemi calls an “inverse law of sanity,” whereby tumultuous times like these actually reward and promote political figures who are “mentally abnormal (or) even ill.”
Now comes a new study from Switzerland’s University of St. Gallen showing that the most successful of the global financial elite probably pose more of a menace to society than known psychopaths.
As the website Newser reported, the researchers “pitted a group of stockbrokers against a group of actual psychopaths in various computer simulations and intelligence tests and found that the money men were significantly more reckless, competitive, and manipulative.” Even more striking, the researchers note that achieving overall success was less important to the stock speculators than the sadistic drive “to damage their opponents.”Read the source story here.
- Teamster Nation:
More signs Occupy is working - Think Progress:
Occupy Wall Street Crowd Greets Fox Host With Chants Of 'Fox News Lies' - The Raw Story:
Tense night at Occupy Boston protest site - The Raw Story:
LIVE BLOG: 'Occupy Boston' under siege? Seattle? Dallas? Atlanta? St. Louis? - The Stranger:
McGinn's Speech Leaves Occupy Seattle Protesters Cold - Huffington Post:
Scott Walker Recall: Effort To Recall Wisconsin Governor To Start Nov. 15th - The Everett Herald:
I-1125: A formula for more gridlock - The Seattle Times:
Save road projects: Vote NO on I-1125 - The Washington Post:
The supercommittee: super-stalled - Think Progress:
GE CEO Immelt Admits Corporate Tax Holidays Don't Create Jobs, But Says We Should Have One Anyway - The Maddow Blog:
Video: GOP war on voting encounters rising defense - The Seattle Times:
Occupy Seattle: Sunshine, speeches, 2 arrests - Crooks and Liars:
Bachmann Tells Man With 'No Teeth' to Rely on Charity - The News Tribune:
About 200 gather in Tacoma for anti-Wall Street demonstration - The Bellingham Herald:
Protesters block downtown Bellingham streets in 'Occupy' protest - The Yakima Herald-Republic:
Numbers of long-term unemployed rising in Yakima County - The Maddow Blog:
Video: Conservatives in panicked hysteria over Occupy Wall Street - The LA Times:
Obama's jobs panel includes job-cutting executives - Talking Union:
Labor Occupies Wall Street, But Democrats Go in Reverse - Wonkette:
Almost Twice As Many People Have Heard of Occupy Wall Street As Rick Perry - Fire Dog Lake:
Occupy Wall Street's Misconconceptions According to Obama's Job Czar - Huffington Post:
Seven Snappy Comebacks for Those Lame Anti-"Occupy" Talking Points