News Stories for November 19, 2011
Teamster NationRight about now our Teamster brothers and sisters in New York are joining Occupy Wall Street to protest their eviction from Zuccotti Park (aka Liberty Park). They're rallying against the park's owners, Brookfield Properties, which ordered the camp taken down.
Once again the 99% -- Teamsters and Occupy Wall Street -- are taking action against the 1%. Once again Teamster Local 814 and OWS are protesting the callous indifference of one particular segment of the 1%.
Sometimes we call that segment "Sotheby's Socialites." Sometimes we call them "entitled jerks." They are all associated with Sotheby's, the fabulously profitable auction house trying to bust their art handlers' union (and, by the way, whose former CEO never went to prison for the felonies she committed). Sotheby's has become an international symbol of reckless greed because it has thrown 43 art handlers out of work because they refuse to let the company destroy their union.
OWS has given tremendous support to the locked-out art handlers from Local 814. They disrupted auctions. They joined picket lines. They got arrested. They crashed a lavish Sotheby's party and put a damning video of the partygoers' arrogance on youtube. Their efforts put a harsh spotlight on Sotheby's callous treatment of its employees.
Read the source story here.
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| Check out the police-to-protester ratio. |
As many police officers as protesters occupied the pavement today in front of 3 World Financial, the headquarters of Brookfield Properties. Teamsters, members of CWA Local 1101 and Occupy Wall Street rallied to protest the company's eviction of the camp at Zuccotti Park. We posted earlier about Mayor Bloomberg's girlfriend's links to Brookfield and to Sotheby's.
Jason Ide, president of Local 814, said Brookfield was not happy about the rally, which included about 50 police officers and 50 protesters. Their target was Diana Taylor, Mayor Bloomberg's galpal. She wants to run for Senate.
Said Ide,
We passed out handbills calling on Diana Taylor to let Occupy Wall Street back in the park. Some of the members talked about getting locked out of Sotheby's, and why Diana Taylor's labor practices are so terrible. We had a chant,Both the Teamsters and CWA workers, whose wages and benefits are under assault by Verizon, have been helped by Occupy Wall Street. Ide said he was glad unions could help them as well.
Zuccotti Park out in the streets, there goes your Senate seat.
We asked, 'How can you represent New Yorkers with a labor record like this?
Read the source story here.
Crooks and Liars
As Mayor Bloomberg's forces swooped down on Occupy Wall Street, news reports described the "hundreds of police and private security guards" who had re-taken Zuccotti Park. Those private guards were used against public citizens who had been exercising their civil liberties in a public area.
That's not just wrong. It's unAmerican.
This incident holds an important lesson for anyone who loves our freedoms: When something public is made private, our liberties are privatized too. And privatized liberty isn't liberty at all.
Zuccotti Park. New Yorkers knew it as Liberty Plaza Park for nearly half a century. Like other sites in New York, the plaza was created through an agreement between the city and a private company, United States Steel, that wanted to erect a building that exceeded the city's height limits. So the city made them a deal: You can take up more than your share of the public skyline, but in return you have to give the city some open space at ground level.
This wasn't a gift. It was a fair exchange between two parties, a private corporation and the people of New York. The people gave up a chunk of their skyline and the owner agreed to provide an open - and, by agreement, fully public - space in return. New York City makes these deals fairly often. The plazas created by these agreements are called "privately owned public spaces," or "POPS," and the city has lots of them.
The Mayor may want to read that phrase again: It doesn't say "privately owned private spaces." Both the owner and the city are obligated to keep them for public use, in the public sphere, with all the laws and freedoms that apply to public space.
The park's current owner, Brookfield Properties, rebuilt the park with private donations after it was damaged in the 9/11 attacks. With Mayor Bloomberg's permission, they also overstepped tradition and the bounds of propriety by renaming the park - not for the thousands of innocent people who died that day, but for their own chairman.
The symbolism is perfect:They replaced a treasured word for freedom with the name of a rich guy who'd done nothing to create the park. With the Mayor's blessing, they literally privatized the word "liberty."Read the source story here.
Think Progress
During a town hall meeting in Ottumwa, Iowa Friday afternoon, Rick Santorum argued that Americans receive too many government benefits and ought to “suffer” in the Christian tradition. If “you’re lower income, you can qualify for Medicaid, you can qualify for food stamps, you can qualify for housing assistance,” Santorum complained, before adding, “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.” However, almost all states have curtailed their aid programs, just as the economic downturn is expanding the pool of eligible applicants.
Read the source story here.
The Polical Carnival
Via Democracy Now:
Retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer Tuesday morning in New York after the police raided the Occupy Wall Street encampment:Read the source story here.
“I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.”
Wisconsinites Rush to Sign Walker Recall Petition: 50,000 Signatures in 2 DaysAFL-CIO Now Blog
In just 48 hours after opponents of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker officially launched their campaign to remove him from office, activists say they gathered 50,000 signatures—9 percent of the total needed—on a petition to hold a special recall election that could boot the governor from office next spring.
And there’s more where that came from, according to Meagan Mahaffey of Wisconsin United, a coalition of labor and progressive groups. Politico reports:
Mahaffey said more than 20,000 have downloaded petitions to collect signatures from the groups website.Since stripping all of the state’s public employees of virtually all collective bargaining rights earlier this year—in a bill that also slashed education and social safety net funding—Walker’s support among Wisconsinites has plummeted. A poll released this week by Wisconsin Public Radio and St. Norbert College found that 58 percent supported recalling the governor.
As we reported, organizers need to gather a total of 540,000 signatures within a 60-day period in order to trigger the recall election; that amounts to about 9,000 signatures per day.
Read the source story here.
International Business Times
Goldman Sachs has set aside $10 billion for compensation and bonuses this year, it announced on Oct. 19 -- the same day it reported a third-quarter loss of $428 million.
It was only the second time that Goldman Sachs reported a loss since it became a public company in 1999, but the company's struggling finances had a remarkably small impact on the bonus total, which is sure to grow even more in the fourth quarter of 2011.
The $10 billion figure is 24 percent less than the bonus pool at this time last year, but if the bonus pool actually fluctuated based on the company's profits, it would have decreased by 70 percent, because that's how much Goldman Sachs's profits have declined since 2010.Read the source story here.
Think Progress
In 2009, 1,470 households reported income of more than $1 million but paid no federal income tax on it, through their use of various tax loopholes and shelters. Tax rates for millionaires have fallen by 25 percent since the mid-’90s, while one quarter of millionaires currently pay lower tax rates than the average middle-class household.
Numbers like these are the driving force behind the Buffett rule, the administration’s proposal aimed at ensuring that millionaires can’t pay lower tax rates than middle-class families. To add to the pile of evidence that such a rule is necessary, Bloomberg News ran a segment today on billionaires who manipulate the tax code to lower their tax rate all the way down to one percent [...]
Read the source story here.
Crooks and Liars
Lori Compas lives in Scott Fitzgerald's highly conservative district and is fed up with him. Undeterred by the heavy lift it will take to secure enough recall signatures for the ballot, she went ahead and filed recall paperwork last week to begin the process.
“I decided last Friday that I would do this,” Compas explains. “I realized that if I didn’t do it, it wasn’t gonna happen.” However, she admits, “I feel like I’m this little ant flinging a crumb at a giant.”Sometimes all it takes is one person stepping up and deciding something needs to be done to start the ball rolling.
Since then, Compas says, “It’s been beautiful. I can’t believe the response.”Read the source story here.Interest in the petitions has been so immense that an initial run of copies she’d thought would last until Thanksgiving has already run out. People heading out to collect signatures for the Walker and Kleefisch recalls have been overwhelmingly supportive of adding the Fitzgerald petition to the bunch.
And in the relatively conservative District 13 people of all political stripes are showing interest in the campaign.
“Something has really changed in the last year,” Compas says of Fitzgerald’s time in office. She sees the main reason to recall the senator having less to do with ideology and more to do with methodology. “The important thing is not what he’s done, but how he’s done it,” Compas adds, referring to the March 9 incident and much of what’s happened since. She believes that the folks in the district have largely lost faith in Fitzgerald because of those issues.
The Progressive
It’s getting ugly in Wisconsin.
A protester in Sun Prairie who has been outspoken in her opposition to Gov. Scott Walker received a death threat this week. And a coffee house in Madison that isn’t shy about advocating Walker’s recall had its storefront window shattered by a rock while a customer was inside.
Heather DuBois Bourenane got a phone call at four in the morning on Thursday, threatening her life and her family’s, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
The man said, “You’ve attracted the attention of some very bad people.”
She called the Sun Prairie police department, which is investigating.Read the source story here.
In These Times
What—or who—is killing off the American labor movement? Is it globalization? New technologies? A shift toward services?
None of the above, say John Schmitt and Alexandra Mitukiewicz of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive Washington think tank. It's politics, they argue, in a study released this week titled "Politics Matter: Changes in Unionization Rates in Rich Countries."
Schmitt and Mitukiewicz compared the experiences from 1960 to the present of 21 rich countries, all of whom had a similar level of global integration and technological development. Despite those resemblances, there were several very different starting points and trajectories for labor movements over the decades with regard to membership and contract coverage. (The two are often quite distinct, since union contracts are extended to nonunion workers in many countries.) And the different patterns closely correlate with the dominant political tradition of the countries.
In the traditionally social democratic countries, like Denmark and Sweden, unions started with very high coverage that grew slightly—often to more than 90 percent—while membership declined a small amount. Countries with a Christian democratic or continental market economy, like Italy, Germany and The Netherlands, have typically seen only modest declines in coverage and membership.
By contrast, labor movements in the largely English-speaking "liberal market economies," like the United States, Australia and New Zealand, have suffered sharp declines, some more dramatic as a percentage of workers than in the United States. (Just 6.9 pecent of private-sector American workers are union members, according to the Labor Department.)
"The patterns are consistent with the view that national politics are a more important determinant of recent trends in unionization than globalization or technological change," the authors conclude.
Read the source story here.
The Washington Post
In the past, I’ve talked about the “do-nothing plan” for deficit reduction: Congress heads home to spend more time with their campaign contributors, and the Bush tax cuts automatically expire, the 1997 Balanced Budget Act’s scheduled Medicare cuts kick in, the Affordable Care Act is implemented, and the budget moves roughly into balance. It’s not an ideal way to balance the budget, but it helps clarify that the deficit is the result of votes Congress expects to cast over the next few years. If, instead of casting those votes, they do nothing, or pay for the things they choose to do, the deficit mostly disappears.
The last few years have added new elements to the do-nothing plan: the trigger, for instance, and various temporary tax cuts Congress has been extending. James Horney of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ran the numbers for my colleague E. J. Dionne, and he says the do-nothing plan would now lead to $7.1 trillion in deficit reduction — more than even the Fiscal Commission envisioned.
Read the source story here.
Charles M. Blow, in The New York Times
Is America exceptional among nations? Are we, as a country and a people and a culture, set apart and better than others? Are we, indeed, the “shining city upon a hill” that Ronald Reagan described? Are we “chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world” as George W. Bush said?
This year, for the first time, most Americans did not say yes.
According to a report issued on Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, when Americans were asked if they agreed with the statement “our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others,” only 49 percent agreed. That’s down from 60 percent in 2002, the first time that Pew asked the question.
Perhaps even more striking was that, among young people (those ages 18 to 29), the percentage of Americans who believed that their culture was superior was lower than young citizens of Germany, Spain and Britain.Read the source story here.
The Political Carnival
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — A German manager with Mercedes-Benz is free after being arrested for not having a driver’s license with him under Alabama’s new law targeting illegal immigrants, authorities said Friday, in an otherwise routine case that drew the attention of Gov. Robert Bentley.Read the source story here.Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson told The Associated Press an officer stopped a rental vehicle for not having a tag Wednesday night and asked the driver for his license. The man only had a German identification card, so he was arrested and taken to police headquarters, Anderson said.
The 46-year-old executive was charged with violating the immigration law for not having proper identification, but he was released after an associate retrieved his passport, visa and German driver’s license from the hotel where he was staying, Anderson said.
Crooks and Liars
So what do you do when financial analysts are warning that housing prices are headed for a "triple dip", the second largest Swiss Bank (Credit Suisse) announces it's piling 1,500 additional job cuts - many from the US - on top of its previously announced 2,000 (after a 12 per cent increase in profits this past quarter) and the federal government just sued one of the nation's largest privately held mortgage brokers (Allied Home Mortgage) for a decade of "fraudulent lending practices that forced thousands of Americans to lose their homes."
Seriously, could the economic Big Brains who think it's a good idea to take money out of people's pockets via spending cuts, while rejecting increased spending on our nation's crashing infrastructure, try punching "Japan" and "lost decade" into the Google machine? Or perhaps just admit their relationship to understood economics is like Kim Kardashian's marriage - shallow, somewhat entertaining, but ultimately embarrassing.
These right-wing members of Congress and inhabitants of the "pro-market," think-tank-welfare world, with their flip reaction the ongoing economic crisis, have begun to remind me of an exchange between John Travolta (trying to steal and sell nuclear weapons) and Christian Slater (trying to stop him) in the movie Broken Arrow. Slater's character says to Travolta's: "You're out of your mind," to which Travolta replies - while wearing a spooky Herman Cain-esque, I-just-gave-a-massage-to-my-secretary smile - "Yeah, ain't it cool."
Apparently, the only stimulant conservatives favour is whatever Rick Perry was mainlining during his speech in New Hampshire the other night.Read the source story here.
- AFL-CIO Now Blog:
Tens of Thousands Rally Nationwide for Bridge Repair, Job Creation - We Party Patriots:
Wisconsin Building Trades Members Vote 97% In Favor Of Keeping Their Union - AFL-CIO Now Blog:
Dangerous Balanced Budget Amendment Fails in House - The Washington Post:
House Democrat: Occupy the Constitution! - The Seattle Times:
Occupy Seattle activists to police: 'Join us' - The Week:
Police vs. Occupiers: The controversial 'sound cannon' weapon - The Political Carnival:
VIDEO: #OccupyNashville infiltrates Donald Rumsfeld dinner - The Hill's Congress Blog:
Labor law for American workers and employers - Daily Kos:
Unions and progressive groups launching 'Occupy Congress' - Politic Mo.com:
'Right-to-work,' employment law reform top Missouri Chamber legislative priorities - The Stranger:
What Exactly Is It that Occupy Critics Don't Get About Civil Disobedience? - NW Labor Press:
NW Oregon Labor Council hosts first mayoral debate - Daily Kos:
AFL-CIO warns Super Congress Democrats against voting with Republicans - Washington Monthly:
The geography of the Occupy movement - Main Street:
Food Banks Across Country in Desperate Need - The Stranger:
Occupy Inanity: D.C. Restaurant's 99% and 1% Hamburgers - Daily Kos:
Child poverty increased in 2010; more than 1 in 5 children are poor - Center for American Progress:
Could Tax Reform Boost Business Investment and Job Creation?