Teamsters highlight contradictions in Mexican trucks case
People's World
Posted March 29, 2012

The Teamsters have apparently caught the Obama Transportation Department in several contradictions in the two sides' continuing fight over the agency's pilot program to let selected Mexican trucks roll on all U.S. roads.

For example, the union's legal brief filed with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C., says the agency admits the pilot program will produce between 2,800 and 4,100 inspections every year of the Mexican trucks, and it admits those trucks also do not meet U.S. environmental rules.

Yet at the same time, the government argues that the extra pollution from the Mexican trucks will have no impact on U.S. pollution - or U.S. truck drivers who, more than other drivers, are exposed to hazardous fumes on the roads.
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Whoa! Record no. of union members running for IN Statehouse
Teamster Nation
Posted March 29, 2012
More than 55 union members, former members or retirees are running for the 125 Indiana House and Senate seats up for election this November.

What an inspiration to know that 44 percent of all legislative races involve our union brothers and sisters. It's a huge step forward in the fight to repeal anti-worker laws in Indiana. Rock on, Hoosiers!
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Ohio Red Cross strike spreading to Michigan
Teamster Nation
Posted March 29, 2012
Northeastern Ohio Teamsters from Local 507 in Cleveland are standing strong against the Red Cross. About 250 blood services workers were forced to strike on Feb. 14 because Red Cross had ignored workers’ concerns about understaffing and the impact on blood safety.

On Friday they will be joined by Lansing Teamsters Local 580 and Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 459. Both have sent notices of intent to strike over cuts to their health benefits.

Last week, hundreds of striking Teamsters boarded a bus at 3 a.m. to come to a rally at Red Cross national headquarters. They came to protest management's disrespect for its workforce and its greed. (If you doubt that, check out their CEO's pay. It's over $1 million.)

The workers wore monkey pins to the rally because management told them their jobs could be done by monkeys. They were joined by members of the United Auto Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers, United Steel Workers, Occupy DC and Jobs with Justice.
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Rallies draw thousands to Missouri Capitol
St. Joseph News Press
Posted March 29, 2012
Thousands of people crammed into the Missouri Capitol and spilled out across its lawn Tuesday as religious groups and unions held nearly simultaneous rallies decrying federal health care policies and state legislation affecting workers.

Inside the Capitol, thousands of people clad in red condemned President Barack Obama's policy requiring insurance companies to cover the costs of providing free birth control to women working at religious-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and colleges. Church leaders from several Christian denominations said religious freedoms are under assault.

Outside the Capitol, thousands of union members wearing bright orange and green shirts rallied against efforts by the Republican-led Legislature to pare back wage requirements on public works projects and to make Missouri a "right-to-work" state in which union dues cannot be a condition of employment. Rally leaders said workers' rights are under assault.

The crowds for the duel gatherings were some of the largest in the past decade at the Missouri Capitol, which hosts gatherings for interest groups on a nearly daily basis during the legislative session. Capitol Police provided no official crowd estimate.
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GOP Threatens Transportation Funding Shutdown That Could Jeopardize 1.9 Million Jobs
Thing Progress
Posted March 29, 2012
House Republicans last night rejected the Senate’s bipartisan transportation reauthorization bill and said they would instead adopt a short-term resolution that would maintain current funding levels for 90 days. With just 10 days until the current short-term authorization plan expires, that means House Republicans have made possible a transportation shutdown that could force more than 1.9 million workers off the job.

The Senate approved MAP-21, its transportation bill, 74-22 last week. The bill “is the biggest jobs bill that Congress will consider this year,” according to its main Democratic sponsor, California Sen. Barbara Boxer. The bill is also fully paid for. A long-term House bill that was rife with problems — not least that it would have bankrupted the Highway Trust Fund — has already been defeated.

According to the Department of Transportation, MAP-21, which continues the current levels of funding plus inflation, would save 1.9 million transportation jobs that would temporarily disappear during a shutdown. The bill would also create roughly 1 million new jobs, according to Democratic estimates, bringing the total number of jobs in jeopardy to nearly 3 million.
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Senator sees savings in 1 big health insurance pool Read
The News Tribune
Posted March 29, 2012
The state teachers union is mounting a fierce campaign at the Legislature this year to defeat a proposed consolidation of school workers’ health insurance.

The Washington Education Association reported spending more than $176,000 on advocacy efforts related to health care in January and February alone, not counting pay for its lobbyists. It stepped up efforts this month by staging 10 rallies that it says drew nearly 4,000 school employees.

The union has aired radio ads around most of the state and on Sunday ran full-page newspaper ads attacking the author of the legislation, Democratic Sen. Steve Hobbs of Lake Stevens.

“We are opposed to any changes in K-12 health care at this point,” Rich Wood, spokesman for the WEA and its more than 80,000 members, said this week.

Hobbs’ proposal to create a single state insurance pool to keep down premium costs over the long haul has bipartisan support and appears to be surviving the union’s attack, at least for now.
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Rand Paul: We Need to 'Glorify Those Who Make a Profit', Like Big Oil
Crooks and Liars
Posted March 29, 2012
It is rare to see someone so lacking in awareness of the situation of most Americans and so clearly devoted to the writings of Ayn Rand that they would openly advocate the praising and worship of Mammon on the floor of the Senate. But Rand Paul is just that kind of person.

Paul argued Big Oil deserves even more favors from government, because they’re doing such a good job extracting wealth from American families:

Instead of punishing them, you should want to encourage them. I would think you would want to say to the oil companies, “What obstacles are there to you making more money?” And hiring more people. Instead they say, “No, we must punish them. We must tax them more to make things fair.” This whole thing about fairness is so misguided and gotten out of hand. [..] We as a society need to glorify those who make a profit,” Paul concluded.

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Is Dodd-Frank being rolled back while no one is looking?
The Washington Post
Posted March 29, 2012
It’s par for the course for the GOP-controlled House to pass bills that few people notice and that ultimately go nowhere. But it’s rare for legislators to join hands across the aisle to roll back parts of President Obama’s signature legislative achievements. That’s what happened on Monday, when the House passed two little-noticed bills that changed the derivatives rules under the Dodd-Frank Act.

Both bills would place new limitations on regulating derivatives, the complex transactions that Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler recently described as “the largest dark pool in our financial markets.” As Reuters explains, one bill provides an exemption for businesses that use derivative hedges to shield themselves against real-world risks — e.g. airlines protecting themselves against oil price spikes, farmers against fluctuating grain prices, known as “commercial end users” — so they don’t have to hold cash reserves to back up deals known as swaps. It passed the House overwhelmingly, 370 to 24.
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The Supreme Court's Momentous Test
The New York Times, editorial
Posted March 29, 2012
In ruling on the constitutionality of requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance, the Supreme Court faces a central test: whether it will recognize limits on its own authority to overturn well-founded acts of Congress.

The skepticism in the questions from the conservative justices suggests that they have adopted the language and approach of the insurance mandate’s challengers. But the arguments against the mandate, the core of the health care reform law, willfully reject both the reality of the national health care market and established constitutional principles that have been upheld for generations.

The Obama administration persuasively argues that the mandate is central to solving the crisis in America’s health care system, which leaves 50 million people uninsured and accounts for 17.6 percent of the national economy. The challengers contend that the law is an unlimited — and, therefore, unconstitutional — use of federal authority to force individuals to buy insurance, or pay a penalty.

That view wrongly frames the mechanism created by this law. The insurance mandate is nothing like requiring people to buy broccoli — a comparison Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in his exasperated questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. Congress has no interest in requiring broccoli purchases because the failure to buy broccoli does not push that cost onto others in the system.
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Scalia Says Court Can't Be Bothered To Read Obamacare: 'You Really Want Us To Go Through These 2,700 Pages?'
Think Progress
Posted March 29, 2012
During the last day of Supreme Court hearings about the Affordable Care Act, the justices covered whether or not the entire law could stand if the individual mandate was struck down and the law’s expansion of Medicaid. But Justice Antonin Scalia seemed surprised that someone would have expected the justices to read the text of the health care reform law before the hearings:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the Eighth Amendment? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? (Laughter.) And do you really expect the Court to do that? Or do you expect us to — to give this function to our law clerks? Is this not totally unrealistic? That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?

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Without SB 5873, data center jobs disappear like a puff of smoke
The Stand
Posted March 29, 2012
Until recently, Washington’s low-cost electricity from renewable hydro and wind power made rural parts of our state a leader for the construction of data centers. But since July 2011, companies including Facebook, Apple, Rackspace and Amazon have all chosen Oregon over Washington as sites to build data centers.

Why is our state suddenly losing out on these family-wage construction and facility maintenance jobs? As companies invest heavily in “cloud computing,” which relies on massive data storage and transfer, why are those investments being made elsewhere?

Washington has lost its competitive edge because its proven, successful Data Center Tax Incentive expired.
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Pennsylvania unions blast new voter ID law
People's World
Posted March 29, 2012
Pennsylvania has become the latest large state to enact a so-called "voter ID" law, and it would deprive 700,000 people of the right to vote, thus drawing a blast from the state AFL-CIO.

The GOP-run state legislature rushed the law through during the week of Mar. 12-16, and GOP Gov. Tom Corbett signed it "even before the ink dried" that Friday night without any public ceremony, the state labor federation said.

Corbett's law is similar to voter ID laws pushed elsewhere by the business-right wing cabal nationwide that also wages war on workers. The voter ID laws are designed to disenfranchise groups of people whose votes would threaten the cabal's corporatist, anti-worker agenda. Pennsylvania's law would hit senior citizens, the disabled, and lower-income workers without a state driver's license, the federation says.
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Where Are the Good-Government Republicans?
The New York Times, editorial
Posted March 29, 2012
Senator John McCain recently denounced the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision as “naïve and politically ignorant,” telling Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, that “the consequences are manifesting themselves every day in what will someday be, sooner rather than later, a huge scandal.” But Mr. McCain has no corrective, and the rest of the Republican Party seems determined to block any reform. Meanwhile, checkbook politicking has already hijacked this year’s Republican primary campaign.

The court at least offered one good antidote — that Congress mandate clear disclosure to the public of fat-cat donors now operating from campaign shadows and underwriting all of those noxious attack ads. “Disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way,” the court advised.

Democrats in Congress are pushing for disclosure, but, so far, there isn’t a Republican co-sponsor in sight.
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New GOP budget proposal would change federal retirement, health contributions
The Washington Post
Posted March 29, 2012
A budget proposal released Tuesday by the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of conservative members of the House, suggests making fundamental changes to the federal retirement and health benefit systems to curtail government spending.

The RSC budget proposal hopes to trim $110 billion in federal spending over 10 years by requiring federal employees to contribute more to their retirement plans. The RSC proposes to equalize contributions, which would mean about a 6 percentage point increase in the employee share. A recently enacted law already requires contributions of 2.3 percent of salary more for employees hired into government after this year who have less than five years of prior service.

The proposal also suggests changing the cost-of-living adjustment peg for federal retirees.
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Missouri unions fight right-wing obstruction
People's World
Posted March 29, 2012
"The sun is shining on organized labor today," State Sen. Tim Green, told thousands of union members as they packed the State Capitol lawn here March 27 to demand an end to the attacks on workers' rights in the Republican-controlled legislature.

Green then introduced Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a friend of organized labor who has repeatedly vetoed anti-worker legislation, - protecting Missouri families from the types of attacks inflicted upon union members and public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana.

Nixon blasted the Republicans for claiming to care about the economy, but doing nothing to create jobs in the Show-Me-State.
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Romney gets flak over Wisconsin anecdote from long ago
Milwaukee Journel-Sentinel
Posted March 29, 2012
Talking by conference call with thousands of Wisconsin voters Wednesday, Mitt Romney told them he had a humorous connection to their state.

But it didn’t take long for “funny anecdote” to become “campaign fodder.”   

Romney’s story involved the time more than 50 years ago that his father, George, an American Motors executive, shut down a factory in Michigan and moved the work to Wisconsin.

 “Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign,” explained Romney, who described a subsequent campaign parade in which the school band marching with his father knew how to play Wisconsin’s fight song, but not Michigan’s.

“Every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.
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