House votes to restrict unions

Measure would curb bargaining on health care. The push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.


 Robert J. Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, said the union would fight the legislation “to the bitter end.” (M. McDonald for The Boston Globe)

Robert J. Haynes, AFL-CIO

By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff

Boston Globe | April 27, 2011

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.

Unions fought hard to stop the bill, launching a radio ad that assailed the plan and warning legislators that if they voted for the measure, they could lose their union backing in the next election. After the vote, labor leaders accused House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo and other Democrats of turning their backs on public employees.

“It’s pretty stunning,’’ said Robert J. Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. “These are the same Democrats that all these labor unions elected. The same Democrats who we contributed to in their campaigns. The same Democrats who tell us over and over again that they’re with us, that they believe in collective bargaining, that they believe in unions. . . . It’s a done deal for our relationship with the people inside that chamber.’’

Yet one more betrayal by the Democrats. How many betrayals will it take for the American people to see the problem is systemic?  That the difference between the two parties is an illusion based on differences of style and levels of hypocrisy?

“We are going to fight this thing to the bitter end,’’ he added. “Massachusetts is not the place that takes collective bargaining away from public employees.’’

The battle now turns to the Senate, where President Therese Murray has indicated that she is reluctant to strip workers of their right to bargain over their health care plans.

DeLeo said the House measure would save $100 million for cities and towns in the upcoming budget year, helping them avoid layoffs and reductions in services. He called his plan one of the most significant reforms the state can adopt to help control escalating health care costs.

“By spending less on the health care costs of municipal employees, our cities and towns will be able to retain jobs and allot more funding to necessary services like education and public safety,’’ he said in a statement.

Last night, as union leaders lobbied against the plan, DeLeo offered two concessions intended to shore up support from wavering legislators.

The first concession gives public employees 30 days to discuss changes to their health plans with local officials, instead of allowing the officials to act without any input from union members. But local officials would still, at the end of that period, be able to impose their changes unilaterally.

The second concession gives union members 20 percent of the savings from any health care changes for one year, if the unions object to changes imposed by local officials. The original bill gave the unions 10 percent of the savings for one year.

The modifications bring the House bill closer to a plan introduced by Governor Deval Patrick in January. The governor, like Murray, has said he wants workers to have some say in altering their health plans, but does not want unions to have the power to block changes.

But union leaders said that even with the last-minute concessions, the bill was an assault on workers’ rights, unthinkable in a state that has long been a bastion of union support. Some Democrats accused DeLeo of following the lead of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and other Republicans who have targeted public employee benefits. “In the bigger world out there, this fits into a very bad movement to disempower labor unions,’’ said Representative Denise Provost, a Somerville Democrat who opposed the bill.

Under the legislation, mayors and other local officials would be given unfettered authority to set copayments and deductibles for their employees, after the 30-day discussion period with unions. Only the share of premiums paid by employees would remain on the health care bargaining table.

Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, said that, even if the bill becomes law, municipal workers would still have more bargaining power over their health care plans than state employees. “It’s a fair, balanced, strong, effective and meaningful reform,’’ he said.

Unions lobbied to derail the speaker’s plan in favor of a labor-backed proposal that would preserve collective bargaining, and would let an arbitrator decide changes to employee health plans if local officials and unions deadlock after 45 days. Labor leaders initially persuaded 50 lawmakers, including six members of DeLeo’s leadership team, to back their plan last week. But DeLeo peeled off some of the labor support in the final vote.

Representative Martin J. Walsh, a Dorchester Democrat who is secretary-treasurer of the Boston Building Trades Council, led the fight against the speaker’s plan. In a speech that was more wistful than angry, he recalled growing up in a union household that had health care benefits generous enough to help him overcome cancer in 1974. He said collective bargaining rights helped build the middle class.

“Municipal workers aren’t the bad guys here,’’ he said. “They’re not the ones who caused the financial crisis. Banks and investment companies got a slap on the wrist for their wrongdoing, but public employees are losing their benefits.’’

The timing of the vote was significant. Union leaders plan today to unleash a major lobbying blitz with police officers, firefighters, and other workers flooding the State House. Taking the vote last night at 11:30 allowed lawmakers to avoid a potentially tense confrontation with those workers, and vote when the marble halls of the House were all but empty.

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2011/04/27/house_votes_to_limit_bargaining_on_health_care/

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Obama’s pseudo leadership continues: Social Security and more at stake

Watch what he does not what he says.

By Patrice Greanville

Rebuilding the Left in a Time of Crisis
______________________

(born December 1, 1952) is an American politician who is the 45th and current Governor of the U.S. state of Florida.  Scott served in the U.S. Navy and then went into business. He earned a business degree and law degree and joined a Dallas firm where he became partner. In 1987 he helped found the Columbia Hospital Corporation with two business partners; this merged with Hospital Corporation of America in 1989 to form Columbia/HCA and eventually became the largest private for-profit health care company in the U.S. He was forced to resign as Chief Executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997 amid a scandal over the company’s business and Medicare billing practices; the company ultimately admitted to fourteen felonies and agreed to pay the federal government over $600 million.[3][4][5][6][7] Scott later became a venture capitalist, and entered into politics in 2010, when he announced his intention to run for Governor of Florida. Having defeated Bill McCollum in the Republican primary election, Scott defeated Democrat Alex Sink in a close race in the 2010 Florida gubernatorial election.[8] “

One of Scott’s least original (for a posturing Republican) but most deleterious acts in office so far has been his rejection of federal moneys to build high speed rails in Florida, something that the whole nation wants and needs and that Obama has been pushing with a certain degree of steadfastness.

He’ll betray this one, too

there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be done today. For its entire life Social Security has been a bastion against the indignities of poverty and old age, despite the fact that it was conceived as a 3-legged horse. That says something about the potency of picking the right concept.

The unsinkable SSN

lump-sum benefit at death. Payments to current retirees are financed by a payroll tax on current workers’ wages, half directly as a payroll tax and half paid by the employer. The act also gave money to states to provide assistance to aged individuals (Title I), for unemployment insurance (Title III), Aid to Families with Dependent Children (Title IV), Maternal and Child Welfare (Title V), public health services (Title VI), and the blind (Title X).[11]

unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Employment definitions reflected typical white male categories and patterns.[12] Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers.[13] The act also denied coverage to individuals who worked intermittently.[14] These jobs were dominated by women and minorities. For example, women made up 90% of domestic labor in 1940 and two-thirds of all employed black women were in domestic service.[15] Exclusions exempted nearly half of the working population.[14] Nearly two-thirds of all African Americans in the labor force, 70 to 80% in some areas in the South, and just over half of all women employed were not covered by Social Security.[16][17] At the time, the NAACP protested the Social Security Act, describing it as “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”[17]

[17]

Social Security reinforced traditional views of family life.[18] Women generally qualified for insurance only through their husbands or children.[18] Mothers’ pensions (Title IV) based entitlements on the presumption that mothers would be unemployed.[18]

Obama enters the fray, wobbly as usual—expect theatrics and no substance

PATRICE GREANVILLE is editor in chief of The Greanville Post.

ADDENDUM FEATURE


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Obama’s Depraved Indifference

By Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford

President Obama seems positively eager to dismantle the safety nets put in place in the Thirties and strengthened by a Black-led movement in the Sixties. He calls it “Winning the Future” – a future that “holds nothing but further pain and decline for Black America.” By virtually all indices, Black fortunes have plummeted under the First Black President, whose policy is to let the (chocolate) chips fall where they may.

“Where previous Democratic administrations have treated Black communities with benign neglect, Obama’s policy is best described as depraved indifference.”

It was one of the First Black President’s greatest “I Have Nothing for the Blacks” moments. “My general approach is that if the economy is strong, that it will lift all boats,” replied the man who had brought millions to the Washington Mall just three months earlier, transforming an inaugural formality into a must-be-there-if-you-are-breathing Great Black Hajj [10]. Obama then offered smug assurances that “folks who are most vulnerable are most likely to be helped because they need the most help.” Under his presidency, the exact opposite would occur.

In the year that followed, Obama would pump $14 trillion into Wall Street’s accounts, the biggest transfer of wealth in human history, but the “rising tide” would swamp Black America. Black male unemployment, which stood at an official rate of 17.2 percent when Showell posed his question, would exceed 20 percent as the crisis deepened, with never a hint of targeted policy consideration from the Obama administration. Today, at 16.8 percent, Black male unemployment [11] is markedly higher than twice that of white men (7.7 percent) – a significant widening of the great gap that has come to be thought of as “normal,” beginning in the early Seventies. The “hidden” chasms of Black joblessness have grown even more under Obama’s economic tutelage, as Blacks disproportionately crowd the subterranean corridors of the long-term and “discouraged” unemployed – a despairing cohort whose ranks have swelled to record levels during this rich man’s “recovery.”

“Barack Obama must bear direct responsibility for the relative Black decline, both as candidate and president.”

Black wealth has virtually disappeared. Data gathered prior to 2007, when the full scope of the subprime mortgage catastrophe was just becoming known, showed median Black family wealth at about $5,000, one-twentieth [12] of the median white family’s $100,000 holdings. Since then, the bottom has fallen out from under whole communities, with Blacks hit by far the hardest. By the second quarter of 2010, Black home ownership had declined [13] from its 2007 level of 48 percent to 46.2 percent, a 3.7 percent drop, and still falling – a guarantee that median Black household wealth is well below the $5,000 registered in 2007. (Median wealth for single Black women [14] at the top of their earning capacity, ages 36 to 49, was precisely $5 – five dollars! – in 2010.)

Barack Obama must bear direct responsibility for the relative Black decline, both as candidate and president. As election year 2008 began, Obama took the most pro-banker [15], laissez faire capitalist position on home foreclosures of the three major Democratic presidential candidates. John Edwards backed a mandatory moratorium on foreclosures and a freeze on interest rates, while Hillary Clinton supported a “voluntary” halt and $30 billion in federal aid to homeowners. But Obama opposed any moratorium, mandatory or voluntary, and balked at cash for homeowners and stricken communities. As president, his program to stem the flow of foreclosures has been pitiful, near worthless in slowing the spiral that has taken down much of what once considered itself the Black middle class.

“His program to stem the flow of foreclosures has been pitiful.”

Where previous Democratic administrations have treated Black communities with benign neglect, Obama’s policy is best described as depraved indifference.

budgetary formula [16] includes only $1 in closed corporate loopholes and higher taxes on the rich, for every $3 he slices from federal spending, most of it from education, health and other social programs. Then, like a cat scratching in kitty-litter, Obama tries to hide his actual deeds with a wonderfully crafted but totally fabulist speech: “We will all need to make sacrifices,” he said [17], without quantifying what was being sacrificed by whom. “But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in.”

Obama has already explained, to anyone that was actually listening, what kind of America he believes in. It is one in which people are tossed about to sink or swim with the tides.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [18].

[19]

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-depraved-indifference

Links:
[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/african-america/black-unemployment
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/african-america/black-wealth
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/obama-budget
[4] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/obama-foreclosures
[5] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/obama-rising-tide
[6] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/obamarama
[7] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/winning-future
[8] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/Obama Indifferent.png
[9] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-preserves-entrenched-power-sidesteps-racial-disparities
[10] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/great-black-hajj-2009
[11] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm
[12] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/study-shows-blacks-will-never-gain-wealth-parity-whites-under-current-system
[13] http://www.thenorthstarnews.com/Issue.aspx?ID=2010-10-12
[14] http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/median-wealth-of-single-black-women-is-5/
[15] http://www.thenation.com/article/subprime-obama
[17] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/04/13/text-of-obama-speech-on-the-deficit/
[18] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
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Lesser-Evil Math Doesn’t Compute: Freedom Plaza Has the Same Name as Tahrir Square

By David Swanson, War Is A Crime [3]  Tuesday 12 April 2011

The Great Promiser at work. Every election round offers worse and worse "choices".

In an electoral system corrupted by money, media, and parties, the US people are offered a choice every four years between two hideously awful candidates for an office that increasingly resembles an imperial throne. And increasingly the primary motivation of voters is to oppose the candidate they believe is the greater evil.

worse [4] in office than his campaign rhetoric suggested, and so were they. But, whether you compare campaign promises to campaign promises or actual performance to actual performance, we are on a downward slide that continues whether or not we elect the lesser evil candidates.

Kerry, Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale, and Carter were lesser-evil candidates as well, but arguably worse than either of the two big candidates in each of the elections that preceded them. Nobody when I was a kid could have imagined someone like Obama as the greater evil candidate, much less the lesser evil candidate. If you look at the national trends toward militarism, an imperial presidency, the concentration of wealth, the erosion of civil liberties, the privatization of the public sphere, the selling out of the environment, et cetera, et cetera, the two candidates in each presidential election tend to agree on policies worse than what either candidate would have accepted four, or at least eight, years before.

The result, after a cycle or two, would be decisive support for decent candidates in both general elections and primaries. But this would only work if accomplished not by staying home and silent but by staying out and visible. Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, has the same name as Tahrir Square in Cairo. If we were to pack it with millions of Americans and march to and nonviolently shut down the Capitol, the White House, and the Pentagon, our voices would be heard. Then, and only then, could we communicate our refusal to any longer support a momentary lesser evil who is historically a greater evil than what has gone before.

DAVID SWANSON is a well-known antiwar and social activist.

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The impotence of the loyal partisan voter

By Glenn Greenwald

Obama: He took us in once and he has a good chance of doing it again. The "Lesser Evil" bogeyman will take care of that.

About that point, Rachel said this:

Only the base itself will ever change that.

fear of Sarah Palin, the Kochs and the Tea Party. Rachel herself made this point quite well before the 2010 election:

I talked at the top of the show tonight with Gail Collins about how one way to motivate your natural base for an election is to make your base afraid of what the other side has to offer. And that is true. That works. That works on both sides. It works for conservatives about liberals and it works for liberals about conservatives.

urged progressives not to organize for Obama until next year while nonetheless vowing to support his re-election, which (though well-intentioned) strikes me as merely reinforcing this dynamic. But what I do know is that Rachel’s optimistic proclamation that “only the base itself will ever change” this dynamic cannot be fulfilled without giving the Party and its leaders a true reason to pay attention or care about disenchantment (and, some day, to fear alienating their base). For those who are hopeful that this will happen, what do they envision will cause it? What would ever make Democratic Party leaders change how they view this dynamic?

* * * * *

documented before — virtually every country that suffers horrible Terrorist attacks — Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia — tries the accused perpetrators in its regular court system, on their own soil, usually in the city that was attacked.  The U.S. — Land of the Free and Home of the Brave — stands alone in being too afraid to do so.

long before Congress acted to ban transfers of detainees to the U.S. — removed decision-making power from the DOJ in the KSM case and made clear it would likely reverse Holder’s decision.  As The Atlantic‘s Andrew Cohen notes:

The Congressional ban is the excuse, not the cause.

* * * * *