Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » NYT

Exploiting Contract Workers

jstuart — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:46:22 +0000

New Orleans Reading an surprisingly good article in the New York Times about the union fight in Indonesia against the great mega-retailer Carrefour to win rights for contract workers that they thought they had gained in a strike earlier this year, I was struck by how blind we all are to similar worker exploitation right in front of our eyes every day. We are not blinded so much by ignorance as by ubiquitous corporate deceit and sleight of hand. The worker smiling across the counter, hauling our garbage can, delivering our prescription, telling us about the traffic on the way from the airport, and in many other situations is not really working for the company whose name is on their uniform, but often an exploited contract worker in disguise.

Recently talking to Ken Paff, the long time organizer for Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) about any new organizing being done by the Teamsters, he was incredulous when I told him that Waste Management and many other companies really only employed the drivers on those privatized municipal sanitation trucks, because the laborers on the back end of the trucks were almost always contracted, casual and temporary workers. I knew because Local 100 has represented them with all of the garbage companies in New Orleans, Dallas, and elsewhere for years. It’s part of the business model, pure and simple. Offload the workman’s compensation liability on someone else because running in traffic behind a multi-ton truck is very dangerous work and besides who knows (cares?) what they might be paid for the work and the risk. Just like the Indonesian worker was quoted by Sara Schonhardt in the Times, “New employees who are young and ready to enter the work force will take whatever pay they can get…” and this sets the stage for exploitation obviously.

Taking a cab into the city from the Metro Airport in Detroit I saw an envelope between the cabbie’s seats that was marked UAW. I asked him if he was represented by the autoworkers union. He was on the organizing committee of a difficult drive to organize the company with the UAW’s help, but they kept being rebuffed as “contract” workers. To same “in name only” beggars the question of the weaknesses of labor laws for this burgeoning sector of the domestic and global workforce.

Of course it goes without saying that this is part of why ACORN International’s India FDI Watch Campaign continues to insist that Carrefour, Walmart, Metro, Tesco, and other giant multi-brand retailers must agree to labor standards, job protections, and community benefits before entering India. The notion of using contract workers in retail to escape national labor laws providing protections and benefits is well established. For example in Mexico where Walmart is well established as Mexico’s largest private sector employer (just as they are in the USA and Canada), when you are watching the cashier ring up your bill and someone else bag your groceries, just like in Indonesia, you are talking to a contract worker with a smiley face on their shirt just like the rest of the Walmart “associates.”

Not all associates are created or treated equally it seems. This is a critical issue that could easily be solved either by worker action or by closing the loopholes in the labor laws. It would be wonderful if both workers and lawmakers could combine to fix this problem in many countries, though that seems like a Christmas kind of wish and too much to hope.

Predatory Student Loan Travesty

jstuart — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 14:20:09 +0000

New Orleans Ok, one hand is clapping. There was some progress on student loans under the Obama Administration. The huge billion dollar scam that was subsidizing banks was kyboshed and federal loans were taken away from the private sector. Furthermore, President Obama won some limits on payments and implemented some forgiveness programs, especially for public service. Clap! Clap! Clap!

But, let’s not pretend there’s a solution by any means, as costs continue to rise and debt for many continues to compound. I was reminded of all of this as I watched an excellent trailer for a coming documentary called “Default: The Student Loan Documentary.” The highlight (lowlight?) was watching one young person after another state obvious: they took out loans with the dewy eyes of youth buying the American myth that riches were on the other end of the education door, and are now drowning in debt and compound interest charges while navigating well paid jobs, professional jobs ($35000/year) that provide living wages but can’t pay loan shark interest and loans.

It has ceased to be a surprise to me that inevitably if we both to look at any powerless constituency like the young, the old, the poor, or immigrants, it is a certainty that we will find financial predation sucking the citizen wealth out of any groups that can be easily exploited by their acute need or their ignorance. One of the functions of government is to protect and defend citizens against such practices, but in our current ideology too many blind eyes are turned and banks and others prey without restrain or regard.

Rob Lieber in the New York Times talked about two new student loans being offered by U. S. Bank and Wells Fargo, and his column was almost as sad to read as watching “Default” had been. Like sub-prime housing loans and refund anticipation loans, I cannot deny that there isn’t a need and market for private student loans. Part of the reason is that the excellent (3.4% interest) federal loans just don’t carry enough of the weight involved in paying for modern higher education. All of which opens the door for these absurdly dangerous and risky loans to teenagers desperate to go to college. Fixed interest rates are a good thing but U. S. Bank offers one for 15 years at 7.8% or with an upfront fee, 8.46%, which right now is knocking on the door of usury, frankly. Wells Fargo fixed rate product moves from 7.29% to almost double that at 14.21 percent if you are a working stiff trying to go to community college or trade school, which enrages me! Add to both of these products the likely certainty that a teenager will have to have a co-signer, usually from their family, and it is easy to see how the whole family could go down on the false promises made at the altar of better incomes through higher education.

This is only a fix in the way that the term is used with hard drugs rather than higher education. Lieber is right to point out that too few students and their families follow the implicit instructions of the federal program and most advisers to first use up the $31,000 that will come at a cheaper vig from the feds and if you need more, realizing that you may be over your head, and need to look at a different school with more affordable debt.

The snowball currently has more chance in hell than we have of getting Congress to expand the federal program to a higher, more realistic level. Everywhere we read of layoffs and cutbacks at even the relatively more affordable public institutions across the country who are being driven to layoffs and price hikes.

The student loan situation is a travesty. What kind of a society refuses to protect its young?

Whistleblowers and Wiki-leaks: Hater Talk, Half-Step Walk

jstuart — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 16:00:23 +0000

New Orleans Reading the long story in The New Yorker recently, it was clear that Thomas A. Drake was no dream employee at National Security Agency (NSA), but it was even more obvious that trying to convict him of the Espionage Act was ridiculous, so seeing him plead out on a misdemeanor deal is probably largely an example of his inability to muster the resources to weather a trial and embarrass the Obama Administration. I’ll be darned if I’ll read all the gee-whiz stories about Sarah Palin’s emails, which I have to bet are 24000 pages of the paper pushing done by governors in small states which make them do crazy things like run like the dickens for vice-president. All of this makes me wonder what’s happening with Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who were last year’s scourge of society and humankind?

Thankfully, Assange has finally gotten the message that if he wants to save the value of Wikileaks and keep his own keister out of the calaboose, he needs to finally put a sock in it and try to hide some of his more obnoxious and paranoid personality quirks (which is not to say some of his paranoia is not warranted!). Smartly, Wikileaks and Assange have now expanded their partnerships with even more media outlets around the world, which has meant that now a long time after the original dumps of information we are still reading citations almost daily somewhere in the world to Wikileaks. It is categorically true that their movement of this information to the press and the people has been an invaluable resource all over the world, and one that continues to keep on giving.

The New York Times seems prissy and hypocritical in still wanting to use soon departing executive editor Bill Keller’s ham-handed and mean-spirited ad hominem slaps at Assange to give cover and comfort to all manner of forces confused over the difference between the messenger and the message. Almost daily I read somewhere in the Times a reference to information they have gotten from Wikileaks, so who cares if they want to eat dinner with Assange and how often he showered? Are they on the high school football team, still looking for a way to make fun of the class nerd or what?

Even more hypocritical is the continued savage curtailment of whistleblowing, news leaks, and public spirited public employees with the bullyboy bluster of the Justice Department and its irresponsible prosecutions of anyone committed to transparency and truth. There are hardly any other areas other than immigration and foreclosure modification policies where what the Administration says is so different than what it does.

I don’t see any apology coming soon to Wikileaks from our government or others much less news outlets with diminished capacity who are relying on Wikileaks like lifeblood, but is it too much to expect that some of them might at least finally say, “thanks!”

Bullseye on Public Sector Workers and Unions

jstuart — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:49:02 +0000

New Orleans For all the talk about the U.S. Congress and what it might do at the hands of the new majority, there’s still a couple of circuit breakers handling too much power surge when business has to go to the Senate or even face a Presidential veto. In the states rouge legislators could be much more frightening, especially as they move against public employees and therefore their unions in this last bastion of relative labor strength.

Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times wrote a scary piece this week detailing some of the draconian steps that legislatures and new governors are proposing to stick it to public employees and their unions, including in some situations outright withdrawal of recognition for the unions. There are few folks out there that have not seen this coming particularly given the last year of struggle in heavily unionized California around state and local employees and the drumbeating by New York’s new democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, and President Obama on wage freezes.

Part of the problem is the wide misperception that public employees are living high on the hog with better salaries and benefits, so now it’s time for them to share in the pain. There is little evidence that this is in fact the truth. The only traditional advantage that public employees have had historically is that their jobs were simply more stable and secure than in the private sector, and workers traded the security of a job certain for the ups and downs of the private sector business cycle. Unions in the public sector, rather than being greedy, simply enjoyed the same security as their members since they were not facing constant employee turnover and therefore costs were less to service and generated a stable dues base. The real crises could be the loss of that stability.

There may be some states and isolated cities where certain jobs between private and public sector are equivalent when one measures both pay and benefits, but this has been an exhaustively studied situation, and the notion that there is a significant public sector advantage is largely a politicians’ mirage. A good example often in the news is the mismatch of pay for public sector nurses compared to those in the private sector where devotion to the job is about all that holds the workers. Lower wage workers in the service sector have increasingly been contracted out in past economic crises and are tit for tat with the private sector if not below.

The advantages argued in the past for public sector pensions are also disappearing, especially as the reports of public underfunding build up in piles these days. In fact what is often ignored is that some of these same pensions substitute for social security, so that if they are degraded public workers could find themselves up a terrible creek.

Contrary to what the right wing is arguing, public employees are not pampered and over paid. The real issue is more likely “defunding” the unions which have been their protectors, especially the aggressive and politically powerful SEIU and AFSCME. Greenhouse makes this point as well arguing that tactically forcing unions to spent more in defense would defang them in terms of political spending for 2012 federally and at the local and state levels.

This is a bad time for this fight, but there’s no reason to “blame the victim” — public employees — when this is just brass knuckle political war. We might as well engage the battle on the real ground rather than the make believe world.

Qualifying Parties via Internet

dine — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:18:30 +0000

New Orleans In a piece about the feinting being done by billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Matt Bai in the New York Times correctly pointed out that not only money but “ballot access” was a huge impediment to alternative political parties and candidacies. A throwaway comment though got me thinking when he mentioned that qualifying such efforts would be easier in the internet age because “…signature-gathering…is far easier to organize now, through online communities….” Bai is simply talking theoretically about organizing efficiencies here, but what hit me like a brick was whether or not it was legal now – or would soon be legal – to actually qualify such petitions through direct internet signature gathering, which would be a revolutionary breakthrough.

I don’t fully know the answer about what might be possible now, though my friends at Google pretty quickly revved up their search engines and allowed me to piece together enough in a sideways fashion to determine that internet petition gathering is already legal in California in seems and at least Utah for a certainty. I don’t normally associate Utah with progressive breakthroughs, so I would not be surprised to hear that other states (I would almost bet on Washington and Oregon for examples) have also joined the 21^st century and allowed internet signature gathering to legally qualify candidates and parties.

I have sent a couple of emails out to colleagues who are mega-domes in this area since surely they would already know where this can be legally done, and when I hear, I will definitely share the news. Whether just these two or another dozen, more interestingly it seems inevitable that within a couple of years or at most a decade, one could qualify alternative parties successfully on a state by state basis via the internet at a fraction off the cost thereby making alternative parties accessible in a way that has not been allowable since the 1890′s when the two-party stranglehold became embedded in law in one state legislature after another.

Visionary thinkers in political strategy and tactics, particularly among progressives, would do well to start tilling these vineyards. This could be big and a total game changer! This is a political forward pass in a landscape dominated by three yards, a cloud of dust, and a rock pile of money: parties, programs, and candidates get ready to step up.

Paul Revere and Darrell Issa: Two if By See!

jstuart — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:44:17 +0000

New Orleans This is a gentle reminder to my friends among the Tea-people. History is a funny thing, comrades, in case you missed this part of high school, it’s based on facts, rather than opinions and in fact you need to base your opinions on facts.

I am reminded of this in looking at the daily screeds among the right wing, professional blogging class. This is no chattering class, but more of a shouting mass that has to somehow push some kind of garbage out by the curb of the internet highway, sometimes several times per day. A popular theme over the last week involving yours truly has been to comment on my warning to all that would listen that Congressman Darrell Issa’s elevation to the head of the House Investigations’ Committee would be bad news for anyone who still believes in freedom of association and freedom of speech.

Although it looks like I might qualify as a soothsayer by the right’s lights, since Issa immediately ran his mouth off about wanting to investigate ACORN as high on his list in order to “keep anything like” such an organization ever being organized again, which seemed more to me like a preemptive strike against all things progressive rather than a real “investigation” of any sort. I wasn’t alone for long either since an editorial in the Times laid out the same concern and a handicapper in last Sunday’s op-ed page on the Times placed an ACORN investigation, particularly of the ACORN Housing Corporation and its programs over the years, to “show” in 3^rd place on the most likely list.

All of which brings me back to the lesson in history or legend of the great Paul Revere’s ride warning “that the British were coming” after the real Tea Party in Boston Harbor. As every school child knows, as Revere rode at night through Concord and Lexington spreading the warning, the watchwords were “One if by land, and two if by sea,” giving the lantern signals for preparation to citizens throughout the land.

Revere’s ride was a warning, not a retreat in fear. Look it up.

My warning of the abuses of power by Issa and the fruitlessness of his self-centered escapades paid for by the taxpayers in frivolous and defamatory witch-hunts is just that: a warning. There’s absolutely nothing to fear from his mess anymore than there was anything to fear from the several ridiculous and error ridden reports he has already issued about the same subjects. We’ve all already been there, done that, and read his press clippings. There was nada. Nothing there! I already have a tie picked out, given to me by my friends in British Columbia and handmade by one of the native tribes in the northern part of the province. It’s gray and black and beautiful, and frankly kind of fierce looking. I’m going to have to fix hole in my books, but there’s plenty of time.

But, I’m still riding and warning others that they need to “Be Prepared” (hey, I was an Eagle Scout so I know what this is about and, parenthetically, let me note how proud I have been to read that Keith Richards of the world’s greatest band, The Rolling Stones, was also well trained by the Scouts over there) and get ready, and this time people and groups need to band together rather than just watching by the sidelines like they did when ACORN was under assault.

Eventually, people and their organizations have to stand and fight. Issa keeps picking a fight like a school yard bully. Me and Paul Revere think it’s time for “one from the hand, and two to make him see!”Paul

Deficit Commission’s Assault on Workers and the Poor

jstuart — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:30:18 +0000

New York Staying in the guest room of an old ILGWU coop near Grand and FDR with a view of Brooklyn and the Williamsburg Bridge from one window and across the street the sprawling Hillman complex named after Sidney Hillman the old Amalgamated Clothing Workers leader, I could remember the vision of unions – and even government – to provide life to death strength for our members. I say government, because these coops were all built as worker and retirement housing through federal financing programs in the 1950-60s. To complete the cycle I was the guest of Sam Mitchell, a retired Canadian professor from Ottawa, who had inherited the place from an uncle, who had far outlived his father, my old friend and colleague, H. L. Mitchell, founder of the historic Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) in eastern Arkansas almost 100 years ago.

There were some brief moments over the last 100 years where it was not politic to victimize the poor and workers. Reading the propositions of the bi-partisan Deficit Commission and its total assault on citizen wealth, if there was any doubt, it’s crystal clear that at least many of the blue ribbons on this commission think those times are long gone. The headlines have focused on spending cuts and adjustments, but this is much, much more and much, much less, and I don’t say this because all of the adjustments are wrong.

Sitting with my view of Brooklyn, I could read the morning paper, the New York Times, and its chart on the cuts which mislabeled some of the most severe anti-poor attacks as “tax increases.” I assume they mean revenue increases, since the point was to eliminate entitlements like the critical ones for working families and low income workers, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the child tax credit, both of which have long enjoyed total bipartisan support whether Clinton or the Bushes or Obama at the top.

They want to save $24 billion by freezing federal and non-combatant salaries for three years moving the concept of an “all voluntary” army bias to public workers without reckoning with the impact there on families, communities, or anything else. In the same spirit this commission’s leaders argued for cutting social security benefits for retirees, and remember those of us who need social security the most are lower income workers without fancy salaries and benefit programs. Reducing automatic cost of living increases also would guarantee that we impoverish senior citizens depending on social security for their subsistence living. I hope Mexico is read for all of the undocumented seniors that will be swarming across the border looking for lower living costs.

Some of the big headline “gasps” doesn’t worry me as much, frankly. Changing the retirement age for social security to 69 by 2075 wouldn’t affect any workers alive now and is so far off in the political and economic future that it’s something that intellectually doesn’t bother me as much as not supporting real workers and their families now.

I argued in Citizen Wealth that we needed to redirect the lost tax revenues that have become nothing more than giveaways to the rich when they receive mortgage interest rate deductions. The tax benefits that might make the difference in a working family entering home ownership do not really matter up the income scale and there’s evidence. The rich continued to buy second homes (and third and fourth) even after the deductions disappeared there, and are still going to buy homes even without a deduction.

The other point I made before repeatedly, and that hopefully is being drummed in by the disaster of the great recession, is that we need to incentive other affordable housing options in multi-family housing, apartment construction, and, yes, public housing. The ILGWU coop where I was staying was no long price capped, but had gone to market rates. Estimates on the value of this “worker housing” in Manhattan were now between $450,000 and $1 million. The coop itself, no longer in the business of safe guarding worker housing now gets 20% of any sale, though in my brief stay I couldn’t find out where that 20% goes. So though the real estate lobbies and interest will lather up on this one, I actually believe that we need to reappropriate the tax revenues from reforming mortgage interest rate deductions to more effective affordable housing programs. Unfortunately even agreeing on some of the Commission’s recommendations doesn’t really mean consensus, since they don’t want to reallocate, they want to recover the funds and pretend that workers and the poor don’t exist, never age, don’t need affordable housing options, and the rest.

What mischief! Read Paul Krugman’s column in today’s Times for even more here.

Fortunately Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Chicago is on this Commission, and she’s a freedom fighter.

Andy Stern, former chief of the Service Employees, is also a member. There’s hope there as well though he was quoted as saying “at least people stayed in the room” in concern for the Republicans walking out. I hope Andy doesn’t get to comfortable in this chair, because frankly I was surprised on reading the early reports that he was still in the room.

Someone has to stand up for the poor and workers here, because there is no question they are under assault both now, and as we can see, in the future.

Palin, Assange, Project Vote, Toronto, and Foreclosures

jstuart — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:13:46 +0000

New Orleans I’m on the predawn patrol to Phoenix to check again on foreclosure ground zero and how it can be possible with tens of thousands of people losing their homes that this is not a central issue in the Governor’s election? When even the New York Times realizes from their lofty perch that the mortgage paperwork isn’t worth fish wrapper and there needs to be a moratorium, I understand why Wall Street can’t hear that, but how is it possible that the White House continues to miss the call?

Speaking of calls, flipping the channels before passing out last night, I saw the Media Matters guy talking head with an interviewer. He first caught my ears with a phrase about the “innocent staffers at the Tides Foundation” being “targeted for assassination,” and knowing so many of them, I could easily visualize them reaching for their cell phones to call Mom back home and explain why this was really a good job! He was threatening to call Sarah Palin, if she didn’t respond to their request for her to denounce Glenn Beck and all of the right wing hate speech. Yeah, right! Grizzly mom sets the scene for slaughter in speech after speech. This call won’t be answered, unfortunately.

Julian Assange of Wikileaks likes to speak for his program but he’s not getting much Media 101 advice from his volunteer team, and this may be why his German spokesperson got in a huff and resigned. He seems to have somehow believed that he could walk off the set on news interviews when he doesn’t like the questions and did so on the other day on CNN. Even with Mr. Softball Larry King and Daniel Ellsberg they had a minute where they thought he had buzzed off. He seems to be offended that folks are going to ask him about the rape and molestation accusations in Sweden. Well, hello, Julian? Until it’s resolved, of course they’re going to ask, and you just answer, and then move on, don’t be an ass about it and think somehow that this is something diva antics can handle. Come on, this is bush league. Man up!

On the rabid right because an election is nigh upon us, there’s a spate of ACORN’s BACK articles on the whack-and-blog front proving once again that the right is now so atavistic that it has become necromantic. Please friends and neighbors, keep away from cemeteries until after November 2^nd. ACORN is dead as a doornail and no amount of blowhard air is going to resuscitate it. I got a couple of emails yesterday and forwarded links where someone was trying to conflate poor Project Vote’s meager efforts this round and argue Project Vote and ACORN were one and the same so let’s go to town. I wouldn’t want to confuse anyone with the facts, but Project Vote is simply not the same as ACORN. The facts are simple. If ACORN were still alive and well, there would be a different calculus right now on the eve of the mid-term elections. The outcome might not be that much different, but the contest would be closer and fairer if lower income and working people were registered and going out to vote in the numbers we have seen in the past.

Which also makes me think about Toronto, one of the shining progressive city lights of North America and has me head scratching to figure out the Mayor’s election this week? How is it possible that a hard right conservative could win by over a 100,000 votes? There’s no job in Mudville today.

So off to Phoenix!

Silver Lining on Home Equity Loans

jstuart — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:25:51 +0000

New Orleans In some ways we all eventually come to grips with the fact that we are a “product of our raising,” as the expression down here goes and in the case of personal real estate and personal debts, I was my father’s son: conservative! When he retired after 38 years with an oil company, the first thing he did was pay off his mortgage. When I left a job I had held for 38 years, I paid off my mortgage. Land is an asset. Pay the notes and hold the land as long as you can. Save, don’t spend, was another part of the standard operating procedure. I know a lot of people who took out home equity loans to pay for this, that, and the other, especially children’s educations. I saved for it, and am still paying off the last $10,000 on the last of my children’s student loans. What did I know? I was the chicken, and it now sounds like my friends, and a lot of big whoops, may have been the foxes!

A front page article in the Times while I was off the grid in talking about home equity loans says it plainly: “…one of the paradoxes of the recession: the more money you borrowed, the less likely you will have to pay up.”

The banks are writing off these home equity loans at record levels and the default rate on such loans, given the collapse of housing prices in many markets, is busting the charts compared to other default rates. In 2009 lenders wrote off $19.9 billion in home equity loans and in the first quarter of 2010 wrote off $7.88 billion in such loans. It goes without saying that big bank balance sheets are probably carrying untold billions of dollars in bad loans that they are sequencing for write-offs in the future that are probably uncollectible but still on the books. When any collection is made, it seems little more than 10 cents on the dollar is being collected. The article quoted a Utah collection outfit plainly stating that anything more than $10-15,000 was simply uncollectable.

Damn!

The plain math for this weird mix of tragedy and opportunity is that if someone pulled out $100,000 or so in Arizona, California, Florida or wherever when the market value of their homes was soaring, then they might end up losing their home because they are underwater (though as I have counseled previously, in many cases their economic self-interest is already better from walking away rather than paying forever to never achieve equity), but they would have pocketed $90,000 free and clear. Bigger whoops with million dollar places might end up walking away with two, three, five times that amount.

Before the crying towel gets pulled out for the banks, remember that the default rate is still less than 5% and falling slightly, so it’s not like there aren’t a lot of chickens like me and fewer foxes out there, but don’t talk about “moral hazard,” because in this bubble the banks and the borrowers were co-dependents all the way up, and now, all the way down

Wrong Reasons, Right Move

jstuart — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:55:41 +0000

Helena Coming back on the grid for a day, you go through your email, answer the urgent calls, see what’s tweeting, hit the Facebook, and scan through the headlines in the New York Times and other papers to see what’s up. The last is the least rewarding task sometimes.

An irresistible headline jumps up on an editorial: “A Welfare Check and a Voting Card.” That’s a verse in my song, so I jump to that. Big mistake!

The good news is that the Obama Administration after delays dating virtually back to the passage of the National Voter Registration Action (NVRA) in 1993 is clearly issuing regulations to the states and making mandatory the so-called “motor voter” provisions that would require registration access and assistance for recipients of welfare and food stamps by government workers who work with these eligible families. That indeed is cause for celebration by all who are committed to democracy, full participation of the poor in what I have called “maximum eligible participation,” and, frankly, just plain following the law.

The Times editorialist was both wrongheaded and mean-spirited.

In the second sentence comes the first backhanded slap: “…but it could also reduce the impact of advocacy organizations whose role in registering voters caused such a furor in 2008.” WTF? Buddy, you want to reduce the impact of groups committed to full democratic participation by all Americans, then stand up with the Times for automatic registration or even better mandatory voting, don’t blame those of us committed to democracy for the fact that the government didn’t do what the law both allowed and required. Jerk-ball!

But, it gets worse. Later the editorialist offers this gem: “But it is worth remembering that the recession has brought millions of new people to food stamp and other welfare offices in the last two years, many of whom may not be traditional Democrats. In addition, government offices are much more likely to provide reliable registrations than Acorn (sic ACORN) or other advocacy groups that were widely accused of fraudulent sign-ups in the last cycle. Welfare offices generally have extensive methods of verifying identities in order to provide benefits, and it is illegal to provide false records there.

Let me try and understand the perverted logic here. Perhaps the writer would hope that you believe that the recession has had the salutary benefit in our democracy of pushing a more deserving class of the poor into government offices s/he would have us believe, and in fact it might not be a partisan group, as if the poor are somehow political and politically active. If the editorialist read their own paper they might have gotten the news that many of those pushed back were the marginally employed who had been pushed into lower wage employment by the draconian pushbacks in welfare and food stamps over the last decade and the total disinterest in government in security full participation from people eligible for any of these entitlement programs.

And, hey, correct me if I’m wrong, but where do you get off a cheap shot, low blow rehash of the Republican National Committee press briefings to simply take a cut with the “likely to prove reliable registrations than ACORN or other advocacy groups that were widely accused of fraudulent sign-ups in the last cycle.” Prove any of that anywhere, pal, or are you just drinking the partisan Kool-Aid, where a smear is as good as it gets. Luckily for this joker, Times editorialist in their anonymous bunker never have to face any accountability for their smears, innuendo, and misstatements.

Finally in a last act of total hypocrisy the writer tries for an upbeat note by using the example of Ohio and Missouri in recent years where suits by what he calls “advocacy groups” forced the law to be obeyed and hundreds of thousands came on the rolls. Please chicken hearted writer, don’t actually say that these “good” advocacy groups were included in the first order both ACORN and Project Vote, since you have just bitch slapped both of them all the way through this piffle.

At the end we agree though: “The more people who have access to the ballot, the better the country will be.” The difference is that I really believe in this – as do these constantly maligned advocacy groups – and our friend with his nose in the air was really holing his nose all the way as he typed out this piece.

I can’t tell you how nice it is to now be getting ready to head south and stop for two days at the famous (within a small circle of friends) Sleepy Time Duck Camp miles off the highway, way off the internet grid, overlooking a view of the Red Rock Lakes in the Centennial Mountains, the only north-south range in the Rockies at the border of Montana and Idaho. 12 hours up in the “real world” and I’m ready for the much more real world looking eye to eye with a bull moose or fat brown trout again before slapping leather home again.

Home Care Labor Crisis in USA & Korea

jstuart — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:43:47 +0000

New Orleans Meeting with three visitors and friends from Korea, Yungik Jeong, Young Mi Choi, and Hwang Inhul, who work with PSAU, an organization of the unemployed and irregular workers, as informal and unprotected workers are now known there, the conversation quickly came to plight of home health care workers or domestic workers as they are sometimes called in Korea. Similar to the US, this has become a fast growing occupation which they estimated already involves 400,000 workers, yet these workers are not allowed the usual protections and social security of other Korean workers and from what they indicated are actually banned from membership in labor unions.

It was painful for me to report that in the US after many years of employment increases and rising protections brought by unionization in many states, these same critical, yet low status health care workers, are facing a crisis in state after state. Announcement curtailments of workers has already expanded waiting lists in many states, and California where there may be close to as a many workers as exist in Korea faces drastic budget proposals by the governor. If all the proposals being discussed were realized my guess is that 200,000 home health care workers could see their jobs disappear with cutbacks in state subsidies. The loss of 200,000 union dues payers would also be critical for SEIU, AFSCME, and other unions representing home health workers.

The IMF crisis a little more than a decade ago in Korea finds its lingering wake in the severe cutback of labor protections. The Great Recession in the US may end up leaving a similar tsunami for many public – and private – employees as well.

Bob Hebert in the New York Times woefully reminded today that many are averaging a 25% cutback in income in the recession and that it may take 6 to 10 years to make up the ground to move back from income insecurity to any semblance of citizen wealth.

Discussions with my Korean friends was a painful reminder of the long tail of economic crises with no end in sight.

Weird Times on Tax Exemptions for Israeli Settlements

jstuart — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:13:32 +0000

New Orleans I was in Mexico City reading the Times on-line and, frankly, didn’t trust what I was reading completely until I could have the paper in my hot hands, but it’s still a strange and weird article printed on 7/6/10 entitled: “U.S. Gives Tax Breaks for Donations to Aid Settlements in the West Bank” and “Tax-Exempt Funds Aiding Settlements in West Bank: U.S. Gives Tax Breaks for Donations That Help to Sustain Efforts it Opposes.” The article ran in the prime real estate on the front page, right column at the top of the fold. Tax-Exempt Funds Aid Settlements in West Bank by Jim Rutenberg, Mike McIntire, and Ethan Bronner.

The bottom line of the article, which ran more than two full pages seems to have been that over the last 10 years groups with 501c3 tax exemptions from the IRS have given more than $200,000,000 with such tax benefits to support Israeli squatting settlements on land where they are forbidden and that should tax privileges interfere with announced U.S. foreign policy objectives for a two-state solution support both Israel’s nationhood and a Palestinian state as well.

This all seems more like an editorial position than a fact based news article. Furthermore, there was obviously a lot of time and money spent doing the research and driving us to a position that somehow there was something very wrong about people getting tax breaks for something that was contrary to US policy. That’s what leaves me very, very uncomfortable and scratching my head.

My personal position is independent here. I’m totally fine with a two-state solution, and believe it is long, long past due, and that and 3 pesos will buy you a ticket for the Metro in Mexico City for all anyone might care. I’m also very, very good with creating a fairer tax code that didn’t allow the rich to hide so much money in foundations and other dodging schemes rather than allowing us to have more revenues to achieve citizen wealth and greater equality in the United States. Stone me now!

But, the notion that it is front page news or somehow a scandalous problem that under existing rules and regulations someone or something would get a tax exemption opposing US policy is wildly wrongheaded, politically dangerous, and deeply disturbing on almost any reckoning of free speech and associations. Here the Times allowed fuzzy waffling to take the place of almost any reasoned argument for the point of whatever point they were straining so hard to make. It was not until a quarter through this long, long piece that the authors finally get around to saying: “…the tax code encourages citizens to support nonprofit groups that may diverge from official policy, as long as their missions are educational, religious, or charitable.” Ok, so what’s the beef then, fellas?

Then the witch hunt begins. First they raise they infer there may be too many nonprofits, almost a million. So much for the classic de Tocqueville argument! Second, they testily concede that in their review of various settler supporting groups “most generally live within the rules of the American tax code” but both the way they say it and the rest of what they have to say seems to rip this veil apart as quickly as they looked around it. Within sentences they are zinging one group for violating the code by making a donation that seemed political, and in another couple we are wallowing in Jack Abramoff land with other disgraced lobbyists and money runners.
And, the rest follows in this vein.

What’s up here? My guess it is the Times simply reaching. The Israeli Prime Minister was due to visit President Obama, and these boys wanted to seem to have some news on the eve of the arrival. So, they grabbed a couple of threads and tried to weave a coat, even though in doing so they mangled and besmirched both their point and a lot about what constitutes philanthropy and nonprofit work with this broad brush.

If the Times wants to make a strong case for a two-state solution, then hear, hear and put it on the editorial page without trying to throw out the baby (the right to oppose government policy) with the bathwater (the scofflaws that may be abusing the tax code). Is that too much to ask?