The Corporate States of America

Listen to Grayson talk about the Citizens United decision. It is the equivalent of the Dred Scott decision from 1857. Those are might words.

The National Labor Relations Board is Abominable

After coming home from Paris and dealing with striking railway workers for ten days it was interesting to come home to news of the abominable National Labor Relations Board. It is a bit of old news, but ironic that the workers in France, if unhappy - strike, upset the entire country and are joined in unison by Air France workers, all fonctionaire workers, teachers, students (yes, students), the museums, etc. It was both a little frustrating and completely invigorating. I heard about this assault by the Bush administration on labor by the NLRB, but after seeing real labor power in France, it strikes me as ever more important for the progressive movement to get behind labor and push for labor reform as soon as possible.

Recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board has unions and pro labor folks up in arms and the thought of a democratic presidency (one that is truly pro labor, not Bill Clinton) is also invigorating.

The National Labor Relations Board was established to encourage "the practice and procedure of collective bargaining" and to protect the "exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid and protection."

For years unions have been saying that the NLRB system is broken and has become a tool of corporate interests and not the worker interests it was supposed to serve. That is why the labor movement and its progressive allies are pushing to amend the law with the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). "But the recent NLRB decisions say that the corporate Bush backers are not satisfied. They want the law completely eviscerated before Bush leaves office to make it even more difficult for a new President and Congress to address the problems of the denial of worker rights in America."

The Change to Win Federation says that in the month of September alone, on the eve of the close of the fiscal year, the Bush NLRB issued 61, mostly anti-worker, decisions -- fully 20 percent of its total output of decisions for the year. Greg Tarpinian, the executive director of the Change to Win Federation wrote recently and most eloquently:

The onslaught of decisions that are a direct violation of the intent of the National Labor Relations Act that established the NLRB is particularly interesting given that more than half of the decisions were on cases that are over four years old. For an agency notorious in its use of delay as a way to deprive workers of their rights, the sudden spate of decisions suggests that the Bush Administration is in full court press mode and will use its last months in office to gut as much as it can in the area of worker, consumer, environmental, and other protections.

This President has not only run roughshod over the Constitution, he has also destroyed the administrative rules by which our progressive laws have been enforced. And he plans on finishing the job before he leaves office. Labor, consumer, environmental, and other advocates for the American Dream need to link arms together to stop him.

Here are some examples of the assault on labor cases. I am taking this from the Change to Win Federation website.

Harder to join a union, easier to get rid of a union

Dana Corp., 351 NLRB No. 28 (Sept. 29, 2007) – In its fervor to undermine majority sign-up - the right of a majority of workers to sign a card to express their desire to gain a voice on the job and join a union - the Board reversed 40 years of precedent and invented a new rule: even when more than 50% of the workers sign cards indicating they want a union and the employer respects that choice, a 30% minority of employees may, within 45 days of voluntary recognition, petition to decertify the union, prevent the parties from bargaining, and force employees to suffer through the NLRB’s lengthy and divisive election process. Adding insult to injury, the NLRB ruled that employers would henceforth be required to post notices making sure employees are aware of their rights to overturn the union’s representation, but the notice does not include any mention of employees’ right to form a union free from interference.

Wurtland Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, 351 NLRB No. 50 (Sept. 29, 2007) – The Board took the opposite view about the reliability of signing a card when it comes to getting rid of a union! In this case, the NLRB ruled that signatures on a petition were sufficient to get rid of an existing union and the Board rejected its own election process, arguing that employees who want to get rid of their union should not have to endure the delay involved in a decertification election. In Dana, the NLRB said that signature cards were not true indicators of employee support.

Harder for illegally fired workers to get back pay

St. George Warehouse, 351 NLRB No. 42 (Sept. 30, 2007) – The NLRB reversed 45 years of precedent and shifted burdens of proof onto illegally fired workers, making it harder for those workers to recover back pay.

The Grosvenor Resort, 350 NLRB No. 86 (Sept. 30, 2007) - The Board announced a new rule that workers who were found to have been illegally fired but who wait more than two weeks before giving up on getting their job back and looking for a new job work will be denied back pay for that period so as not to “reward idleness.”

Easier for Employers to Fire and Intimidate Union Supporters

BP Amoco Chemical-Chocolate Bayou, 351 NLRB No. 39 (Sept. 29, 2007) - The Board ruled that it was perfectly permissible for an employer to target union supporters for layoffs, and then to force them to sign release forms, as a condition to receiving severance pay, that prevented them or anyone else from challenging the legality of their termination.

This is a shocking assault on the power of the American worker. Know that every assault on any union worker is assault on all American workers, chipping away at what the labor movement achieved in America over the past 100 years. Take action and condemn the Bush administration's assault on workers.

jersey teen sticks it to AT & T over iPhones!

george hotz, from glen rock, nj, gets the special subversive honor this week for stickin' it to corporate america!

according to today's new york times, george deconstructed AT & T's exclusive hold on iPhone's provider service. he published online detailed instructions to let iPhone users unlock their cells, abandon AT & T's choke hold & go to competing carriers.

“This was about opening up the device for everyone,” Mr. Hotz said in an interview over his iPhone, which he was using on the network of T-Mobile, a rival to AT&T.

read more about nj's subversive teen on boing boing (plus see a pix of what he drank while decoding) and check out engadget to see the instructions.

American Poor Not Getting the Help They Need, But Corporations Sure Are

As F. Scott Fitzgerald said many years ago, the rich are not like you or me: They need the government's assistance to get by. There are all sorts of ways in which the government helps those who have the most.

A New Study Released Tuesday says half the Nation's Poor are not Getting the Food Stamps to which they are Entitled. Overall, 50.2 percent of the nation’s qualified poor received food stamps in 2004, according to the study by the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research group that examines the local impact of federal budget policies. The District of Columbia had the highest participation rate in 2004, at 71.8 percent.

"We've got over 35 million people in this country struggling to get enough food to eat, and 50 percent of all low-income people are not receiving the benefit that is intended to alleviate this food insecurity," said Greg Speeter, the project’s executive director. "While the food-stamp program provides a vital service, clearly too many people are still going without."

The food-stamp program was founded in 1964 and run by the Department of Agriculture and is the largest of the federal government’s food and nutrition programs. In 2004, the program cost $28.6 billion, or 1.2 percent of total federal spending, and served 23.2 million people, according to the study. It is also the easiest public assistance program the poor may gain access to, including immigrants who have been banned from just about everything.

There are all kinds of reasons (rationalizations) for the drop in participation, but the fact remains as it does for Welfare and other public assistance programs for the poor, the public stigma attached to welfare is a big reason for low participation rates as is those persons who administer the program throw so many rules at citizens and recipients it becomes nearly impossible to qualify or more aptly to stay qualified.

Of course that is for public assistance for the poor. Public assistance for the rich has no stigma, instead those on the rolls of corporate welfare feel entitled and actually make us feel it is our duty to provide these perks to the rich.

For instance an article Welfare as We Know it describes some of these programs. Bill Gates might have to work for a living if the government didn't grant Microsoft a copyright monopoly on its software... there are much more efficient ways for the government to provide incentives. But, the more efficient mechanisms may not make Bill Gates and his ilk quite so rich, so politicians who hope to get elected and reelected don't talk about them.

The CEOs of drug companies like Pfizer and Merck are able to earn tens of millions of dollars each year only because the government grants them patent monopolies on their drugs. As a result of their government granted monopolies, drugs that would sell for $4 a prescription in a competitive market can instead be sold for hundreds of dollars per prescription, and sometimes even more.

This is enormously inefficient from an economic standpoint. It also leads to unnecessary suffering on the part of millions of people who must struggle to pay for their drugs out of pocket, or deal with crazy bureaucratic rules to get insurers to pick up the tab. But, when it comes to helping the most affluent, efficiency is a secondary consideration.

The right markets corporate welfare as the "market" and welfare to the poor is marketed as "handouts." Why do we allow this? There are so many more examples one could cite to.

One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little known federal agency called the Export-Import Bank, an institution that has a budget of about $1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk some $15.5 billion in loan guarantees annually. At a time when the government is under-funding veterans' needs, education, health care, housing and many other vital services, over 80% of the subsidies distributed by the Export-Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations. Among the companies that receive taxpayer support from the Ex-Im are Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil Oil, IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon, and United Technologies.

General Motors has received over $500 million in direct loans and loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank. The result? GM has shrunk its U.S. workforce from 559,000 to 314,000.

Motorola has received almost $500 million in direct loans and loan subsidies from the Ex-Im Bank. The result? A mere 56 percent of its workforce is now located in the United States.
In fact, according to Time Magazine, the top five recipients of Ex-Im subsidies over the past decade have reduced their workforce by 38% - more than a third of a million jobs down the drain. These same five companies have received more than 60 percent of all Export-Import Bank subsidies. Boeing, the leading Ex-Im recipient, has reduced its workforce by more than 100,000 employees over the past ten years.

These subsidy programs are endless for the rich. Yet, poor people have to beg, steal and borrow and at times cheat just to stay afloat. I would do the same thing if I knew the inequities in the system.

For more on corporate welfare see a Ralph Nader article that appeared at the beginning of the millennium.