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  1. #26
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    This is, of course, completely false. As Sarah Laskow wrote yesterday in The Mulch, \'comprehensive clean-energy and climate legislation could create 1.9 million jobs,\' while Ryan\'s budget plan not only sacrifices the EPA -- $1.6 billion in cuts -- it also decimates jobs.
    I don't consider creating hundreds of thousands of new government jobs to be legitimate "job creation"...just another burden on an economy already stretched too thin with too much government spending coupled with too little government revenue.

  2. #27
    Alleged Michigander ChumpDumper's Avatar
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    How many government jobs did it say that legislation would create?

  3. #28
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    it didn't. CC's knee jerked

  4. #29
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    Why Are We Letting Fossil-Fuel Billionaire Pickens Write Our Energy Policy and Push for More Dangerous Gas Drilling

    Pickens has essentially written a bill called the NAT GAS Act (“New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions,” H.R. 1380), to switch fleet vehicles such as buses and interstate trucks to “natural” gas.

    http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/150644

    ====

    If only natural gas were clean to extract, and didn't need head's "Halliburton law" that excepted fracking from Clean Water statutes.

  5. #30
    Mr. John Wayne CosmicCowboy's Avatar
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    How many government jobs did it say that legislation would create?
    How many civilian jobs did it say would be created and how would those jobs be paid for? Federal grants? Subsidies? Tax credits?

  6. #31
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    "Federal grants? Subsidies? Tax credits?"

    All of those go to oil and gas co's, and $Ts go the military black hole, why not something to renewable, non-fossil energy development?

    Taxpayers pay for oil/gas explorations costs!!

  7. #32
    Alleged Michigander ChumpDumper's Avatar
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    How many civilian jobs did it say would be created
    That was right there in the quote, and it had nothing to don with what you were talking about.

    Please answer my question.

  8. #33
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    Koch Industries Coerced Employees During The 2010 Midterm Elections

    Writing today in the Nation, Mark Ames and Mike Elk reveal that Koch Industries mailed a letters to 50,000 employees instructing them on who to vote for in the 2010 midterm elections. The Koch packet given to employees included candidate names, a letter from a Koch lobbyist, and a right-wing screed from the company and the Washington Examiner, an outlet owned by Phil Anschutz, a billionaire who is close to the Koch family. (View a copy of the packet here.)

    Corporate coercion of employees is perhaps the most profound repercussion from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year. The Nation spoke to several law experts who noted that “Citizens United frees Koch Industries and other corporations to propagandize their employees with their political preferences.” Before the decision, businesses were prohibited from instructing their employees to vote a certain way.

    Not only was Koch active in helping push the Citizens United decision (several of the groups filing amicus briefs supporting unlimited corporate spending were funded by Koch), but Koch actively planned for exploiting the decision. When we exposed a memo outlining the 2010 secret Koch political strategy meeting with fellow right-wing donors, we noted that the summit included a presentation from Karl Crow. Crow is a Koch operative who had penned a memo calling for corporations to exploit Citizens United and aggressively use “employees, vendors, and customers” as tools for advancing business interests in the political sphere

    http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/20/...erm-elections/

    ===============

    If KOCH BROS do it, you can expect other Corporate-Americans to propagandize their Human-Americans. I expect there will be quite a bit of pressure, making the workplace into a "closed shop" of politicized pressure.

    If you don't play the employer's political games, you don't advance or even retain your job.

  9. #34
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    Capitalism's Crisis Within, and How Larry Summers Still Doesn't Get It

    one of the most important economic policy players shaping the environment leading up to the financial crash did not. Former Treasury Secretary and avid deregulator Larry Summers said he wasn't convinced financial "innovation" caused the crisis, a convenient narrative for someone who allowed exotic derivatives to grow unchecked under his watch. (And a bit hard to square with what he said last year on PBS when asked if he had any responsibility for the crash. He said that credit default swaps were "the center of the issue now," and this financial innovation "barely existed [during his tenure at Treasury.]")

    He also warned against the demonization of mainstream economics by people who "don't do math," and flagged the dangers of overregulating in the wake of a crisis. Summers suggested that a crisis mentality is what led Communists to create a planned economy, which eventually collapsed. To my ear, Summers himself sounded not unlike communist authorities who deflected blame by simply denying having agency or authority, and striking a disinterested, distancing voice. By the way, in that PBS interview, he said the word "mistakes", "error" or "failure" five times, with his finger pointed not at himself but squarely at Wall Street and corporate America. Arrogance and ignorance, meet evasion and avoidance.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine...tml?view=print

  10. #35
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    Greenspan's Back to Lead the Charge Against Responsible Regulation

    Wall Street bankers, with help from key Republicans in the House and Senate, have begun a major campaign across the country to kill the regulations currently being developed to enforce Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform. A recent speech by the leader of Wall Street bankers, JP Morgan's CEO Jamie Dimon, took direct aim at financial regulation and new, more rigorous capital standards.

    The same week, Alan Greenspan -- just a year removed from his mea culpa on "self-regulation" -- said the Dodd-Frank legislation would create the "largest regulatory-induced market distortion" in the US since wage and price controls. Very shortly afterwards Senator DeMint introduced a bill to repeal Dodd-Frank. And House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus led 34 of the committee's Republicans in sening a letter to the six agency heads charged with implementing the Dodd-Frank Act stating that the members are "troubled by the volume and pace of rulemakings."

    It is very hard to believe that anyone would propose going back to the policy of "self-regulation" on Wall Street and elsewhere. We tried that during the last 20 years, and it catastrophically resulted in the worst financial meltdown in 80 years, almost destroying the US and world financial systems. It caused more than 3 million homes to be repossessed, drove the unemployment rate over 10 percent, and left millions in economic, and emotional, shock.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-te...tml?view=print

    =========

    my bet: financial regulation will be gutted, Elizabeth Warren will accomplish nothing, and the next bubble will occur long before unemployment is down to 5% (it probably won't ever be down to 5% again, only by redefining that already-redefined number)

  11. #36
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    The New Corporate World Order: American Citizens Paying the Price for Tax-Dodging Companies

    The debate over Republicans’ insistence on continued tax breaks for the superrich and the corporations they run should come to a screeching halt with the report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad.” Those tax breaks over the past decade, leaving some corporations such as General Electric to pay no taxes at all, were supposed to lead to job creation, but just the opposite has occurred. As the WSJ put it, the multinational companies “cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show.”

    No less important than U.S. military muscle is the power of the American government to construct and enforce a worldwide trade and finance structure to the advantage of U.S.-based multinational corporations. That is why the companies spend so much money lobbying Congress on matters ranging from regional trade agreements to international banking regulations. It is precisely the impact of trade agreements like NAFTA that has facilitated the erosion of well-paying jobs. And it was the deregulation of international banking standards, led by the U.S. Treasury Department under the past five presidents, that created the conditions for the recent disastrous housing and banking meltdown.

    Big government, the devil that Republicans love to inveigh against, is big precisely because it is so active in so many costly ways in serving the interests of our biggest corporations. Corporate lobbyists attest with their every breath that big government and big business are bedmates in a bountiful venture that impoverishes the rest of us.

    http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/150688

  12. #37
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    Beware of Vampire Squids and Their Stadium Schemes

    As the Lexington Herald-Leader reported in a September 2010 editorial en led “Arena Cautionary Tale,” public revenue from the stadium “isn’t living up to expectations in terms of paying off the debt incurred in building the facility.” As a result, Louisville’s already-strapped government “may be on the hook for an extra $3.3 million beginning in 2012.”

    That’s because, as Goldman admits on its website, the deal was funded by a massive commitment of public revenues from taxpayers. If the arena isn’t generating tax receipts committed to funding this $200-million-plus “Tax Incremental Financing” scheme, then taxpayers have to come up with that public money from somewhere else—most likely, from cuts to social services or from tax hikes.

    This is the kind of story the Vanity Fair ad is supposed to obscure—the kind of story that got Goldman its Rolling Stone magazine billing as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” It’s a reputation the bank deserves—one that should make every local official in America hesitate the next time that squid slithers into their town.

    http://www.truthdig.com/report/print...emes_20110421/

  13. #38
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    The 46 Year-Long Republican War On Medicare


    if Americans want to know why Republicans are so eager to kill Medicare, they should look to the party’s history with the popular program. Leading Republicans actually denounced the program as it was being designed, warning that it would take us down the road to totalitarianism or worse, and other leading Republicans were caught on record plotting to eliminate it after it was created:

    - Ronald Reagan: Before he was president, Reagan actually lead a campaign against the creation of Medicare. He ominously warned: “[I]f you don’t [stop Medicare] and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” [1961]

    - Barry Goldwater: Goldwater, a conservative icon, said that establishing Medicare would lead us down the slipper slope of subsidizing alcohol for all: “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink.” [1964]

    - George H.W. Bush: Bush, who would go on to be president after Reagan, said that Medicare shouldn’t be established because it was nothing more than “socialized medicine.” [1964]

    - Bob Dole: In 1996, during his campaign for the Presidency, Dole openly bragged that he was one of 12 House members who voted against creating Medicare in 1965. “I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare . . . because we knew it wouldn’t work in 1965.” [1965]

    - Sen. Carl Curtis (NE): During the debate over the creation of Medicare, Curtis said that the “insurance industry has a remarkable record” and that Medicare “is not public welfare. It is not charity. It is not kindness. It is socialism. Socialism is not the answer to anything.” [1965]

    - Armey: Armey told reporters in 1995 that “we need to wean our old people away from Medicare.” [1995]

    - Newt Gingrich: Gingrich, who is now likely running for president, told a Blue Cross Blue Shield conference how he plans to eventually get rid of Medicare: “Now, we don’t get rid of it in round one because we don’t think that that’s politically smart, and we don’t think that’s the right way to go through a transition. But we believe it’s going to wither on the vine because we think people are voluntarily going to leave it — voluntarily.” [1996]

    - Rep. Jeb Hensarling (TX): During an appearance on MSNBC last week, Hensarling referred to Medicare along with Social Security as “cruel Ponzi schemes.” [4/15/2011]


    it is a single-payer health care system has little involvement from the private insurance industry that is both incredibly efficient and remarkably popular among the general public. It completely violates the conservative mantra that the market should be the arbiter of all things.

    http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/23/...edicare-never/

  14. #39
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    Anybody got an "equivalent" Dem proposal as mean, and as racist as this Repug:

    State Sen. Bruce Caswell's (R) budget proposal would force children in the state's foster care system to purchase clothing only in used clothing stores.

    Children who are placed in foster care receive a state-funded clothing allowance. Under Caswell's plan, foster children would receive gift cards redeemable only at places like Goodwill and the Salvation Army. Caswell insists the proposal has nothing to do with stigmatizing poor children and everything to do with saving the state money.

    http://www.care2.com/causes/politics...-used-clothes/

    ===========

    The Repug idea of everybody sharing the pain for the criminal Banksters' Great Depression.

  15. #40
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    Corporpations win again, stomping on a poor community to get control of their community beach park for a golf course:

    Benton Harbor's EFM suspends city officials' power

    Benton Harbor's Emergency Financial Manager has suspended the decision-making powers of city officials, and Joseph Harris may be the first to do so under the new state legislation.

    http://www.wndu.com/localnews/headli...119969374.html

    Maddow specifically mentioned the Jean Klock Park situation, a story that the Messenger has been following closely for years — and most of the media in the state have been ignoring. A large chunk of that park, deeded to the city on the condition that it remain a public park forever, was leased to private developers to be made into a golf course.

    http://michiganmessenger.com/48319/m...r-efm-takeover

  16. #41
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    EPA is a key target for corporations. Here's a criminal Governor attacking Clean Water Act for his state.

    Governor to EPA: Water guidelines aren’t necessary here


    Gov. Scott asks EPA to rescind federal water pollution control rules, saying the state already has guidelines in place that accomplish the same things.

    http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/2...#ixzz1KS3Ca1ZF

    =========

    There's a reason for head's Halliburton exception, exempting fracking pollution of ground and surface water from Clean Water act: more profits for fracking corporations.

  17. #42
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    Wall Street still spending against Wall Street reform

    They couldn't stop the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation, though they pretty effectively watered it down. That hasn't stopped the banksters from spending like, well, banksters who want to buy their own political system to water it down even more.

    Wall Street and the financial industry spent more to lobby Washington in the first quarter of this year than a year ago when Congress was writing sweeping financial-overhaul legislation, according to a Wall Street Journal review of lobbying reports released Thursday. [...]

    The disclosures show that 26 of the financial firms and trade associations that spent the most in 2010 collectively spent $27 million in the three months ending March 31, a 2.7% increase from the $26.3 million spent in the comparable period in 2010.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/0...28Daily+Kos%29

    ==============

    The 100% falsity of the tea baggers is that they are trashing the Dems and ANY govt while leaving the financial and carbon-energy sectors untouched.

  18. #43
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    Madness: Right-Wingers Are Serious About Trying to Undermine Child Labor Laws

    allow employers to pay anyone under 20 a six-month “training wage” that falls more than $2 per hour below the minimum wage, eliminate rules establishing a maximum number of hours kids 16 and over can work during school days, allow those under 16 to work up to four hours per school day, allow home-schooled kids to work during school hours and eliminate any limit on how many hours kids of any age can work in agriculture (with a signature from their parents or legal guardians). L.D. 516 would allow teens to work longer hours and later into the night than is allowed under current law.

    Children under the age of 14 would no longer be barred from employment. They'd also be able to work all hours of the day, no longer need a work permit from their school and be able to work at motels and resorts so long as they're given a place to lay their weary heads each night. Moreover, businesses that employ children would no longer be subject to inspections from the Division of Labor Standards.

    http://www.alternet.org/module/print...version/150709

    ===============

    Repugs just being repugnant. The VRWC has destroyed millions of good paying jobs, and now needs super-low-cost, no-benefits labor to do the work of ty jobs.

  19. #44
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    Right-Wing Network Behind the War on Unions

    Behind the onslaught is a well-funded network of conservative think tanks that you've probably never heard of. Conceived by the same conservative ideologues who helped found the Heritage Foundation, the State Policy Network (SPN) is a little-known umbrella group with deep ties to the national conservative movement. Its mission is simple: to back a constellation of state-level think tanks loosely modeled after Heritage that promote free-market principles and rail against unions, regulation, and tax increases. By blasting out policy recommendations and shaping lawmakers' positions through briefings and private meetings, these think tanks cultivate cozy relationships with GOP politicians. And there's a long tradition of revolving door relationships between SPN staffers and state governments. While they bill themselves as independent think tanks, SPN's members frequently gather to swap ideas. "We're all comrades in arms," the network's board chairman told the National Review in 2007.

    Advertise on MotherJones.com

    Founded in 1992 by businessman and Reagan administration insider Thomas Roe—who also served on the Heritage Foundation's board of trustees for two decades—the group has grown to include 59 "freedom centers," or affiliated think tanks, in all 50 states. SPN's board includes officials from Heritage and right-wing charities such as the Adolph Coors and Jacqueline Hume foundations. Likewise, its deep-pocketed donors include all the usual heavy-hitting conservative benefactors: the Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, which funds the Cato Ins ute and Heritage; the Castle Rock Foundation, a charity started with money from the conservative Coors Foundation; and the Bradley Foundation, a $540 million charity devoted to funding conservative causes. SPN uses their contributions to dole out annual grants to member groups, ranging from a few thousand dollars to $260,000, according to 2009 records.

    According to SPN's website, Roe launched the conservative network "at the urging" of President Reagan himself as a way to shape state-level policy just as Heritage has influenced federal policy.

    http://motherjones.com/politics/2011...ion-bargaining

  20. #45
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    Another VRWC lie exposed:

    Report knocks legs from under study saying regulations cost the economy $1.75 trillion

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/25/969321/-Report-knocks-legs-from-under-study-saying-regulations-cost-the-economy-$175-trillion?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm _campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29

  21. #46
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    the Tea Party Patriot Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. Prominently displayed was the new group "Dodd-Frank Exposed," with a big booth running this video in a continuous loop.

    Although the organization is ostensibly hosted by the “Judicial Crisis Network” — a group that has no actual registration or office — Dodd Frank Exposed is actually run by two veteran astroturf lobbyists, Gary Marx and Robert Bork Jr. Marx is a vice president at Ralph Reed’s lobbying firm Century Strategies. Bork runs his own public relations company called the Bork Communication Group.

    Bork, the son of famed Reagan Supreme Court nominee, has made a career coordinating front groups on behalf of corporations facing negative scrutiny.

    He later clarified that he was receiving a monthly check from the Compe ive Enterprise Ins ute, a corporate-funded front with a long history of peddling industry-friendly studies.

    Century Strategies, has a similar history as Bork. Century Strategies created Christian-themed front groups for Enron to lobby for energy deregulation, launched a religion-based direct mail campaign to maintain sweatshops in the Mariana Islands, and was caught up in a money laundering scheme with Jack Abramoff for his casino clients.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/0...28Daily+Kos%29

  22. #47
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    The Next Big Thing In Industry: Water Profiteering

    the Global Water Summit 2011, a meet up for corporations that want to profit from water as it becomes scarcer. Sponsored by all the bad actors in the water industry, from Veolia to General Electric, the conference URL was WaterMeetsMoney.com. Even the Koch Brothers' empire was represented (Koch Industries helped pollute water with its fossil fuel operations, so why not profit also from cleaning up the mess?)

    The conference started on a sour note with a keynote address from Michel Camdessus, former Managing Director of the IMF. Camdessus is one of the masterminds behind the scheme to force the 1.44 billion people who make $1.25 a day to pay for the full cost of water. It was also disappointing that Kofi Annan appears to be running interference for the water corporations, basically saying in his speech that the time for protest is over and that we all need to get along.

    One of the most distasteful moments of the conference, which was held in a Five Star hotel in Berlin, was when Sanjay Bhatnagar, CEO of WaterHealth International, took the mic to brag about how his investors were making piles of money selling water in villages in Africa and India. WaterHealth issues smart cards that are used to fill jugs with water -- a 21st century "innovation" for redistributing wealth from the poor in the developing world to the "global investors" of the company. He is a vocal proponent of the poor paying for water, even as the audience used the hotel's excellent plumbing facilities that are linked to Berlin's sewage system -- a system built using public tax dollars. The irony seemed to escape the 400 plus people attending the meeting.

    Another major theme of the meeting was making money from water technologies for mining. During a session chaired by John Veil, the audience heard how producing water for mining and cleaning it up after it's destroyed will be the promised land for the industry. They discussed with glee how fracked gas, known in Europe as shale gas, uses millions of gallons of water that can be produced through desalination or provided in other ways. And after it's horribly polluted, the industry can benefit from "processing" it so that it can be "reused" by the public. Sounds like a science fiction nightmare.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wenona...tml?view=print

  23. #48
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    The Corporate State Will Continue its Inexorable Advance Until We're Locked into a Permanent Underclass

    Corporate capitalism—because it was trumpeted throughout the Cold War as a bulwark against communism—expanded with fewer and fewer government regulations and legal impediments. Capitalism was seen as an unalloyed good. It was not required to be socially responsible.

    Any impediment to its growth, whether in the form of trust-busting, union activity or regulation, was condemned as a step toward socialism and capitulation. Every corporation is a despotic fiefdom, a mini-dictatorship. And by the end Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs had grafted their totalitarian structures onto the state.

    The Cold War also bequeathed to us the species of the neoliberal. The neoliberal enthusiastically embraces “national security” as the highest good. The neoliberal—composed of the gullible and cynical careerists—parrots back the mantra of endless war and corporate capitalism as an inevitable form of human progress. Globalization, the neoliberal assures us, is the route to a worldwide utopia. Empire and war are vehicles for lofty human values.

    Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations.

    The massive redistribution of wealth, as Hacker and Pierson write, happened because lawmakers and public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen. It was not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda, have been able to short-circuit the electorate.

    The reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or Republicans, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour. Wolin writes, “By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes” that it can make their interests a priority, the Democratic Party “pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats are always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism.

    The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most Americans will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word—more.

    They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes

    http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/150790

    =========

    Anybody got any positives?

  24. #49
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    Did You Fall for It? America's Outrage Over TSA Naked Body Scanners Was Right-Wing PR to Prevent Workers from Unionizing

    insight into the Republican playbook against public sector unions, which boils down to this:

    1) Manufacture a fake budget crisis in order to frighten the state’s residents;

    2) PR the false-crisis hard enough until it breaks out of the right-wing/libertarian pipeline and into the mainstream media;

    3) Blame the fake crisis on a fake villain -- “greedy” state employee unions -- thereby pitting the public against state workers.

    That way, when Republicans pass new laws destroying teachers and firefighters unions, they’ll come off as heroes defending the public from greedy unions, rather than as sleazy mercenaries carrying out their corporate sponsors’ dirty work.

    If anyone is wondering why collective bargaining rights are so important to public sector workers, look no further than the TSA, whose employees suffer the lowest morale and highest attrition rates of any federal agency, year after year. Complaints and lawsuits abound, accusing TSA management of rampant sexual harassment, racism, bullying, wrongful termination and abuse of power. If that didn’t make working in the TSA difficult enough, the recent campaign demonizing TSA agents as modern-day Gestapo-agents turned them into the most hated of all federal employees; passengers, encouraged by incendiary PR, hurled abuses in TSA screeners’ faces, and in a few cases even physically attacked screeners.

    , we published an article in The Nation questioning the media-driven anti-TSA campaign, which we argued smelled of AstroTurf.

    we uncovered numerous Koch-linked libertarian activists spearheading the campaign to demonize TSA screeners, DC lobbyists specializing in fake-grassroots campaigns setting up “Opt Out” websites while posing as regular Joes, and sleazy Republican hacks who had shown little interest in protecting civil liberties suddenly getting their ACLU on over the TSA’s intrusive pat-downs and “porn scans.” Progressives were understandably drawn into the anti-TSA campaign and hysteria, as the PR campaign cleverly framed it not as a union-bashing operation, but rather, as a purely civil liberties issue.

    phobic Public Advocate of the United States, a Reagan-era anti-gay group, whose leader accused the TSA of pursuing a “ sexual agenda” with its enhanced pat-downs and scans, echoing charges by the leader of the Americans for Truth about sexuality, who called for a prohibition of gay TSA screeners because they “might get turned on” while patting down passengers.

    If TSA employees are allowed to unionize with collective bargaining rights, it would represent perhaps the single largest pro-unionization drive in decades, adding tens of thousands of dues-paying members to the public sector union rolls, reversing decades of decline and, most importantly, funnel money to pro-labor and predominately Democratic candidates.

    So the Republicans gave in and passed a law federalizing airport and baggage screeners, but with one unusual caveat: no collective bargaining rights for TSA employees, unless their boss, the appointed head of the TSA, gave the green light.

    DeMint made no bones about which threat bothered him most; unions or terrorists:

    "Unionizing the 43,000 security screeners at TSA could give labor unions a $17 million annual windfall in the form of new union dues,"

    http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/150767

  25. #50
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    43,117
    OK, I'll be post #50...

    Just have to point out that Boutons must be raving mad that this isn't a long post. He so far has 72% of the posts and has the last 17 consecutive posts. Winehole is in second place at 10%, but isn't enough to bring much desire for anyone to join in. Chump, Cosmic, and zOsa each have two posts at 4%. The rest of us stopped at one post.
    Last edited by Wild Cobra; 04-30-2011 at 11:21 AM.

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