VRWC news: gonna be a long thread

[boutons_deux]

War on Employees

Hospitals Across America Lead A Profit-Driven Fight Against More Labor Protections For Nurses

Nurses are fighting to improve hospital standards and patient care by pushing for mandated minimum staffing levels for nurses in hospitals. The logic — which has been reflected in reality — goes that, with more nurses per patient, the better and more personal level of care Americans will receive. But as nurses’ unions take their push for legislation establishing these standards nationwide, they’ve come up against a formidable foe: hospital administrators who are balking at the price tag.

“Hospitals right now are run like businesses and they’re focused on the short-term bottom line,” said Jeff Breslin, president of the Michigan Nurses Association, a union backing a minimum staffing bill in the Michigan legislature. If the bill becomes law, he said, “it doesn’t matter what part of the state you’re in, you can be assured you’re going to have adequate nursing care whatever place you’re going into.” [...]

Today, only California requires all of its hospitals to maintain a minimum nurse-to-patient ratio. If a hospital sees a surge of patients due to something unexpected, like a car crash or an outbreak, it still must meet the minimum ratio. The only time a hospital can go under the minimum ratio is during what the statute calls a “healthcare emergency.”

Jolee Cochran, a registered oncology nurse who has been working at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for 26 years, said the law has made her job more manageable. Before, she said, it wasn’t uncommon for a nurse to be responsible for seven patients at a time. Now, it would be a violation of the law for her to have more than five patients under her care.

Cochran said patients in her hospital are much sicker than they used to be and require much more complex care. “I can’t imagine having more than five patients with one nurse, with the type of patients we have now,” she said.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013...affing-ratios/

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013...affing-ratios/

[boutons_deux]

New Paper Links Food Price Inflation to the Power of “Agro-Trader Nexus” (ie, Monsantos + Cargills)



Joseph Baines’s new article, “Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System” is a must read if you care to understand how major corporations exercise hidden influence on our daily lives. The paper is so chock full of information and history that a summary does not do justice to its arguments, so I hope you’ll read it in full.

Surprisingly, conventional wisdom in academia is that retailers, meaning supermarkets, are the most powerful players in the food system. Baines argues that that view is out of date. While grocers gained influence from the 1960s through 1990s, which was reflected in capturing a larger share of the total profits in the food supply chain, that changed around 2000, and their profit share has fallen since then. The turn of the millennium also marks the onset of food price inflation. Baines argues that the change in dominant players and in pricing dynamics are linked, and reflect the rise of a new constellation:

My main contention is that since the late 1990s the dominant grain traders have forged close linkages with major agribusinesses. These links have given rise to a power constellation that I call the Agro-Trader nexus. The nexus’s main impact on the world food system since the early 2000s comes in the form of its facilitation and championing of the wasteful absorption of grain and oilseeds into the heavily subsidised first- generation biofuels sector. The soaring production of biofuels has contributed to a dramatic upswing in ac ulation for the firms of the Agro-Trader nexus. However, the biofuels boom has been less beneficial for other firms operating in food supply chains and it has pushed millions of people into conditions of acute undernourishment.

These are the major types of players that Baines identifies in this Alien v. Predator struggle for dominance:





The paper describes how these two sectors have combined forces through joint ventures and more important, for working together to create what Veblen called “ins utional wastage,” or scarcity in the midst of potential abundance. One way has been to encourage greater production of meat, since eating higher up the food chain requires more grain. But the biggest culprit is biofuels:

It was primarily the rapid development of the first-generation biofuels sector in the 2000s that cata- lysed the inflationary shifts that have recently reverberated throughout the world food system. The Agro-Trader nexus was at the forefront of this biofuels boom. Indeed, the Renessen venture between Cargill and Monsanto sought to engineer and patent varieties of corn with high levels of starch, so that the crop can be more easily processed into ethanol (GRAIN 2007: 19) and Bunge’s and DuPont’s Solae venture has also come up with inbred and bioengineered varieties of corn and soybeans specially de- signed for the combustion engine rather than the human stomach (Milling & Baking News 2006: 20). Although ADM has not been involved in any comparable ventures with the agro-biotech giants, it has worked unremittingly to create a policy environment within which the wasteful absorption of grain in the biofuels sector can be achieved. As one Washington analyst put it:

Perhaps no commodity in American history has depended more on government support for its viability than ethanol. And perhaps no other company has done as much to orchestrate Washington’s current support for the fuel than ADM.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/...+capitalism%29

[boutons_deux]

Kochs Form New Dark Money Group To Hide Political Activities From Public

The right-wing network funded by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers is being revamped after the 2012 elections, starting with a new nonprofit called the "Association for American Innovation" that will act as a hub for funneling undisclosed spending towards the Kochs' political projects.

With ambiguous IRS rules and a deadlocked Congress, they might get away with it.

The role for the group, according to the Huffington Post, is to serve as a financing vehicle for the Koch political network, which includes organizations like Americans for Prosperity. In some respects it appears to be playing a similar role as the Center to Protect Patient Rights, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit run by Koch operative Sean Noble that funnelled nearly $55 million to other front groups, which in turn ran ads attacking Democrats in the 2010 elections.

The Association for American Innovation will likely help the Kochs and their allies continue avoiding transparency in political spending.
Association Formed as "Business League," Perhaps to Avoid IRS Scrutiny

The Association is organized under Section 501(c)(6) of the tax code, setting it apart from many of the dark money groups active in the 2010 and 2012 elections, like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS or Americans for Prosperity, which are organized as 501(c)(4) "social welfare" nonprofits.

Section 501(c)(6) is reserved for business leagues like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or trade associations like the pharmaceutical lobby PhRMA; but unlike those groups, there is little evidence the Association exists to advance the interests of any particular trade or industry.

"A (c)(6) is exactly where you'd expect captains of industry to go for political leverage out of the public view, especially if the notorious 501(c)(4) organizations are about to be more heavily scrutinized and regulated by the IRS," attorney Greg Colvin, an expert in nonprofit law, told the Center for Media and Democracy.


"Unlike a (c)(4), the organization would have no pretense of promoting the common good and general welfare of the community," Colvin said. "A 501(c)(6) is not a public interest organization. It can promote the special interests of oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, real estate developers, manufacturers, or free enterprise capitalism generally."

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...ter834900&t=19

"They'll Be Baaack" -- Terminators of Democracy (even if it is a Great American Myth)

[boutons_deux]

A Bigger, Darker Rightwing Funder

It's "the most powerful organization in America that no one seems to know about."

That's how Scot Ross, executive director of the progressive think tank One Wisconsin Ins ute, describes the Bradley Foundation.

Unlike David Koch of the Koch Brothers, whose cover was blown when a gonzo blogger named Ian Murphy (editor of the Buffalo Beast and a frequent contributor to The Progressive), impersonated him in a prank call to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

The Milwaukee based Bradley Foundation operates off the mainstream media radar. Yet the group has made more than $530 million in grants and awards since 1985, making it a much, much bigger giver to rightwing causes than the Koch brothers. With more than $290 million in assets, Bradley is one of the biggest foundations in the United States.

Bradley Foundation's particular focus on privatizing the public schools.

Among the report's findings:

--The Bradley Foundation, headed by Governor Scott Walker's campaign co-chair Michael Grebe, has underwritten a massive, pro-privatization propaganda campaign, including "a systematic and relentless campaign to turn public opinion against the public school system."

--Bradley has spent more than $31 million since 2001 supporting organizations promoting education privatization, academics providing favorable pro-privatization pseudo-science, media personalities promoting the privatization agenda, and lobbying organizations advocating for privatization legislation.

--The Bradley-financed campaign has manufactured an education "crisis," proposed a "solution," attacked and undermined the ability of potential opponents to block their agenda, and funded aggressive pro-privatization media and lobbying efforts.

--The Bradley-financed Wisconsin Policy Research Ins ute has manipulated research and pressured a University of Wisconsin professor to downplay results that show school vouchers in a negative light, while highlighting scientifically dubious favorable results.

http://www.progressive.org/bradley-f...public-schools

Of course, Bradley is REALLY REALLY concerned about the educating children ... by indoctrinating them with bull .

[boutons_deux]

Republican Court Says Employers Have A Cons utional Right To Keep Workers Ignorant Of Their Rights


Although this language says nothing about employers also having the right not to post information they would prefer to keep their workers ignorant of, the three Republican judges fabricate such a right through the power of a rhetorical question:

Suppose that § 8(c) prevents the Board from charging an employer with an unfair labor practice for posting a notice advising employees of their right not to join a union. Of course § 8(c) clearly does this. How then can it be an unfair labor practice for an employer to refuse to post a government notice informing employees of their right to unionize (or to refuse to)? Like the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment, § 8(c) necessarily protects—as against the Board—the right of employers (and unions) not to speak. This is why, for example, a company official giving a noncoercive speech to employees describing the disadvantages of unionization does not commit an unfair labor practice if, in his speech, the official neglects to mention the advantages of having a union.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...-their-rights/

[boutons_deux]

VRWC/corporate war on employees:

Now They Want to Take Away the 8-Hour Day and 40-Hour Week

House Republicans are pushing a bill that takes away extra pay for overtime, subs uting "comp" time instead. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 is the law that brought us the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek. This law does not prohibit employers from requiring workers to work over 40 hours. Instead, it gives employers an incentive to instead pay extra or hire more people, and gives employees a premium if they do have to work longer. (Note that this is also the law that brought us a minimum wage and outlawed child labor.)


There is proof that overtime pay works: workers like domestic workers and agricultural workers - jobs not covered by the FLSA - are twice as likely to have to work more than 40 hours in a week. And even with this law, Americans already work more hours than in almost any other industrialized country.

The Bill - No Guarantees

The House will be voting on H.R. 1406, The Working Families Flexibility Act, which lets employers offer "comp time" instead of overtime pay. The problem is that employers will pressure workers to take comp time instead of overtime, which reduces paychecks and gets rid of the incentive to hire more people. Later, the employees will be pressured to not take that comp time, or will have to be "on call," etcetera.

It is important to note that the law does not guarantee workers the right to actually use the comp time they get instead of extra pay. Employers can put it off forever. You can't use this time when you want to, only when the employer decides it is okay.
This really is a flat-out pay take-away, can't use it another day.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/16238...d-40-hour-week

[boutons_deux]

ALEC Ignores First Amendment, Assembles a "Most Wanted" List

In what might be the biggest anti-ALEC rally yet, the ALEC legislators and lobbyists arriving at the Renaissance Hotel on May 2 were greeted by a wave of protesters that outnumbered the conference attendees.

More than 600 firefighters, teachers, environmentalists, and church leaders carried signs reading "ALEC is Not OK" and chanting "backroom deals are ALEC's game/sweetheart deals for corporate gain," while a giant inflatable pig wearing a banner reading "Hi, my name is ALEC" floated overhead. Two big rigs adorned with Teamsters logos circled the convention center, honking their horns and blowing air brakes. Harold A. Schaitberger, President of the International Association of Fire Fighters, told the crowd that ALEC's “sole purpose is to develop the most anti-worker, anti-employee, anti-union, anti-middle class, pro-business, pro corporation policies, legislation and agenda possible.”

Inside, white men in dark suits milled in the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel and the neighboring Cox Convention Center. Laughter floated through the hotel bar as corporate lobbyists (with a "private sector" tag on their name badge) huddled with state legislators (wearing "public sector" tags).

ALEC's Most Wanted

How does ALEC know who Surgey is?

CMD later obtained a do ent led "OKC anti-ALEC photos" at the ALEC conference.

The page featured the pictures and names of eight people, four of whom work with CMD, including Surgey, CMD's general counsel Brendan Fischer and its Executive Director Lisa Graves, as well as CMD contributor Beau Hodai.

It is not known whether the photo array of people who have reported on or criticized ALEC was distributed to ALEC members or shared with Oklahoma City law enforcement.

Other targets on the do ent included The Nation's Lee Fang, who has written articles critical of ALEC, and Sabrina Stevens, an education activist who spoke out in an ALEC task force meeting last November. Also featured were Calvin Sloan of People for the American Way and Gabe Elsner of Checks and Balances Project, both of whom are ALEC detractors.

The name of ALEC Events Director Sarah McManamon was in the top corner, indicating the do ent was printed from her Google account.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association teacher's union, told the crowd via Skype that ALEC has a "systematic approach to pushing a corporate agenda in all aspects of public policy."

Ryan Kiesel, Executive Director of the Oklahoma ACLU, highlighted ALEC's support for bills to make it harder for Americans to vote through voter ID restrictions (and its promotion of sham "voter fraud" claims), and is not buying ALEC's claim that it has abandoned its voter suppression projects. "If ALEC were really withdrawing its support for voter ID, they could use their elected official proxies to announce that fraud is not a real problem, and that these laws are unnecessary," he said. "But they have not."

Jane Carter, an economist at AFSCME, identified the problems with the ALEC privatization agenda, particularly the Public-Private Fair Compe ion Act, a "forced privatization" bill that requires public services be turned over to corporate control if private industry claims they can do the service; this bill was recently introduced in Michigan. Phillip Martin of Progress Texas described how ALEC's healthcare agenda -- particularly its adoption of the Health Care Compact, which asserts state control over health care -- could be used to thwart federal healthcare reform.

Dr. George Young Senior, a Pastor at the Holy Temple Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, highlighted how ALEC is where the struggles of communities of color, workers, environmentalists and others converged -- and how people need to unite against the forty-year-old organization to fight back.

"If we let this go on for another forty years," he said, "next time they won’t just move us out of our room, they will kick us out of the whole building!"

http://truth-out.org/news/item/16216...st-wanted-list

[boutons_deux]

How Big Oil Uses the Republican Party

In a surprise move, the eight Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday blocked a floor vote on President Obama's nominee, Gina McCarthy, as EPA Administrator. In doing so the Republican senators broke their earlier promisadditione to move McCarthy's nomination if she answered an unprecedented 1079 written questions, a quest she completed. Political observers assume the Republican roadblock is meant to derail or delay the implementation of a new EPA rule, promised by President Obama to finally regulate carbon pollution. The Republican ranking member, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, orchestrated the double cross. Vitter is an unabashed mouthpiece for the petroleum industry and record breaking receptacle for petrodollars having received $1.2 million in oil company largesse during his public service career. With cash gushers of oily money cascading down their open gullets, the Republican leadership's mercenary devotion to Big Oil shouldn't shock us. However, the boldness of the party's most recent assault on the public interest might cause us to ponder how GOP's honchos' knee jerk slavishness to petroleum interest has infected its rank and file.

The perversity of the modern conservative mind is displayed in two studies published last week. Those studies illustrate the extent to which the right wing has become the ideological sock puppet of Big Oil and the GOP's army of right wing Christian fundamentalists oil industry foot soldiers. A peer reviewed National Academy of Sciences report shows that the label "energy efficient" on a product actually makes it less likely that self-identified conservatives will purchase that product. Why? Because morally twisted right wing orthodoxy has taken the "conserve" out of conservatism. Craven hatred of all things environmental has made the labels "clean," "green" or "efficient" pariah among GOP acolytes. Conversely, dirty energy is patriotic and even "blessed."

Big Oil's Orwellian skill at employing the rhetoric of patriotism and emblazoning its enterprises with stars and stripes, has s ched the notion that conservation is synonymous with "anti-American" into the fabric of GOP talking points. In 2006, President George W. Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer answered a press query about whether President Bush believed in fuel efficiency standards for automobiles saying, "That's a big 'No.'" The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country... Conservation alone is not the answer."


After a decade of this brand of oily claptrap from the industry's political toadies and its talking heads on Fox News and hate radio, many conservative Americans now embrace the farcical presumption that buying and burning gas is a patriotic act. In 2008, as the oil industry raked in record profits by raking Americans with record prices at the pump, the party of the petro plutocrats proudly adopted Big Oil's rallying cry as its mantra "Drill, Baby, Drill."


By the way, Fleischer's use of the term "blessed" to describe unconscionable profligacy and immoral waste reflect another GOP orthodoxy -- the notion that God wants us to burn oil.

A second study published this week by University of Pittsburgh Professor David Barker and Professor David Bearce of the University of Colorado found that a fundamentalist Christian belief in biblical End Times is a significant motivating factor behind Republican voter resistance to curbing climate change. According to Bearce and Barker, 76 percent of self-identified Republicans say they believe in the End Times. "Since the world is going to end at a predestined time anyhow," their logic goes, "it would be heretical to curb our destructive appe es under the delusion that we can do anything about pushing back God's ordained date."


Anointing rapacious behavior with religious gloss is an old strategy for both right wing conservatives and the extraction industry. When a House Oversight Committee summoned Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of Interior, James Watt, to explain his caper to sell off American's public lands, waters and mineral rights to oil, mining and timber companies at what the General Accounting Office called "fire sale prices," Watt, a former mining and oil company lawyer, retorted, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Embracing his party line, along with its hook and sinker, Watt explained that environmentalism was a plot to "weaken America" and dismissed environmentalists as a "left wing cult which seeks to bring down the kind of government I believe in."


Watt was an early proponent of Dominion Theology, the authoritarian Christian heresy that cites cherry-picked phrases from the book of Genesis to advocate man's duty to subdue nature. His carbon industry alliances and Apocalyptical Christianity inspired Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his department and distributing its assets to his pals. His disciple and former employee, Gale Norton, another energy industry lawyer and lobbyists, would continue the chicanery when she succeeded Watt as Interior Secretary during George W. Bush's administration. As Shakespeare observed, "The devil can quote Scripture to serve his own purposes."


In reality, there is nothing patriotic, moral or religious about Big Oil. A storied history of perfidy and greed has distinguished these companies among the most treasonous and piratical of all American business enterprises. Halliburton's decision to relocate to the Cayman Islands after fattening itself on $9 billion worth of inherently crooked no-bid, cost-plus contracts during the Iraq War is only one of many examples of their shaky loyalty to our country. Before it vaulted onto the bandwagon of patriotism, Texaco flew not "Old Glory" but the "Jolly Roger" over its Houston headquarters, proudly adopting the pirate flag as the emblem of a pirate industry.


The threats from global climate change and ocean acidification are only the tip of a melting iceberg. Not satiated with simply destroying the planet, the oil industry's relentless greed has eroded American's economic independence, imperiled our national security, and ruined our global economic leadership and moral authority.


America's national security is rooted in a strong economy at home. As Republican oilman T. Boone Pickens has acknowledged, our deadly addiction to oil is the principal drag on American capitalism. Our nation is borrowing a billion dollars a day to purchase a billion dollars of foreign oil, much of it from nations that don't share our values or that are outright hostile to our interests.


Our oil jones has us funding both sides of the war against terror! Big Oil has embroiled us in foreign wars supporting petty dictators who despise democracy and who are hated by their own people. The export of $700 billion dollars annually of American wealth has beggared our nation, which, a few short decades ago, owned half the wealth on Earth.


Add to these cataclysmic numbers, the $100 billion annual military cost of protecting oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, trillions spent on various oil wars over the past decade, billions more in economic injury from oil spills in Valdez, the Gulf of Mexico and in American rivers from the Hudson to the Kalamazoo to the Yellowstone, the massive damage done to the coast of Louisiana from local drilling companies which aggravated New Orleans' destruction by Katrina, not to mention the hundreds of billions annually in externalized health care costs from illnesses caused by the oil industry.


If the oil industry had to pay the true costs of bringing its product to market, gas prices would be upwards of $12 per gallon at the pump, according to economist Amory Lovins, and most Americans would be running to buy electric cars.


With low cost disruptive technologies like cheap, fast and efficient electric vehicles, and solar and wind technologies poised to displace Big Oil, the industry is using its hold on the Republican Party to permanently embed itself in our economy while subverting science, American democracy, free market capitalism and our sacred belief in an ethical God.


http://readersupportednews.org/opini...publican-party

[boutons_deux]

If Barry gets his secret TPP implemented, the following will seem trivial

How Corporations Are Subverting Attempts to Rein in Their Power

Citizens have won important policy victories only to be undermined by the growing web of international investment rules and arbitration courts.


In 2009, when the government of El Salvador refused to issue an environmental permit to a Canadian mining corporation, community activists in Las Cabañas rejoiced. For years they had been fighting a pitched battle against the efforts of the company, Pacific Rim, to mine for gold in their region - plans that included the dumping of toxic arsenic in their rivers. It was not a campaign without risk. Four Salvadoran anti-mining activists have been assassinated in the course of their courageous efforts. That victory, however, may well prove to carry a high cost for the people of El Salvador. In a legal assault filed in a World Bank trade court, Pacific Rim is now demanding $315 million in compensation payments from the Salvadoran government, an amount equal to one third of the country’s annual education budget.

That is just one example among many where citizens have fought for and won an important policy victory only to find that victory undermined by corporations using the growing web of international investment rules and arbitration courts. There are many others. Public health campaigners in Uruguay won a huge victory in 2010 when the national government passed new health laws to discourage tobacco consumption. Even though those new laws (including aggressive new warnings on cigarette packages) directly mirrored the guidelines of the World Health Organization, the U.S. corporate tobacco giant Philip Morris retaliated with a $2 billion legal action against the government.

Nowhere is this muscle-flexing by multinational corporations a greater threat than on issues related to sustainable development. The result is a little known but enormous legal obstacle planted directly in the policy path toward a sustainable future. The Democracy Center has just do ented that threat in an important new report released this week: Unfair, Unsustainable and Under the Radar: How Corporations Use Global Investment Rules to Undermine a Sustainable Future.

For many this system of corporate-driven investment rules and “dispute resolution” burst into public view a decade ago when Bechtel, the San Francisco-based engineering conglomerate, sued the people of Bolivia for $50 million following the now-famous Cochabamba Water Revolt, after investing just $1 million in the country. A global citizen campaign aimed at the corporation ultimately forced Bechtel to drop that case for a token payment of 30 cents. Yet in the years since, the pile of corporate cases has only grown ever higher.



http://www.alternet.org/environment/...ter845794&t=21

[boutons_deux]

If VRWC can't stuff the federal/state courts with ideological, extremist, politicized hatchet judges, they try to indoctrinate what they think are susceptible judges

Secret court judge attended expenses-paid terrorism seminar

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, who signed an order requiring Verizon to give the National Security Agency telephone records for tens of millions of American customers, attended an expense-paid judicial seminar sponsored by a libertarian think tank that featured lectures from a vocal proponent of executive branch powers.

Vinson, whose term on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began in 2006 and expired last month, was the only member of the special court to attend the August 2008 conference sponsored by the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment, according to disclosure records filed by the federal judge.

The Center for Public Integrity collected the disclosure records as part of aninvestigative report that revealed how large corporations and conservative foundations routinely sponsor ideologically driven educational conferences for state and federal judges.

It’s unclear which lectures Vinson attended during the “Terrorism, Civil Liberty, & National Security” seminar. FREE’s website only provides a general agenda for the program and no lecture transcripts.

But Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor who delivered two lectures, argued in a 2007 book he co-wrote — Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts — that “the executive branch, not Congress or the judicial branch, should make the tradeoff between security and liberty.”

The book also asserts that while “no one doubts that injustices occur during emergencies, the type of judicial scrutiny that would be needed to prevent the injustices that have occurred during American history would cause more harm than good by interfering with justified executive actions.”

The seminar, conducted in Montana, also included separate lectures en led “Terrorism & the U.S. Cons ution,” “Decision-Making in Counter Terrorism Dilemmas” and “The Triumph & Pitfalls of the Security State.”

Update, 3:11 p.m.: From 2005 to 2009, FREE received a total of $430,000 in general operating support from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, of which billionaire businessman Charles Koch is a director. The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, however, is listed as the sole funder for the national security conference that Vinson attended.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/...=publici-email

[boutons_deux]

Conservatives Target State Courts in Battle Over Culture Wars

There’s a court battle over abortion taking place in Kansas, but it’s probably not the fight you think. Anti-abortion activists in the state are slowly and systematically trying to “reform” the state judicial system in an effort to give conservatives greater control over the courts. And as state courts play an increasingly important role in the battle over reproductive rights and the policing of pregnancy, these so-called “reforms,” if successful, could be more devastating to women than the deluge of anti-abortion laws enacted in the state so far.


Kansas House Judiciary Committee Chairman and staunch anti-abortion activist Lance Kinzer closed out the legislative session with a flurry of proposals aimed at limiting the influence of the state’s supreme court. The proposals follow a growing rift in the state between the extremely conservative legislature and the state supreme court that has thwarted conservatives on education funding, the death penalty, and, of course, abortion.

One of the reforms proposed last month would amend the state cons ution to have the governor appoint and the state senate confirm members of the state’s supreme court and appeals court. This reform eliminates a commission that currently screens applicants and names three finalists for judicial vacancies for the governor to consider. Five of the commission’s nine members are attorneys elected by other attorneys, and under the current system in Kansas the state legislature plays no role in judicial appointments. The proposals also bookend a legislative session that started with Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signing legislation granting Kansas governors greater influence over selection of judges to serve on the Kansas Court of Appeals but failing to eliminate the nominating commission.

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/20...ality+Check%29

[boutons_deux]

Illustration of how 1%/corporate money s the 99% in court

For Judges, Campaign Cash Speaks Louder than Ideology


A new study compares contributions from big business to state supreme court rulings in more than 2,000 cases from 2010 to 2012, and it concludes that “a justice who receives half of his or her contributions from business groups would be expected to vote in favor of business interests almost two-thirds of the time.” This correlation was strongest in the handful of states with partisan high court elections. Republican judges receive much more funding from big business, and in general, they are more likely to vote in favor of corporate litigants.
The study found, however, “a stronger relationship” between corporate campaign cash and the votes of Democratic justices. “Judges who are not ideologically or otherwise predisposed to vote in favor of business interests might….cast votes in cases either to obtain financial support from those business interests for their future campaigns, or at least to reduce incentives for….attacks funded by business interests.”

This discrepancy mirrors the findings of a 2007 study by Madhavi McCall and Michael McCall of Texas Supreme Court rulings between 1994 and 1997. In general, the Republican-controlled court was much more likely to favor defendants over plaintiffs. But plaintiffs who made a campaign contribution received “more than double the rate of support” among the justices.

These results suggest that campaign contributions can be very effective in persuading judges to vote against their ideological inclination. Campaign cash speaks louder than a judge’s predisposition to favor individual plaintiffs or corporate defendants.
Shepherd’s study, sponsored by the American Cons ution Society, found that the correlation between corporate campaign contributions and rulings has grown stronger since the late 1990’s, as spending on high court elections has exploded. In a series of cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down limits on independent spending in political campaigns and limited states’ options to curb the influence of campaign cash.

The study noted that corporate-funded groups are taking advantage of these loopholes in campaign finance laws, and their “dominance of television advertising has steadily increased over time.” Because voters often lack knowledge about judicial candidates, these ads can be very effective at defining the candidates in the minds of voters.


http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...than-ideology/

illustrates that the real "war" is not left vs right, but 1% vs 99%, the Wealthy Class making war on the non-Wealthy.

[boutons_deux]

Republicans Are Passing ALEC Written Laws Banning Paid Sick Leave

conservatives and Republicans that their primary concern is enriching corporations and promoting their so-called “free-market capitalism” meme as the be all, end all solution to America’s economic woes. Part and parcel of free-market capitalism is removing all constraints from businesses whether it is environmental regulations or workplace protections for employees who drive corporate profits with their cheap labor and purchasing their cheap Chinese-made products. What is less well-known is that for 80 years Republicans have panted to eliminate New Deal provisions that protect workers and provide them with reasonably-safe working conditions including a 40-hour work week, safety inspections, and what Republican’s consider luxuries; bathroom and lunch breaks, overtime pay, and a woefully inadequate minimum wage

The latest assault on American workers, like most assaults on the labor force, is courtesy of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and it is occurring in Florida where ALEC controls the governor and state legislature. At the urging of large corporate employers, and ALEC members, the Florida legislature passed and Governor Rick Scott signed, a pre-emptive law making it illegal to pass legislation to provide paid sick leave to employees. That’s right, a state law banning local governments from implementing paid sick leave legislation to protect corporate employers such as Disney World, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and perennial enemies of labor, the Florida chapter of the Chamber of Commerce who all whole-heartedly supported the Draconian measure.

The law is one of ALEC’s fill-in template bills being introduced across the nation and an effort to pass “preemption bills” that will block any prospective paid sick leave legislation as part of the corporate drive to keep measures helping workers off the books before they can be proposed or voted on by legislatures or the public. In Florida, more than 50,000 voters attempted to get a required paid sick leave measure on the 2012 ballot, but it was thrown off by Republicans on the county commission and it took a three-judge panel to have it included on the 2014 ballot. Now, regardless the voters’ wishes, the measure is moot and it is down to the state’s Republican House Majority Leader, Steve Precourt (R-ALEC), who pressed the measure through the legislature and it is no surprise Precourt is an active ALEC member.

The idea of passing laws in Republican-controlled states preemptively banning worker-friendly labor laws is not unique to Florida and nothing new coming from ALEC that is on a tear to destroy the democratic process for years.

http://www.politicususa.com/2013/06/18/republicans-passing-alec-written-laws-banning-paid-sick-leave.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&u tm_campaign=Feed%3A+politicususa%2FfJAl+%28Politic us+USA+%29

[boutons_deux]

ALEC Tours Tar Sands, Works with Industry Groups to Block Low-Carbon Fuel Standards

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) recently adopted a “model” bill from an oil-industry lobby group, that would limit the ability of states to negotiate regional “low-carbon fuel standards” (LCFS), a mechanism designed to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. If agreed by states, LCFS could have a significant impact on the sale of fuels derived from Canadian tar sands in the United States, regardless of any decision the Obama administration makes over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

ALEC’s interest in the tar sands is increasingly active. It organized a tour of the Alberta tar sands for its members in October 2012, and as previously reported by CMD, at least seven states introduced resolutions in 2013 calling for the approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas. The resolutions contained language from an ALEC “model” bill and from a set of talking points by TransCanada, the proposed pipeline operator that was also listed as a sponsor of the most recent ALEC conference that took place in Oklahoma City in May 2013.

American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Partner with ALEC

The new ALEC “model” bill, called "Restrictions on Participation in Low-Carbon Fuel Standards Programs," was sponsored at an ALEC conference in Washington, DC in November 2012, by Steve Higley, a lobbyist from the U.S.-based industry group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM). Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil, both of which are represented on the ALEC Private Enterprise Advisory Council, are members of AFPM and have executives sitting on the board of directors.

The ALEC bill is intended to block environmental LCFS agreements. The implementation of LCFS poses a threat to the continued U.S. market for oil derived from the Canadian tar sands. Following the passage of the California LCFS law in 2006 – so far the only state to have such a standard in operation – the president of AFPM stated it would "harm our nation's energy security by discouraging the use of Canadian crude oil."

http://truth-out.org/news/item/17071...fuel-standards

[boutons_deux]

The American Legislative Exchange Council Is Hard at Work Privatizing America, One Statehouse at a Time


In state legislatures around the country, boilerplate ALEC legislation that dilutes collective bargaining rights, blocks Americans from voting, and limits corporate liability is passing without the public knowing who’s behind it.

A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge.

one Wisconsin politician describes as “a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests.”

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...tizing-america

VRWC installing the corporatocracy at all levels of govt. It's NOT for the good of Human-Americans.

Privatizing as many public functions as possible, the coporatacarcy distributes taxpayer contributions to capitalists bank accounts, while delivering, as all business does, the tiest possible product for the highest possible price, amplified by the no-compe ion, long-term, practically irreversible "agreements" of privatization

[boutons_deux]

Meet the Right-Wing Bankrollers Behind High Court Challenges to the Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action


The challenges to both the Voting Rights Act and university affirmative action programs were organized by the same activist, who has acknowledged that he receives funding from the Bradley Foundation -- a Milwaukee-based funder of right-wing causes that has long targeted racial equity.

Same Group and Donors Behind Fisher and Shelby County Cases

The group that brought both challenges is the Project on Fair Representation, a legal defense fund dedicated to reversing race-based legal protections and whose website says it devotes “all of its efforts to influencing jurisprudence, public policy, and public at udes regarding race and ethnicity.” The Project was founded and led by one person, Ed Blum, who coordinated the challenges in both the Fisher and Shelby County cases.

Blum has likened his role in high-profile litigation to "Yenta the matchmaker." "I find the plaintiff, I find the lawyer, and I put them together, and then I worry about it for four years," he said.

Blum urged Shelby County, Alabama, to bring its Section 5 challenge after the Department of Justice blocked its effort to dilute the voting power of its growing African-American population. He also connected with Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin and claimed it was because of her race. Blum was also behind the last Voting Rights Act challenge to make it to the Supreme Court, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder.

The Project on Fair Representation covered the legal fees in both the Shelby County and Fisher cases using funds filtered through the secretive Donors Trust, which has been described as a "Dark Money ATM" since it stealthily funnels money from the Kochs, Bradley and other funders to organizations in the right-wing network.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...tter861503&t=7

Just like Scaife bribing/financing Jones to go after Clinton

[boutons_deux]

VRWC War on (women) Employees

Forced to Work Sick? That's Fine With Disney, Red Lobster, and Their Friends at ALEC

America's one of the only industrialized nations that doesn't mandate paid sick leave. These guys want to keep it that way.

Before jetting off last week for a trade mission at the Paris Air Show, Florida's Republican Gov. Rick Scott took a moment to sign into law a bill that banned local governments from requiring employers to offer paid sick leave. The restaurant industry and Florida's big theme parks lobbied hard for the passage of the legislation, which blocked local efforts to give low-wage workers a basic benefit that's standard in virtually every industrialized country in the world except the US.

The Florida law is the most recent in a series of victories by low-wage industries that, with the aid of Republican-led state legislatures, have succeeded in derailing or overriding measures providing this benefit to workers. Working behind the scenes in this campaign is a familiar foe of employee rights, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose membership includes a range of major corporations and industry groups. The corporate-funded organization's model "preemption" legislation—disallowing municipalities from enacting their own paid leave laws—have been introduced by state legislators around the country.

The numbers are sobering: 43 percent of women employed in the private sector don't have a single paid sick day, and more than half of all working mothers don't have paid leave they can use to care for sick kids. The figures are even worse for women in low-wage jobs. More than 80 percent of people making less than $8.25 an hour have no sick leave, and women are over represented in this category.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...da-disney-alec

[boutons_deux]

How the Temp Workers Who Keep Huge Corporations Running Are Getting Crushed



It’s 4:18 a.m. and the strip mall is deserted. But tucked in back, next to a closed-down video store, an employment agency is already filling up. Rosa Ramirez walks in, as she has done nearly every morning for the past six months. She signs in and sits down in one of the 100 or so blue plastic chairs that fill the office. Over the next three hours, dispatchers will bark out the names of who will work today. Rosa waits, wondering if she will make her rent.

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.

Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.

http://www.alternet.org/labor/temps-...etting-crushed

ah, America The Beautiful, Taking Care of Its Own

iow, America is a failed society and civilization.

[boutons_deux]

St Ronnie started the War on Employees, the SCOTUS VRWC political hacks keep it going, for decades


Five Ways The Supreme Court Gave The Shaft To Workers

Last week, a bare majority of the Supreme Court did something this Court rarely does — it made life markedly better for millions of Americans by striking down the uncons utional Defense of Marriage Act. This decision, however, should not overshadow the blow the Court’s conservatives dealt to the franchise by striking down a key prong of the Voting Rights Act. Nor should it displace two other decisions handed down last week that delivered big victories to abusive bosses throughout the nation. Indeed, the Court’s five conservatives have become a worker’s worst enemy in Washington. Here are five examples of how the Supreme Court has made life more difficult for workers:

1. Waving Off Workplace Harassment

Federal law provides very robust protection to workers who are sexually or racially harassed by a supervisor, but it is far more difficult to win a lawsuit if you have been harassed by a co-worker. This distinction exists because supervisors are capable of intimidating their victims into keeping silent, and so there needs to be additional protections for workers harassed by their bosses so that these workers feel safe complaining about their supervisor’s actions.
Yet, in Vance v. Ball State University, the five conservative justices virtually wrote these protections for victims of boss-on-employee harassment out of the law. Under Vance, your boss only counts as your “supervisor” if they have the power to make a “significant change in [your] employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits.” Thus, in many modern offices where hiring and firing decisions are made by a distant human resources manager, few bosses will actually qualify as “supervisors.” Vance also ignores the authority often given to senior workers to direct the actions of junior employees — and to potentially abuse this power in the process. In one case described by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent, a senior truck driver coerced a newly hired woman to have unwanted sex with him because she feared he would fail her on an important exam. Yet this man no longer qualifies as a “supervisor” thanks to Ginsburg’s conservative colleagues.

2. Unwinnable Lawsuits

The second big anti-worker decision last week cut off an important mechanism ensuring that employers are held accountable if they retaliate against workers who file civil rights complaints. In University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the five conservatives nixed what are known as “mixed motive” lawsuits in retaliation cases, a decision that effectively forced many workers to develop extra sensory perception if they want their employers to comply with anti-retaliation law.

Under the mixed motive framework, a worker only needs to show that racism, sexism or a similarly improper motive was part of the reason driving an employer’s decision to lash out at a worker. The burden then shifts to the employer to prove that discrimination did not drive their decision. These suits force an employer to reveal what they were actually thinking at the time that they fired an employee, rather than forcing the worker to read their boss’ mind.
Without mixed motive lawsuits, many victims of retaliation will discover that it is impossible to prove their claims in court. Worse, Nassar builds off a similar decision, Gross v. FBL Financial Services, that gutted the ability of many victims of age discrimination to hold their employers accountable.

3. Signing Away Your Rights

The Court’s five conservatives are staunch supporters of forced arbitration, a practice that enables businesses to shift lawsuits against them out of real courts and into a privatized arbitration system where the corporate party is often able to select an arbitrator with a record of siding with corporate interests. Indeed, one notorious arbitration company behaved as such a rubber stamp for corporate parties that it ordered a woman to pay more than $11,000 that she did not owe because she had the same name as another woman who did owe money. (This company is now out of the consumer arbitration business, largely due to a settlement with Minnesota’s attorney general.)

Federal arbitration law explicitly exempts “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” Yet, in Circuit City v. Adams, five conservative justices joined an opinion holding that forced arbitration contracts could be imposed on workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce. The upshot of this opinion is that your employer can force you to sign away your right to sue them in a real court — under penalty of termination if you don’t comply.

4. Dividing and Conquering

Two years ago, the Court shut down a class action lawsuit brought by more than 1 million women against the giant retailer Walmart. Walmart, however, was only the second most important class action case that Supreme Court term. Two months earlier, the five conservative justices held in AT&T v. Concepcion that your employer can force you to sign away your right to bring a class action against them just as easily as they can force you into privatized arbitration. Indeed, the Court based this decision on the same Federal Arbitration Act that forms the basis of their forced arbitration decisions, despite the fact that that act has nothing to say about class actions.

Class actions, which allow multiple parties with common claims to join together under the same lawsuit, are often the only cost effective way to hold a company accountable. Lawyers are expensive, and plaintiffs’ attorneys are often paid a percentage of their client’s winnings rather than an hourly fee. For this reason, it is often impossible to hire a competent plaintiffs’ attorney unless your claim is valuable enough that a lawyer can earn a living representing you. Class actions make it possible for multiple workers whose individual claims may only amount to a few thousand dollars — a lifeline for the workers but rarely enough to entice a good lawyer — to join together in order to hire counsel and share the costs of litigation among themselves. Cases like Concepcion, render many workers with relatively small claims against their employer powerless to fight back.

5. Unequal Pay for Equal Work

Finally, the Court’s five conservatives famously tossed out Lilly Ledbetter’s claim that she, as a woman, is en led to earn just as much as her male colleagues earned for doing the same job. Ledbetter became a political celebrity after this decision, and her name is now attached to the law President Obama signed overruling the Supreme Court’s rejection of her case.

Ledbetter’s story, however, demonstrates just how difficult it is to fix a Supreme attack on workers’ rights after the justices have decided. Ledbetter became a national figure. President Obama ran ads touting his support for her. And yet the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act barely overcame the Senate’s de facto 60 vote threshold after Obama took office backed by enormous super-majorities in both houses of Congress.

Laws overruling anti-worker decisions are all but certain to die in the House today, even if they somehow overcome a Senate filibuster. And few people know the names of Jack Gross or Naiel Nassar or Vincent and Liza Concepcion, even though their cases likely did far more to harm workers than the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter. Absent a dramatic shift in Congress — or a new justice to replace one of the Court’s conservatives — the Court’s anti-worker march will likely continue with impunity.


http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...ft-to-workers/

and assholes STILL vote for Repugs

[boutons_deux]

The Republicans of the Supreme Court


n order to fully understand what the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been up to when they make decisions that affect our democracy, as they did last week on voting rights, you need to understand what the Republican Party has been up to.

The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they've experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino.

The real reason small business owners and struggling whites haven't done better is the same most of the rest of America hasn't done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top.

Government is implicated, but not in the way wealthy Republicans want the other members of their coalition to believe. Laws that the GOP itself championed (too often with the complicity of some Democrats) have trammeled unions, invited outsourcing abroad, slashed taxes on the rich, encouraged takeovers, allowed monopolization, reduced the real median wage, and deregulated Wall Street.

Four decades ago, the typical household's income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans' incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.

Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this - including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they've created a convenient scapegoat in America's minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.

This is where the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have played, and continue to play, such an important role.

First, wealthy Republicans have to be able to spend as much money as possible to bribe lawmakers to do their bidding, tell their version of history, and promulgate several big lies (the poor are "takers not makers," government keeps them "dependent," the wealthy are "job-creators" so cutting their taxes creates more jobs, unions are bad, regulations reduce economic growth, and so on).

The five Republicans on the Supreme Court have obliged by eviscerating campaign finance laws. Their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, along with the broad interpretations given it by several appellate judges (also Republican appointees), has opened the money floodgates.

Second, wealthy Republicans want to quietly reduce the impact of any laws that might limit their profits, even though they may help struggling whites as consumers or employees. The easiest way to execute this delicate maneuver is to make it harder to sue under such laws.

Here, too, the five Republicans on the Court have been eager to oblige by tightening requirements for class actions and limiting standing to sue. In their recent Comcast Corp. v. Behrend decision, for example, they threw out $875 million in damages that a group of Philadelphia-area subscribers had sought from the cable giant, reasoning that the subscriber plaintiffs hadn't proven they cons uted a "class" for the purpose of a class action.

Third and finally, wealthy Republicans want to minimize the votes of poor and minority citizens - and further propagate the myth that these people are responsible for the economic problems of struggling whites - through state redistricting and gerrymandering, voter-identification requirements at polling stations, and the use of almost any pretext to purge minority voters from voting lists.

The five Republicans on the Court obliged last week by striking down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that sets the formula under which states with a long history of discrimination must ask the federal government or a judge for approval before changing their voting procedures.

The significance of Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder was made plain Thursday when the Court effectively nullified two cases involving Texas voter laws by sending them back to lower courts to reconsider in light of Shelby. One was a voter identification requirement, enacted in 2011, that a federal judge had rejected on grounds that it imposed a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, many of whom are minorities. The other was a redistricting plan, also rejected by a federal court, in part because it would block minorities from gaining a majority vote in almost all districts.

But now both are effectively reinstated, as are the efforts of several other states to suppress votes.

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life in order to ensure their independence from politics. But when it comes to the core political strategy of the Republican Party, the five Republican appointees are, in effect, an extension of the GOP.

http://robertreich.org/post/54383807135

[boutons_deux]

VWRC War on Employees, including rampant, wide-spread wage theft

Contracts, court rulings giving employers legal upper hand

When Jose Tadeo Gamez Flores realized that his employer had failed to pay him for all the hours he was working as a janitor, he did what many other employees might do in the same situation: He tried to sue to recover the lost wages.

But Flores, 34, ran into an obstacle when he tried to file a class-action lawsuit to get back his and other janitors' wages. He had signed away his right to file a lawsuit against his employer.

After being hired, Flores had been presented with a pile of papers to sign. And he had unknowingly agreed not to take any legal problem with his bosses to the courts, but instead go to a private arbitrator handpicked by his employer.

"This is the equivalent to saying you have to give up your right to vote in an election," said Ari Moss, Flores' attorney. "It's about punishing the poor and the weak, and saying you don't have the right to come and seek redress."

Emboldened by a series of Supreme Court decisions and an employers' job market, many companies are starting to require workers to sign away their rights in return for a job. It is a trend that experts worry could further wear away employees' power in the workplace. The contracts make it harder for employees to join class-action lawsuits, take their employers to court, or leave to go work somewhere else.

"You can see this common thread of making it more difficult to have your day in court," said David Yamada, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. "The legal climate for employees is a tough one."

Employers defend arbitration agreements as a low-cost way to resolve disputes while freeing up space in the overburdened court system. But some lawyers label arbitrators "corporate courts" because the arbitrator is hired by the employer, and because employers statistically win much more in arbitration than they do in courts.

"It unevens the playing field," said Paul Bland, a senior attorney at Public Justice. "It used to be if you took away a right that you would have under normal law, the courts would throw it out."

The use of these arbitration agreements has become more common since a 2011 Supreme Court decision, AT&T Mobility vs. Concepcion, that made it easier to prevent workers from participating in class-action lawsuits, Bland said. That further complicates things for employees who have small claims that aren't big enough for a lawyer to take on unless they turn into a class-action lawsuit.

Mazhar Saleem is bound to his employer by a number of contracts that made it hard to earn enough money to live, but also hard to go work anywhere else. He drives a town car for a company in New York as an independent contractor, rather than as a full-time employee. That means he doesn't get benefits, never gets overtime, and isn't guaranteed set hours.

But he also signed a non-compete contract when he started working, meaning he can't drive a car for anyone else in New York. So even if his employer doesn't give him any work, he's not allowed to go find it elsewhere, says his attorney, Michael Scimone, with the law firm Outten and Golden.

"It ties into the larger theme of employers trying to use contracts to alter pieces of the employment relationship that are supposed to be governed by law," Scimone said.

Non-compete clauses, once a staple of the high-tech world, are being extended to cover hairdressers, auto mechanics, exterminators and other professions that courts would traditionally not uphold them for, lawyers say. They essentially mean an employee can't leave a job to take another one nearby, unless he or she wants to stop working for a year or so.

It's a way to keep promising employees from leaving, said Matt Marx, an MIT professor who has studied these contracts.

"Given the increased job mobility of today's world, companies are saying, 'We can't count on people to be here forever. We have to lock them up with contracts," he said.

In a recent case in Worcester, Mass., three women working at a hair salon tried to leave after their conditions at work deteriorated. All three received cease and desist letters when they started working elsewhere, because they had signed non-compete clauses. They had to wait a year for the clauses to expire before they could work in the area again.

In other contracts being distributed at the workplace, employees agree to pay the costs of litigation if they lose, and employers shorten the amount of time in which employees can sue them. All of these contracts make it less likely for employees to win against their bosses in court — if they are even allowed to take them to court.

That means lawyers will be more hesitant to take on workplace cases because it has gotten more difficult for them to win them, said Catherine Fisk, an employment law professor at UC Irvine's law school.

"The less likely an employee is to file a claim, the less incentive a company has to extend money and other resources to prevent the illegal discrimination from happening," she said.

Two recent Supreme Court decisions have made it harder for employees to win discrimination suits.

Many employment lawyers say they're not surprised that courts have made life tougher for employees. Since the beginning of the Roberts court, experts say, the Supreme Court has issued decision after decision cutting back employees' legal avenues to complain.

"Since the Warren court, employers have done well at the Supreme Court, but in the Roberts court, they have done exceptionally well," said Cynthia Estlund, a professor at New York University's School of Law. John G. Roberts Jr. became chief justice in 2005.

Law historians trace the court's conservative leanings to the long stretches of Republicans in the White House in the 1980s and 2000s that allowed presidents to appoint more conservative judges to lower courts and to the Supreme Court.

A study published earlier this year in the Minnesota Law Review found that two of the court's current justices are the most conservative out of any of the justices who served between 1946 and 2011, and that court under Roberts is friendlier to business than it was during either of the two previous chief justices.

Adding up seven years of decisions, the workplace is getting to be a tough place for many, said Cliff Palefsky, an employment lawyer at McGuinn, Hillsman & Palefsky in San Francisco. Employers already can ask employees to work harder for less because the job market is still so sluggish in many fields. But in some cases, employees who think they can find a better situation elsewhere are going to have trouble doing so.

"The law is being undermined and it's putting some workers in a bind," Palefsky said. In some situations, when non-compete clauses are mixed with arbitration agreements, he said, "We're one step away from indentured servitude."

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/17.../p2p-76573747/

America the Beautiful, ing over employees who simply want to work, get ahead, chasing the mythical, false American Dream

[boutons_deux]

Charles Koch Foundation: An Income Of $34,000 Puts You In The Wealthiest 1 Percent

If you earn $34,000, that puts you in the wealthiest 1 percent of the world, according to the Charles Koch Foundation.


That's one of many assertions made in a new ad that attempts to undermine government policies that protect low- and middle-income Americans.

The Economic Policy Ins ute estimates that a family of three needs an income of at least $44,617 a year to cover basic living expenses in the cheapest parts of the country. In Wichita, Kansas, where the commercial is currently being aired, according to Think Progress, a family of three would need to make $53,721 to get by. That's far more than $30,000 a year that two parents earning minimum wage would make.

Minimum wage is one policy that billionaire Charles Koch would like to see eliminated. In a recent interview with the Wichita Eagle, Charles Koch described the federal minimum wage as one of the policies that “creating a culture of dependency” and added that it “reduces the mobility of labor.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...tent=NewsEntry

[boutons_deux]

An Impertinent Question

ermit me an impertinent question (or three).


Suppose a small group of extremely wealthy people sought to systematically destroy the U.S. government by

(1) finding and bankrolling new candidates pledged to shrinking and dismembering it;

(2) intimidating or bribing many current senators and representatives to block all proposed legislation, prevent the appointment of presidential nominees, eliminate funds to implement and enforce laws, and threaten to default on the nation's debt;

(3) taking over state governments in order to redistrict, gerrymander, require voter IDs, purge voter rolls, and otherwise suppress the votes of the majority in federal elections;

(4) running a vast PR campaign designed to convince the American public of certain big lies, such as climate change is a hoax, and

(5) buying up the media so the public cannot know the truth.

Would you call this treason?

If not, what would you call it?

And what would you do about it?

http://robertreich.org/post/55191562750

[boutons_deux]

6 Dangerous ALEC-Backed Bills Beyond Stand Your Ground Laws

On Saturday, a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of shooting unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. The case has put a spotlight on the state’s Stand Your Ground Law, which enabled Zimmerman to initially walk free because it allows the use of deadly force in self-defense. In the wake of the jury’s ruling, President of the National Urban League Marc Morial turned attention back to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative, corporate-backed group that crafts model legislation and is behind the country’s wave of Stand Your Ground laws.

ALEC has pushed other destructive laws across the country, many of which are already being adopted:

1. Pushing voter suppression laws: The group’s model legislation was a big factor in the wave of voter suppression laws passed ahead of the 2012 election in states such as Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida. These bills include restrictive ID requirements, cutting back on early voting, residency restrictions that often impact enrollment for college students, putting roadblocks in the way of mass voter registrations, and others. While the group vowed to focus just on economic issues after corporations pulled funding in response to these voter efforts, the efforts are still moving forward in many states.

2. Reducing or eliminating income taxes: Research conducted for ALEC has claimed that cutting the income tax rate in states will spur growth and create jobs, and many states have followed up on this research and proposed just such plans. The group’s connection to anti-tax efforts was made abundantly clear when a state lawmaker neglected to remove its mission statement from a boilerplate bill.

3. Blocking paid sick leave bills: While the movement to guarantee workers paid sick days has gained momentum at the city and state level, as New York City just joined four other cities and Connecticut with such a bill, ALEC has been behind a counter effort to make sure these laws can’t be enacted. The latest such bill passed in Florida, where local governments are now forbidden from enacting paid sick leave legislation. They have also cropped up in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Mississippi.

4. Attacking efforts to raise wages: More than 100 bills have been introduced in 31 state legislatures since 2011 that are aimed at repealing or weakening laws that raise wages at the local level, 67 of which were “directly sponsored or co-sponsored by ALEC-affiliated legislators,” according to a report from the National Employment Law Project. Eleven of those have already been signed into law. The proposed laws attempt to repeal state minimum wage laws that are above the federal floor of $7.25 an hour, reduce the minimum wages for young people and tipped workers, weaken overtime compensation, and block local governments from passing bills that increase pay to a living wage.

5. Taking down state renewable energy standards: In partnership with the Heartland Ins ute, ALEC has written model legislation called the “Electricity Freedom Act” that rolls back state standards. It argues that renewable energy mandates are “a tax on consumers of electricity” and that they go beyond what market forces would call for. Such a bill was being considered in North Carolina, although failed in committee, and it is now under consideration in Kansas. States have also pushed an ALEC-backed bill to teach climate change denial in schools.


6. Banning the exposure of unsafe or cruel farm practices: Seven states are considering “ag gag” bills that would prevent whistleblowers from exposing inhumane factory practices against farm animals, requiring that evidence be turned over to law enforcement within 24 or 48 hours. These bills have their roots in ALEC’s effort on legislation that labels people who interfere with these operations terrorists and makes it illegal for activists to take pictures or video of them.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...r-ground-laws/


ALEC, conserving the status quo, protecting/enriching Corporate-Americans (that finanace ALEC) while ing Human-Americans.

[boutons_deux]

ALEC (UCA, United Corporations of America) wealth extraction, wealth redistribution upwards

Cashing in on Kids: 139 ALEC Bills in 2013 Promote a Private, For-Profit Education Model

Despite widespread public opposition to the education privatization agenda, at least 139 bills or state budget provisions reflecting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) education bills have been introduced in 43 states and the District of Columbia in just the first six months of 2013, according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org. Thirty-one have become law.

ALEC Vouchers Transfer Taxpayer Money to Private and Religious Schools

News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch has called public education a "a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed."

But this "transformation" of public education -- from an ins ution that serves the public into one that serves private for-profit interests -- has been in progress for decades, thanks in large part to ALEC.

ALEC boasts on the "history" section of its website that it first started promoting "such 'radical' ideas as a [educational] voucher system" in 1983 -- the same year as the Reagan administration's "Nation At Risk" report -- taking up ideas first articulated decades earlier by ALEC supporter Milton Friedman.


ALEC Corporations Reap the Rewards
\
Some of the for-profit corporations profiting from the ALEC Education privatization agenda include:

"Amplify," the newly-created education division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, parent company of Fox News. News Corp is on the ALEC Education Task Force. In 2010, News Corp hired former New York City chancellor Joel Klein to run its education division, which includes the for-profit education company formerly known as Wireless Generation. The firm has big plans for a specialized "Amplify Tablet" that would provide lesson plans, textbooks and testing to cash-in on new "Common Core" required state standards.

K12 Inc., the nation's largest provider of online charter schools, where low-paid teachers manage as many as 250 students at a time and communicate with their pupils only through email and phone. The corporation, whose CEO Ron Packard received $5 million in total compensation in 2011, is on the ALEC Education Task Force and its lobbyist Lisa Gillis has Chaired ALEC's Special Needs Subcommittee. According to a report in the New York Times, students in K12, Inc. schools often perform very poorly, and some K12 teachers claim that they have been encouraged to pass failing students so that the company can receive more reimbursement from states. K12 receives an average of between $5,500 and $6,000 for every student on its rosters -- the same amount that would be spent for students attending a brick-and-mortar school, despite K12 not having to pay for cafeteria, gyms, busing, or heat and air conditioning -- and much of K12's profits are spent on advertising targeted at increasing enrollment, rather than on investments in education. At K12's Agora Cyber Charter School, which produces more than 10% of the company's revenue, nearly 60% of students are behind grade level in math, nearly 50% are behind in reading, and a third do not graduate on time.

Corinthian Colleges is a for-profit college chain that operates campuses under names like Everest, Heald, and WyoTech, in addition to offering degrees online. It has become notorious for aggressive recruiting practices and leaving students unprepared for the job market and saddled with massive student loan debts. In Milwaukee, for example, where a Corinthian Everest campus was financed with $11 million in city bonds, just 25% of students found jobs and over half dropped out; the campus closed two years after it opened. Nationally, over 40 percent of Corinthian's students default on their loans, and only 60% of students complete their coursework. In June, Corinthian disclosed that it is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and has been subpoenaed by California's Attorney General for its recruiting practices and financial responsibility.


The 501(c)(4) American Federation for Children and its 501(c)(3) wing the Alliance for Children, for example, have brought an array of privatization bills to ALEC and promoted the legislation across the country. The groups were organized and are funded by the billionaire DeVos family (heirs to the Amway fortune); Richard DeVos has received the ALEC "Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award." AFC's top lobbyist is disgraced former Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, who was convicted of three felonies for misuse of his office for political purposes and banned from the state Capitol for five years (though the charges were later reversed and dropped as part of a plea agreement). Jensen represents the organization on the ALEC Education Task Force and has brought AFC bills to ALEC for adoption as "model" legislation. AFC spent at least $7 million electing privatization-friendly state legislators across the country in 2012, but reported far less to state election authorities.

In addition to the DeVos family foundations, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is one of the top school privatization funders in the country, spending over $31 million over the past eleven years promoting "school choice" nationwide, according to One Wisconsin Now; for decades, Bradley has also been a major ALEC funder. The foundation has over $600 million in assets and is headed by Michael Grebe, Scott Walker's campaign co-chair.

Originally promoted as a program for Milwaukee's low-income students of color to have access to private education, the initial voucher program gained support from some African-American leaders and was pushed by State Representative Polly Williams, a Milwaukee Democrat. But last session, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker broadened vouchers to families with higher incomes, and in the 2013-2015 budget further expanded the program. "They have hijacked the program," Williams says. "As soon as the doors open for the low income children, they're trampled by the high income," she said. "Now the upper crust have taken over."

http://truth-out.org/news/item/17636...ducation-model

for-profit schools extractive capitalism: tiest possible product for highest possible price