Union Thug by LizaWasHere

So it is the day after Labor Day and what are the Republicans doing as they return to Washington? Why trying to prevent the National Labor Relations Board from creating a new rule that would make it easier and faster to hold a vote on forming a union, of course.

The Hill is reporting this morning that Republican lawmakers want to block a newly proposed rule which would take away a few of the barriers that are currently used by business to slow and stymie the process of even getting to a vote on the formation of a union.

The issue here is not whether a group of workers can form a union but how they go about getting to the vote to see if they have enough support for such a move or not. The new rules would allow for the electronic filing of petitions, would force management at the company in question to provide a list of all the workers who will be voting, including their home phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and would move the appeals process from pre-vote to post-vote.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I am the grandson and nephew of Union members, I grew up in Michigan in a UAW extended family and am the son of a Labor Law attorney, so I am going to be pro-labor. All that said I am having a hard time finding what is so objectionable about these changes.

One supposes that it is because preventing months or years of delay by companies as they produce more and more black propaganda and pressure against the idea of collective bargaining will make it more likely that workers will see the benefits of banding together. But that is not how it is being framed by the Chamber of Commerce and Republicans.

The often clueless House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, has sent around a memo including this change as part of ‘the 10 most harmful regulations proposed by the Obama administration’.
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Action Comics #1 by j_philipp

On a day when Mitt Romney is getting a lot of press for saying the corporations of people, it is probably worth remembering just how wrong headed that really is. The Citizens United case was decided on ideological grounds rather than sound legal reasoning (or frankly common sense).

The idea that a non-living entity made up of people who work for the same company is somehow the same an actual citizen is ludicrous. The amount of trouble we have seen from this is only starting.

Which is why I want to bring attention to the protest action that the Center for Media and Democracy is promoting. Basically it is a day of online action. The CMD is asking everyone that thinks the Citizens United decision was a flawed one to get out there in social media and let your voice be heard.

It is pretty simple just follow this link, the page it takes you to will let you post on Facebook, Twitter, and whatever Google’s new thing is for social media. A couple of clicks is all it takes.

That and getting out there and encouraging everyone you know to do the same. I got this information rather late in the day (hat tip to our own ubetchaiam) , but there is still time for you to make your displeasure about the unfettering of corporate cash and the kind of politicians that are being elected because of it heard.

So, take the time to speak up! If nothing else you will be able to go to sleep tonight knowing that you have done your small part in pushing back against the kind of corporate interests that would by elections anonymously.

What is on your minds tonight Firedogs? The floor is yours!

Battle of Thermopylae by Σταύρος

Now what? The worst compromise since the one Xerxes offered the Spartans is on its way to becoming law. There were no 300 at an American Thermopylae turning back the tides of an oppressor. So there is no heroic last stand and not a lot for those of us on the Left to be in any way happy with.

We did avoid a default, though we have validated using the debt ceiling as a Sword of Damocles (which is completely the fault of the Democrats, since it was Sen. Kent Conrad that first used it as leverage to get the Cat Food Commission appointed by the president) hanging over the economy for as long as we are dumb enough to have a debt ceiling.

All this might leave one a little dispirited. This is understandable, but not acceptable. It is not acceptable for anyone that wants to call themselves an activist. It is the hard fact of this political life that as an activist one is going to get a lot of kicks in the teeth, especially when you are on the Left.

There is just so much money and institutional inertia in the system that the deck is stacked against us. Even those who we should be able to reliably count as Liberal or Progressive are caught by the need to raise money and to have the support of their political party to run and win. It distorts their ability to make votes on principal.

Still this is the time to review why it is we do what we do. I can’t speak for anyone else but I do this out of wholly selfish reasons. It’s true. The return on time, sweat and tears invested is huge, well, huge in the sense of personal satisfaction. I like the idea of an United States where people are treated equally regardless of their color or gender or sexuality or economic class. I’ve never see the full thing, but the vision of it keeps me going.
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The people, united, will never be defeated!

So, are you unhappy? Odd are good that if you are a political junkie, if you are a follower of politics or if you have ever heard the word politics that you are in some form of discontent this morning. The plan that has been put forward as a “deal” has all the appeal of being told that you get to live, but you’ve had your left leg cut off and sometime later this year we’ll know how much of your right leg gets cut off as well.

It is getting late in the day but there still are ways that you can affect the outcome. You see this thing is not going to get out of the House without Democratic support. And a significant amount of it.

It could easily fail if Speaker Boehner’s “institutional” Republicans fear a primary more than they fear bucking their weak and oft confused leader. But there is a flip side of this, there is the Democratic 90 to 100 votes that are going to be needed to make it all happen.

Right now the leaders of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus are saying they are extremely unhappy with the plan and at least a couple of them are saying they will not support it. While there is some cross over between the two caucuses, between they have enough members to make passage much harder, if they all stick together to vote no.

At this point I am not sure what the President would do if faced with a last minute collapse of this, to quote the leader of the CBC, “Sugar coated Satan sandwich”. There is a lot of talk about the 14th Amendment, or the specifically reserved right to mint platinum coins or even the fact that there is a Homeland Security directive that seems to allow the president to take all kinds of unilateral action in the event of a wide range of emergency conditions including, specifically, economic turmoil.

I am pretty damned unhappy with President Obama, but even at the depths of my frustration I know that he is a smart guy and that smart folks don’t put all their eggs in one basket, even if they are saying they do. So, with that assumption of competence we can have some hope that if Progressives did derail this craptastic deal there would be something other than default in our future.

So what is there for someone who is seeing red to do? Quite a lot actually. The vote in the Senate is going to be first. It is a lock. It is going to happen and it is going to pass. There is no point in working there. However given the numbers of voices saying they are unhappy with the deal in the House there is a chance to push for rejection of a bad deal.
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Insane Asylum by simonk

Steve Benen at Political Animal managed to reach back a couple of years to find just the right quote form John Cole about dealing with the Republicans in Congress:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

I know that I have a spent a lot of time hammering Republicans for being dumbasses and nitwits over the last couple of years, but this whole fight with the debt ceiling really is showing what happens when conspicuously uncurious people who only listen to their own ideological outlets get into power.

The Conventional Wisdom (including mine) keeps saying that we will get some kind of deal to avoid a real potential disaster. And things certainly look that way. After all the rumors are that Majority Leader Reid is going to unveil a plan that cuts 2.5 trillion (2,500 billion) from the budget over 10 years in ways that Democrats can get behind. A major feature of this plan is that we’d say 1.5 trillion by ending our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would have no increased revenue and it would have no cuts to entitlements.

All of this is to the good (if you can call anything about Republican made mess good) in that the Democrats have offered the Republicans everything they insisted on, cuts that equal the increase the debt ceiling and no new revenue. In any sane world that would be that, a total acquiescence’s to the hostage conditions and an end the crisis.

The problem is that it is unclear that Republicans can take a solution that does not only meet their stated goals but lets them stick it to the people they have decided that they don’t like. It is no mystery that the GOP really does not like the “average” people of the nation. They have been showing their disdain for the millions of unemployed people for a very long time, call them lazy and wanting to subject them to random drug screenings merely for being victims of the economy they helped to engineer.
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Burning Man 2009 by JahFae, on Flickr

There is an apocryphal quote from the Vietnam War “We had to destroy the village to save it”. I call it apocryphal because its attribution is murky and it has been distorted from the original quote over time. However it is still a powerful idea that leaders can get so close to their immediate goals that they lose sight of the bigger picture of what they are trying to achieve.

The quote comes from the story of Ben Tre , a provincial capital in the Mekong Delta. The United States Army made the decision to shell and bomb the town, even though there were large numbers of civilians in it, in order to break the Viet Cong hold on the town. They destroyed the town to deny it to the enemy. Not exactly a productive thing to do when you are fighting a counter insurgency.

It sees that this kind of thinking has infected the Congressional Republicans. Yesterday Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Dr. Evil –VA) said that he and his caucus, who control the House of Representatives, will not take up the issue of raising the debt ceiling until after it actually is hit. Right now the Treasury department estimates this will happen no later than May 15th.

Why is the House Majority Leader going to wait? Because he sees political advantage in playing with the nations credit rating. You see even when we a prevented by law from borrowing any more money there are ways that the Treasury department can shift dollars around for a few weeks to keep paying for things. They think they can get us through June and into July before those emergency measures run out.

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(picture from Steve Wampler via Flikr)

Not much of value comes from gangs. Oh sure there are some rap artists who started as gang members and I am not going to minimize the art that they have created, but really they are the exception not the rule. Gangs in history and in contemporary America are generally associated with criminal activity.

Given this basic premise it is hard to understand why a long time United States Senator would want to form a gang, but Sen. Lieberman really has a bit of a chubby for them. It was eons ago in blog time, 2005, but there was a show down between Democrats and Republicans over judicial nominees. The Dems where holding up 11 applet court nominees and the Republicans were talking about the “nuclear option” of ending the filibuster.

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Nietzsche said:

“When we look into the abyss, searching for monsters, the abyss looks into us as well.”

Right now we are staring the abyss in the face and there are indeed monsters there. This abyss is the elections this fall. The chance that radical Republicans will take over the House and perhaps the Senate has grown. The affect of constant lies from Fox News and Talk Radio have energized the Republican base. The limp leadership from the White House and from Majority Leader Reid has demoralized the Democratic base.

The passing of many of the Lefts long term wish list items, barely and with tons of ridiculous and galling compromise has created a situation where the Right is fired up and the Left is angry at its own leadership. The conditions are in place for a wave election and the wave is not likely to go the way that we Liberals are going to like in any fashion. . . .

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Since the Republicans have managed to stand tall on their intransigence that up to 2 million unemployed Americans should lose their meager benefits, perhaps it is time to start introducing them to some of the unemployed. We have heard the Dickensian pronouncements on the Senate floor that the unemployed are lazy, that the benefits they receive are keeping them from looking for work, that it is more important in a financial crisis to cut spending (and thus cut the over all recovery off at the knees) than it is to help our fellow Americans who, through no fault of their own, are now paying the price for financial deregulation.

As long as this debate is kept in abstract terms it is easy for those Republicans who have a conscience (all three of them) to talk about how we should be burdening our children and grandchildren with debt. It is time to use the very effective method of hearings to bring the real face of the long term unemployed right into the face of the heartless and petty Republican majority.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

Imagine the scene; there are the Senators all in their expensive suits, high end electronics at their sides, expensive watches at their wrists, sitting in the lovely hearing rooms at the Capital. In come the five witnesses, the laid off factory worker in his mid-forties, single mom who was an administrative assistant for a medium size company, the engineer who worked her whole life at one company and now is unlikely to find a job in her field again because of age bias, the construction worker who used to build houses and the coffee shop worker who lost her job to hours cuts.

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We all know that Sen. Blanche Lincoln is facing a real challenge from her left today. Lt Governor Bill Halter has done what needed to be done. He has (with the help of the Netroots) raised the money. He has busted his butt getting out there and letting the Democrat in Arkansas know that they have a real choice between a bought and sold Insurance Cartel shill and someone who will represent the people of their state.

The key today will be getting as many votes as possible for Lt. Gov Halter so there will be a run off. If this three way race goes to a run off there is very good chance that a bad senator can be replaced by a good one.

Turn out is what we are talking about here folks, and you can help! Just like every other election it does not matter how many people support the candidate, it matter how many take the time to get out and vote. By signing up for a phone banking shift, you can help turn out the voters who will tell Blanche Lincoln that her watering down of health care reform, her siding with the insurance industry over the people is a good reason for her to spend a lot more time with her family, starting in January of next year.

So, will you take the time to do a phone bank shift for Bill Halter? Just click here and you will be connected with the system. Once you have done that the campaign will get back with you and walk you through getting started for your shift.

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