All posts by George
Hip Hip Hypocrite
If you deprive hundreds of thousands of people of something they need, without giving them any say in the matter, then announce that you yourself are keeping that thing because you need it, you just might be an asshole. Of the congressional Republican variety, specifically. Some Republicans who voted to shut down the government, furloughing 800,000 federal workers, delaying paychecks even for the essential employees who are at work every day (like, say, Capitol police), and closing many needed government programs are now coming forward to explain why they won’t be donating their paychecks to charity as others are doing. Take Rep. Renee Ellmers, Republican of North Carolina: Similarly, Rep. Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota: “I will continue to earn it, and I will continue to collect what I earn, yes,” he added. If, as a person who actually does need your paycheck, you can’t bring yourself to care about all the people who also need their paychecks and don’t get the choice, people over whom you have power, then you may suffer from a deficit of empathy that is in a way even worse than that of people like Sen. Ted Cruz, who don’t really need their piddly little $174,000 congressional pay.
“I need my paycheck. That’s the bottom line. I understand that there may be some other members who are deferring their paychecks, and I think that’s admirable. I’m not in that position.”
Oh, well, as long as you neeeed it, I’m sure that makes you very different from all the janitors and secretaries and accountants and Head Start teachers and workplace safety inspectors you voted to furlough without pay. Ellmers is, in fact, close to the bottom of the House wealth rankings. It probably would be uncomfortable for her to go without her paycheck! Which is where maybe she should think about all the people who make a fraction of what she’s paid as a member of Congress, people who didn’t get to vote, as she did, on taking their damn paychecks away.
“I’m staying here, and I’m working,” said Cramer in an interview with Valley News Live on Wednesday. “My office is open, we’re taking phone calls, I’m voting every day, I’m debating every day, I’m going to countless meetings. I’m working to earn the salary that the people pay me to do the job. I don’t get into those sort of stunt-y things, and I’m not going to do it.”
Again, let’s refer to the Capitol police and other essential government workers who are showing up every day and will not get paid until Cramer and his party end this damn shutdown. Cramer makes a fair point about members of Congress donating their salaries when he says “If you want a Congress that’s full of millionaires and doctors’ spouses, this is a great little trick.” But if you’re delaying or denying paychecks for people making a fraction of what you make, all of whom are either working now or wishing they were allowed to come back to work, you need to share the damn pain. Maybe it would provide a glimmer of insight into what you’re doing to the country.
Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson
Reality
How to Detect an Obamacare Lie
By Rick Newman | The Exchange You’ve got to be pretty gullible to believe that politicians elected by actual Americans would ever pass something this inflammatory. Yet people opposed to Obamacare in principle may simply be willing to suspend disbelief when presented with any evidence of its flaws, true or not. If anybody cared to check whether this information is true, here’s how you might do it.
When Yahoo Finance hosted an online Obamacare Q&A recently, more than 2,300 people sent in questions about how to get insurance under the new health reform law. Not surprisingly, a few hecklers were among them to rant against the law and make startling claims about the objectionable practices it will sanction — most of them totally false.
The propaganda campaign surrounding Obamacare may be the most widespread onslaught of misinformation since the McCarthy inquisitions of the 1950s. There are many genuine problems with the Affordable Care Act, as Obamacare is formally known, such as its complexity and costs, new risks of fraud and the individual mandate, which rankles a lot of reasonable Americans. Critics of the law hardly have to make stuff up to give the electorate something to worry about. Yet even as the insurance exchanges set up by the ACA launch, millions of Americans seem more swayed by fallacies than facts.
So I’d like to deconstruct one myth that surfaced during the Q&A as a way to illustrate how nonsensical some of the anti-Obamacare rhetoric is, along with how simple it can be to check information that sounds suspicious. One participant submitted a comment claiming that “illegals will get free healthcare under Obamacare,” along with the following language that supposedly comes straight from the law itself:
First, look up the ACA online and see if this language is actually in there. All federal laws are public (except those pertaining to classified information) so anybody can search a law online to check what’s in it. The Affordable Care Act , it turns out, doesn’t even have a Section 152; all sections in the bill are either four or five digits, as in Sec. 2704 or Sec. 10201. There is a Sec. 152 of the Internal Revenue Code, which the ACA refers to several times, but that defines who qualifies as a given taxpayer’s “dependent” and has nothing to do with immigration, legal or illegal.
While scanning the ACA, it takes only a few minutes of searching for keywords to turn up this passage, in Sec. 1312: “ACCESS LIMITED TO LAWFUL RESIDENTS.—If an individual is not, or is not reasonably expected to be for the entire period for which enrollment is sought, a citizen or national of the United States or an alien lawfully present in the United States, the individual shall not be treated as a qualified individual and may not be covered under a qualified health plan in the individual market that is offered through an Exchange.” So the law actually denies coverage to illegal immigrants. And if you’re wondering what an “alien lawfully present” is, you can search further on the Web and learn that these are basically special categories of legal immigrants whose status is uncontroversial.
Use common sense. Would Congress really pass a bill that provides health insurance to “all non-U.S. residents?” In literal terms, that would include everybody in the world EXCEPT U.S. citizens, or approximately 7 billion people. Congress might be filled with venal politicians, but it’s also staffed by hundreds of shrewd lawyers who know how to write laws and are very unlikely to make a typographical error of that magnitude.
Have a little faith in elective government. Any politician who really voted to give away gobs of taxpayer money to illegal immigrants, steal money from people’s bank accounts and cut off 76-year-old cancer patients would be run out of office, even in today’s sputtering system. Congress might be corrupt, but it’s still pretty hard to get elected if you’re a despot.
Obamacare propaganda is likely to persist, even as millions of Americans enroll in the program and begin to develop opinions of how well it works based on their own first-hand experience. Efforts to discredit the program might even intensify as critics begin to fear that the more people who sign up, the more entrenched Obamacare is likely to become.
Bogus information doesn’t just come from bashers of the program, either. The fact-checking Web site Politifact has identified 16 common myths perpetrated by critics of the ACA, but also 10 fibs emanating from Obamacare supporters, such as the claim that it will lead to better benefits and lower health insurance costs for everybody.
Perhaps the only thing about Obamacare that’s indisputable is that it has produced a gargantuan amount of hokum.
Nuff Said
Voting the Central
Will there be support for UPS, Teamsters contract supplement? Teamsters Local 89 members at United Parcel Service Inc. again are voting on a regional contract called the Central Region Supplement. The regional contract covers geographically specific work rules, seniority and grievance procedures and acts as a supplement to a national contract between Teamsters and UPS, Mike Mangeot, manager of public relations for Louisville-based UPS Airlines, said in an email. Voting began yesterday and continues through Oct. 9. Union members rejected a regional contract supplement offer early this summer, as Business First reported. But UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters agreed to an indefinite extension of their current national master agreement and supplements. “While under the contract extension, it is business as usual at UPS while the vote and negotiations continue,” Mangeot wrote. “Any suggestions of potential disruptions during this period have no merit.” Teamsters Local 89 president Fred Zuckerman also could not be reached immediately for comment. According to the Teamster’s website, there is not support for the regional supplement. Union members held a meeting earlier this month and unanimously accepted a motion to again vote no on the supplement, a post on the site said. The post said the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, rather than local 89, is leading the negotiations with UPS and “the membership has seen only token attempts to resolve the many issues still lingering throughout the proposed Central Region Supplement.” Among concerns listed on the website are that the supplement contains “dangerous language” that gives UPS “almost unlimited power to terminate employees for anything the company deems a ‘serious offense.’” The post also references modifications to the union’s TeamCare health care plan, saying it lacks many of the key benefits members and their families have come to rely upon. “Current full-time employees under TeamCare will have an inferior plan to both part-time and new full-time employees if the package is not further modified,” it says. Atlanta-based UPS (NYSE: UPS) is Louisville’s largest private-sector employer with more than 20,000 full-time equivalent workers. The company operates its largest air sorting hub, Worldport, and a ground operation, Centennial Hub, in Louisville. Teamsters Local 89 represents about 8,800 workers at Worldport and about 1,900 in the company’s ground operations, Zuckerman said in a previous interview. Another union agreement, called the Louisville Air Rider, remains in negotiations, so it is not up for consideration, according to Mangeot. “As always, UPS continues to negotiate a contract that rewards our employees while protecting our competitive position,” he wrote. David A. Mann Reporter- Business First
Adios…
That’s How I’d Do It
Why the Fight?
Unions—Not Just for Middle-Aged White Guys Anymore
During the floor debate yesterday on a resolution expanding the AFL-CIO’s commitment to take the workers excluded from labor law’s protections into its ranks—domestic workers, taxi drivers, day laborers, and the like—one delegate to the union’s quadrennial convention likened the proceedings to the 1935 AFL convention, when a sizable group of unionists wanted the Federation to expand its ranks to include factory workers. The more conservative Federation leaders, including its president, William Green, believed that unions should represent only workers in skilled trades—carpenters, masons, plumbers, and so on. But John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers and Sidney Hillman of the Clothing Workers believed that there were millions of factory workers who would flock to unions if given the chance. Lewis and Hillman’s motion to organize factory workers was put to a vote and lost. They were not happy. Indeed, Lewis decked Big Bill Hutchinson, the president of the Carpenters, and stormed out—to form the CIO, a labor organization pledged to organize factory workers and that organized millions of them over the next couple of years. No such dramatics attended yesterday’s proceedings, but the delegate who harked back to 1935 had a point. The issues before this year’s AFL-CIO convention, like the issues before the convention 78 years ago, concern opening labor’s ranks to a whole new group of workers—disproportionately minority, immigrant, and female. There was an ethno-cultural dimension to the factory-worker debate of 1935 as well: The AFL trade unions (though not the Mine and Clothing Workers) consisted disproportionately of men of Northwestern European descent, while the factory workers were often of Southern and Eastern European descent. Some were even black or, horror of horrors, women. Opening labor’s ranks to these workers was something that many in the AFL would simply not countenance. Indeed, the most striking thing about this year’s AFL-CIO convention is that it’s the first one I’ve attended—I daresay, the first one, period—that hasn’t looked like a sea of middle-aged white guys. America’s unions have long had racially diverse and multi-gender memberships, but it’s taken a while for that diversity to reach the movement’s topmost ranks (AFL-CIO conventions draw their delegates from the leaders of the federation’s 50-plus unions). Today, the AFL-CIO’s two largest affiliates are headed by an African American man and a Jewish lesbian. Tefere Gebre, who will be elected the Federation’s executive vice president in balloting tomorrow, is a political refugee from Ethiopia who came to the United States as a teenager. The resolutions enacted today, which commits the Federation to place almost as much emphasis on community coalition-building as it does on the increasingly impossible task of conventional union organizing, only furthers the impression of a movement in demographic as well as functional transition. In what I think was an unprecedented move, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka allowed three prominent allies of labor, including National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill, to speak for the resolution, even though none were delegates or, for that matter, union members. So, yes—by virtue of both the fundamental shift in strategy and the implications that shift has for further changing labor’s demographics, this week’s convention is a lot like 1935’s. With a signal difference, however: The changes of ’35 could only take place once the Federation split. The changes this week have clear majority support, though at some level they pose an existential threat to both a stereotype and some actual people: the labor boss of legend, old, white, male, and puffing a cigar.
This week’s AFL-CIO convention heralds some fundamental changes for labor.
No such hard and fast racial or gender lines were apparent in yesterday’s debate. Many of today’s unions are already heavily minority, immigrant, and female. Some of the union leaders who have been the most skeptical about allowing organizations that aren’t unions onto labor’s governing bodies have taken a leading role in the fight for immigration reform, most particularly Terry O’Sullivan of the Laborers.