How the Mortgage Crisis Got to be a Crisis….(1)

There’s a certain irony in the mortgaghe crisis, and a certain justice, though that justice is about to become, as always, injustice in order to protect the Usual Suspects. The ironic justice of it was put succinctly today by one Edmund Andrews in one of the Grey Lady’s patented business stories. Whether he meant to or not is another question.

Over the last two decades, few industries have lobbied more ferociously or effectively than banks to get the government out of its business and to obtain freer rein for “financial innovation.”

But as losses from bad mortgages and mortgage-backed securities climb past $200 billion, talk among banking executives for an epic government rescue plan is suddenly coming into fashion.

A confidential proposal that Bank of America circulated to members of Congress this month provides a stunning glimpse of how quickly the industry has reversed its laissez-faire disdain for second-guessing by the government — now that it is in trouble.

I guess he did.

Yes, it’s that old Round Robin of Yesteryear:

Deregulation -> Speculation -> Collapse -> Govt Bail Out

I know. You said that would happen when the Dereg Boys came around selling their snake oil with high-falutin’ promises and their fingers hovering bare inches from the pocket you keep your money in. And you were right. So was I. Who could have predicted that business would use deregulation as an excuse to bring back all the old scams (along with a few new ones) that created the last economic collapse?

You could. So could I. In fact, WE DID.

Who could have predicted that when the shit hit the fan and the greed, the wild speculating, the lying, false annual reports, phony accounting tricks, and outright scamming of both customers and their own investors threatened to bring down the whole House O’ Cards, the very same con artists who’d created the mess would be banging on the Treasury’s doors with both fists and demanding our tax money, screaming, “Save us! Save us!”

Well, you could have. So could I. In fact, WE BOTH DID.

Despite our predictions (pretty easy, not-too-hard-to-figure-out kind of predictions, sort of like, you know, predicting that the sun will rise in the east), y’all just went ahead and listened to the Siren Song of Greed thinking they (The Great They) was gonna make y’all rich. Despite many warnings, signs, and signals that what they wuz gonna do wuz make theirselfs rich by skimming your money, y’all went ahead and decided that De-regulation wuz a Good Thang. And now they’re gonna make you – all of us – pay through the goddamn nose to save their sorry asses.

See, E Andrews misses something kind of key.

Bank of America suggested creating a Federal Homeowner Preservation Corporation that would buy up billions of dollars in troubled mortgages at a deep discount, forgive debt above the current market value of the homes and use federal loan guarantees to refinance the borrowers at lower rates.

“We believe that any intervention by the federal government will be acceptable only if it is not perceived as a bailout of the bond market,” the financial institution noted.

In practice, taxpayers would almost certainly view such a move as a bailout. If lawmakers and the Bush administration agreed to this step, it could be on a scale similar to the government’s $200 billion bailout of the savings and loan industry in the 1990s.

(emphasis added)

Not really. Unfortunately, more than $$$200BIL$$$ has been thrown at the banks to solve this problem already, more than half from the govt and it ain’t done shit except buy the investor class and the financial class a li’l more time before it all caves in, like propping up a sagging, rotten roof with toothpicks – A LOT of toothpicks. Another $200BIL$$$ wouldn’t fix it, either, but if such a package does get aimed at aiding the borrowers (the victims) rather than the lenders (or “perps”), it would actually do more to limit the damage than the so-far followed policy of having banks and govts “lend” $$$BILLIONS$$$ to, you know, each other.

It would mostly benefit banks and Wall Street firms that earned huge fees by packaging trillions of dollars in risky mortgages, often without documenting the incomes of borrowers and often turning a blind eye to clear fraud by borrowers or mortgage brokers.

A rescue would also create a “moral hazard,” many experts contend, by encouraging banks…to take outsize risks in the future, in the expectation of another government bailout if things go wrong again.

If the government pays too much for the mortgages or the market declines even more than it has already, Washington — read, taxpayers — could be stuck with hundreds of billions of dollars in defaulted loans.

Uh, yeah. And where have we heard that before?

Oh yeah: every time deregulation goes smash, here come the perps and the con men and the bankers and their lobbyists with their hands out.

Will we EVER, you know, learn? These people haven’t changed since Cato was a Roman slumlord. Enough is never enough and they don’t care who pays for their folly and greed as long as it isn’t them. (Which means it’s always, you know, us.) Can we just stop believing their lies now, please? Pretty please?

Oy.

The Charlotte Observer Investigates the Poultry Business

[Jordan Barab may have abandoned his outstanding blog, Confined Spaces, to take a position on Rep George Miller’s House Committee on Education and Labor but he hasn’t used that as an excuse to abandon his faithful readers. Once a month or so he sends out an email to his Confined Spaces Google Group on what the committee is doing or the media is reporting. This week he sent out 3 emails linking to a groundbreaking series in the Charlotte Observer on the way workers in the poultry industry in the South – many of them illegals – are being mistreated. Below are the emails, complete with links to the entire series. I urge you to read them. – MA]

1) Attached are excerpts and links to the first of an amazing six part Charlotte Observer series on health and safety hazards in the poultry industry

The cover page is here: http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/ (Note: you may have to disable your popup protector.

Individual articles:

The cruelest cuts

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/487187.html

 

In an industry rife with danger, House of Raeford Farms depicts itself as a safe place to work. Company records suggest relatively few workers are injured each year as they kill, cut and package millions of chickens and turkeys.

But an Observer investigation shows the N.C. poultry giant has masked the extent of injuries behind its plant walls.

The company has compiled misleading injury reports and has defied regulators as it satisfies a growing appetite for America’s most popular meat. And employees say the company has ignored, intimidated or fired workers who were hurt on the job.

An epidemic of pain

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/487186.html

Like black lung in the coal industry and brown lung in textiles, the hands of the poultry industry suffer a long-neglected threat. Two decades ago, musculoskeletal disorders at poultry and meatpacking plants prompted a public outcry. Legislators and government officials vowed change.

Now, an Observer investigation shows, the hands of poultry workers are more threatened than ever.

He says his agency is at fault

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/487188.html

Bob Whitmore is doing what few career government employees dare — publicly criticizing his own agency.

Whitmore, an expert in record-keeping requirements for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said OSHA is allowing employers to vastly underreport the number of injuries and illnesses their workers suffer.

The true rate for some industries — including poultry processors — is likely two to three times higher than government numbers suggest, he said.

The perils of processing

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/487189.html

About 100 U.S. poultry workers have died on the job during the past decade, and more than 300,000 have been injured. The industry’s death and injury rates are higher than those for manufacturing as a whole. For many workers — including those who suffer amputations, chemical burns and debilitating hand or wrist ailments — on-the-job injuries have left a lasting mark. Poultry plants are typically divided into two functions. At one end, birds are slaughtered, scalded and plucked. At the other end, tightly clustered workers cut and package meat.

From the Editor: Poultry series exposes a new, silent subclass

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/487184.html

Today we ask you to join us for a six-day series on the plight of Carolinas workers who put America’s most popular meat on the table.

These workers — about 28,000 of them in the Carolinas — process chicken and turkey in all its forms. Whole birds, fillets, nuggets, slices, cubes, sausage and even hot dogs.

It may surprise you to learn that most of the workers speak Spanish. Many of them entered the country illegally.

Should that matter as you consider the working conditions you will read about?

I say yes, but maybe not for the most obvious reason.

It should matter because the neglect of these workers exposes an ugly dimension to a new subclass in our society. A disturbing subclass of compliant workers with few, if any, rights.

Editorial: Spoiled meat

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/487185.html

What happened to Karina Zorita just isn’t decent. Yet it’s commonplace in pain factories such as the ones in the Carolinas where thousands of poultry workers clean and debone America’s best-selling meat.

Ms. Zorita, 32, is a former line worker for House of Raeford, a poultry processor in Eastern North Carolina. Her painful, crippled hands don’t show up on any government injury report. But an Observer investigation has documented her plight — and the injuries suffered by other workers like her.

The shameful truth? Feeble rules and lax oversight have made it easy for a dangerous industry to exploit illegal workers, underreport injuries and manipulate a regulatory system that essentially lets companies police themselves.

The Observer’s report begins today, and continues for six days. It focuses heavily on Ms. Zorita’s former employer

House of Raeford responds

Excerpts from a Jan. 14 letter to the Observer

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/484515.html

2) On September 3, 1991, a fire broke out at the Imperial Poultry Processing plant in Hamlet, NC. Workers tried to escape, but managers had locked the fire doors to prevent workers from stealing chicken nuggets 25 worker died. This powerful video is part of the Charlotte Observer’s series on the poultry processing industry which continues today: http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/poultry_video2/

Misery on the line

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/489655.html

Illegal immigrants say it’s easy to get a job at House of Raeford Farms.

Of 52 current and former Latino workers at House of Raeford who spoke to the Observer about their legal status, 42 said they were in the country illegally.

Company officials say they hire mostly Latino workers but don’t knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

But five current and former House of Raeford supervisors and human resource administrators, including two who were involved in hiring, said some of the company’s managers know they employ undocumented workers.

“If immigration came and looked at our files, they’d take half the plant,” said Caitlyn Davis, a former Greenville, S.C., plant human resources employee.

Former Greenville supervisors said the plant prefers undocumented workers because they are less likely to question working conditions for fear of losing their jobs or being deported.

.

A boss’s view: Keep them working

http://www.charlotte.com/716/v-print/story/489654.html

The production lines rarely stopped.

An endless stream of raw chickens — thousands an hour — had to be sliced and cut into pieces for family dinner tables.

It was Enrique Pagan’s job to keep his part of the line running.

He paced and often screamed at Mexicans and Guatemalans cutting chicken thighs. He demanded they move faster and scolded them when they left too much meat on the bone.

Pagan said most of his 90 workers in 2002 suffered hand and wrist pains. But he had production goals to meet. And he knew that workers wouldn’t complain because many were in the country illegally.

Editorial: Throwaway workers

http://www.charlotte.com/716/v-print/story/489653.html

You may not like the fact illegal immigrants break the law to come to this country for jobs. Yet they do come, and Americans want the low-priced products and services their cheap labor provides. But we should be appalled by what’s happening to thousands of immigrant workers who do dangerous, dirty work in pain factories in the Carolinas.

They are being exploited, abused, then thrown away when they are injured or when they speak up. Companies can get away with it, in part, because politicians in Washington don’t have the conscience or will to fix failed immigration policies.

3) Yet another stomach churning read from today’s Charlotte Observer:

Workers say they’re denied proper medical care

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/490858.html

Mike Flowers is a powerful gatekeeper. He often decides whether to send poultry workers to a doctor when they get hurt on the job or complain of chronic pain.

“I think we do a pretty good job of taking care of these folks,” said Flowers, who treats workers at the House of Raeford Farms plant in West Columbia, S.C.

Ernestina Ruiz thinks otherwise.

In 2006, after months of de-boning thousands of chicken breasts each day, her hands and wrists began to hurt. She complained to Flowers at least three times, she said, but each time he gave her pain relievers or a bandage and sent her back to work.

” `You’re going to be fine,’ ” she recalled him saying.

A large lump grew on her left wrist. The pain got so bad, she said, she went to a private doctor and had surgery.

Day after day, poultry workers are cut by knives, burned by chemicals or hurt by repetitive work, according to dozens of injury logs compiled by plants across the South.

Because many workers are illegal immigrants and can’t afford private care, their health rests largely with company medical workers.

Those in-house attendants are supposed to help workers heal. Instead, some have prevented workers from receiving medical care that would cost the company money, an Observer investigation has found. And in some instances, the treatments they provide can do more harm than good.

Judge criticized Tyson guidelines

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/490859.html

A judge sharply criticized policies at one large poultry company that encouraged nurses to delay medical treatment for some injured workers.

Tyson Foods, in a manual once issued to company nurses, provided the following guidance on how to handle workers with symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, a painful hand ailment: Treat them in-house and “if not improving after 4 weeks, refer to a physician.”

Administrative Law Judge Murphy Miller concluded in 2002 the policy left Georgia worker Carolyn Johnson with permanent injuries.

“An employer that … requires four weeks of in-house treatment before a physician referral charts a collision course with medical disaster,” the judge wrote. “The employee’s permanent nerve damage is the foreseeable result.”

A worker’s grueling day

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/story/490857.html

Celia Lopez felt lucky when she was hired at the House of Raeford Farms turkey plant in Raeford. But after six years, the 44-year-old mother of three said she feared the “hands that take care of my family” are ruined. Last February, Fayetteville Dr. Stanley Gilbert performed carpal tunnel surgery on her left hand. In June, he performed surgery on her right hand. At the Observer’s request, Lopez recounted a typical day:

TrenchNews, Verse 13

TOP STORY

LabourStart Forced to Close Website After Campaign Against Home Care Employer

Eric Lee’s LabourStart is an internet organizational tool for Britain’s unions. It has been more than a resource, it has been responsible for launching successful campaigns against employers and govts around the world who abuse workers and/or their unions. Barnet Unison, a website run by a local of the English union, explains.

To those of you unfamiliar with this organistion they provide information of campaigns across the world. Often they are exposing organisations/ governments who may have murdered, tortured , imprisoned Trade Union activists for going about their business, something which we all take for granted in this country. As with the Fremantle campaign, they will have a standard email detailing the issue and request readers to send the email off to the Head of the Organisation or Government.

By mobilizing union memberships around the world through its widespread newsletter to target specific injustices, LabourStart has been able to swamp offending employers and govt agencies or ministers with thousands of emails from all over the globe protesting anti-union or anti-worker activities. It has succeeded in getting trade union leaders released from jails, helped international unions win job actions, and supported trade unions in some of the most brutal countries on the planet.

Here, as Barnet Unison said, is the shocker: in all that time, they have never been threatened by anyone they went up against, not by military juntas or dictators or the cruelest and most vicious of employers.

Until now. And it’s coming from a British employer called Fremantle, not a Third World despot.

Privatization of previously govt functions and agencies came to Britain with Thatcher and grew under Poodle Blair as the UK’s Labour party followed Bill Clinton and the DLC’s lead in appropriating conservative positions and inserting them into a supposedly liberal political organization. Five years ago, The Poodle privatized Britain’s home care agencies (they call it “care home”), handing the contract to a so-called “non-profit” corporation called Fremantle. I’ll let Eric summarize what happened next.

On 1 April 2007 Fremantle Trust cut low paid care workers pay by up to 30%. The workers were told — “accept these terms or be sacked”! The members involved in the dispute provide residential and day care to the elderly and vulnerable residents in Barnet’s old peoples’ homes, in north London. Fremantle Trust is a not-for-profit company that took over care home contracts five years ago. The cuts include lower wages, increased hours, no sick pay, shorter holidays and reduced payment for working unsocial hours. Even pensions to which contributions have been made during the workers’ service are to be dramatically cut by more than one third. In response to these attacks our members voted to take strike action. Care workers need to be properly trained, decently paid and most importantly, valued members of society. This is an all too familiar story of privatisation, where companies pledge to keep delivering the same service but under-cut the in-house provision by attacking the conditions of the workforce.

(emphasis added)

Eric began an email campaign, urging his mailing list to send messages to Fremantle’s CEO, Carol Sawyers, expressing disappointment with the company’s treatment of its workers and urging it rescind the cuts. In the first 3 days, Sawyer’s inbox was flooded with over 5000 emails. Eric again, from his newsletter last week:

The reaction of the company was swift: On Friday afternoon, they fired off an email message to me threatening LabourStart with legal action, accusing us of “libel”. (As you may know, English libel laws are biased against the defendant, and are used by corporations to attempt to suppress dissent.)

A couple of days later, Fremantle got even more aggressive, and sacked Unison rep Andrew Rogers (pictured).

Andrew Rogers, Unison rep sacked by Fremantle this week

This bullying behavior is, I am told, typical of how this company works. They’ve asked us to stop this campaign, to stop saying negative things about them, and to stop sending them email protest messages.

Eric’s response was predictable: step up the campaign. After his newsletter notified his members of the threat, 8000 more emails poured into Fremantle. What happened next was a first.

[O]n Thursday, in an unprecedented move, the employer (Fremantle Trust) contacted our internet service provider and demanded that they shut down the campaign or else face a lawsuit themselves.

We were contacted by the legal department of the internet service provider and told that we had until noon on Friday to close down the campaign or else the entire LabourStart site would be shut down.

We worked very hard over those 24 hours to attempt to get our provider to back down, and had the full support of Unison (Britain’s giant public sector union, whose members are at the center of the dispute) but were not successful in doing this before the noon deadline on Friday.

As a result, at 11:59 on Friday we were compelled to shut down the campaigns.

But not for long. The internet is still much harder to control than other forms of media.

But — we instantly revived the campaign in nine languages on a different server, in a different country, with a new name that reflects our feeling at this time.

The new site is called “We will not be silenced!” and is located, appropriately enough, at http://www.wewillnotbesilenced.org

Eric simply moved his site to an overseas server to prevent Sawyers’ attack on a new provider if he used a British ISP, and the campaign continues.

If you click the link, you’ll be directed to a page with a form letter you can simply sign and sent or re-write in your own words if you feel strongly enough. I urge you to do so. The global corporatocracy is a jungle virus – whatever slimy anti-union, anti-worker bullying succeeds will spread through the entire network. If most of Wal-mart’s skanky corporate behavior has been slow to be adopted by other corps in the US, it’s only because they’ve been caught so often and lost so many battles that their reputation is in tatters. And even at that, a number of chains have still appropriated wholesale illegal techniques like time-shaving and demanding workers put in time for no pay as secret corporate policies passed down verbally to managers with instructions to make sure workers don’t find out about upper management’s involvement.

Don’t let Fremantle get away with this bullshit. If you do, it could come to your company next.

OTHER STORIES

TrenchNews, Verse 12

TOP STORY

Changeover at Delta Airlines

We noted awhile back that Delta, under a charismatic CEO with the unlikely name of Gerald Grinstein, was the only airline around to treat its workers with respect, the only airline around to give its employees a large part of the credit for turning it around and bringing it out of bankruptcy, and the only airline around to reward its employees as well as its management. Well, Grinstein is retiring, and in his place Delta’s board has hired as its new CEO a guy named Richard Anderson who comes with a reputation for ruthless cost-cutting.

Incoming Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson is a friendly and approachable leader whose easygoing manner often masks a shrewd and cunning lawyer’s mind, say Northwest Airlines workers and former associates of the one-time Texas prosecutor.

Anderson, 52, oversaw the heavily unionized Minnesota-based carrier from 2001 to 2004, a tumultuous period that pitted rank-and-file workers against management during a series of cost-cutting initiatives.

Despite his reputation, Northwest’s union chief suggests Delta’s workers could do worse.

Union leaders at Northwest give Anderson high marks for his “open-door” policy toward organized labor, but point out that he departed in 2004 before the worst of the bloodletting at the carrier, which was carried out by his successor, Doug Steenland.

“We had our issues with Richard, but overall we did OK with him,” said Ted Ludwig, president of Local 33 of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association.

“If we felt we had a concern we could not get resolved at the lower levels, he would always listen. He might not agree with us, but he would listen and seemed to empathize with you and he really seemed like he tried to put himself in your shoes.”

The last thing Delta needs right now is an anti-union, cost-cutting boss. Unlike American Airlines, Delta’s employees have been well-treated and well-rewarded for their efforts, and are perfectly aware that is was those efforts that were responsible for getting the airline out of a hole. They aren’t likely to take kindly to a CEO who wants to take it all away from them in the name of cutting costs after they’ve sacrificed so much. Just last week, the PBGC announced that Delta pilots’ pensions will be a little heftier than they thought.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a quasi-government agency that insures workers’ traditional pensions up to certain limits, said it expects to cover a greater share of the pilots’ pension benefits because it also received more valuable stock and other assets than expected as part of Delta’s bankruptcy reorganization. The agency pays pensions above its guaranteed limits when it recovers enough assets to do so.The PBGC received a $225 million IOU and a $2.2 billion unsecured claim as part of a settlement for taking over Delta’s pension plan last year, which was underfunded by $3 billion at the time. Those claims were converted into Delta stock when the airline emerged from bankruptcy in April. The PBGC now has about 50 million Delta shares worth about $800 million, and expects to receive more as remaining disputes in the bankruptcy case are settled.

Many retirees will see a “significant increase in benefits” as a result of the additional money coming into the plan, Joan Weiss, chief valuation actuary for the PBGC, told about 120 Delta pilots and retirees Monday.

If Anderson screws around with that, he’s in trouble. So’s the airline. And he may have to. Why? Because he has negotiated a potentially humungous salary package with the Delta board.

Anderson’s base salary is just below his $612,307 base salary with Minnesota-based United HealthGroup in 2006, where he served as an executive vice president before accepting the Delta job. His total 2006 compensation at United HealthGroup was about $4.3 million, according to a database of U.S. executive compensation.

The Delta package would pay Anderson at least $900,000 a year — 150 percent of his base pay — in 2008 if he meets or exceeds key goals in Delta’s business plan. Meeting those goals would also trigger profit-sharing for other employees, said Delta spokeswoman Betsy Talton.

Anderson will get a “long-term incentive award” valued at an estimated $11 million in 2007. This would be awarded as 55 percent restricted stock, 25 percent in stock options and 20 percent in the form of performance shares. For 2008, Anderson will be eligible for long-term incentives valued at $4 million, according to the SEC filing.

(emphasis added)

At least his raise is tied to his performance – more than many CEO’s are saddled with – but even so, $15Mil in bonuses is considerably more than Grinstein got, and he’s the one who turned everything around. That money has to come from somewhere. Wouldn’t be that it turns out the employees pay for it, would it? It sure won’t be the investors.

OTHER STORIES

TrenchNews, Verse 11

TOP STORY

NYT: 7 Unions Ask NLRB to Go Back to Rule Allowing Unions to Bargain Without a Majority of Employees

Back in the 30’s when employers were fighting unions with private armies and using local police forces as strikebreakers, FDR’s National Labor Relations Board allowed – even encouraged and occasionally demanded – employers bargain with unions even though the unions did not yet represent a majority of the company’s workforce.

Today, the methods of intimidation used by employers to prevent unions from organizing employees are less violent and more sophisticated but just as immoral, and seven unions have together decided that it’s time The NLRB went back to the old rules – which are still in force.

Seven labor unions asked the National Labor Relations Board yesterday to order employers to bargain with unions, even when the unions represent only a minority of employees.

This would be a sharp departure from current practices, in which employers are required to bargain with a union only after it shows that a majority of employees at a workplace support it.

The unions hope that such a change will make it easier to unionize workers. Today, 7.4 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, less than a fourth of the rate in the 1950s.

The unions involved in the bid, including the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers, say the labor board should return to a largely forgotten practice, prevalent in the 1930s, in which companies often bargained with unions representing only a minority of workers who had joined them.

“This is what the text of the National Labor Relations Act requires, and there are no decisions to the contrary,” said Charles J. Morris, an emeritus professor of labor law at Southern Methodist University and the foremost champion of this notion.

Union officials acknowledged that the labor board, currently dominated by appointees of President Bush, would probably not adopt a rule so favorable to unions. But union officials said they were petitioning now in the hope that there will be a Democratic president someday who will appoint a board that will look favorably upon their argument.

A pro-labor Labor Board – now there’s a radical idea.

TrenchNews, Verse 10

TOP STORY

AFGE Local President Asked to Quit Union or Leave FEMA

The Bush Administration’s long-standing effort to politicize and de-unionize government employees has taken some strange turns in the past, and it just took another one. An AFGE leader, president of Local 4060 in Washington, is accusing FEMA of intimidation.

Leo Bosner, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 4060, is an emergency-management program analyst at FEMA and has worked at the agency since its creation in 1979.

In his complaint, Bosner wrote that a FEMA security officer told him that “because I have a security clearance I must resign from the union, and I can be fired if I refuse to do so.”

***

In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Bosner and other AFGE leaders spoke out on what they saw as weak management practices and inadequate staffing for disaster response. Bosner has faulted the leadership of Homeland Security’s political appointees and has spoken out in favor of removing FEMA from the department and restoring its status as an independent agency.

“I believe I am being singled out for my disclosures to Congress and to the news media,” Bosner said in his complaint. He said he thought FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison was behind the effort to make him choose between his job and his union membership.

(emphasis added)

The sudden conflict between his job and his position in the union may well be, as Bosner believes, payback for his criticism of FEMA. Michael Chertoff and Karl Rove have both, after all, been fond of revenge plots aimed at people who disagree with them. But there’s another possibility as well, and it’s hinted at in what Bosner was told by a FEMA security officer.

Click to read more ->

OTHER STORIES

Wal-mart News

AP: “Workers suing Wal-Mart win class-action status”

This one has been working its way through the courts for several years. It had been stalled for a while when an appellate court unaccountably denied it class-action status, but the NJ Supreme Court just overturned that decision.

The New Jersey Supreme Court certified a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart by employees who claim that the nation’s largest retailer denied them meal and rest breaks, and forced them to work off-the-clock.

The Thursday ruling revives the workers’ lawsuit, which had been denied class-action status by a trial judge and an appellate panel.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Judith L. Spanier said the class would contain about 80,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees.

Wal-Mart spokesman John Simley said the Bentonville, Ark.-based company was disappointed with the ruling and was studying its options.

“It’s our policy to pay every associate for every hour that they have worked. Any manager who disregards that is subject to discipline, up to and including termination,” Simley said.

That’s a flat-out lie, viz the very next grafs:

TrenchNews, Verse 9

TOP STORY

Supreme Court Decides to Favor Discrimination Against Women Workers

The Bush SCOTUS seems to get less friendly to non-corporate non-oligarchs every day. After last week’s insulting of both women in general and a doctor’s ability to make medical decisions not in line with the beliefs of James Dobson, they’ve gone after women again, this time women who work.

A Supreme Court once again split by the thinnest of margins ruled yesterday that workers may not sue their employers over unequal pay caused by discrimination alleged to have occurred years earlier.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Lilly Ledbetter, the lone female supervisor at a tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., did not file her lawsuit against Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in the timely manner specified by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This court is so anti-female that it’s impossible to figure out whether they would have reached a different decision had it been a man who overshot the deadline, but it has been so pro-corporate and anti-worker that it’s reasonable to assume they would have made the same decision on that basis.

IAC, the ruling, though it sticks strictly to the specific limitations in the law, is so divorced from actual realities of the workplace that it amounts to a travesty. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read an angry dissent from the bench.

The decision moved Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to read a dissent from the bench, a usually rare practice that she has now employed twice in the past six weeks to criticize the majority for opinions that she said undermine women’s rights.

Speaking for the three other dissenting justices, Ginsburg’s voice was as precise and emotionless as if she were reading a banking decision, but the words were stinging.

“In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” she said.

Read the rest of this entry ->

OTHER STORIES

Modern Employment

Associated Press: “Bribery Claimed in NY Slave Labor Case”

The mother of a woman accused of keeping two Indonesian women as slaves tried to bribe a victim’s relative to make the case go away, prosecutors said.

The accused woman, Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, and her husband, Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, were being held in jail on Friday, a day after the new charges arose at their arraignment.

The millionaire couple — who operate a worldwide perfume business out of their Long Island home — pleaded not guilty to federal slavery charges.

They were arrested last week after one of the servants, wearing only pants and a towel, was found wandering outside a doughnut shop in Syosset, on the region’s so-called Gold Coast. Authorities concluded she escaped the Sabhnanis’ nearby Muttontown home when she took out the trash.

Unable to speak English fluently, she showed her wounds and Indonesian passport to a shop worker and said, “Mister, mister, I want to go home — Indonesia,” said Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Kristiarto Legowo.

Prosecutors said Thursday that Varsha Sabhnani’s mother, who lives in Indonesia, tried to make the case go away by bribing a son-in-law of one of the servants with the equivalent of $2,500. They also said Varsha Sabhnani had earlier told the other victim that her husband, who still lives in Indonesia, would be arrested unless she followed orders.

“The defendants operated a torture house,” federal prosecutor Mark Lesko said. “They are capable of acts of violence.”

This horror was going to be our Top Story until I saw that Barbara Ehrenreich had already seized on it to point out that it isn’t as unusual as you might think.

Changes

There’s going to be a big change to this site starting tomorrow. If you’re interested, the explanation is here.

Stealing the ’08 Election: Rove and Reconstruction After Katrina

Evidence has come to light over the past month that the so-called “incompetence” of the Federal response to Katrina is anything but. It has been a calculated effort led by Karl Rove to turn Louisiana from a Democratic state into a Republican state by destroying New Orleans, but it may backfire.

Two weeks ago the WaPo reported that roughly a quarter of a million people are suing the Federal government for damages, claiming that the Army Corps of Engineers screwed up the building of the levees, dams, in fact the whole New Orleans water delivery system.

Ever since the floodwaters receded, the idea that the U.S. government was to blame for the Katrina catastrophe has possessed and angered its victims.

A legion of lawn signs, posted in front of many wrecked homes, wagged a finger at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency responsible for the flood works: “Hold the Corps accountable!”

Turns out it was more than mere talk. After a massive deadline filing rush recently that is still being sorted through, the United States is facing legal claims from more than 250,000 people here demanding compensation because, they allege, the Corps negligently designed the waterworks that permeate the city.

***

[O]fficials said the damage claimed against the Corps exceeds $278 billion, an amount that dwarfs even the estimated $125 billion that the federal government has put up for Gulf Coast hurricane recovery.

Win or lose, the volume of claims is a measure of the prevalent sense in this city that the United States created the disaster and that, worse, it has failed to make up for it in disaster aid.

“This was the largest catastrophe in the history of the United States, and people want justice,” said Joseph M. Bruno, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys handling the case in federal court.

New England Journal of Medicine Prints Report Critical of GlaxoSmithKline Drug (Updated)

The Boston Globe reported today that a new study released early by the New England Journal of Medicine on its website questions the safety of one of the largest-selling diabetes medications in the country, Avandia.

Avandia, the world’s top-selling oral diabetes drug, significantly increases the risk of heart attacks, a prominent cardiologist said in an article that the New England Journal of Medicine deemed important enough to post on its website yesterday, weeks before the scheduled print publication date.

Dr. Steven E. Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and the article’s lead author, pored through summaries of dozens of studies and found a 43 percent higher risk of diabetics suffering a heart attack if they took Avandia compared with other drugs or sugar pills. Nissen was unable to determine whether the risk is affected by how long Avandia is used or how much is taken.

***

“The leading cause of death in diabetes is heart disease. It causes between 65 to 80 percent of all diabetes mortality,” Nissen said in an interview. “When a diabetes drug, which is intended to reduce the risk of diabetes complications, actually increases it, it has profound public health consequences.”

In an accompanying editorial published by the New England Journal of Medicine, Bruce Psaty and Curt Furberg, doctors who are critics of the FDA’s drug-approval process, said there is little reason for doctors to prescribe Avandia….

(emphasis added)

The drug is produced by GlaxoSmithKline, a major player in Big Pharma, and is worth over $$$3BIL$$$/year in sales worldwide. GSK immediately attacked the report, claiming it’s “flawed”.

That’s not particularly surprising, nor is it surprising that after the Vioxx debacle, the release of the report triggered a nosedive of GSK’s stock.

Since the Food and Drug Administration approved Avandia in 1999 doctors have written tens of millions of prescriptions for the drug. The Journal released the paper in advance of its June 14 print publication date partly because of its public health impact, according to executive editor Dr. Gregory Curfman.

Investors and others, including members of Congress, yesterday reacted strongly to the article.

GlaxoSmithKline shares closed at $53.18, down 7.85 percent, in heavy trading.

(emphasis added)

The big question here is, “Where was the FDA?”