NLRB Must Start Next Week

Next Week’s Opportunity To Get Our Labor Board Operating Again

By Dave Johnson | May 10, 2013

President Obama has nominated five people to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Two are Republicans. All are waiting for confirmation by the Senate. Let your Senators know these nominees should be confirmed so the NLRB can get back to work.

What Is The NLRB?

The NLRB is the agency that “safeguards employees’ rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative. The agency also acts to prevent and remedy unfair labor practices committed by private sector employers and unions.”

The NLRB supervises elections to form or decertify unions in the workplace. It investigates charges that employees, unions or employers violated rules over labor practices and rules on the charges. It works to get problems resolved rather than taken to court. And finally, when the NLRB has issued a ruling that is ignored it can take the parties to court.

But if the NLRB is prevented from operating there is no one to make sure that the rules for labor practices are being enforced. This hurts workers and companies.

Background Of The Nomination Battle

Individual workers have little power when up against giant corporations. They can ask for better pay, benefits and working conditions, please, and the giant companies can just say, “you’re fired” if they do — and working people know that. However, when the employees all band together it gives them collective power. It’s the old story of how a person can break a single stick, but when all the sticks are bundled together the person is not able to break them. Banding together the workers have the power to get better wages, benefits and working conditions.

The other side of this is that big companies can make a lot of money if they can keep their workers from organizing unions. So they use their money and power to try to stop workers from organizing unions.

Because the economy does better when people have better wages, benefits and working conditions, and because strikes and lawsuits can plug things up, it is the law that workers have the right to form unions and bargain collectively to balance out the immense power of the giant corporations.

This is why the NLRB battle matters. For years elected officials allied with anti-union businesses worked to block the NLRB from operating, so that workers are not able to form unions and existing unions are not able to enforce labor rules. At the same time these elected officials worked to get anti-union judges into the courts and block impartial judges from being confirmed. This enabled the giant companies to make more money — and working people less money. (Meanwhile as wages dropped nationally the economy slowed and slowed.)

A strategy unfolded, in which big companies would put up money to elect anti-union candidates. Then these anti-union elected officials blocked nominees to the NLRB and filled the courts up with anti-union judges. Senator Lindsay Graham, for example, has vowed to block all nominees to the NLRB, saying “the NLRB as inoperable could be considered progress.”

Over time this strategy meant that there were too few people confirmed to sit on the NLRB, and too many anti-union judges in the courts.

Timeline

After President Obama took office anti-union Senators rolled out a strategy of blocking confirmation of any appointees to the NLRB to keep the agency from having a quorum so it could not operate.

In 2010 the anti-union judges on the Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB could not issue rulings without at least three confirmed members.

Anti-union Senators continued to block confirmations to the NLRB.

In January, 2012 President Obama made recess appointments to the NLRB to enable it to operate again.

In January, 2013 anti-union judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unconstitutional.

Today’s Situation

Anti-union companies are refusing to comply with NLRB rules by allowing union elections or bargaining with unionized employees, thereby making money by keeping wages low. More than 85 companies are now challenging NLRB rulings that went against them, claiming the rulings shouldn’t count — even though they were found to have violated labor practices.

The result is that the rights of American workers to organize unions and bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions are unprotected, and the big companies are taking advantage of this. Wages are stagnant and benefits are disappearing. Obviously the economy does better when people are paid better and have better working conditions, so this is also holding the economy back.

What Next?

Next week on May 16 a Senate committee will hold a hearing on the nominees to the NLRB. Anti-union senators are expected to try to block the nominations because a lot of money for the giant corporations rides on keeping the NLRB from operating.

Then the full Senate will consider the nominees.

What is needed now is for people to contact their Senators and let them know they need to confirm all of these nominees, Democratic and Republican alike, so the NLRB can get back to work.

—–

Too Big Oil Greases the GOP Lie Machine

How Big Oil Uses the Republican Party

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Reader Supported News

10 May 13

n 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 stitched 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 appetites 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.

 

Crooked Congress on Steroids

Senator Orrin Hatch's top aid briefed investors on legislation on the hill that led to huge profits. (photo: Getty Images)

Investors Get 'Political Intel' Directly 

Congress

By Jia Lynn Yang, Tom Hamburger and Dina ElBoghdady, The Washington Post

07 May 13

n the same morning a congressional staffer told investors in a private call that odds were improving for a government decision that would help medical insurers, trading spiked in a major health-care company.

The private call, arranged by a consulting firm called Capitol Street, took place the morning of March 18. At 11:05 a.m., a certain form of speculative trading in Humana, the health insurer, jumped. That day, there was nearly 10 times as much volume as any day in the previous two weeks.

There is no evidence that the trades were in response to the Capitol Hill phone call with a top aide for Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). But the conference call reveals the extent to which a direct pipeline of valuable political insight exists between Capitol Hill and Wall Street, one that ordinary Americans and investors do not enjoy.

"Political intelligence" firms - companies that sell their analysis of federal actions to investors - have drawn much of the scrutiny from lawmakers and investigators worried about potential insider trading. Last month, federal regulators issued subpoenas to the law firm Greenberg Traurig and an analyst at the brokerage firm Height Securities in connection with another spike in trading that occurred after information was shared about the government's health-care decision.

But it is not just boutique firms and lobbyists offering political intelligence. Congress itself has become a source of sophisticated political analysis for investors, for whom every nugget of exclusive information can translate to millions of dollars in profit.

Ipsita Smolinski, managing director of Capitol Street, said she has asked other Senate staffers to participate in similar calls, though she declined to estimate how many had done so, or how often. She viewed the calls as innocuous.

"I wouldn't expect anyone on a call - any staffer - to say anything they would not say to a researcher, a student, an investor or a reporter," said Smolinski, adding that she routinely records such calls as part of an ongoing "commitment to transparency."

She called it "highly unlikely" that her clients would have moved the market. Smolinski described the participants in the call with Hatch's office as institutional investors, such as pension systems, mutual funds and hedge funds. Of interest was how the Obama administration would set rates paid to health insurers that participate in Medicare. She said the half-hour call took place in the morning but could not confirm the precise time.

Hatch spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier denied that the call had anything to do with the spike in trading or that the staff member revealed confidential information.

"No one working for Senator Hatch had any advance knowledge of this [Medicare] announcement - period," said Ferrier, who argued that the staff member, Stephanie Carlton, actually made the wrong prediction on the call about the administration's action.

According to an audio recording of the call obtained by The Washington Post, Carlton, a longtime health-care policy aide for Hatch, spoke cautiously, offering technical details and often attributing her facts to public information.

At one point, Capitol Street's Smolinski pressed Carlton to be specific with her insight. Smolinski asked her to quantify her "crystal ball" regarding the administration's decision.

"I think I would have moved from, say, if I were assigning probabilities 0 to 100 percent, I would have said 5 to 10 percent likelihood . . . a month ago," Carlton said. "I would move it up to maybe 30, 35 percent probability that they change it."

She added that she was "definitely more optimistic," though there remained at least one roadblock.

Based on some different factors, though, if they were ever to change the Medicare policy, "this would be the year to do it," Carlton said.

Carlton left Hatch's staff last week for a job in the private sector, a move that Hatch's office said was a long-standing plan. Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.

Information in Washington is both highly valuable and extremely fluid. Every day there are lobbyists, congressional staffers and reporters trying to figure out what happened behind some closed-door meeting, which senator is about to switch position on a major piece of legislation and whether a regulator is going to greenlight or block a big merger.

This has given rise to a booming business in researchers claiming to offer political intelligence that could give investors an edge in their trading.

Stan Brand, a Washington lawyer specializing in congressional ethics, said he is hearing increasingly about Hill staffers being called to participate in financial industry and investor briefings like the one hosted by Capitol Street.

"It was not common until very recently," said Brand, former counsel to the House of Representatives who now handles criminal defense and ethics cases involving public officials. "I think the financial meltdown and the ensuing interest in regulation of the markets and how they are impacted by Washington has made this a more recurrent issue."

Ferrier said Hatch was aware that his staff gets requests to do briefings from a wide variety of individuals and organizations, including investors. "What information they share is the same information that Senator Hatch shares in an open and transparent way with his constituents," she said.

From Brand's perspective, virtually no limits on speaking exist for congressional staffers, provided there is no remuneration of gifts provided to the public official. Could a Senate staffer impart insider information and be prosecuted? "I think that would be a tough row to hoe," he said.

Insider-trading laws dictate that information that's "material" and not public has to be treated with the utmost care. The Stock Act, passed last year, makes explicit that members of Congress, their staff members and government officials must treat certain information as confidential.

Yet there is a whole gray area of information - call it analysis - that is not easy to judge. Lobbyists with close ties to former colleagues on the Hill, or congressional staffers themselves, can sometimes offer their best sense of what is happening in Washington, offering to investors a composite of what they are hearing from various sources.

Basing predictions on many little data points, none of which are material, is a permissible practice often referred to as the "mosaic theory" in industry parlance, said John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School.

"But as a matter of ethical policy, you should have a Caesar's-wife approach," said Coffee, who specializes in securities law and white-collar crime. "Stay above suspicion and do not participate in discussions with investors who are clearly seeking to profit from your information."

A few weeks after the call with Hatch's staffer, the administration announced it would raise rates for insurers participating in Medicare, instead of cutting them as previously proposed.

Investors who purchased the options on March 18 could have made a return of five times on their investment or more, said Laura Robinson, a managing director at Navigant Economics in Washington, an economic and financial consulting firm.

The data on the unusual spike in the trading of certain options on Humana's stock were supplied to The Washington Post by Tradeworx, a quantitative trading firm.

Hatch's office denied that there was any connection.

"To say that a staffer who got it wrong contributed to a spike in the market is like saying that because the sky is blue and a train went through Washington, the reason the train went through Washington is because the sky is blue," Ferrier said. "The fact is correlation isn't causality."

 

US Surveillance State

Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the US Government?

By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK

he real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he meansnot that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.