Republicans hating Unions..Hotcarl's hard-on

[jobs1stb4polarbear]

Definition of hard-on

hard-on -

a like of.
He's got a hard-on for the local sports team.

.....
To better understand why many republicans hate unions and democrats also(just look at the polls), you have to separate the two types of Unions: Private Unions(UAW...) and Public Union(government).... and then you will realize why Private Unions(UAW,Teamsters,etc...) are getting a bad reputation....

I am not against union in the private sector, I am against goverment union robbing the middle class. I totally agree that strong union build the middle class, but pubilc unions were not allowed until JKF signed the exective order allowing collective bargining for public workers (sorry don't have time to check the exact date), from what I remember membership peaked soon after then started its long decline.

My thought here (and I am just testing it on CAPS) is to have ALL public employee salaries limited to the average of the private sector - I want the goverment to work for the people not the people work for the goverment.

Now the CEO argument is too easy to make and deflect the real argurment. But, I believe public compaines have been hi-jacked by the board of directors and fund manager to rig the game. So, I would not mind limiting CEO salaries of public companies in the name of shareholder rights, but a private company with zero public support should pay whatevery they want to folks.

Government union are not accountable to the market forces. The average Chicago CTA pay package is $80k per year (I can find the actual wages so its pay/employees) this in an environment where unemployment is 10-17% depending on how you count. They are low skilled job, it’s likely they could fire 50% of the 10k workers and have 5 applicants for every job at a 40K pay package. If the CTA were private, the “market” would either make it raise fares or lower employment costs to keep running... but since its public the CTA fires low level (new) employees w/ no "connections" and cut services until the "public" is demanding a return of old service levels, paid for by a tax increases (aka robbing the poor to pay for above market pay packages).

Also, I am talking about “average pay”, so the president can make 400K per year and top admins can have nice packages but OVERALL the salaries my drop to that of the public level. For example, we have 17K people in the pentagon making $150k or more per year, as a test I suggest cutting their wages to $80k, and if they are actually that valuable then they should have no problem moving the private sector… my bet would be very little turnover b/c they can’t make it in the real world where they are accountable for their services.

And don’t get me started on Police and Teacher, there are 100s of applications for every open position, they could easily lower wages and have plenty of qualified cops and don’t even tell me is a dangerous job, yes cops are killed but you have a better chance of dying in a car accident than being a cop. Plus, in my town we have lots of six figure teachers that only work nine months a year w/ full pensions… I know lots of folks who would take those jobs at a fraction of the pay.

BTW – we work for a Private Campany that nogatiates with a Private Union (UAW), it’s been good to us but they only stay in business by making choices in a rational market not at the expense of taxpayers.

[jobs1stb4polarbear]

Chicago Transit Authority(CTA)

[keithf]

i've never understood the "public" unions. it seems when unions were first created, it was to protect the workers from the sometimes awful companies. now we have them to protect workers from the gov't, and their wages are paid by tax dollars. seems ass backwards.

[kessinger]

Wow, see the world is round me and polar can find some common ground. I agree with you polar on the CEOs at private versus public companies. Normaly a private company is still ran by the visionary that started the company and that person respects his workers as a mechanic does his tools. When a company goes private he is legaly bound to put his sharholders above all else. Therefore the workers can never get an even shake since there is no direct person to appeal to just the "shareholders".

I am a yes and no on some of the other things. I am almost never for lowering wages because doing this has a ripple effect that we have all seen in recent years. When you lower the top it does tend to push everyone lower.

Your statements could hold water but are too generalized for me to jump onboard with. I know of NO unemployed teachers and that leads me to believe there aren't alot floating around to fill the "100's" of applications. And as for Cops, I would rather not just have anyone doing those jobs. Better pay gets you better people thats just life, or the "market" If you want the best and brightest to teach your kids you must pay enough to get them. Sure you could fill the postions for $3 an hour but they wouldn't be certified. You could just roll my the guys huddled around the fire in the garbage can looking for work, and yell "first 20 in the truck are teachers", but your kids would only speak spanish. Just my two cents.

[hotcarl]

jobsfirst, Is that you Former Senator Larry Craig? Thanks for noticing my hard-on. Are you closet homo? Thing is: I shouldn't have to point out that Republican lawmakers hate all unions. I can't believe that union represented workers cannot understand this and support these bozos. They loathe you. Then they brainwash you with guns, abortion and fear. They tell you that they are fiscally conservitive then they take a budget surplus and turn it into the largest deficit every under a single President. When was the last time that Republicans sponsored a bill that helped the UAW or any other union brother and sister?. I'll hang up and listen.

[marcus]

Are you closet homo? Thats not very PC is it?

Im pro union but I cant turn my back on everything else i believe in and vote on one issue.Bush did take a surplus and turn it into a deficit and HBO made Bush deficit look like a fraction.You hammer Bush on debt but not a word on HBOs?

[jobs1stb4polarbear]

I love these loaded questions on threads with these presupposed realities. That's like asking, "why do you liberals hate people who succeed?". I would throw it back at you and ask why liberals hate corporations?

[kessinger]

Here's one reason polar. While Forbes hails Sam Waltons kids on their worlds richest list. Us taxpayers have to pay their employees hospital bills, and give'em food stamps. This should be illegal, how a company can make that much money yet we have to pay taxes to prop up their employees is ignorant. See one of many articles here.......


Wal-Mart Welfare
How taxpayers subsidize the world's largest retailer.
by Jenna Wright
Dollars and Sense magazine, January/February 2005


Wal-Mart has released its expansion plans for 2005, and Americans can expect up to 230 new supercenters to open in their communities. The company plans to open SO million square feet of retail space this year. President and CEO Lee Scott is confident the expansion will boost Wal-Mart's bottom line. But it takes money to make money, and WalMart is getting a surprising amount of that seed money, along with massive subsidies to its existing operations, from U.S. taxpayers.
A raft of studies show that millions of taxpayer dollars are flowing to new and existing Wal-Mart stores around the country. In many instances, individual Wal-Mart facilities have received either direct or indirect subsidies from states and localities. Last May, Good Jobs First (GJF), a research and advocacy group that seeks to hold corporations accountable when they receive public subsidies, released a report detailing subsidies WalMart has received to build both retail stores and the network of nearly 100 distribution centers the company has created to facilitate its expansion. The group found that over 90% of the company's distribution centers have been subsidized. It also uncovered 91 instances when the retail stores received public funds, and believes "the real total is certainly much higher."
GJF investigators documented 244 Wal-Mart subsidy deals with a total value of $1.008 billion. Taxpayer dollars have helped individual stores and distribution centers with everything from free or cut-price land to general grants. One example: in Sharon Springs, N.Y., a distribution center made a deal with an industrial development agency for the agency to hold the legal title to the facility so the corporation could evade property taxes. Good Jobs First estimates that Wal-Mart will save about $46 million over the life of this one agreement.
Subsidizing Low Wages
Wal-Mart's low-road labor policies give the corporation access to a less obvious taxpayer subsidy: government benefits to its employees. The company's policies by now are notorious: wages at or close to poverty level, managers discouraged from awarding overtime, employees forced to work off the clock without pay and repeatedly denied their right to organize. The result is that many Wal-Mart employees are eligible for myriad forms of public assistance. In other words, by providing financial assistance in various forms to Wal-Mart employees, the federal and state governments are essentially subsidizing the corporation for its substandard wages and benefits.
Health care benefits represent one such subsidy. Wal-Mart's employee health coverage is minimal and expensive; little of the company's vast low-wage workforce is covered. Nationally, two-thirds of workers at large firms get health insurance from their employer. But at WalMart, only 41% to 46% of employees use the company's health insurance, in large part because many of Wal-Mart's low-wage workers simply cannot afford to pay the high premium the company
charges. In 2001, Wal-Mart workers paid 42% of the total cost of the company's health plan. In contrast, the typical large business expects employees to pay only 16% of the total cost for individual coverage, or 25% for family coverage. At discount retailer Costco, which competes directly with Wal-Mart's Sam's Club stores, employees pay less than 10%; as a result, 82% of them are covered through the company.
Instead of providing affordable health insurance, Wal-Mart encourages its employees to sign up for publicly funded programs, dodging its health care costs and passing them on to taxpayers. The company is the poster child for a problem outlined in a 2003 AFL-CIO report on Wal-Mart's role in the health care crisis: "federal, state and local governments" - American taxpayers - must pick up the multi-billion-dollar tab for employees and dependents, especially children, of large and profitable employers who are forced to rely on public hospitals and other public health programs for care and treatment they need but cannot obtain under their employers' health plans."
In Georgia, one of every four WalMart employees has a child in the state's PeachCare health program, according to a recent survey. Over 10,000 of the 166,000 children covered by PeachCare have a parent working for Wal-Mart; no other employer in the state has a comparable share of its employees in the program.
In California, the families of Wal-Mart employees use an estimated 40% more in publicly funded health care than the average for families of employees at other large retail firms, according to an August 2003 study by University of California, Berkeley's Institute for Industrial Relations. Providing health care to Wal-Mart families costs California taxpayers an estimated $32 million annually.
Thanks to their poverty-level wages, Wal-Mart workers are often eligible for other kinds of government assistance as well. The same study found that California Wal-Mart employees and their families utilize an additional $54 million in non-health related federal assistance, including food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, subsidized school lunches, and subsidized housing.
The Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimated the breakdown of costs for one 200-employee Wal-Mart store:
* $36,000 a year for free or reduced school lunches, assuming that 50 families of employees qualify.
* $42,000 a year for Section 8 rental assistance, assuming that 3% of the store employees qualify.
* $125,000 a year for federal tax credits and deductions for low-income families, assuming that 50 employees are heads of households with a child, and 50 employees are married with two children.
* $108,000 a year for the additional federal contribution to state children's health insurance programs, assuming
that 30 employees with an average of two children qualify.
* $100,000 a year for additional Title I expenses, assuming 50 families with two children qualify.
* $9,750 a year for the additional costs of low-income energy assistance.

Overall, the committee estimates that one 200-person Wal-Mart store may result in an excess cost of $420,750 a year for federal taxpayers.
The effects of Wal-Mart's free-loader policies radiate beyond Wal-Mart itself; Wal-Mart employees are not the only victims. Firms large and small are forced to cut their own costs in order to compete, creating a "race to the bottom, in which everyone suffers," according to the AFL-CIO report. Employers that provide adequate pay and benefits to their employees are under pressure from companies like Wal-Mart that do not. The result: a growing low-wage sector and ever-greater need for government benefits (funded, incidentally, by an increasingly regressive tax structure).
As an economic power, Wal-Mart is in a class by itself, with over $8 billion in net income last year-it's about five times the size of the second-largest retailer in the United States. Wal-Mart's sheer size means it can drag whole sectors with millions of workers both in the United States and abroad down its low-road path. Taxpayers are feeding this giant corporate monster, and at a very high price.

Jenna Wright was a D&S intern in 2004.

[kessinger]

Heres another reason. In Bolivia the privitaised water wells. Then charged people who coudln't afford pumped water for collecting RAIN WATER...thats right they charged you for collecting RAIN. Claiming the rain ran into the wells and that by collecting it you were taking the companies water. God made the rain not Bechtel corp. here is an article...

Etched deeply into the granite walls just inside the entrance of the World Bank headquarters in Washington are the words, "Our dream, a world free of poverty." Earlier this month in Bolivia, the citizens of South America's poorest country sent the bank a message once again that the poor aren't too keen on the part of that dream that involves handing their water over to foreign corporations.


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Jim Shultz: Once again, World Bank water policy is challenged by the poorest.
On January 10 the citizens of El Alto took to the streets en masse to demand that their water system, privatized in 1997 under World Bank pressure, be returned to public hands. Three days later Bolivia's president issued a decree canceling the water concession, led by the French water giant Suez, and an arm of the World Bank itself. The El Alto water revolt follows, by five years exactly, the now famous revolt against water privatization in Cochabamba, in which a company controlled by the Bechtel Corporation was ousted from the country.

Together, these two revolts over water should send an important message to officials at the World Bank, if they are willing to hear it.

The people of Bolivia did not choose to privatize their public water systems.That choice was forced on them, as it has been in many poor nations around the world, when the World Bank made privatization an explicit condition of aid in the mid-1990s.Poor countries such as Bolivia, which rely heavily on foreign assistance for survival, are not in much of a position to say no to such pressures.

World Bank water officials claim all the best intentions when they make the push for water privatization.The bank has argued that poor governments are often too plagued by local corruption and too ill equipped to run public water systems efficiently. Handing water over to foreign corporations, the bank has said, opens the door to needed investment and skilled management.

However, to borrow a phrase, the road to bad public policy is often paved with good intentions.Bolivia's experience with bank-forced water privatization is a striking example of the yawning gap between World Bank theory and how things actually work in the real world for the poor families who have to live with the results.

In Cochabamba five years ago, the water contract with Bechtel and the Abengoa Corporation of Spain paved the way for rate increases of double and more for poor water users.Those steep and sudden price hikes, needed in part to finance the 16 percent annual profit demanded by the companies, led to citywide protests and eventually to Bechtel's and Abengoa's ouster.The Bolivian government declared martial law in an effort to save the companies' contract, leaving one teenage boy dead and more than 100 people wounded.

In El Alto the chief complaint about the Suez/World Bank privatization is that it left tens of thousands of poor families with no access to water whatsoever.Fortunately, no one was killed or wounded in this latest water revolt, a credit to President Carlos Mesa, who agreed that the water contract was inadequate and approved its cancellation.

Observers from all sides will try to pin exotic labels on what happened this month in Bolivia--an indigenous uprising, the work of radicals secretly trying to subvert the government, etc. None of these capture the real lesson.At their essence, the water revolts in Cochabamba and El Alto were consumer rebellions.While many Bolivians are philosophically opposed to putting the country's natural resources into the hands of private corporations--and not without good reason, given the country's recent experiences with World Bank/IMF-forced reforms--most people here are simply angry at the practical result.

When Cochabamba's privatization failed, the bank blamed bad implementation, insisting that the theory still held.In 2002 the Bank declared the El Alto-La Paz water privatization as having "achieved positive results."When the people of El Alto took to the streets this month, it was a clear declaration that the bank got it wrong.

The promise of private investment has turned out to rely on market-rate pricing that the poor cannot afford.In El Alto the cost of getting a water and sewage hook-up exceeded a half-year's income at the minimum wage.The promise of skilled management turned out to be about corporate leaders willing to let the poor suffer and, in Bechtel and Abengoa's case, stand aside while they were shot. No one--not the Bolivian government, not the World Bank and certainly not the multinational corporations involved--ever asked the Bolivian people, "Do you want to privatize your water?" One of the most important policy choices a people can make--public or private?--was taken away and made by economists and theorists in a huge white stone building a hemisphere away.

Bolivia's second citizen revolt against water privatization in five years ought to give the officials working in that building a moment of pause, to ask why the theory that seems to work so well on paper seems to work out so badly once it hits the ground.

[kessinger]

Heres another. This company patented breast cancer cells. They didn't make em. They just want to make money off em. They did it to patent their breast cancer test, then got greedy and started sueing people who used breast cancer cells to do breast cancer research. So if you are trying to cure breast cancer you have to pay them to study a gene. Just because they were the first to think of patenting it. THANK GOD we the people struck this down through the courts that WE THE PEOPLE run.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A federal judge in New York struck down patents on two genes that play a role in breast cancer in a ruling that, if upheld, could have far-reaching effects on genetics in the biotech industry.

In a 152-page ruling on Monday, Judge Robert Sweet made invalid seven patents that involve the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, mutations of which are linked to breast cancer. The patents are held by Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah.

The judge concluded in part that the patents should not have been awarded because they were essentially on products of nature not resulting from human action.

"The patents issued by the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) are directed to a law of nature and were therefore improperly granted," he ruled in part.

A lawsuit had dated from May 2009, and was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Patent Foundation in cooperation with groups representing patients and medical groups.

Plaintiffs argued that genes were outside the scope of intellectual property protection, and unduly complicated research.

Myriad Genetics had asked the court to throw our the suit arguing that the expertise and the effort required to isolate DNA justified the granting of a patent.

Similar patents have been around for some time. The Supreme Court upheld granting protection of rights over living organisms in 1980.

The impact of the ruling is potentially great: about 20 percent of all human genes are subject to patent protection in a business that moves billions of dollars.