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An ancillary Obama campaign makes constant reference to Jim Crow seeping out of every crevice in our society. In an interview with comedian Marc Maron, he actually driveled this out, after admitting that “race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime.”:
The 2016 election is not a contest between the Democrat and Republican ideologies, nor is it a choice among various approaches to address the nation's problems, but something far more fundamental.
It is a battle between the entrenched power of the bipartisan political-media establishment versus the rights and liberties of the American people.
America was was intended to be a “shining city on a hill” of freedom, individual liberty, and unlimited opportunity. She was never intended to be a socialist state. Socialistic egalitarianism is strikingly antithetical to the American paradigm.
Founded in individual liberty, America has always been the one nation under heaven where equality of opportunity has taken precedence over equality of outcome. The whole concept of the “American Dream” is based on the individual freedom to become, to achieve, to build, sell, and succeed. This requires individual freedom (which is diminished proportionate to expanded governmental power), and a free market economy (not centralized planning, or government control over the means of production). Consequently, socialism in any of its iterations (communism, national socialism, fascism, and democratic-socialism) is philosophically, morally, and pragmatically, contrary to the principles upon which the republic was founded. Consequently, it is deductively anti-American.
As part of an event on diversity and inclusion in the labor movement, professors at Cornell University displayed cartoons depicting Republicans as knife-wielding terrorists, raving lunatics, and even molesters.
The drawings were displayed at a social justice roundtable on November 13 sponsored by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) as a way of putting students in touch with labor and social justice representatives, according to Hypeline.
As bureaucracy sprawls, nobody can say with complete authority exactly how many federal agencies exist.
The twice-annual Unified Agenda of Federal Deregulatory and Regulatory Actions, which compiles agency regulatory plans in the federal pipeline, listed 60 agencies in the Spring 2015 edition, a count that can vary slightly from report to report. The Fall 2014 edition that also contained many agencies’ Regulatory Plan also listed 60.
The Administrative Conference of the United States lists 115 agencies in the appendix of its “Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies, but notes:
In a shocking admission for most of mainstream America, the former U.S. comptroller general says the real U.S. debt is closer to about $65 trillion than the oft-cited figure of $18 trillion, thanks to unfunded liabilities which simply cannot be ignored. As The Hill reports, unless economic growth accelerates, he warns, "you’re not going to be able to provide the kind of social safety net that we need in this country," adding unequivocially that Americans have "lost touch with reality" when it comes to spending. As The Hill reports:
There were a few different stories coming out over the last few days that reveal the true nature of government and the apparatchiks who use disinformation, devious machinations, fraudulent accounting, and taxpayer money to cover up their criminality, lies, and the true state of the American economy. The use of government accounting tricks to obscure the truth about our dire financial straits is designed to keep the masses sedated and confused.
A few weeks ago, to great fanfare from the fawning faux journalists who never question any Washington D.C. propaganda, they announced the lowest annual deficit of Obama’s reign of error.
The man currently running a distant second for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is a self-declared socialist, and most of his party’s voters now have a positive view of socialism. They are almost evenly divided as to whether they like capitalism or socialism more.
That went triple for the miserable parade of hypocrisies that was the Democratic debate where a gaggle of establishment political hacks claimed to be the voice of political change and where men and women whose combined net worth could break banks ranted about the rich in a debate hosted in a $2.7 billion dollar luxury resort and casino with its own Ferrari dealership so that the candidates can take a break from their income inequality spiels to test drive a 2015 Maserati GranTurismo.
The Democratic debate only ran hours, but it seemed to last for years as the Democratic Party’s crazy Socialist grandpa Bernie Sanders nervously waved his hands, struggled to follow the answers of the other candidates and talked about himself in the third person.
Sanders’ support comes from his authenticity and he was certainly authentic tonight promising to make Americans love Socialism, claiming that Global Warming was the greatest national security threat and warning that the planet will soon be uninhabitable.
Nevertheless, the White House does appear to be trying its best to appease both, Obama’s corporate cronies, as well as his friends inside the House of Labor on a new campaign page on the White House website announcing the “White House Summit on Worker Voice.”
“A voice in the board room starts with a voice in the break room,” the website site declares. “There’s something every one of us can do to create change in our workplaces, and it always starts with a conversation — with colleagues or with decision makers. Make a commitment to start that conversation today.”
The website even has a slick video that talks about workers making changes in their workplaces through collective action (aka “concerted activity”)—all the while not mentioning the word “union” once.
While there has been much political rancor over the last several years regarding the pro-union leanings of Obama’s appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, one of the lesser-seen pushes coming from the NLRB has been the push toward the expansion of protected, concerted activity without a union.
The Obama administration is telling us that the unemployment rate in the United States has fallen to 5.1 percent, but does that number actually bear any resemblance to reality? On Friday, news outlets all over America celebrated the fact that the U.S. economy added 173,000 jobs in August. We were told that the unemployment rate has fallen to a seven year low and that wages are going up. So everything must be getting better for the middle class, right? After all, isn’t that what the official numbers are telling us?
The financial markets are buzzing over this news because the unemployment rate has fallen into a range that the Federal Reserve has typically considered to be “full employment”, so there is an expectation that the Fed may raise interest rates shortly. The following comes from Business Insider…
The unemployment rate fell to 5.1% in August, the lowest since April 2008. This was lower than forecast, and put the measure in the middle of the 5.2% – 5.0% range the Federal Reserve considers to be “full employment.” The economy added 173,000 jobs, below the expectation for 217,000, although August payrolls are usually revised higher. We also saw some wage growth, with average hourly earnings rising 0.3% month-on-month, and 2.5% year-over-year. The payrolls gain for July was revised up to 245,000 from 215,000.
But do we actually have anything close to “full employment” in this country?
Of course not.
The truth is that the only way they have been able to get the official “unemployment rate” to steadily go down over the past few years is to eliminate hundreds of thousands of Americans that are chronically unemployed from the official labor force numbers every month. Jim Quinn elaborated on this very eloquently in one of his recent articles…
Last year, according to reports on file with the U.S. Department of Labor, the Service Employees Internationals Union paid Scott Courtney $232,060 in total compensation.
Though his official SEIU title is “Deputy Chief of Staff,” according to a post in the Guardian, Courtney is the chief strategist of the SEIU’s Fight for $15 campaign–the campaign concocted by the SEIU in late 2009 as a means of unionizing low-wage fast-food workers.
To date, Courtney and the SEIU have rejected the notion of unionizing 100 or 200 McDonalds and negotiating higher wages to use as a model elsewhere, opting instead for a much grander goal.
Meet 31-year-old Dan Price... Dan is the CEO of Seattle-based credit card payments processing firm Gravity Payments, and three months ago, he did a funny thing. After talking with a friend who confessed to having difficulties making student loan payments and rent each month on an annual salary of $40,000, Dan decided to set a $70,000 per year pay floor at Gravity.Needless to say, the unintended consequences were catastrophic. Employees who earned $70,000 by dint of hard work felt they had been shafted; several quit. Price's friends in the business community were ticked off - he had established what they felt was an unsustainable minimum wage. And his older brother is suing him, presumably because of his, uhm, novel approach to management.
There were two accidents on the Schuylkill Expressway last Monday morning. You know what this meant. I had the pleasure of traveling to work on the scenic 30 Blocks of Squalor. The 30 blocks from 69th Street in Upper Darby to 39th Street in West Philly is a tribute to government incompetence, failed government policies, shoddy union labor practices and fiscal mismanagement.
This entire thirty block trek could be completed in 5 to 10 minutes if the hundreds of union government drones in the Philadelphia Streets Department would get off their fat asses and timed the lights. The blocks are identical in distance. They don’t need advanced degrees in physics or calculus to set the lights to go green every ten seconds in order. They were timed in the 1970s and 1980s. Would smoothly flowing traffic be such a bad thing? Do they not care or are they really this incompetent? The first light at 61st Street was red when I arrived. It turned green and before you could touch the gas, it immediately turned yellow and red again. I wondered how long they’d allow this to go on. My guess would be days.
I’ve noted in previous 30 Blocks screeds that Philadelphia put a thin veneer of blacktop on the entirety of Chestnut Street about two years ago. I’ve also detailed the dozens of water main breaks that occur on a regular basis under the streets of Philadelphia, causing tens of millions in property damage. This is how corrupt incompetent government drones run the show. They gloss over the long-term real structural problems with a thin veneer of cheap half assed faux solutions that provide the false appearance of fixing something.
A new milestone must have been established recently – we’re now officially in a new era of the $400 new college textbook and the $300 used college textbook, see accompanying graphic showing the top 15 most expensive textbooks at the University of Michigan-Flint based on a new unpublished report by Matthew Wolverton, an electronic resource management librarian at the Thompson Library (UM-Flint’s library). The graphic below shows the most expensive college textbooks by discipline at UM-Flint, based on the average price of new textbooks for each discipline in winter 2015 semester.
For business students taking five classes per semester and paying an average of $250 per textbook, their textbook bill would be $2,500 per year and $10,000 over four years! Of course, those students would be taking courses in non-business disciplines where the average textbook price is lower, but even at an average price of $200 per new textbook, students could be facing costs as high as $8,000 over four years. And even though renting textbooks is a less expensive option compared to purchasing books, rental costs per semester are running above $200 per new book and well above $100 per used textbook (and as high as $180), see top graphic above. Even if students could rent used textbooks for all of their college classes at $100 per course (which is probably on the low side), that would still amount to $1,000 per year (for ten classes) and $4,000 over four years (for 40 classes).
The graph below shows the historical increase in college textbooks (981%) between 1978 and 2014 in comparison to increases in the overall CPI (262%), the CPI for medical care (604%), and the median sales price for new homes (408%) over that 37-year period. Textbook prices seem like they are clearly on an unsustainable trajectory, especially in the face of new low-cost alternatives as discussed below.
Clashes break out as Greek lawmakers debate austerity bill
Jul 15, 3:24 PM (ET)
By ELENA BECATOROS and DEREK GATOPOULOS
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Rioters hurled petrol bombs at police who responded with tear gas as an anti-austerity demonstration outside parliament turned violent Wednesday, while Greek lawmakers began debating contentious measures needed to start negotiations on a new bailout and avoid financial collapse.
Groups of youths among the more than 12,000 protesters smashed storefronts and set at least one vehicle alight. The clashes were the first significant protest violence since the left-wing Syriza government came to power in January promising to repeal bailout austerity. Police said at least 50 people were detained.
The clashes were the first significant protest violence since the left-wing Syriza government came to power in January promising to repeal bailout austerity. Police said at least 50 people were detained.
Despite overwhelming rank-and-file union support for self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka has tried to quell a membership uprising by sending a memo out to union leaders nationwide reminding them that the federation’s bylaws do not permit them to endorse a presidential candidate individually.
Reported by Politico last month as “an informal, intimate get-together for national and international labor leaders at campaign chairman John Podesta’s Washington, D.C. home,” under the headline “Clinton to face grilling by union leaders on trade, economic issues“, Reuters is reporting Clinton “seeks to prevent a revolt by union members infuriated by her cautious stance on a looming trade deal.”
Dubbed the NLRB’s “ambush-election rules,” the new rules went into effect on April 14th and are primarily designed to shorten union recognition elections from a then-median time of 38 days down to as little as 14.
The purpose, of course, is to give employers as little time as possible to respond to union organizing.
“Delay hurts,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, “because they [employers] can fire one more worker, or engage in five more captive-audience meetings or three more supervisor one-on-ones per person.”
It was Bronfenbrenner, the Director of Labor Education Research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, a former union organizer and long-time union advocate, whose flawed studies have been used in pr-union propaganda to first, attempt to effectively eliminate secret-ballot elections through card-check legislation then, later, to argue for the so-called ambush election rule.
