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Sam Pizzigati

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, on line weekly Too Much

A consumer alert for soccer moms and doting granddads: Outrageous compensation rewards give corporate executives an incentive to behave outrageously — against you! The story behind the sad demise of a beloved camera.

We’ve come to expect, here early in the 21st century, that business will abuse workers, at every opportunity. We’ve watched corporate leaders downsize and outsource, slash benefits, raid pension funds, and routinely replace full-timers with temps. Such moves have become standard corporate operating procedure.

But we don’t expect corporations to show consumers the same contempt, at least not openly. Corporate execs, behind the curtains, may overcharge and bait and switch. In public, these same execs pay homage to consumer sovereignty.

We consumers have internalized this hypocrisy. We really believe we matter. We assume that corporations will bend over backwards to discover and deliver the products and services that great numbers of us want.

We’re living, in effect, a fairytale. Corporate leaders today care no more about consumers than they do about workers. What do they care about? Maybe we should ask John Chambers, the CEO of high-tech giant Cisco. (more…)

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

How debates are framed is critical because the “center” or “middle ground” is supposedly halfway between the two extremes.

We continue to hear that the Great Budget Debate has two sides: The president and the Democrats want to cut the budget deficit mainly by increasing taxes on the rich and reducing military spending, but not by privatizing Medicare. On the other side are Paul Ryan, Republicans, and the right, who want cut the deficit by privatizing Medicare and slicing programs that benefit poorer Americans, while lowering taxes on the rich.

By this logic, the center lies just between.

Baloney. (more…)

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

The Republicans voted to phase out Medicare and use the money for even more tax cuts for the rich. The public found out and turned out. So now they are coming up with new ways to mask the same thing. They call them “triggers,” “across-the-board cuts” and “spending caps” but these are all really just about cutting Medicare and Social Security and education and giving more and more tax cuts to the rich. Please don’t be fooled. And please get active and let them know you do not like what they are up to.

The “Ryan Plan” To Phase Out Medicare

A Republican named Paul Ryan came up with a plan to phase out Medicare and use the money to give even more tax cuts to the rich. Hence the name “Ryan Plan.” The plan replaces Medicare with a “premium support” voucher that covers some of the cost of insurance, (as if an ill 80-year-old can get insurance at all. The trick was to start the phase-out in 10 years, hoping people won’t notice.

While this phase-out of Medicare cuts “government spending” it just shifts that cost to you and me, and actually dramatically increases the overall costs. The Center for Economic and Policy Research calculates that it adds $7 in individual costs (you and me) for every $1 it cuts in “government spending.” But the mask that it cuts “government spending” gives them cover for even more tax cuts at the top. (more…)

Jack Metzgar

By Jack Metzgar
Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago

After years of teaching numeracy to undergraduate college students, I’ve developed a few rules-of-thumb to try and help students stop reading around numbers and instead read into them.  One of the rules goes like this: “If somebody gives you an absolute number (like $112 billion), ask them for a relative number, like a percentage or ratio, or some other point of comparison.”

$112 billion is the total deficit of the 50 United States of America – that is, the gap between what all the states are spending and how much revenue they expect in the next fiscal year.  That’s a huge amount of money in most contexts.  It’s larger than the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of most of the 227 countries listed in the CIA Fact Book, for example.  But it’s only 6/10ths of 1 percent of the GDP of the U.S.

For want of $112 billion the nation’s classrooms are being stripped of teachers as students are piled on top of one another.  Potholes, bridges, and sewer systems can’t be fixed. Sick people can’t be treated. State and local government workers lose either their jobs or a chunk of their wages.  Firefighters get to fires 90 seconds (and who knows how many lives) later, and police forces adopt “innovative” rotations to make it appear they could actually protect people from crime and mayhem.  All for the lack of $112 billion, a tiny piece of the total amount of goods and services we produce each year. (more…)

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

Before ExxonMobil announced a 69% jump in their profits this week, the oil giant’s top lobbyist launched an attack on Democrats who have long proposed ending subsidies to Big Oil and instead invest in clean energy. Politico reported:

“Over the last week as earnings season has approached, the Democratic Party leadership again talked about removing what they call $4 billion in oil industry subsidies,” Cohen said. “But what they really mean is that they want to increase our taxes by taking away long-standing deductions for our industry while leaving these same deductions in place for other sectors of the economy.”

Um, yeah.

ExxonMobil, this may be hard for you and your Big Oil friends to accept. But you’re all grown up now! (more…)

Jim Hightower

By Jim Hightower
Author, radio commentator, America’s number one populist

They came they saw, they conquered. This line pretty well sums up a little-reported but important story about the new tea partiers in the U.S. House of Representatives.

No sooner had they arrived than the corporate lobbying corps came to visit, saw what these supposed rebels were made of, and quickly conquered them without a fight. The forces of big business needed only to lay out some campaign cash – and quicker than you can say “Business as usual,” the budding lawmakers snatched up the money and immediately began carrying the lobbyists’ corporate agenda.

Check out the financial services subcommittee, which handles legislation affecting Wall Street bankers. Five tea partiers got coveted slots on this panel, and all five were suddenly showered with big donations from such financial lobbying interests as Goldman Sachs. Now, all five are sponsoring bills to undo parts of the recent reforms to reign-in Wall Street excesses. Steve Stivers of Ohio, for example, hauled in nearly $100,000 in just his first two months in office – 85 percent of it from the special interests his committee oversees. He insists that the cash he took from Goldman Sachs and others has nothing to do with his subsequent support of bills that Goldman is lobbying so strongly for. Stivers claims that his sole legislative focus is on jobs for Ohio’s 15th district. (more…)

United Steelworkers’ Secretary-Treasurer Stan Johnson speaks movingly at the 2011 Workers Memorial Day ceremony at the USW headquarters in Pittsburgh.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews questions Birthers Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, and U.S. Sen. Steve Smith, R-Arizona, revealing that despite President Barack Obama going the extra mile and releasing his official, long-form birth certificate, Republicans and Tea Partiers are still trying to raise doubts about his citizenship.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

The Clearwater Paper Corp. in Lewistown, Idaho chose the king cobra to symbolize its workplace safety program. A cobra. One of the deadliest snakes on the planet.

Every day on his way to and from work at Clearwater, John Bergen III drove past a billboard in the company parking lot sporting a picture of a king cobra and the explanation that it represented the company’s behavior-based safety program – Changing Our Behavior Reduces Accidents – COBRA.

Bergen, a devoted father, a gifted artist and a conscientious worker who urged everyone to observe safety rules, died last summer after inadvertently stepping through a gaping opening in the floor of the Clearwater Paper mill.

Behavior-based workplace safety programs like COBRA are attempts by corporations to shirk responsibility to eliminate hazards by blaming workers instead. When workers die, behavior-based programs disrespect the deceased by blaming them for their own deaths. These safety programs say to Bergen’s young son, “Your daddy’s dead because he wasn’t careful enough.”

These programs are cruel. They don’t work. And they must stop. This Workers Memorial Day, a day on which we honor those killed in the workplace and recommit ourselves to ending the slaughter, workers and their families across America demand an end to “blame the worker” safety programs.

Last year, among those killed on the job were 44 members of my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), which represents industrial workers including those in the paper sector. That is nearly one a week. Bergen was among them. His friends Jesse and Nigell Hutson wrote after his death:

“Such a tragic loss for everyone. He will be missed more than words can say. We love you, John.”

Over the past 18 years, the number of Steelworkers who died on the job has remained tragically constant, at about one every 10 to 12 days. So far this year, 11 Steelworkers died at work.

The stubborn consistency of the death toll demonstrates that the corporate-favored  behavior-based safety programs achieve nothing.

The premise of behavior-based safety is that employees can work around hazards if they are just careful enough — if they are ever vigilant.  “You are looking at the person responsible for your safety,” these programs proclaim on stickers attached to workplace mirrors. One behavior-based safety consultant actually counseled that if there were an opening in the shop floor, the employer should leave it there because repairing it would give workers a false sense of security.

Al Chapanis, an expert on workplace safety, explained why behavior-based programs fail to keep workers safe. Chapanis was a professor of psychology and industrial engineering at Johns Hopkins University and a founder of ergonomics — the branch of engineering that considers product and workplace design from the physical point of view of the actual user.

“Everyone, and that includes you and me, is at some time careless, complacent, overconfident and stubborn. At times each of us becomes distracted, inattentive, bored and fatigued. We occasionally take chances; we misunderstand; we misinterpret, and we misread. These are completely human characteristics. . . Because we are human and because all these traits are fundamental and built into each of us, the equipment, machines and systems that we construct for our use have to be made to accommodate us the way we are, and not vice versa.”

His message is simple: eliminate or control the workplace hazard. Cover the opening in the floor or at least surround it with a guard railing; don’t expect ever-vigilant workers to walk around it because humans aren’t ever-vigilant. Change the workplace because human nature won’t change.

In behavior based programs like Clearwater Paper’s COBRA, observers scrutinize workers’ performance. Their reports say: These workers acted like humans this many times today. They don’t say: There’s a giant gaping opening in the floor and someone might fall through it to their death!

At the Clearwater Paper Corp. plant in Lewistown, Idaho, the COBRA safety program failed to correct a gaping opening in the floor.

On June 30, late in the evening, 35-year-old John Bergen, a third generation paper worker and model employee, attempted to remove jammed paper from what was called the third auxiliary roll, a massive steel roller with paper wrapped around it. It stood above two other giant steel rolls of paper.

Bergen reached above his head with a knife and sliced into the paper. Beginning at one end, he walked forward, dragging the knife through the paper. Another worker, who was kneeling on a landing above the rolls, reached down and cut starting from the other end.

As Bergen scored the paper above his head, he stepped into a huge opening in the floor, two feet wide by four and a half feet long. He fell through to a conveyer belt below. There, unconscious, he was delivered to a 1,500-gallon hydrapulper tank, where he suffocated.

The opening in the floor accommodated a particular paper process called “thread up.” When that process was not occurring, a hatch was to be placed over the opening. But when the thread up process was done, vibrations caused the hatch to fall, covering the opening and thwarting the threading.

Someone tied the hatch open to keep production running. Afterward, the opening in the floor remained uncovered. In addition, no guard railing enclosed the opening to prevent workers from falling in. An inspection of the opening revealed post holders around it that could have secured a guard railing. But the railing was missing. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited and fined Clearwater for not covering the hole or providing a railing.

Bergen died because of design and maintenance flaws. Clearwater’s COBRA did not work because the philosophy behind blame-the-worker programs is fatally flawed.

Today, in Lewiston, Idaho, the two USW local unions that represent workers at the Clearwater plant, will conduct a special Workers Memorial Day ceremony honoring John Bergen III and other fallen workers.

Clearwater, and employers across America, must stop trying to cover their culpability with “blame the worker” programs and, instead, cover dangerous floor openings — which means pursuing life-saving and worker-respecting workplace hazard elimination and control.

***

Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

So the calvary’s here huh? The Tea Party is going to save the day right? I’ve heard those terms used by others in referring to the Tea Party and the new blood in our political leadership. Congratulations, you wanted it and now you got it.

What you got is leadership that would turn Medicare and programs like it into something totally different. Starting in 2022 their plan would no longer directly pay bills for senior citizens in the Medicare program. Instead, recipients would choose a plan from a list of private providers, which the federal government would subsidize. This proposed plan by Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, is very similar to what is affectionately called “Obamacare” by the Paul Ryan types and Tea Party types in that it would create a government subsidy for Americans to help them purchase healthcare.

The thing is “ObamaCare” doesn’t include senior citizens in its dynamic but does include younger healthier Americans who would be more apt to afford it. When it comes to Ryan’s bill, the older population is naturally more illness prone and therefore their healthcare would cost more. The government can provide subsidies of  $1000 a month for healthcare, but if a senior citizen’s healthcare costs him $3000 a month and his retirement and social security totals a fixed amount of $900 a month, there’s nothing to live off of.

Talk about killing grandma. Oh, by the way, this same leadership is the one that balks at increasing taxes on the wealthy. As a matter of fact, Ryan’s bill which passed on the 15^th of April in the Tea Party/Republican controlled Congress would lower the top income and corporate tax rates from 35% to 25%. What an outrage at this time of such a large deficit right? (more…)