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Congress is back in session and Republicans are right back to shutdown threats. Once again Republicans are trying to use shutdown threats to bust unions (the 99%), once again doing it for pay, for a specific company (the 1%).

Funding for the Federal Aviation Administration runs out and the agency is threatened with being shut down again January 31. Republicans demand that Congress pass a union-busting provision for Delta Airlines in the FAA “reauthorization” (funding) bill or they will shut the agency down again. Delta wants a provision in the FAA funding bill that changes union election rules to say that any worker who doesn’t vote be counted as a ‘no’ vote, against joining the union. This is because flight attendants (the 99%) are trying to organize a union, and Delta management (the 1%) is trying to block them from doing so.

Politico: Transportation bills abound as Congress returns,

[FAA] Funding expires in exactly two weeks, and Congress had 4½ months since the last stopgap to work on a new long-term bill, the most breathing room since 2009. Optimism on getting a new four-year bill persisted until winter set in, when it was revealed controversial National Mediation Board language over how union election votes are interpreted forced negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

TPM: Labor Targets Vulnerable House Republicans Over Union-Busting Bill

The House and Senate have been grappling for months over a provision in the House GOP’s FAA reauthorization bill that would count abstentions as “no” votes when airline and rail workers want to form a union. Democrats were once thought likely to cave on the issue, but have held their ground on the issue as the public has soured on GOP-driven shutdown threats. (more…)

In America, when gangs of bullies torment school children, pushing them around and extorting their lunch money, parents know only one response effectively counters the abuse: confrontation. Running, whining, negotiating — none of that works.

For the past year, since Republicans took the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, they’ve behaved like young thugs, extorting Democrats to get what they wanted. Employing the blackmail techniques of schoolyard gangs, House Republicans repeatedly threatened to hurt the American people and the American government if Democrats didn’t submit.

Then President Obama confronted them. In recent weeks, he finally internalized and implemented the advice of American parents on dealing with bullies. He stood his ground. He called the GOP bluff on the payroll tax. And they backed down. He recess appointed four officials, defying GOP attempts to thwart service to American workers and borrowers.

Apparently, it’s a new day in Washington, one in which Democrats, who control the presidency and the majority in the U.S. Senate, are fed up and not going to take GOP extortion anymore.

For a year, Republicans leveraged their demands with blackmail.  If Democrats didn’t accept draconian and economic recovery-starving budget cuts, Republicans would shut down the government. If Democrats didn’t agree to slash the budget by exactly the amount Republicans required, the GOP would destroy the country’s credit rating.

In December, House Republicans overplayed. Initially, they’d opposed President Obama’s proposed extension of the payroll tax break that puts about $1,000 a year back into the pockets of working Americans. Just before the holidays, they changed their minds and said they’d accept a one-year extension, if it were offset by cuts in the federal budget. A dispute ensured between Democrats and Republicans about what to cut. As time ran out before the scheduled holiday break, the Senate compromised and passed a two-month extension, with the remaining 10 months to be settled later. The approval was overwhelming, 89 to 10. The Senators went home.

That bi-partisan action in the Senate left House Republicans with the choice of approving a two-month extension of a tax break they claimed to support or rejecting it, which would increase payroll taxes for 160 million workers.

For days, House Republicans refused to accept the Senate measure, threatening workers with a tax increase. The House Republicans claimed they wanted a one-year extension, but what they really wanted was a one-year extension paid for by cuts they chose without Democratic input. They demanded Senators return to Washington and vote on cuts to support a one-year deal.  Or they’d increase taxes.

The Senate refused. Obama refused. They confronted the bullies.

And the bullies blinked. The House passed the two-month extension. (more…)

The Republican war on unions continues apace. On a near-party-line vote Wednesday, the House passed a bill crafted to thwart a National Labor Relations Board decision, made earlier Wednesday, that would entitle workers to a timely vote on unionization once they’ve petitioned for it. By ruling that employers’ legal challenges can be entertained only after a vote, the board effectively denied employers the ability to hold up a vote for weeks, months or even years. Elections delayed, the NLRB essentially said, are elections denied.

The House legislation, by contrast, stipulated that such legal challenges can go forward before the vote. The bill will almost surely go nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but then, it’s just one foray in the Republicans’ battle to extirpate worker-controlled organizations in America.

In the run-up to Wednesday’s NLRB vote, there was considerable doubt as to whether a vote could even be held. The five-seat board is down to three members. Republicans have vowed not to confirm any more of President Obama’s appointees, and the Supreme Court ruled last year that if the board’s membership fell to just two, it would no longer have the power to issue rulings. In recent weeks a number of Republicans have urged the board’s remaining GOP member, Brian Hayes, to resign, stripping the board of its rule-setting ability. After NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce scaled back the proposed reform, Hayes decided to stay on, though he did vote against Pearce’s modified proposal.

Also Wednesday, one ostensible casus belli for the GOP war on the board was removed when Boeing and the Machinists Union agreed on a new contract, under which the company committed to expand production at its unionized Washington-state factories. In return, the union agreed to drop its complaint to the NLRB against Boeing’s new factory in non-union South Carolina. When the NLRB’s general counsel took up the case, Republicans pounced: The board, they said, was threatening to kill jobs. This week, the general counsel indicated that if the machinists dropped the case, so would he. (more…)

OK. Thanksgiving’s behind us, the 91% of the workforce with jobs are back to work, and in DC at least, there’s a sense of “what happens next?” in the air.

Here’s one man’s answer:

Anatomy of a failure: It would be a pleasure to never hear the words “super” and “committee” in the same sentence again for a while but I’m afraid it’s actually important to review what happened. The “both sides are to blame” meme is irresistible but doesn’t hold up to even casual scrutiny. The Democrats on the committee went deep into Republican territory with spending cuts, putting hundreds of billions of cuts in Medicare and Medicaid on the table, and asked for less revenue in exchange than they should have. But the Republicans wouldn’t really budge on taxes and that queered the deal from the start. (Their latest retort: “you can’t raise taxes in a recession… even the president has admitted that”… is nonsense. This is a ten year deal, one that could easily have the tax increases phase in later.)

I’m really not sure how this story gets told and who’d even want to hear it. But it needs to get out there.

Where’s POTUS? The president should not, in my opinion, take any heat at all for not playing along in the deficit reduction follies going on in Congress. The Republicans have made it clear that if he’s for it, they’re agin’ it and I don’t see what’s gained for him getting burned again by them. If I thought his involvement would contribute to a more positive outcome, I’d argue differently, but I don’t. (more…)

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree spoke out on the House floor today in opposition to free trade agreements with Panama, South Korea and Columbia that she says will send good paying American manufacturing jobs overseas. Pingree said over 30,000 Maine manufacturing jobs have disappeared since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was ratified. The trade agreements up for a vote today are all patterned after NAFTA.

“I have great respect for each of you individually, but collectively I’m worried you’re going to fail — fail the country,” former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, a co-chairman of President Obama’s fiscal commission, sternly told the congressional supercommittee last week. Elite pressure is building on the committee to reach for a “grand bargain” to cut trillions out of the budget deficits over the next 10 years. Last week 100 House members, including 40 Republicans, dispatched a letter urging “a big, grand bargain” with “all options” — code for tax hikes — “on the table.”

In fact, the best service the supercommittee could do for the country is to fail. It is charged with a task that can only weaken an already faltering economy. The committee is like a gang of delinquents armed with grenades set to go off, but struggling to build a really big bomb that could do even greater damage. We’d prefer the grenades get defused, but we truly don’t want them to put together the bomb.

Misbegotten Mission

The supercommittee, the misbegotten offspring of the summer’s debt ceiling deal, is charged with reducing the deficit by a minimum of $1.2 trillion over 10 years by cutting spending or raising taxes. It must report before Thanksgiving and any report must be voted on before Christmas, with no amendments, no filibuster, no extended debate, majority rule. If it fails, then $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts in discretionary spending, split between domestic and Pentagon budgets, kick in. It provides a choice, as Newt Gringrich put it, between shooting yourself in the head and cutting off your right leg.

(more…)

Voting doesn’t work anymore. If it did, Americans would get what they want — or at least some of it — from Washington.

But they don’t.

Instead of the people’s priority, which is jobs, country club conservatives in Congress stubbornly fixate on deficits. Instead of ensuring millionaires and corporations pay their fair share, House Republicans passed a budget that would destroy Medicare and Medicaid.

Corporate and clandestine campaign contributions have undermined the power of traditional voting, the kind done at polls on election day. Rather than voters, politicians now serve donors — billionaires and banksters — who invest untold millions and demand returns in the form of self-serving policy.

This is demoralizing to those who cherish democracy and the sanctity of one person, one vote.

Hope, however, arrived with the debit card fee victory. The 99 percent forced Bank of America to back off its proposed fee. Average Americans accomplished this by voting differently, not at the ballot box but at the twitter account, the Occupy march and the teller window, where 1 million depositors went to move $4.5 billion from the big Wall Street banks to community banks and credit unions. They found another way to exercise their franchise and force the powerful to respond.

The 99 percent must exploit the method of this triumph to get what they need. Because politicians sure as hell aren’t giving them what they want.

The numbers don’t lie. Coin-operated conservatives in Congress have rejected President Obama’s jobs plan, parts of the jobs plan and Obama’s pitch to raise taxes on the rich to pay for it.

And yet, the electorate strongly supports both surtaxing millionaires and the elements of the jobs plan. In a CNN poll in October, 75 percent favored sending federal money to the states to hire teachers and first responders and 72 percent favored infrastructure investments.

A whopping 76 percent wanted millionaires to pay higher taxes.

In that same CNN poll, there’s another compelling statistic. Sixty-one percent said reducing unemployment was the most important issue. Reducing the deficit didn’t even come close at 35 percent.

The numbers aren’t flukes. Another survey, taken a week later by CBS found the same thing. (more…)

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the nation last week, politicians in D.C. flipped the bird at protesters – including those camping in Washington’s McPherson Square.

Here’s how: While occupiers sought political focus on the unemployment, impoverishment and foreclosures suffered by the nation’s non-rich 99 percent, politicians considered three major pieces of legislation and passed only the one that will help the wealthiest 1 percent and hurt the remaining 99 percent.

Senate Republicans murdered-by-filibuster the American Jobs Act, which would surtax the 1 percent to provide jobs for the 99 percent. The Senate did pass the currency manipulation bill, but House GOP leaders refused to schedule a vote on the measure that would protect jobs for the 99 percent by punishing countries that undervalue their currencies to artificially lower prices on their exports.

By contrast, both houses of Congress adopted the so-called Free Trade Agreements with Panama, Colombia and Korea, which will, just like their predecessor NAFTA, destroy jobs held by the 99 percent.

It’s incredible. Inexplicable. Inexcusable. In a country where joblessness is a painful 9.1 percent. Where one in five children lives in poverty. Where foreclosures rose again last month. Where a whole movement is growing to protest the appeasement of the rich at the cost of the middle class. In that place, Congress chose to walk backwards. It didn’t take two steps forward – which it could have by passing the currency bill and jobs act. No. It just took a giant step backward by embracing job-killing trade agreements.

It all forces the 99 percent to demand even more loudly: Where’s the jobs?

WHERE’S THE JOBS? (more…)

Today, you can take action to stop Congress from approving job-killing trade deals with Korea, Colombia and Panama and tell Republicans and Democrats to put Americans back to work.

Join the AFL-CIO’s National Call in Day and dial 1-800-718-1008 and tell your lawmakers to stop these dangerous trade deals. You can also send your message via email by clicking here.

With 25 million Americans desperately looking for full-time work Congress should be spending its time on job-creating legislation like President Obama’s American Jobs Act, not job killing trade deals.

Also today, hundreds of workers from around the country will be on Capitol Hill to talk with their lawmakers about the trade deals that put corporations over people and profit over prosperity.

Here’s what’s wrong with these trade deals:

• The Korea agreement is the largest off-shoring deal of its kind since NAFTA. If enacted, it likely will displace 159,000 U.S. jobs, mostly in manufacturing. And its glaring loopholes would allow unscrupulous businesses to import illegally labeled goods from China and possible even from sweatshops in North Korea—potentially without any tariffs at all.
• In Colombia, one trade unionist is murdered nearly every week and almost none of the murderers are brought to justice. In 2010, 51 trade unionists were assassinated in Colombia—more than in the rest of the world combined. So far in 2011, another 22 have been killed, despite Colombia’s heralded “Labor Action Plan.” Would we reward a country where 51 CEOs were killed last year?
• And the Panama agreement has many of the problems of the other two deals, like deregulating big banks and letting foreign investors bypass U.S. health, safety labor and environmental laws. Panama is also a tax haven: a place where tax-dodging, money-laundering millionaires and billionaires hide their money.

Please take a few minutes today and call 1-800-718-1008 (or click here to e-mail) and tell Congress to stop the Korea, Colombia and Panama trade deals that will destroy U.S. jobs and decimate American manufacturing—and give a virtual blank check to foreign governments to trample on the rights of workers.

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This entry originally appeared at the AFL-CIO Now Blog.

While the Republican candidates for President made it clear in their debate this week that they are happy to let uninsured people die if they have a serious illness, the Republicans in Congress are plotting to make people with insurance pay even more for their coverage to boost insurance company profits. How? By stealing nearly $2 billion in rebates that insurance companies owe consumers and small businesses and giving the money back to the insurers.

At a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, this would be an astonishing transfer of money from consumers to the already overflowing coffers of the health insurance industry, whose top five companies alone made $11.7 billion in 2010. (more…)