The Next Big Legal Case to Assassinate Unions Is on the Way
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47157"><span class="small">Hamilton Nolan, Splinter</span></a>
Friday, 07 December 2018 14:27
Nolan writes: "This summer, the Supreme Court gutted America's public labor unions with the Janus ruling. Now, another case has the potential to further destroy the very basis of organized labor in America. This is serious."
Supreme Court Justices. (photo: AP)
The Next Big Legal Case to Assassinate Unions Is on the Way
By Hamilton Nolan, Splinter
07 December 18
his summer, the Supreme Court gutted America’s public labor unions with the Janus ruling. Now, another case has the potential to further destroy the very basis of organized labor in America. This is serious.
Uradnik v. Inter Faculty Org is a case brought by the right wing Buckeye Institute with the specific aim of dismantling a key part of U.S. labor law. The case seeks to end the practice of exclusive representation in public unions—the rule that a union represents all of the workers in a workplace. In the case, a college professor is arguing that the requirement that the union in her workplace negotiate on her behalf even if she does not want to be a union member is an infringement of her free speech. The case is a part of a long-term strategy by right wing groups to use the pretext of free speech as a way to destroy protections for organized labor. The Janus case—in which the Supreme Court ruled that nobody has to pay public unions for representing them (not even “agency fees,” which just cover the cost of representation) if they don’t want to—was the most successful manifestation of this strategy.
The Uradnik case could be the next step. It has just been appealed to the Supreme Court. If they decide to hear it, the outlook is not good. (And if they don’t decide to hear it, there are more identical cases in the pipeline.)
Both Janus and Uradnik deal exclusively with public employees, not private employees. But that just means they have the most potential to damage the union movement in America, because public employees are unionized at a far higher rate than private employees; and on top of that, it is quite possible that the blows to public unions can be translated down to private employee unions in time. This Bloomberg story from September lays out the implications of the Uradnik case, should the Supreme Court choose to pursue it:
It’s unclear whether public employers would have an obligation to negotiate with unions that aren’t designated as a bargaining unit’s exclusive representative, University of North Carolina labor law professor Jeffrey Hirsch told Bloomberg Law. States with anti-union officials would likely resist negotiating unless they absolutely had to, he said.
Abolition of exclusive representation could also open the door to multiple members-only unions representing different factions of employees working alongside one another, Hirsch said.
Anti-union forces know that the Janus ruling will make it much harder for public unions to sustain themselves financially. Add in the abolition of exclusive representation—and add to that a sustained, well-financed campaign targeting public employees to try to convince them to abandon their unions, which is already underway and is sure to intensify—and you will absolutely see a serious decline in union power in public workplaces, which they will then try to translate into private companies as well. If this case is successful, unions that were solid and powerful one year ago could soon find themselves underfunded, with their membership riddled with defectors and free riders and stupid or completely cynical competing factions in the workplace, and on top of that, with employers refusing to even negotiate at all. It would be bad.
If there is a silver lining to this possibility, it is this: the entire structure of modern labor law was to a large degree set up to enable collective bargaining because it was considered better than endless labor strife in the streets. If business interests think that they will win a decisive victory over working people by destroying collective bargaining, they will find themselves again facing angry workers whose only outlet is street protests, wildcat strikes, and other direct action that grinds business to a halt.
Right wingers are greedy. And foolish. They may get what they’re asking for. In the meantime, unionize your workplace.
FOCUS: Monumental Disaster at the Department of the Interior
Friday, 07 December 2018 12:16
Clement writes: "A new report documents suppression of science, denial of climate change, the silencing and intimidation of staff."
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke speaks during his Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, January 17, 2017. (photo: Zach Gibson/Bloomberg)
Monumental Disaster at the Department of the Interior
By Joel Clement, Scientific American
07 December 18
A new report documents suppression of science, denial of climate change, the silencing and intimidation of staff
his is a tough time to be a federal scientist—or any civil servant in the federal government. The Trump administration is clamping down on science, denying dangerous climate change and hollowing out the workforces of the agencies charged with protecting American health, safety and natural resources.
At the Department of the Interior (DOI), with its mission to conserve and manage America’s natural and cultural resources, the Trump administration’s political appointees are stumbling over one another to earn accolades for disabling agency operations. I should know; I was one of dozens of senior executives targeted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for reassignment in a staff purge just six months into the new administration.
From that day onward, Zinke and his political staff have consistently sidelined scientists and experts while handing the agency’s keys over to oil, gas and mining interests. The only saving grace is that Zinke and his colleagues are not very good at it, and in many cases the courts are stopping them in their tracks. The effects on science, scientists and the federal workforce, however, will be long-lasting.
A DAMNING REPORT
In a new report, Science Under Siege at the Department of the Interior, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has documented some of the most egregious and anti-science policies and practices at the DOI under Secretary Zinke. The report describes suppression of science, denial of climate change, the silencing and intimidation of agency staff, and attacks on science-based laws that help protect our nation’s world-class wildlife and habitats.
It is a damning report and required reading for anyone who values public lands, wildlife, cultural heritage, and health and safety.
It would be impossible to cover everything this clumsy political wrecking crew is up to, but the report provides details on the most prominent actions that deserve greater scrutiny, such as: the largest reduction in public lands protection in our nation’s history; a systematic failure to acknowledge or act on climate change; unprecedented constraints on the funding and communication of science; and a blatant disregard for public health and safety.
Why is this administration so scared of science? Why cancel a study into the health effects of mountaintop removal coal mining so soon after lifting a moratorium on coal leasing on public lands? Why keep scientists from speaking with the press? Because, while science provides the best evidence we have for making policy decisions that serve the broader public, Ryan Zinke has been very clear that he is in office to serve the oil, gas and mining industries, not the general public.
THE ATTACKS ON SCIENCE NEVER STOP
It is challenging to keep up with the relentless attacks on science coming from Secretary Zinke and his team of political appointees. Since the finalization of UCS’s report, we have seen Secretary Zinke blame “radical environmental groups” as the cause of wildfires, with no mention of climate change, which scientists know is creating the conditions for bigger, hotter, more ferocious fires. Like President Trump, he continues to suggest that poor forest management is the real reason for the deadly fires, regardless of whether they occur in suburbs or shrublands, far from federally managed forests. His ignorance of science is perhaps only surpassed by that of his boss.
It has also recently come to light that DOI has taken steps to roll back protections for individuals impacted the most by the agency’s anti-science actions. In November, it was reported that DOI rescinded two environmental justice policy memos that were put in place over 20 years ago to reverse decades of environmental racism and the marginalization of low-income communities. This is an affront to Native American communities suffering from the ongoing impacts of fossil fuel development.
Zinke’s disdain for science was on display again the day after Thanksgiving, when the Trump administration quietly released two groundbreaking climate reports that featured the work of DOI scientists: the 2018 National Climate Assessment (NCA) and a report on the greenhouse-gas emissions produced from fossil fuel development on federal lands. The NCA describes a stark future for the United States if climate change is left unchecked: destructive sea-level rise, long-lasting droughts, infectious disease outbreaks and crippling economic costs. The federal lands emissions report pointed out that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels produced on federal lands represent nearly 24% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. These are vitally important reports sounding a clarion call that climate action on federal lands is essential to the safety and well-being of the American public.
How did Zinke respond? With the standard anti-science lies being trotted out by Trump and others in the administration. Like his colleagues, Zinke claimed that the NCA was based only on extreme scenarios, when in fact it considered a broad range of emissions scenarios; he also claimed that the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) at DOI had “concerns” with the NCA when in fact dozens of USGS staff, as well as scientists from other DOI bureaus, were co-authors and contributors to the report. Apparently he didn’t have time to get to the other administration talking point about how climate scientists are just trying to get rich off of their work—a laughable assertion for anyone familiar with the compensation afforded to scientists who volunteer to contribute to such reports. He had nothing at all to say about the federal lands emissions report that was produced entirely within DOI.
A DESECRATION OF PUBLIC SERVICE
It is a desecration of the concept of public service for Zinke to ignore science aimed to protect the public’s best interest, and an insult to the taxpayers who pay his salary and those of his political colleagues. Zinke won’t be around forever, but he has filled the ranks of political appointees at DOI with like-minded industry lobbyists and climate deniers, so things are not likely to change at Interior anytime soon unless Congress, with a vocal public behind it, insists on transparency, scientific integrity and immediate climate action.
America’s public lands, and the natural and cultural resources they contain, belong to all of us. It is astounding that a small group of ideologues thinks they can hand these resources, and the agencies that manage them, over to industries eager to carve them up for private profit. To do so with blithe disregard for the impact upon our planet’s operating system is careless and dangerous, and we must demand better.
In addition to the comprehensive new report, UCS is providing resources and support for Americans eager to fight for science in our democracy while supporting federal scientists under siege. A new Congress will soon be asking harder questions and holding DOI leadership accountable for its actions. We can make it much harder for Zinke and his colleagues to run roughshod over the agency at the expense of our health, our safety, our heritage and our shared public lands.
FOCUS: Sean Penn Smeared in Arabic Press as "Muslim Brotherhood" for Khashoggi Documentary
Friday, 07 December 2018 12:00
Cole writes: "The October 2 murder of dissident Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi is still shrouded in some mystery despite extensive leaks by Turkish intelligence and the CIA/ NSA."
Sean Penn. (photo: YouTube)
Sean Penn Smeared in Arabic Press as "Muslim Brotherhood" for Khashoggi Documentary
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
07 December 18
he October 2 murder of dissident Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi is still shrouded in some mystery despite extensive leaks by Turkish intelligence and the CIA/ NSA.
The Arabic press is reporting that actor Sean Penn has shown up outside the consulate where Khashoggi was murdered with a film crew of ten. They are described as shooting a documentary on the murder.
Penn first met with Turkish authorities in Ankara, then went to Istanbul to begin work, and the Turkish press is reporting that his work has the approval of the Turkish government. He will interview high-ranking Turkish officials on their findings, as well as the late Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancee. The two-time academy award winner (for Mystic River (2003) and Milk [2008]) has directed films and documentaries, including one on the aftermath for the victims of the 9/11 attacks on New York by al-Qaeda.
The Egyptian press, which often kowtows to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (big aid donors to the al-Sisi government of Egypt) immediately went after Penn as a spy for Qatar, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, they castigated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization (it is not) and so implied that Penn is giving material aid to terrorism.
The same sort of attacks were launched by the UAE’s increasingly conspiracy-theorist-oriented Alarabiya, as Think Progress pointed out.
The Saudi government has accused Khashoggi of having been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is not true, though it is true that Khashoggi was very interested in populist reform of Islam and had had Brotherhood friends. He had also been friends in the old days of the Afghanistan struggle against the Soviets with Usama Bin Laden, but denounced the latter when he turned to terrorism.
There is no reason to believe that Penn has been put up to this documentary by Qatar (!) or the Turkish government. He is well known for championing human rights issues in Haiti and elsewhere and for having been a vocal critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War.
It is a sign of how polarized the contemporary Middle East is, that Egypt and the Gulf states are trying to smear a Hollywood actor and famed leftist as a “Muslim Brotherhood” agent, i.e. as working for Muslim fundamentalism.
George H.W. Bush Campaigned as a Demagogue. Twice.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
Friday, 07 December 2018 09:20
Pierce writes: "Taking the oath of office did not abracadabra all that away."
George H. W. Bush. (photo: Terry Ashe/Getty)
George H.W. Bush Campaigned as a Demagogue. Twice.
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
07 December 18
Taking the oath of office did not abracadabra all that away.
t was during Jon Meacham's paean to our civic religion over the casket of the late George H.W. Bush that I was struck by the thought that, even if you think we need a "civic religion," which I don't, the state of our current civic religion is very much the same as the state of Christianity was in Paris at the end of August in 1572. So I began running down the alleged elements of the creed of this civic religion people talk so much about, and I ran aground on one of them that has been getting quite the workout over the past two weeks.
Nobody with any longterm memory at all doesn't realize that, in 1988 and 1992, the late Mr. Bush ran for office in campaigns thick with calumny and deceit. In 1988, for political gain, he engaged in the personal destruction of Michael Dukakis, using the most poisonous tactics available to any American politician—racism and accusations of disloyalty. (Remember all the stuff about the Pledge of Allegiance?). In 1992, late in the campaign, his people—on the taxpayer's dime, I might add—scoured various passport files to prove that Bill Clinton had become a secret Communist on a visit to Russia, and also went through Clinton's mother's file as well. My own personal gripe is that Bush hired the dirty work out to some godawfully terrible people, without whom American politics would have been infinitely better off. This, I might add, was typical of the way the WASP elite had done business for centuries.
Anyway, apparently, our civic religion requires that we confess our belief that there is some sort of bright line between "campaigning" and "governing." (The gang at MSNBC seems particularly devoted to this part of the creed.) That is all my bollocks, and it's goddamn dangerous thing to accept as axiomatic, as has been demonstrated to the country on a regular basis since January of 2019. (It is the profession of faith that underlies all that hopeful whimpering about how the president* may one day pivot to being president.) The poison injected into the bloodstream during a campaign doesn't magically get cleansed as soon as somebody puts his or her hand on the Bible.
The Reagan-Bush years were years of profound racial reaction and social backlash in this country. Because it was the easiest and surest way to get elected, both men pandered to those forces. Those forces did not dissipate just because, at one point, each of them became president of all the people. Ask the families of the people with AIDS who died of neglect. Ask the black folks who saw the gains of the civil rights movement chipped away, brick by brick. The dumbest thing Mario Cuomo ever said was that thing about how you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. There's an unspoken corollary to that. If you campaign in slander, you govern that way, too. You have no choice.
Demagoguery has been recognized as a mortal threat to democracy as far back as Aristotle. (He took a demagogue named Cleon to the woodshed because Cleon "was the first who shouted on the public platform, who used abusive language, and who spoke with his cloak girt around him, while all the others used to speak in proper dress and manner." Bad hair, too, in all likelihood.) And drawing a distinction between what a politician says while campaigning and what he does while governing demands an ongoing offer of proof rather than a hand-wave of denial. Without that offer of proof, the demagogue cannot help but triumph.
George H.W. Bush campaigned as a demagogue, twice. He was not transformed by his oath of office, which is neither a magic spell nor a religious incantation.
US Is Enabling War That Has Made Yemen a Hell on Earth for Civilians
Friday, 07 December 2018 09:20
Murphy writes: "Washington is agonizingly slow at learning from its mistakes. Especially in the Middle East. Over the last decade and a half in that critical but chaotic part of the world, the United States has repeatedly witnessed the limitations of using the blunt instrument of American military force to solve complicated political, social, economic and religious conflicts."
A child in Yemen. (photo: AFP)
US Is Enabling War That Has Made Yemen a Hell on Earth for Civilians
By Senator Chris Murphy, CNN
07 December 18
ashington is agonizingly slow at learning from its mistakes. Especially in the Middle East. Over the last decade and a half in that critical but chaotic part of the world, the United States has repeatedly witnessed the limitations of using the blunt instrument of American military force to solve complicated political, social, economic and religious conflicts. There is, of course, no better example of this failure to understand the limits of American military power than our decade-long disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. And yet we are now back to making the same mistakes, this time in a less well-known country called Yemen.
For three years, the United States has supported a coalition led by Saudi Arabia that is waging war inside Yemen, trying to oust a rebel government made up of members of the Houthi tribe. Our role in the coalition is significant -- we sell bombs and weapons to the Saudis, we help them pick targets inside Yemen, and until recently, we refueled their planes in the sky.
To anyone paying attention, it's clear that the United States is engaged in a war in Yemen. And yet this war has not been authorized or debated by Congress. Our involvement started quietly under President Barack Obama, and now President Donald Trump has increased our participation. And it's not as if our participation in the Yemen conflict hasn't come with serious consequences.
Yemen has become a hell on earth for the civilians caught within its borders. More than 10,000 innocents have been killed in the Saudi-led bombing campaign since the beginning of the civil war. Targets have included schools, hospitals, weddings, a funeral party and recently a school bus carrying 38 children to a field trip.
More than 22 million people -- three quarters of the population -- require humanitarian assistance and protection. The country is on the brink of famine and is in the midst of the worst cholera outbreak in the world.
To date, an estimated 85,000 children under the age of 5 in Yemen may have died from starvation and disease. In many ways, this suffering is an intentional byproduct of the Saudi coalition, which has targeted water treatment plants, health clinics and even a Doctors Without Borders hospital, all with US assistance.
There is a US imprint on each of these civilian deaths. As the humanitarian nightmare worsens, it also provides the fuel to recruit young men into terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS, which have been able to thrive in the power vacuum created by the war. For as many bad guys that we kill with this strategy, we create two more. Ultimately, our involvement is making the United States less safe as we create conditions that radicalize a generation of young Middle Easterners against us.
That's why I am working with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Utah Republican Mike Lee to force the Senate to vote on a resolution that says this President and this administration cannot continue to engage in the conflict in Yemen without a declaration of war from Congress. Our legislation, which cleared a major procedural hurdle Wednesday and is working its way through the Senate under the 1974 War Powers Act, would require the administration to pull its support from the Saudi coalition until it gets that declaration of war.
It's time for Congress to reclaim one of its most fundamental duties -- deciding when and where the United States goes to war. For too long, we have been content to sit on the sidelines and cede this power to the executive branch. But in doing so, we are repeating the same mistakes we have made over the last 15 years of US foreign policy in the Middle East.
It's time for us to end our disastrous engagement in Yemen, and it's time for Congress to reclaim its role as the body with the sole authority to declare war. We can start by deciding to end our involvement in the war in Yemen.
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his summer, the Supreme Court gutted America’s public labor unions with the Janus ruling. Now, 
t was during Jon Meacham's paean to our civic religion over the casket of the late George H.W. Bush that I was struck by the thought that, even if you think we need a "civic religion," which I don't, the state of our current civic religion is very much the same as 
ashington is agonizingly slow at learning from its mistakes. Especially in the Middle East. Over the last decade and a half in that critical but chaotic part of the world, the United States has repeatedly witnessed the limitations of using the blunt instrument of American military force to solve complicated political, social, economic and religious conflicts. There is, of course, no better example of this failure to understand the limits of American military power than our decade-long disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. And yet we are now back to making the same mistakes, this time in a less well-known country called Yemen.
