turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalAir traffic controllers defeated Trump. That's worker power
Robert Reich
Public workers who lack any formal power to strike – but have the informal power not to work – are becoming a force in American politics and labor relations
Air traffic controllers hold the trump card (pardon the expression) in upcoming negotiations between Donald Trump and congressional Democrats over border security.
That’s because the president and the Republicans know that another shutdown would likely cause a repeat of what happened last Friday, when so many of the nation’s air traffic controllers called in sick that America’s air traffic came to a near standstill. Hours later, Trump agreed to reopen the government without funding for his wall.
Never underestimate the power of airport delays to arouse the nation. Nancy Pelosi deserves credit for sticking to her guns, but the controllers brought the country to its knees.
Trump is threatening another shutdown if he doesn’t get his way by 15 February , when government funding will run out again. “Does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL?” he tweeted Sunday, after his acting chief of staff said the he was prepared to shutter the government for a second time.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/air-traffic-controllers-defeated-trump
Eric Trump: It's 'truly heartbreaking' that NBC made Trump golf course look bad for firing undocumen
DAVID EDWARDS
28 JAN 2019 AT 13:15 ET
Eric Trump on Monday complained that NBC News had focused on the firing of undocumented workers at Trump National Golf Club after President Donald Trump shut down the government in a failed attempt to fund his border wall.
In a report published over the weekend, NBC said that at least 12 workers were fired from the Westchester County golf club. According to the workers, people at the “highest levels” of the golf club knew that they were living in the U.S. illegally.
The firings came as President Trump shut down the government in hopes of forcing Democrats to fund a border wall. The gambit proved to be a failure in the short term.
According to Eric Trump, NBC should not have covered the firings in its evening newscast on Sunday, calling the decision “truly heartbreaking.”
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/eric-trump-truly-heartbreaking-nbc-made-trump-golf-course-look-bad-firing-undocumented-workers/
Hey SHIT for brains.......................I got a fucking question to ask you...................what did your fucking father do for Puerto Rico..................come on , SHIT for Brains tell everyone what your fucking father did for the island and the Virgin Island.................let me remind you what he did asshole..................and remember asshole that this is a UNITED STATES TERRITORY.........and what has he done since..................fucking nothing, have you been down there lately ..............you POS.........................
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-puertorico-trump/trump-lays-blame-on-puerto-ricans-for-slow-hurricane-response-idUSKCN1C50GQ
So for you SHIT for brains to come out and blame the media for not covering the Brazil dam break..................because your fucking father asshole hired illegal aliens, while you have and had munchies with him at the same golf course knowing full well that he did this.
And just for giggles there SHIT for Brains, did you by some chance ever take a plane ride on the taxpayer dimes, lets say down to Mar a Lago, which means in my book jerk that if he had and did hire these people to exploit them, that he should be charged with a felony, you know like human trafficking, falsifying work documents, and in the course of doing that making harder for people to get the cards they need to work and live in this country...................its against the fucking law SHIT for Brains.................
But you don't see that the hypocrisy of what your father and his lackey's inside the white house are doing what with immigration.....................you really have SHIT for brains between your ears..........................go the fuck away............
January 31, 2019..................Summer Zervos and Trump
If anyone would correct this please do.................
But doesn't the sexual predator have to give a deposition by the above date?
Have not heard to much about this.......................
-snip-
"The judge also has set a Jan. 31 deadline for legal depositions from both sides — a ruling that raises the prospect of Trump testifying under oath in the coming months".
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/10/31/president-trump-disclose-calendars-summer-zervos-defamation-lawsuit/1836278002/
The Air Traffic Controllers Even the Score
HAROLD MEYERSON JANUARY 25, 2019
Reagan fired their predecessors for striking in 1981. Today, they got sick, stayed home, and forced Trump to end the shutdown.
On January 14, the Prospect ran a piece by Georgetown’s Joe McCartin, one of the nation’s leading labor historians, recommending that federal workers start staging sickouts as, perhaps, the one way to compel our deranged president to end the government shutdown.
McCartin was uniquely qualified to offer such advice: As the author of Collision Course, he had written the definitive history of the air traffic controller strike of 1981, which ended calamitously when President Ronald Reagan abruptly fired the strikers, busted their union (PATCO), and hired permanent replacements, thereby encouraging many American corporations to lock out their workers and fire them as a way to bust their own unions. Since strikes by federal workers are forbidden by law, Joe suggested that sickouts from strategically situated federal workers who were compelled to work without pay would be a way to force President Trump to end the shutdown.
And lo and behold, it was air traffic controllers at LaGuardia who did just that—essentially taking their airport out of commission this morning by refusing to show up for work, thereby wreaking havoc all across U.S. air travel. (Yesterday’s comments by their boss, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, encouraging them to take out loans, surely pushed some of those controllers over the edge.) Within hours of the LaGuardia shutdown, and battered by public opinion, Trump caved.
Thirty-eight years after the failed PATCO strike, the air traffic controllers have finally evened the score. Good for them!
https://prospect.org/article/air-traffic-controllers-even-score
Bees Are Facing Yet Another Existential Threat
We can’t breed bees fast enough to keep up with the losses and maintain healthy colonies.”
LIZA GROSS JANUARY 26, 2019 6:00 AM
This story was originally published by Reveal and produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent nonprofit news organization. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
While soybean farmers watched the drift-prone weed killer dicamba ravage millions of acres of crops over the last two years, Arkansas beekeeper Richard Coy noticed a parallel disaster unfolding among the weeds near those fields.
When Coy spotted the withering weeds, he realized why hives that produced 100 pounds of honey three summers ago now were managing barely half that: Dicamba probably had destroyed his bees’ food.
In October, the US Environmental Protection Agency extended its approval of the weed killer for use on genetically modified soybeans and cotton, mostly in the South and Midwest, for two more years. At the time, the EPA said: “We expect there will be no adverse impacts to bees or other pollinators.”
But scientists warned the EPA years ago that dicamba would drift off fields and kill weeds that are vital to honeybees. The consequences of the EPA’s decisions now are rippling through the food system.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/01/bees-are-facing-yet-another-existential-threat/
State senators spar over requiring citizenship test as high school graduation hurdle
2019 Indiana General Assembly
Daniel Carden
Statehouse Bureau Chief
Jan 27, 2019 Updated 1 hr ago
INDIANAPOLIS — The frustration is real for state Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, and state Sen. Jeff Raatz, R-Centerville.
Few people in their legislative districts seem to know what a state senator does, and others believe they work in Washington, D.C.
To try to change that, Kruse and Raatz on Thursday led the Republican-controlled Senate in approving a plan to require all Indiana students to pass the U.S. citizenship exam typically administered to immigrants to earn a high school diploma.
"Constituents don't know that we're state senators; we don't belong in Washington, D.C," Raatz said. "I'm not being critical of them; they just don't understand the system."
https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/state-senators-spar-over-requiring-citizenship-test-as-high-school/article_94811799-510b-5d01-adc6-41e1c5b8899b.html
No Species Is Safe From Trump's Interior Appointee
Susan Combs, Friend of Big Oil, Wants to Speed Up the Interior Department’s Permit Process
By Sarah Okeson
Trump appointee Susan Combs who was paid up to almost $2.2 million by oil companies and who blocked federal protection for a tiny Texas lizard on oil fields, now wants to restructure our nation’s Interior Department to “result in improved permitting.”
Combs, the acting secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that she wants to consolidate administration of the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
“As long as her industry pals make a profit, she won’t think twice about letting a species go extinct,” said Stephanie Kurose of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Combs, Trump’s nominee to be assistant secretary of the Interior, is just one of the grifters in the Trump administration.
https://www.dcreport.org/2019/01/25/no-species-is-safe-from-trumps-oil-friendly-interior-appointee/
Roger Stone Will Save Himself, With Trump Or Without Him
The Indicted Political Trickster Signals that He’s Ready to Tell Mueller What He Knows
By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief
At DCReport we focus on what politicians do, not what they say. Sometimes, however, parsing words is important. Such is the case with what Roger Stone, the freshly indicted adviser to Donald Trump, said after he was indicted Friday, Jan. 25.
Stone has been a dirty trickster his whole life, growing rich by making up lies, misleading voters and generally being a scoundrel, a role Stone relishes. He says what he does is legal and is “perfectly legal” exercise of his First Amendment free speech rights.
Until Friday Stone had said again and again that he would never testify against Trump.
Indeed, Trump tweeted just that on Dec. 3, 2018, quoting Stone: “I will never testify against Trump.”
But when Stone walked out of Florida courthouse Friday, released on $250,000 bond, Stone spoke in nuanced terms.
https://www.dcreport.org/2019/01/28/roger-stone-will-save-himself-with-trump-or-without-him/
-snip-
Stone says nothing improper went on between him and Donald. Maybe, in fact, the crimes Mueller has already identified were done through intermediaries.
Both men are known to work through intermediaries to maintain deniability for their conduct. Donald has likely used his son Don Jr. and his son-law, Jared Kushner, while Stone has used another Mueller indictee, the fabulist Jerome Corsi.
For a prosecutor like Mueller that’s not a big problem to get around. Good prosecutors know how to deal with crime via third parties. And Mueller is not just good. He is as good as it gets.
I waiting for Steve Bannon to be indicted, right along with everyone else, associated with this bunch........................
How Harris Wofford Changed Our History
January 27, 2019 4:36 am / 0 Comments / Civil Rights & Liberties, Congress, Featured Post, Health
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
In 1960, when John F. Kennedy was running for the White House against Richard Nixon, winning Democratic presidential tickets still depended on the backing of segregationist party colleagues in the Southern states.
In October of that year, when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and sent to jail on a trumped-up traffic charge in Georgia, his wife, Coretta, then five months pregnant, was legitimately worried about her husband’s safety and survival. Kennedy’s Southern backers told him not to intervene. But after the persistent advocacy of Harris Wofford and Wofford’s close friend Sargent Shriver (JFK’s brother-in-law), Kennedy —ignoring the arguments of his own campaign leadership, including his brother Robert — called Mrs. King to offer his comfort and sympathy to her and to say he would do whatever he could to see that justice would be done.
Blacks in the South who could vote at that time were, out of gratitude to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and because local Democrats did not welcome them to the voter rolls, overwhelmingly Republican. “Daddy King,” one of the South’s most influential ministers and Martin Jr.’s father, was in Coretta Scott King’s home when she answered Kennedy’s call. He was skeptical of Kennedy’s Catholicism and sympathetic to Nixon. After the call, he said the following: “If Kennedy has the courage to wipe the tears from Coretta’s eyes, (I) will vote for him whatever his religion.” Nixon remained silent. After Democrats delivered Daddy King’s endorsement to the national black communities, JFK’s narrow victory, with a smashing 79 percent of the U.S. black vote, was secure. And the national Democratic Party would abandon the segregationist South to champion federal civil rights laws.
In Wofford’s single winning campaign, his 1991 upset win over Dick Thornburgh for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, he ran on an issue that many national Democrats had told him would be a loser, national health care. Wofford, after a conversation with a Philadelphia doctor, insisted on making a TV ad in which he said straightforwardly: “If criminals have the right to a lawyer, I think working Americans should have the right to a doctor. … I’m Harris Wofford, and I believe there is nothing more fundamental than the right to see a doctor when you’re sick.” Wofford won, and the national debate on health care was profoundly changed, such that 20 years later, the Affordable Care Act could become the law of the land.
Harris Wofford, a committed American citizen who died this past week at 92, proved conclusively that one individual and two political campaigns can change our nation.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/how-harris-wofford-changed-our-history/
Thank you Senator Wofford...............
Indiana lawmaker who employs hundreds of minors pushes to scrap state child labor laws
Kaitlin Lange, Indianapolis Star Published 6:03 a.m. ET Jan. 28, 2019 | Updated 6:46 a.m. ET Jan. 28, 2019
A lawmaker who employees hundreds of minors at an Indiana ski resort is pushing to scrap all state child labor laws, which is raising questions about whether his role in such an effort is a conflict of interest.
Senate Bill 342 — filed by Republican state Sen. Chip Perfect, the CEO of Perfect North Slopes — would get rid of work permit requirements for minors and remove all restrictions on what hours 16- and 17-year-old Hoosiers can work.
While federal child labor laws offer greater protections for those under 16, they barely touch on work requirements for older teens, aside from wages.
Perfect, of Lawrenceburg, said the resort employs anywhere from 300 to 400 minors, and his human resources director testified in favor of the bill during a committee hearing last week, raising questions about whether his involvement in the legislation is a conflict of interest.
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/28/lawmaker-who-owns-perfect-north-slopes-pushes-end-state-child-labor-laws/2657091002/
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