By a 5-4 decision, the conservative judicial activists on the Supreme Court violated in the Ricci decision any reasonable notion of state sovereignty by second-guessing use of public money by a local government, imposing by fiat the elitist views of those judges on how to judge potential qualifications for a local firefighters job.

It is a remarkable thing that conservatives that supposedly object to (a) inflexible federal rules on civil rights; (b) telling states how to spend their own money, and (c) second-guessing elected officials with judicial opinion would violate all three principles in the Ricci firefighter case. But then, conservatives have never really objected to judicial activism or federal imposition on local governments, just to most situations where such federal activism benefits poor people or non-white folks.

Somehow don't expect to hear Sotomayor praised for judicial restraint and deference to states rights in her 2nd Circuit ruling in the Ricci decision.

Update Below the Fold

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So in one of the largest organizing events I've ever helped organize, the White House and Capitol Hill will both be hosting events for a delegation, organized by Progressive States Network, representing 700 state legislators from 47 states who have signed onto a letter demanding a public option, employer responsibility and affordability measures in any federal health care bill. That letter includes 4 Speakers of the House, 3 Senate Presidents, and 7 Party Caucus Leaders, along with 33 health committee chairs - the very legislators chosen by their colleagues to represent them on health care issues.

Secretary Sebelius and Nancy Ann DeParle will be receiving the letter at the White House at 3pm-- with a press conference -- and Senator Tom Harkin will be hosting a Capitol Hill press conference with key state leaders to highlight the letter and legislator voices in the federal health care debate. As we've highlighted, states have already pioneered legislation for public plan options -- so it's worth highlighting what state leaders have already done in understanding what federal lawmakers should do.

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While you hear rightwing state politicians beating their chests about "states rights" and even potential secession, you might have missed them applauding Obama this week taking multiple steps to restore state regulatory authority against an overreaching federal government that, under Bush, had repeatedly overruled states laws in the name of federal authority.

For years, California and a number of states had sought to enact car emission standards, yet had been blocked by the Bush Environmental Protection Agency which refused to allow those standards to go into effect. Obama not only embraced those state standards in action this week but affirmed the right of states in the future to enact additional environmental standards beyond any federal minimum standards.

And in that same week, Obama established a sweeping policy for all heads of executive departments and agencies, ordering them to avoid the preemption language routinely included in Bush-era regulatory preamble statements or in codified regulations unless there is "full consideration of the legitimate prerogatives of the States and with a sufficient legal basis for preemption." More below the fold:

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Wage theft is illegal. Yet rightwing politicians largely dismiss the problem and most systematically oppose laws to increase enforcement of wage laws. Yet at the same time in recent years, those conservative politicians have been attacking undocumented immigrants as undermining wage standards for native workers. The hypocrisy is palpable, but here's a lesson: state legislators standing up against wage theft have been able to expose that hypocrisy.

At Progressive States Network, we've worked with community groups, advocates and legislators to promote wage enforcement directly as a counterpoint to anti-immigrant rhetoric and promote a policy agenda that builds support for all workers, native and immigrant alike. In states like Kansas, Iowa, and Connecticut, anti-immigrant legislation has been derailed once the issue of the failure to enforce broader wage laws entered the discussion. For example (see below the fold):

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The United States has roughly two million people in jail or prison-- and almost none of them are there for stealing wages from their workers, despite the fact that as Kim Bobo highlights in her book, millions of people have wages illegally stolen from them. In fact, customers of businesses go to jail for shoplifting -- 360 people are in jail for life in California for shoplifting under that state's three strikes law -- but low-wage employers steal thousands of dollars from individual poor employees in violation of minimum wage and hour laws with almost zero chance of jail time.

I would ask why a crime involving millions of people and tens of billions of dollars stolen each year is so poorly enforced and so widely ignored in the media. But the answer is unfortunately obvious. Rich people stealing from the poor is just not considered a serious crime. White collar criminals go to jail for stealing from middle class and other rich people, but the working poor may be stolen from pretty much at will, with at most a tiny monetary fine at stake even if wage theft is actually investigated in court. That is the scandal that Bobo's book outlines-- and will never get the same coverage as the crimes of Madoff or others who steal from the middle class and other rich.

It seems relatively simple.  The proposed federal Employee Free Choice Act would give employees the freedom to form a union when a majority of workers sign cards saying that they want one, avoiding the often months of employer harassment that have inevitably accompanied traditional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election processes. While there is now talk about a compromise of replacing majority signup with some kind of expedited elections, it's worth emphasizing that the EFCA majority signup proposal is not some kind of wild new proposal by labor, but one used by well over a dozen states for groups of public and some private employees.

Ignoring Evidence of Majority Sign-up Success in the States: Yet the anti-union lobby in Washington, D.C. has been churning out propaganda about the supposed horrors of coercion workers would face by unions if the Employee Free Choice Act was enacted.  They inevitably tell hypothetical stories about what could happen -- but studiously ignore the fact that states around the country already allow groups of public and private employees to form unions through majority sign-up procedures without any evidence of the coercion they conjure up.

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What is remarkable in Ahamed's book are both the parallels and contrasts of the 1920s to the past decade. The most obvious parallel is the amazing ability of smart people to collectively believe such dumb things-- and inflict pain on others justified by those wrong beliefs.

In the 1920s it was the Gold Standard-- the firm faith that price consistency between nations must be maintained at all costs. What is striking is how much the costs of deflation and joblessness imposed by it was understood; as is described on p. 161, Britain in 1920 very consciously went back on the gold standard and "two million men were thrown out of work" and, note a decade before the Great Depression, mass unemployment would persist for the next two decades. Some like Keynes identified the madness but most "smart" people thought such the gold standards and its costs the height of sanity.

Just as "securitization" and deregulation were the obvious financial orthodoxy in recent years, with groups condemning "predatory lending" and demanding more financial regulation treated as cranks.

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In comments on my last post, a number of folks keep arguing that secret ballots are an integral part of American democracy. It's a standard part of the current anti-Employee Free Choice Act propaganda line by management, but if secret ballots are so important, why is the equivalent of card check used for most important corporate decision making? Essentially the exact process proposed for establishing unions in the EFCA bill is exactly how corporate boards of directors are chosen by shareholders. To quote wikipedia on proxy voting by shareholders:

Proxies are essentially the corporate law equivalent of absentee balloting. Shareholders send in a card (called a proxy card) on which they mark their vote. The card authorizes a proxy agent to vote the shareholder's stock as directed on the card. The proxy card may specify how shares are to be voted or may simply give the proxy agent discretion to decide how the shares are to be voted.

Substitute the word "union organizer" for "proxy agent" and you have how majority signup would work under the Employee Free Choice Act. So if it's good enough for shareholders running a corporation, why isn't it good enough for choosing a union to bargain with that corporation?

The irony is that the GOP is wailing about the potential violations of democratic decision-making embodied in the Employee Free Choice Act -- and they are so concerned that a minority of workers might somehow impose a decision to unionize on the majority that the GOP is going to use the filibuster to impose their will on the majority of Congress.

So since the GOP is so concerned about protecting majority rule, they should support a campaign to abolish the filibuster

Let's start with one basic idea-- "Buy American" provisions are not protectionism (and by the way, neither have much to do with "fair trade", but that's another question). In fact, the bigger danger is that without such provisions in stimulus packages around the world, global production and trade could collapse.

Protectionism is when a national government requires PRIVATE purchasers of any product to buy only domestic versions of a product or pay such a high tariff on foreign products as to obtain the same result. The "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus are quite limited, applying only to purchase of iron, steel and manufacturers goods for about $78 billion in public works. This is hardly enough to undermine the global trading regime, but fears that federal spending would not lead to creating domestic jobs could have undermined support for the overall hundreds of billions needed for the stimulus. Requirements to buy domestically may be the key to convincing enough nations to pass sufficient amounts of stimulus to jumpstart the global economy

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With the federal government about to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the states, with many of those funds going to private contractors, a broad-based, bi-partisan coalition of organizations has come together in a Coalition for an Accountable Recovery to actually track whose getting the money and whether they are creating quality, decent-paying jobs with the cash.  

The goal is to promote reforms at both the federal and state level to assure transparency in how funds are used by federal and state contractors, the number of jobs created, and the quality of jobs created-- with the results posted online in easily searchable websites for the public. A poll released yesterday by the Coalition highlights the public support for transparency (more on the flip)

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That was Obama statement repealing a number of Bush-era anti-union executive orders and creating a White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families, chaired by VP Joe Biden and no doubt staffed by former-TPMCafer Jared Bernstein.

I'll skip the substance of the exec order actions and emphasize that Obama statement as far more significant. We have not had a President that so forthrightly identified the health of the nation with the health of the labor movement in many decades. I'm sure Clinton and Carter never did and I'd be curious if anyone has quotes from LBJ or JFK said so strongly.

Remembering that much of the upsurge in labor organizing in the 1930s came BEFORE the Wagner Act was allowed to go into effect by the Supreme Court in 1937, in many ways the most significant tools of the labor movement that decade was FDR's statement early on that, President Roosevelt declared publicly, "If I were a worker I would join a union." Union leaders used that statement to rally workers across the country. Whether Obama's statement will have the same galvanizing effect is unclear, but it may help significantly -- and may help undercut the anti-union stance of Congressional opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act and other labor bills pending.

At Progressive States, we've highlighted the potential and actual taxpayer ripoffs hidden in the industry siren song of selling off public assets like highways.  States gets what looks like an attratctive upfront payment, but lose in the long-term from lost toll revenue and lost democratic control of transit decisions.

The credit crisis has undermined the financial players who had been leading the charge on privatization, so they are looking for a bailout under the federal recovery plan.   As reported by Reuters, Morgan Stanley, Merril Lynch, and a number of other firms pushing "public private partnerships" -- the industry's preferred euphemism for privatization -- wants part of the stimulus package to flow to them.   Their wish list includes federal rules to push privatization of airports and highways, along with a national infrastructure bank to subsidize loans for private sector deals.  

And the privatization industry appears to have already won one item on their wish list in the federal bill -- an obscure but profitable loophole exempting profits from "private activity bonds" issued by local governments used for infrastructure from the federal alternative minimum tax. 

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A lot of school reformers argue that one of the wonders of charter schools is that they escape teacher union rules to better serve student needs (which of course explains why non-union states like Mississippi lead the nation in excellent schools). But even the premise that lack of unions improves the teaching environment is challenged by teachers, including increasingly by those at charter schools themselves.

In New York City this week, teachers at one of the supposedly star charter schools in the city, KIPP AMP Charter School in Brooklyn, informed the co-principals that they were organizing themselves into a union. In a letter to management, the teachers argued why unionization is critical for improving the teaching environment at the school:

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The Wall Street Journal is sometimes an amazing window into the bizarre, callous viewpoint of the corporate overlords of the economy. I don't mean the editorial page-- those folks are just cranky ideologues -- but the bloodless professional economic analysis of the news pages. Take this story, Behind Grim Jobs Data, a Potentially Hopeful Sign

There may have been a silver lining for the economy in the horrific December job losses reported Friday by the Labor Department. Companies are cutting back so aggressively that they actually might be increasing their productivity even in the face of a wrenching economic shock...businesses appear to have squeezed more out of the workers they kept on staff, increasing business productivity...

i.e. The remaining workers not only saw large numbers of their collegues fired, they are having to do a lot of the work of those laid off.  And that's good news!

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