Sunday Morning News Clips
Manual Transmission Foils Car Theft
“A press release from the Nashville police department said they arrested two teenagers last Wednesday aftr they attempted to carjack two women that day and failed. The teens ultimately failed both times, with the second being because the car had a manual transmission. They had to run away on foot.”
We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service . . .
A British woman tried to place an order at her local McDonald’s while on horseback, but was turned away.
Louise Carter, who lives in Powick, England, made the three-and-a-half-mile journey to nearby Malvern last month, but was rejected by staff citing a strict drive-thru policy.
According to McDonald’s UK, drive-thru lanes are reserved solely for motor vehicles, meaning that horses are out. Bicycles are also prohibited.
The Impact of Higher Temperatures on Economic Growth
“What happens to the economy when it gets hot outside? Despite long-standing assumptions that economic damage from rising global temperatures would be limited to the agricultural sector or developing economies, this Economic Brief presents evidence that higher summer temperatures hurt a variety of business sectors in the United States.”
Congressman Chris Collins arrested
Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y. was arrested Wednesday morning on federal insider trading charges, law enforcement officials said.
Why You Should Care About Unions
The average person in the United States has essentially zero power in society. That’s why millions have organized into unions over the years. But the slow decline of unionism in the United States should concern you even if you’re not in one.
Busting the Myth of Immigrant Crime
“My national analysis last year detailed the startling fact that Whites living in suburban, small-town, and rural areas surrounded by other Whites are in much more danger of violent and premature death, including suicide, homicide, gun fatality, drug overdose, and related “deaths of despair” than Whites living in or around multiracial cities. Whites show worse social trends than non-Whites, and Whites in remote exurban and rural areas show by far the worst trends and highest violent death rates of all. Despite Trump’s and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ baseless condemnations, “sanctuary cities” that adopt pro-immigrant protections are especially safe for Whites.”
“According to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.
Gerta Keller argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,’ Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. ‘She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.’”
Re: Why You Should Care About Unions
I’m just finishing up Chuck Todd’s 2014 book The Stranger and am surprised how totally our legislators are terrified of going against the grain of their constituents on even one issue — and how totally they are glued to anyone who comes through the door with any appreciable sum of money. Matching funds might be a big help on the latter: buy our government back.
And how useless our reps are when there is nothing in it for them. My personal favorite: Gilead wants $100,000 for one course of treatment with the drug Harvoni — a 99% cure for Hep C — which costs them $200 to manufacture and for which the VA did the the founding research before Pharmasset slipped the follow up work away to Ireland to lower taxes on their (morally) ill gotten gains.
$300 billion is all Gilead wants to cure 99% of Americans with Hep C. And they will get it at a rate of about $15 billion a year for near dying patients — and at the end of their 20 year patent run there will be more infected sufferers than ever. There’s a whole 400 page book detailing medical rip off page after page, Elisabeth Rosenthal’s American sickness …
… and that’s just one of many sectors of our economy where nobody is minding the store!
Labor unions are the only restorative in America’s current condition for common sense politics as well as universally shared prosperity. Our reps will be as terrified of defying them (us) and as enamored of their (our) campaign money as they are of whoever is scaring and buying them now.
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If we made union busting a mandatory five year federal felony and hired tens of thousands of enforcement agents, millions of business owners would just laugh (at this stage in US labor history): “What are you going to do, lock us all up?” Ho Ho Ho.
Let Republicans lead the way to re-establishing American unions: amend NLRA to require regularly scheduled elections — skipping over the long since unpassable organizing gauntlet (I would suggest one, three or five year cycle — local plurality rules).
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Republican methods to learn from:
[Missouri — happening now] “Another bill, H.B. 1413, which was one of 77 signed into law by Greitens hours before he stepped down, requires unionized government workers to vote every three years on whether they still want their union to represent them. Any union that fails to get a vote of recertification from a majority of its members would be blocked from representing those workers entirely.”
http://prospect.org/article/missouri-unions-battle-far-over
[Wisconsin’s Act 10] “One particular twist in the law: Public-sector unions now have to win support from a majority of employees in the bargaining unit, not just a majority of those voting in the certification election. Every year. And that status allows them only to negotiate a sliver of what they could before — pay raises, capped by inflation.
“For the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, winning recertification has not been difficult. The latest vote received 65% approval.”
https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-wisconsin-fast-and-hard-fall-since-act-10.html
[last year] “One of [Wisconsin Governor Scott] Walker’s admirers, the Republican Party of Iowa, fancied the same deal for their public employees in 2017: 93% voted pro union (under same not-to-vote is a “no” vote). ‘Of the 33,252 eligible voters statewide, 28,448 voted to retain their unions and only 624 cast ballots in opposition.'”
http://qctimes.com/news/local/government-and-politics/update-percent-of-iowa-unions-vote-to-recertify/article_6f021d3e-7303-59ad-9da9-1e4ae4b18d08.html
[now] “Republicans in Congress have already proposed a bill* that would require a new election in each [private employer] unionized bargaining unit whenever, through turnover, expansion, or merger, a unit experiences at least 50 percent turnover.
* H.R.2723 — Employee Rights Act — 115th Congress (2017-2018)
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2723/text
There are also Republican rumblings about requiring regularly scheduled certification elections at every private workplace that has a union. Blue wave time to go them one better: cert/recert/decert elections at every (non-gov) workplace with or without a union now. Begin to restore American democracy with one act (maybe that’s what they should call the act).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-should-unions-have-eternal-life-1520982788