UAW cuts auto workers’ pay
United Auto Workers officials told Local 5960 workers in Lake Orion, Mich. Sunday they had agreed to a 50 percent wage cut for workers with less than 11 years seniority at GM’s assembly plant in the Detroit suburb.Shocked workers were told they would not be permitted to vote on the wage cut because “general language” in the 2009 labor agreement allowed GM and the UAW to implement “innovative labor agreement provisions” at factories producing small cars. Any workers who refused to take the wage cut would lose their jobs.
At least 500 workers―around 40 percent of the factory’s 1,300 workers―will be paid $14 an hour. […] Media and industry sources said the agreement paved the way for cut-rate wages at the factory being retooled to make the subcompact Chevrolet Aveo, currently produced in Korea and Mexico.
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Shop Chairman Mike Dunn enthusiastically praised the agreement, saying, “It worked out―we’re keeping jobs in America.” As for the workers, Dunn added, “I can’t say everyone was happy, but they seemed to understand it.” -- Source
US banks fake documents to rush foreclosures
Major US banks systematically faked documents in order to speed up foreclosures for hundreds of thousands of homeowners, a mounting body of evidence shows. It appears likely that federal and state laws were broken in the process.The scandal speaks both to the dimensions of the social crisis and the criminality of the big banks. The immediate cause of the mortgage lenders’ rampant cheating on foreclosure paperwork is the tidal wave of families ruined by the economic crisis—a crisis itself set into motion by the banks’ predatory lending practices. The goal was to get people out of their homes as efficiently and ruthlessly as possible, skating over legal requirements relating to documentation.
Politicians have responded with calls for investigations and temporary suspensions of foreclosures. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and 30 other California representatives this week demanded a federal investigation into the mortgage lending industry in a letter sent to the Justice Department. Democratic Senators Al Franken of Minnesota and Robert Menendez of New Jersey on Tuesday requested an investigation from the Government Accountability Office into the role of government regulatory agencies in allowing the abuses to take place. Attorneys general in a number of states have launched investigations, and foreclosures have been temporarily stopped in a few.
This pre-election concern for embattled homeowners is dishonest to the core. -- Source
Class warfare
Besides, the rich should pay more because they get more from the government. All those Wall Street and S&L bailouts, the funding of regulatory agencies, and the public school training of workers aren’t services used by the middle and lower classes. There are some studies that have estimated that the tax breaks and services that benefit the wealthy add up to $400 billion a year, compared to the $116 billion spent on programs for the poor.Class warfare?
One of the richest Americans, Warren Buffett, replies to that notion:
“There’s class warfare, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
As Richard Thaler, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed: “The question comes down to whether we want a society in which the rich take an ever-increasing share of the pie, or prefer to return to conditions that allow all classes to anticipate an increasing standard of living.
“Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief to others is simply elitist.”
But, hey, as his colleague professor Henderson pointed out, it’s tough getting by on $250,000 a year. -- Source
White House squelched oil spill estimates
Government scientists wanted to tell Americans early on how bad the BP oil spill could get, but the White House denied their request to make the worst-case models public, a report by the staff of the national panel investigating the spill said Wednesday.White House officials denied that they tried to suppress the information.
The allegation was made by unnamed government officials cited in a staff working paper released Wednesday by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Although not a final report, it could raise questions over whether the Obama administration tried to minimize the extent of the BP oil spill, the worst man-made environmental disaster in U.S. history.
The staff paper said that underestimating the flow rates "undermined public confidence in the federal government's response" by creating the impression that the government was either incompetent or untrustworthy. The paper said that the loss of trust "fuels public fears." -- Source
posted by Tom Nadeau at 7:15 AM
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