Landmark Theaters Employee Union

One of the nation's biggest corporate swindlers sub-prime mortgage lenders and a company at the center of the sub-prime disaster is being sued by the 900 employees it laid off because it didn't obey the law and is trying to cheat them out of the severance pay and benefits it owes them.

Atlanta-based HomeBanc Corp.'s abrupt layoff of more than 900 workers at the start of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing has spurred some of the former workers to sue the fallen mortgage lender.

In a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., three of the company's former workers said that the massive layoff violated employee rights under federal law.

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN Act, requires that companies give their workers 60 days advance written notice before conducting widespread layoffs.

HomeBanc failed to provide such notice and owes the dismissed workers 60 days of wages, bonuses, holiday and vacation pay, and other benefits, according to the lawsuit.

I suppose it's no surprise that a corporation whose very existence, let alone its massive profits, was the result of its unethical behavior would try to rip off its own employees. Par for the course, I'd say.

What's interesting about this is that just before HB went into Chap 11, it sold off some of its paper to a competitor, Countrywide Financial Corp, for a nice chunk of change - around $110Mil - which is now protected thanks to the new bankruptcy law passed by the Republican Congress last year. Slick.

We’re talking today, not 200 years ago. The Boston Globe reported on Monday that a non-profit group called the Massachusetts Human Trafficking Task Force estimates that between 14,000 and 17,000 slaves are brought into the US every year. A second NGO, Trafficking Victims Outreach & Services Network, says it has worked with 100 such cases in the last 5 years just in Boston.

Modern-day slavery is an issue not only in far-flung countries but in our own backyard. According to Karen McLaughlin, director of the Massachusetts Human Trafficking Task Force, the state reports that between 14,000 and 17,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year. Typically victims are from poor families and lured under the guise of a better life once their legal status clears.

Carol Gomez, cofounder of Trafficking Victims Outreach & Services Network, said her organization has dealt with more than 100 cases involving people affected by domestic violence, labor exploitation, and trafficking/slavery since 2002. Her group helps find legal advocacy, medical and mental health care, and housing for clients who have left or want help escaping exploitation.

Among the cases Gomez has worked on was that of Naseem Mohamed Siraj, the 36-year-old woman who successfully sued her Brookline captors and returned to India. Rick Mann, the attorney who worked on the case pro bono, said he would like law enforcement agencies to receive more education to look for these crimes.

“It is kind of a hidden problem,” Mann said. “You have people living in situations where often times they don’t go out of the house. You really have to be trained to spot the signs.”

The numbers may very well be much larger than we now suspect. It is an invisible problem. Perpetrators today, unlike those in the days when slavery was legal, don’t put their slaves in fields and brag about what they cost. Their slaves are usually “domestic staff” and forbidden to leave the house. This case is typical:

One woman who shared her story though HERvoices had signed up with a job agency in her South Asian country and was sent to Boston to work for a family with a baby. When she arrived, her employers picked her up from the airport and took her passport. “The husband said to me I can’t walk on the streets or the policeman is going to shoot me,” she said in a phone interview.

The family often created unnecessary work for her, she said. “I had to clean the bathroom three times a day — after they showered I had to clean the bathroom.” The couple also hired nurses to help care for the baby, she said, and the nurses reported the case to city officials, who rescued her. The woman now works as a pharmacist’s assistant.

None of the employers are identified in the Globe’s story, not even the ones who were successfully sued by one woman in open court, but it isn’t too hard to guess who they are. “It’s so hard to get good help nowadays” is not a complaint one hears from the middle class. Even if it was, no middle-class perp involved in slavery would be protected from jail and even public identification. They’d be in a cell, their crime splashed across the front pages.

Instead, there isn’t so much as a hint that anyone - ANYONE - has gone to prison behind one of these cases. Not one, not even the ones who lost a civil suit and had to pay to repatriate the woman they’d enslaved. That might be sloppy reporting, but I suspect that it was simply the fact that you can’t report something that hasn’t happened.

It’s significant to me that the slavery market seems to have begun again in the US not long after the election of George W Bush. With Republicans in charge of Congress and a wealthy playboy with few morals and no discernable sense of ethical behavior sitting in the White House, the filthy rich obviously felt they had nothing much to fear in the way of consequences if they were caught. Apparently they were right, even in heavily Democratic Massachusetts.

There is no crackdown on slavery despite its being the most hateful form of illegal immigration, no FoxNews exposes or Minutemen demonstrating outside the houses of rich slaveowners, and the reason is simple enough to explain:

The slaveowners are all Republicans.

The right-wing media and conservative politicians will take notice only when and if a Democrat is caught with a slave in his/her home. Until then, they couldn’t care less.

This is not - cannot be - merely a Massachusetts phenomenon. It is likely happening all over the country, particularly in Red States located close to borders - Texas comes to mind, naturally - where the problem would be hundreds of times larger due to totally uninterested govt and law enforcement agencies who have no intention of investigating their wealthy supporters to see if they have slaves.

That this is happening at all - and with no punishment of any kind for perps caught in the act - is a clear signal that the rich are out of control. American plutocrats feel so safe inside the Republican bubble that they dare even to own slaves.

Conservatives, who created the atmosphere that allows such abominations to flourish, have a lot to answer for.

Tom Toles

Leona Helmsley is finally dead, and the world is a better place for it.

That’s a horrible thing to have to say about anyone, bad enough when it’s an exaggeration but worse when it’s literally true as it is in Helmsley’s case. Leona had not a single redeeming quality save one: she apparently genuinely cared for her husband, Harry. Although, with her dominant character trait being unrestrained greed, one is forced to consider the possibility that it may have been his money she loved, that her public affection for him was a result of the enormous wealth he represented and how willing he was to turn it over to her.

The Associated Press (Richard Pyle) did an obit (via Norwegianity) that manages not to fawn over her even in death - something the right-wing media usually does when even rotten rich people die - and presents a portrait of “The Queen of Mean” that at least begins to do her justice. She was a tyrant, a woman who abused everyone she came in contact with who wasn’t as rich or richer than she was, a woman who thought the usual rules didn’t apply to her.

That image of Helmsley as the “queen of mean” was cemented when a former housekeeper testified that she heard Helmsley say: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

***

Helmsley nickel-and-dimed merchants on her personal purchases, stiffed contractors who worked on her Connecticut home and terrorized both menial and executive help at her homes and hotels, detractors say.

***

The Helmsleys’ charitable gifts may have run to the tens of millions, but people who dealt with them spoke bitterly of being stiffed.

One of them, a painting contractor, said Leona Helmsley wouldn’t pay an $88,000 bill for work on Dunellen Hall because she was entitled to a “commission” for the $800,000 worth of other jobs he got in Helmsley buildings.

After making a sales clerk rewrite a bill for earrings to save $4 in sales tax, she reportedly said: “That’s how the rich get richer.” Her lawyers suggested that the government came after her to make an example of someone with high visibility.

(emphasis added)

Implicit in those comments is her disdain and even contempt not just for the poor but for the un-rich, and the one mistake Pyle makes is his assumption that somehow Leona’s attitudes made her different, unusual. She wasn’t, not by a long shot. At best, her crassness, cruelty, and overwhelming sense of entitlement were a slight exaggeration of the attitudes prevalent in the vast majority of the rich in America - that they are the only ones who matter, that the common population is a mob of thieves and bums, that the govt’s purpose is to do their bidding, that laws are for commoners, and that having money is all that matters.

We need to begin to understand that Helmsley merely got caught saying and doing things the rest of the US plutocracy says and does in private all the time. I know. When I was much younger, I spent a couple of years working for very rich people - you’d know some of the names if I wrote them - in a personal capacity. I got to see them up close, and after 2 years of it I quit. I felt as if I was living, 24/7, hip-deep in filth and disease of the most abominable kind. There were exceptions but very few. Virtually all of the members-in-good-standing of the investor class for whom I worked were paragons of vice, greed, selfishness, and immorality. I understood by then why they call them the “filthy” rich.

Look around. The filthy rich have been in full charge since Bush was “elected”, and it has taken them a mere 6 years to turn America into a Third World country where the middle class is being eradicated, the money - including our tax money - is flowing to the top while responsibility is heaped on the bottom, the health care system has been disemboweled for the sake of insurance company profits and the President of the United States brags about it, the Treasury has been looted and our tax money handed out to the top 1% of “earners”, the safety net that’s been in place for 50 years has been shredded, the nation is more deeply in debt to the rich than ever before in our history, and an insane war is being stubbornly pursued largely for the sake of the oil industry. The govt is corrupt to its foundations, watchdog groups that were meant to protect us from corporate greed and dirty tricks have been turned over to the very corporations they were supposed to protect us from, and the attitudes Leona Helmsley personified have become rampant in the upper class.

They have made a mess for us because it made them even richer than they already were, which is what it’s all about. Michael Parenti predicted this almost 15 years ago when he said in a speech, “There is only one thing the ruling class has wanted since the beginning of time - they want it all. All the rewards with none of the responsibility, all the riches with none of the risk, all the wealth of the world’s resources with none of the expenses. They want everything, and in America they mean to have it.”

They’re well on their way. They’ve all but destroyed democracy simply because it got in the way of their appropriation of everything, they’ve stripped the country of its wealth and stuffed their own pockets with it, they’ve made our govt little more than a corporate subsidiary, and they are helping themselves to our resources with little if any resistance from us.

If we want our country back, we’re going to have to do more than regain control of the govt. We’re going to have to force the corporatocracy back under the lash of law and reason. Otherwise, they’ll simply buy the next govt the way they’ve bought this one and our democracy will be finished forever.

(First published at Ethel the Frog, Sept 4, ‘05)

For years the left has been screaming that the Emperor Georgius has no clothes, that he and his merry band of corpo-fascists are incompetent, insensitive, ideological bullies who care only about the rich and powerful, who value property over human life, and who have criminally mishandled everything they touched. We have pointed to example after example of their preference for illusion and consequent disdain for reality, of the way they were leaving us vulnerable to and unprepared for any negative event from hurricanes to flu epidemics, and that the Emperor exists in a plastic bubble, carefully protected and disconnected from that reality where the rest of us live. We have protested over and over again that this administration believes that saying something is true is the same as its being true, that PR is all that’s necessary and they don’t have to actually do anything as long as they can make it look that they’ve done it.

And so on.

We have concentrated on everyone’s fear of saying out loud what everyone knows, the part of the story where they watch him parade naked up the street and compete with each other to describe the glory of his raiment. We haven’t paid much attention to the end of the story when a perplexed child finally says it for everyone—‘But…the Emperor has no clothes!’—and the scales fall from the eyes of the watching public. Maybe we didn’t pay attention because we couldn’t understand why they didn’t see it before. Maybe we were afraid that the child would never open her mouth and the Emperor would be allowed to continue his masquerade forever.

Well, the child has appeared. Her name is Katrina and her message is being heard loud and clear throughout the land.

The Emperor is naked as a jaybird.

In the Emperor’s response to Katrina we see everything the Emperor is and everything he truly believes in action.

• PROPERTY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN PEOPLE
  
  Instead of bringing food and water to the thousands in the Astrodome, the Emperor, afraid that if he let them leave looting might spread to the suburbs, decided to instead to lock them in and let them starve (video from FoxNews available at Crooks and Liars). Then he put checkpoints on all the roads leading out of the city and gave them orders to turn back anyone who tried to leave to look for the food and water they didn’t have.
  
  While his Homeland Security and FEMA teams sat on their hands for six days, the Emperor said, ‘The results are not acceptable’, then did nothing to get them off their asses. When large-scale looting was reported, though, he leapt into action, finally ordering the National Guard into the city—not to deliver food and water to those trapped by the storm but to stop the stealing of food and medical supplies by the victims he had refused to help. Because, you see, it turned out that when he said it was ‘unacceptable’, what he meant was the weak security.



• ILLUSION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN REALITY
  
  In advance of the Emperor’s visit, a hastily assembled ‘stage set’ making it appear that a critical levee was being repaired was dismantled as soon as he—and the cameras—were gone.
  
  Later, German tv reported that a food distribution center that was set up expressly for a Bush visit was torn down immediately after he—and the cameras—were gone.



• THE POOR ARE LESS IMPORTANT THAN THE RICH
  
  After days of waiting without food, water, or working sanitary facilities, buses finally arrived to begin the evacuation of the Astrodome. But the first buses to arrive weren’t sent to the Astrodome. They were sent to pick up the 700 guests and staff of the Hyatt Hotel who had had food and water and working toilets for the whole eight days.



• WHEN THE VICTIMS ARE POOR, BLAME THE VICTIM
  
  As early as Thursday night, HS Director Michael Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown were making the rounds of the media saying that the people who were trapped—overwhelmingly poor and black—were in dire straits because they had ‘chosen’ not to leave.



• THE EMPEROR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE—EVER
  
  While horse lawyer Michael Brown dithered and dicked around for six days and the Federal govt did NOTHING to help Katrina’s victims, the Emperor did find time in his busy schedule of guitar playing, golfing, and trying to sell his Social Security scam, to line up scapegoats for his govt’s failure to react: chiefly the Democratic Gov of Louisiana and the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans. If the Federal govt didn’t act, it was the locals’ fault.

If you needed more proof that Karl Rove’s management of reconstruction after Katrina has been heavily weighted in favor of rich, white, Republican neighborhoods, it came today in an NYT report detailing the effect of the Army Corps of Engineers’ repairs in the two years since the hurricane hit.

Six inches.

After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher’s Gentilly neighborhood.

Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood.

By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly five and a half feet.

“If I got my risk reduced by five feet five inches, I’d feel pretty safe,” said Ms. Pratcher, who along with her husband, Henry, warily returned home from Baton Rouge, La. “Six inches is not going to help us out.”

(emphasis added)

The ACE, moving as slowly and clumsily as ever, has rebuilt a “patchwork quilt” of dams and levees that seems designed to make sure rich white neighborhoods are securely protected while poor black and middle-class neighborhoods get slap-dash token efforts. After spending a $$$Billion$$$, much of NO is no better off than it was two years ago.

The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called “a system in name only” is still just that.

The corps has strengthened miles of floodwalls, but not always in places where people live. It has built up breached walls on the east side of one major canal, but left the west side, which stood up to Hurricane Katrina, lower and thus more vulnerable. It has not closed the canals that have often been described as funnels for floodwaters into the city.

And its most successful work, building enormous floodgates to cut off the fingerlike canals that brought so much flooding into the city, had a divisive effect. The gates now protect prosperous neighborhoods like Lakeview, and though corps officials say there has been no favoritism, the effect has been to draw out old resentments and conspiracy theories in a city that never lacked for them.

“We have spent a lot of money and gotten some very good patches, but we’re putting them on this decayed old quilt,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is an author of an independent report on the levee failures. “We’re still with this damned patchwork quilt.”

No favoritism, my ass. So it was an accident that ACE’s planning just happened to center itself on a construction sequence that favored rich Republican neighborhoods at everyone else’s expense? A co-incidence that their “objective, scientific” strategy just happens to maintain the very same weaknesses that plagued NO before Katrina? And this despite the ACE’s own criticism of such a strategy? Is that what Rove expects us to believe?

Reporter John Schwartz does his best to lay this all off as “conspiracy theories” from disgruntled homeowners but we’re way past that stage and have been for nearly 2 years. It’s been obvious practically from the beginning what the Bush Administration’s Rove-directed intentions were: to abandon the Democratic majority population, mostly poor and/or black, while arranging for a NEW New Orleans that functioned as a mecca for rich white tourists. Virtually everything they’ve done - or, more accurately, NOT done - has had that effect. Months ago, we passed the point where any reasonable person could maintain doubt about what Rove has been doing. There’s no “theory” here any more. It must now be considered demonstrable fact. And it’s a strategy that, thanks to the favoritism of Rove’s ACE, is working.

Without a strong rampart of protection against storms, New Orleans will have a hard time persuading its far-flung residents and businesses to return and rebuild. Matt McBride, an engineer who became an anti-corps gadfly on flood-protection issues, left the city along with his wife after deciding he simply did not trust the new system.

“There’s too many things that can go wrong,” Mr. McBride said.

Maggie Carver, a Gentilly resident now living in Woodstock, N.Y., but hoping to get back, said she thought that all the time and work would have resulted in more progress and a clearer sense of safety than she had seen.

“If I sell my house and put everything into rebuilding and living in New Orleans and it happens again, then where am I?” Ms. Carver asked. “I’m in a boat somewhere with four Jack Russell terriers and my grandson. I won’t have anything.”

Rove and the Bush Admin don’t want them back, that’s the whole point of the exercise. Rove saw Katrina not as a human disaster but as a political opportunity, a chance to wipe out a major Democratic stronghold in the South and further his radcon dream of a single-party nation. Cold-blooded as a cod, he grabbed it, trading the health and welfare of thousands of former NO residents in order to recreate Democratic New Orleans as a safe Republican enclave.

I realize there’s a lot of competition for the title, but this just may be the most despicable, unforgivable thing Karl Rove has ever done. And brother, that’s saying something.

The second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is nearly upon us. Karl Rove, the guy who's been responsible for overseeing the reconstruction of New Orleans, will be leaving the White House shortly after the anniversary passes. In his wake is a New Orleans - in fact, a whole Gulf region - barely better off than it was in the weeks immediately after Katrina hit.

Unless, of course, you're rich, white, and Republican.

With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama's football stadium.

About 10 condominium projects are going up in and around Tuscaloosa, and builders are asking up to $1 million for units with granite countertops, king-size bathtubs and 'Bama decor, including crimson couches and Bear Bryant wall art.

While many of the buyers are Crimson Tide alumni or ardent football fans not entitled to any special Katrina-related tax breaks, many others are real estate investors who are purchasing the condos with plans to rent them out.

And they intend to take full advantage of the generous tax benefits available to investors under the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, or GO Zone, according to Associated Press interviews with buyers and real estate officials.

The GO Zone contains a variety of tax breaks designed to stimulate construction in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. It offers tax-free bonds to developers to finance big commercial projects like shopping centers or hotels. It also allows real estate investors who buy condos or other properties in the GO Zone to take accelerated depreciation on their purchases when they file their taxes.

The GO Zone was drawn to include the Tuscaloosa area even though it is about 200 miles from the coast and got only heavy rain and scattered wind damage from Katrina.

The GO Zone legislation was sponsored by Republican Sen Trent Lott of Mississippi and extended to Tuscaloosa by Republican Sen Richard Shelby of Alabama - who's from Tuscaloosa. The favoritism in the GO Zone legislation is so blatant, so indefensible, that even some contractors who are taking advantage of it recognize its unfairness.

But the tax breaks are galling to some community leaders, especially when red tape and disorganization have stymied the rebuilding in some of the devastated coastal areas.

"The GO Zone extends so damn far, but the people who need it the most can't take advantage of it," said John Harral, a lawyer in hard-hit Gulfport, Miss.

"It is a joke," said Tuscaloosa developer Stan Pate, who has nevertheless used GO Zone tax breaks on projects that include a new hotel and a restaurant. "It was supposed to be about getting people ... to put housing in New Orleans, Louisiana, or Biloxi, Mississippi. It was not about condos in Tuscaloosa."

It is now, just as most of the money which was supposedly intended to rebuild homes, schools, and hospitals is ending up in the pockets of developers building restaurants and shopping malls.

At the tip of Bayou St. John in the Mid-City neighborhood here, the brown and white bulk of Lindy Boggs Medical Center looms behind a chain-link fence. Nineteen people died at the medical center after Hurricane Katrina, and now the hospital itself is dead, sold to developers who plan to replace it with a shopping mall.

Anne Mulle, a nurse practitioner at the Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans, examines Donald Crosby, who traveled 75 miles from Venice, La., to receive treatment for an injured wrist.

On the surrounding streets — Bienville and Canal and Jefferson Davis — lies the wreckage of a once-bustling medical corridor. Doctors’ offices sit empty behind five-foot-high water marks, and nearby clinics wait to be demolished. In back of one medical building, a gaping refrigerator still holds jars of mayonnaise and Mt. Olive Dill Relish.

Harder to see, but just as tangible, people here say, are the other ripple effects of the flood and the closed hospital: workers displaced, houses for sale and, of course, patients forced to seek health care many miles away. If they have returned to New Orleans at all, that is, given the grave wounds to the health care system.

“I’ve been telling people, don’t bring your parents back if they are sick,” said Dr. David A. Myers, an internist who lived and worked in Mid-City before the flood and has moved his home and practice to the suburbs.

While tens of thousands of poor and black New Orleanians languish in trailers from Montgomery to Houston, Reconstruction Czar Karl Rove has been making sure the bulk of Federal money goes to corporations, not people. Wanna guess which corporations?

After Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, tens of billions of dollars in federal and private contracts, the largest of which went to companies like Bechtel, Halliburton, and its then-subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root, were dispatched to New Orleans. The alleged goal was to fund a clean-up effort President Bush said would require "a sustained federal commitment to our fellow citizens." That, of course, never came to pass.

Now where have we heard those names before? Oh, yeah, that's right: Iraq, where they took $$$BILLIONS$$S of our tax dollars for building projects in Baghdad that were never completed or built so shabbily that they collapsed of their own construction defects. 

I've been saying from the very beginning that the Bush Administration never intended to rebuild New Orleans, and everything Rove has done in the past two years proves it. Under Rove's command, FEMA awarded Trent Lott's Mississippi with 4 times the relief money it sent to Louisiana even though Mississippi had only a third the number of destroyed homes Louisiana suffered, hospitals are being bulldozed to make way for shopping centers, Federal funds meant for rebuilding homes have been delayed again and again as Rove took advantage of every opportunity to use the bureaucracy as an excuse to withhold money, HUD has refused to release money for reconstructing public housing, and an endless series of tricks have been played on New Orleans' homeowners.

The massive federally funded program for rebuilding hurricane-damaged Louisiana homes is short nearly $3 billion largely because Louisiana officials are compensating thousands of homeowners who were not originally supposed to benefit, according to an analysis by the Bush administration.

The money was supposed to pay for rebuilding flooded homes but not those damaged by wind, said federal officials familiar with the negotiations between the administration and the state officials who designed the program.

The Louisiana administrators of the program, however, are on track to dole out an estimated $2.6 billion to cover damage in homes that were not flooded, federal officials said, and that policy explains why the $6.9 billion program for homeowners is short by nearly half.

State officials responded that it is unfair to compensate some owners but not others, depending on which hurricane phenomenon wrecked their home.

“The Bush Administration has been asking us to discriminate against storm victims since day one,” Andy Kopplin, director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said in a written statement last night. “We rejected it then and we reject it today… . These are American citizens we’re talking about, and they’ve been out of their homes for almost two years now. Enough is enough.”

The Bush Administration is, in effect, using the same shabby trick insurance companies are using to get out of paying for homes destroyed in the storm. Rove wanted to prevent NO's black population from returning, and he succeeded. He wanted to turn Louisiana Republican by removing its Democratic base - the city of New Orleans - and he succeeded. He wanted to turn NO into a playground for the rich, a sort of DisneyWorld for affluent white tourists, and he has nearly succeeded.

Rove is leaving a mess behind him but exactly the kind of mess he wanted to leave - a crippled Democratic city in the process of morphing into a white Republican tourist trap.

No word yet on who's going to replace him as New Orleans' new executioner.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for several years, ever since I read a bunch of articles about how a myriad of different corporations, convinced that a major, global water shortage was coming, were acting swiftly to purchase water supplies all over the world and, in the US, were planning an all-out assault on public water systems, in some places trying to buy them outright, in others trying to convince public officials to privatize the systems that controlled and distributed local water supplies.

In the 3 or 4 years since I read that, unscrupulous corporations have made serious headway turning their agenda into reality. They’ve been busily purchasing water supplies - as if you can “own” a lake or a system of rivers and creeks - in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Brazil, and in the US they’ve made a good deal of headway in their privatizing campaign, convincing cities and towns from Georgia to California to turn public water systems over to them to run. They’ve made, needless to say, a bundle of $$$ doing this, but they’ve profited only because they’ve refused to spend any money maintaining or upgrading the systems they took over. Old pipes deteriorate and aren’t replaced, pumps malfunction and aren’t repaired, water quality isn’t tested regularly, treatment plants aren’t maintained, and new facilities are neither planned nor built.

The result of this privatization of public utilities was predictable: manufactured water shortages, ever-increasing rate hikes, tap water that has to be boiled before it can be used, and the clear and present danger that the neglected system will eventually simply collapse, leaving the local govt with NO water delivery system at all and the massive costs required to get it up and running again. The corporation that stuffed its pockets by ignoring its responsibilities, will, of course, have run for the hills by then, taking its looted profits with it like a con-artist fleeing town after fleecing everybody in it.

Yesterday, in Huntington, Utah, a mine collapsed with such force that scientists thought at first it was an earthquake.

Scores of rescue workers toiled into the night Monday to try to find six coal miners who were trapped inside a shaft that collapsed with such force that seismologists at first thought an earthquake had occurred.

The men were trapped in a remote section of the Crandall Canyon Mine, about 1,500 feet below ground and nearly three miles from the mine’s entrance, Sheriff Lamar Guymon of Emery County said.

There was no indication whether the miners were alive or dead, officials said.

***

Sheriff Guymon said efforts to reach the men were being led by rescuers using specialized equipment from several area mining and power companies.

Robert E. Murray, chairman of the Murray Energy Corporation, owner of the mine, said the company would try a new approach Tuesday, involving the detonation of explosives and the measuring of seismic activity as a way to help find the miners. Mr. Murray expressed doubts, however, that this method would work.

There were 10 men in the crew. Four escaped. If the 6 still trapped are alive, they have enough air and food for several days, so there is some hope. But the seam they were working is so far beneath the surface and from the entrance that that hope must be realistically considered minimal. Experts aren’t even sure where they are or what the extent of the collapse is.

What’s infuriating about this is that after the fact, as always, we will find out that it never should have happened.

The A.P. reported that federal mine inspectors had issued hundreds of safety violation citations against the mine since January 2004 and had ordered the owner to pay nearly $152,000 in penalties.

Mr. Murray defended the mine’s operation, telling The A.P.: “I believe we run a very safe coal mine. We’ve had an excellent record.”

Hundreds of safety violations and $152K in fines is a “good record”??? There in a nutshell you have the cruel and callous attitude of mine owners toward the murder of their employees by neglect and greed. Murray was too cheap and too greedy to spend money on safety - why should he? his workers don’t even speak English - and now 6 men may die unnecessarily while Murray prattles on, conscienceless, about his “good record”.

The Bush Administration’s abandonment of OSHA is responsible for this. Murray’s corporation should have been shut down until the safety issues were dealt with. Instead, Murray was allowed to go right on ignoring the law and endangering his workers for the sake of a few extra $$$ in profit.

If those men die, it is Bush and Murray together who will have killed them.

Showing rare good sense for a change, Orrin Hatch led seven other Republican Senators in a revolt against Bush’s knee-jerk, strident, ideological opposition to SCHIP on the grounds that it was “socialized medicine”. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority of 68-31.

The bill would increase spending on the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over the next five years.

“Covering these children is worth every cent,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who helped create the program 10 years ago.

The House passed a much larger bill on Wednesday, presenting negotiators with a formidable challenge in trying to work out differences between the two measures.

Still, the strong commitment to the issue by Democratic leaders virtually guarantees that they can work out a compromise before Sept. 30, when the program is set to expire. But that compromise is likely to be unacceptable to Mr. Bush.

With nothing left to lose, Bush apparently doesn’t mind being seen as the kind of worthless scum who puts insurance company profits ahead of the health of the nation’s children or as the kind of clueless, patrician elitist who takes Marie Antoinette as a role model, only instead of “Let them eat cake”, our home-grown Emperor proclaims, “Let them go to the emergency room.”

While this is undoubtedly a victory for the forces of Good, it never should have been this close. It’s bloody depressing that a significant majority of Republican Senators showed the white flag and voted against a measure they previously supported just because the Boy-King, lost in an ooze of corporate corruption and ultraconservative contempt for the poor and their children, told them to. Too many Democrats may be gutless wonders who cave in to the Emperor’s demands at the mere threat of being blamed by him if they don’t, but compared to the automaton Pubs, the Dems are profiles in courage.

It beats me how a party as full of cowards and consummate ass-kissers as the GOP ever got a reputation for being “tough” despite years and years of kowtowing to birdbrains like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and George W “I couldn’t find Iraq on a map until Dick showed me where the oil wells were” Bush. It’s a party of corporate boot-lickers, petty thieves, hypocrites, perverts, and demagogues, yet for 30 years it’s been masquerading as wholesome, clean, brave, and reverent and it’s gotten away with the imposture.

Wasserman

I know what you’re thinking. “So what else is new?” But as the battle over SCHIP expansion gets closer (the House passed it today and the Senate may pass it as early as Monday), it’s important to know what the lies are and how to counter them. Via Art Levine at Huffblog comes this link to a point-by-point debunking of Pub TP’s from the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). Going through it reveals the brazen lies, clever misdirection, and bogus “interpretations” that have been standard conservative weapons for decades.

Karl Rove has crafted the conservative response to the SCHIP legislation along Norquistian/John Bircher lines, ie, that SCHIP is somehow the thin end of the wedge of “socialized medicine”. Most of us aren’t convinced that would be such a bad thing considering the success of Medicare and Medicaid, but for the conservatives it’s a war cry presaging an all-out attack on “our way of life”, which they and Bush define as unregulated, run-away capitalism. The CBPP shows it’s no such thing.

We’ve all been there, some of us more often than others: you get caught short, forget a previous payment or ATM withdrawal, or assume that check you deposited yesterday must have cleared by now - after all, when you write a check to someone the money vanishes from your account the same day it’s deposited; presumably it works the same way for you. But when your statement arrives, it turns out the bank held your deposit for several days before crediting your account and has charged you a $30 penalty for overdrawing it.

If you’re middle-class, I don’t suppose $30 is all that much - annoying but hardly the end of the world. But if you’re working class, that 30 bucks could be next week’s food budget or a part for your beater car that will keep it on the road another month. And all because you couldn’t resist that pair of jeans on sale for $10. Now your next weekly $200 paycheck will only be worth $170, your rent will be short or your food budget drastically curtailed, and you suddenly realize that you spent almost a full day last week working for the bank.

You’re pissed, of course, because you know the amount of money you’ve cost the bank is 1000X less than the charge - about 3 cents. That’s a pretty big markup, you think. You remember back before the advent of computers when the cost was much higher but the penalty much lower - in the old days the cost to the bank was a couple of dollars and the charge was about 3 times the cost - a sawbuck, give or take. Now, with computers, it costs the bank virtually nothing to adjust the transaction and the penalty is 3X higher than it used to be. Doesn’t make sense.

If you’re old enough, you may even be able to remember when banks sold the idea of checking accounts with “overdraft protection” by touting the way it would save your good credit. Now checks slightly larger than the amount in your account wouldn’t bounce, creditors wouldn’t hound you and hurt your credit rating, and the bank would allow you to pay back the overdraft with only the smallest of penalties (the $3 the transaction cost them) which they called a “convenience fee”.

With the deregulation of the banking industry in the 80’s, that all started to change. Overdraft charges have increased steadily since then even as costs have plummeted. So have all those hidden fees they’re so fond of, like paying an extra $2 every time you withdraw money from your own account through an ATM or use your credit/debit card to buy something. Those can’t be justified by the expense, either. They’re the “convenience fee” pushed to ludicrous proportions.

But let’s let those go for the moment and stick with the overdraft charges. They’ve leveled off in the last decade. In most places they’re stable at around $20-30, which is where they’ve been for some time. They seem to have reached a plateau - that’s the point at which if they get any bigger customers will start screaming bloody murder and threaten to close their accounts - but that plateau is somewhat misleading. Productivity in the banking industry has increased dramatically in the last 10 years just as it has in the rest of the corporatocracy, so while the charge has not increased, the costs have steadily decreased, meaning that every year a higher percentage of the overdraft charge is profit than it was the year before. How much? About $$$17 and a half BILLION$$$, that’s how much.

John Edwards, who has been on a Poverty Tour following Robert Kennedy’s famous tour of Appalachia just weeks before his murder, announced his plan to attack poverty today. While it sounds sensible on he surface, there are some serious questions about key portions of it.

Calling the current tax code “badly out of whack,” former Senator John Edwards yesterday proposed increasing the capital gains tax on upper-income investors and using the money to provide tax-free savings accounts and expanded tax credits for lower-income workers.

In a speech in Des Moines, Mr. Edwards, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he would “rewrite our tax code to make sure it is fair” and added that tax policy under President Bush had led to “more wealth for the wealthy and more power for the powerful.”

The Edwards campaign said his plan would raise the tax rate on capital gains, which are profits from investments, to 28 percent from the current 15 percent for taxpayers with incomes over $250,000. It would remain at 15 percent for those who earn less than $250,000.

So far so good. The capital gains tax rate has been ridiculously low under the Republicans. While the investor class has been enriching itself with market manipulations, globalization scams, consumer and employee rip-offs, and stock manipulations, it has also been gaming the tax code and using its hired guns in Congress to give it breaks the rest of us have had to pay for. Raising the CGT is a necessary first step in restoring some kind of balance.

Mr. Edwards repeated his calls to repeal the Bush tax cuts for families with incomes over $200,000 and to raise taxes on hedge fund and private equity managers. And he said he would “declare war” on off-shore tax shelters and put limits on executive compensation.

Mr. Edwards said the revenue gained from these tax increases would pay for a variety of tax cuts aimed at middle- and lower-income people, including exempting the first $250 of investment income from capital gains taxes, expanding the earned-income and child and dependent care tax credits, setting up special tax-free savings accounts of up to $500 a year and a program where the government would match the first $500 in savings.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with the first part above except the doubt that he could do it with Republicans in full obstruction mode and determined to protect their corporate bosses. The Bush tax cuts are a travesty. They should never have been passed in the first place. Off-shore shelters have allowed some of our richest corporations, including oil companies, to pay little or even NO money in taxes. Over the last 6 years, we have lost $$$BILLIONS$$$ in revenue due to corporate tax breaks written into law by corporate lobbyists and obligingly passed without debate by a compliant Republican Congress.

But the stuff in the second graf is largely junk.

Steve Benen links to a NYT report on how Republicans in Congress who were once in full support of SCHIP have now caved in to Bush’s ideological snit-fit.

Just 11 days ago, the WaPo’s Christopher Lee noted, “If anything looked like a sure thing in the new Congress, it was that lawmakers would renew, and probably expand, the popular, decade-old State Children’s Health Insurance Program before it expires this year.” It’s a no-brainer, right? Who’s going to balk at an established, successful program that offers health insurance for kids?

Well, the first the president balked, saying expanding healthcare access for children in middle-class families ran counter to his ideology, and he would therefore veto the bill. As recently as three days ago, the LA Times reported that bipartisan support for S-CHIP expansion was so strong, proponents of the bill believed they could likely override a veto.

Not anymore. As part of a reminder of why congressional Republicans lost their majorities, a handful of top GOP leaders have decided to align themselves with Bush and against healthcare for children.

If you click the link on “SCHIP” above, it will remind you that Bush’s objections have to do with his antipathy to govt programs and his near-hysterical fear that private insurance companies may lose money. As usual with this moron, his belief is entirely faith-based. SCHIP has been around for years and there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that it has hurt any private insurance company in any way, shape, manner, or form at any time in any place under any conditions. As Steve said, it’s been an astounding, resounding success story, and you’d think Bush, his popularity firmly in the toilet, would want to trumpet one of the few govt programs he hasn’t screwed up beyond all hope of redemption.

But no. Instead, he’s threatening to veto the bill on the amazingly ignorant grounds that people with sick kids who don’t have insurance “can always go to the emergency room”, that SCHIP is “socialized medicine”, and that his wealthy insurance company campaign contributors might find that it has lowered their profit margin by a quarter of a percent. So sick kids can die, as far as he’s concerned, if it means that private insurance profits aren’t harmed.

It’s a mind-bogglingly callous position, openly contemptuous of both medical realities and humanity - pure Molochian greed trumping compassion and common sense.

Innovation can sometimes lead you down strange pathways, and this has to be one of the strangest.

The picketers marching in a circle in front of a downtown Washington office building chanting about low wages do not seem fully focused on their message.

Many have arrived with large suitcases or bags holding their belongings, which they keep in sight. Several are smoking cigarettes. One works a crossword puzzle. Another bangs a tambourine, while several drum on large white buckets. Some of the men walking the line call out to passing women, “Hey, baby.” A few picketers gyrate and dance while chanting: “What do we want? Fair wages. When do we want them? Now.”

Although their placards identify the picketers as being with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters, they are not union members.

They’re hired feet, or, as the union calls them, temporary workers, paid $8 an hour to picket. Many were recruited from homeless shelters or transitional houses. Several have recently been released from prison. Others are between jobs.

“It’s about the cash,” said Tina Shaw, 44, who lives in a House of Ruth women’s shelter and has walked the line at various sites. “We’re against low wages, but I’m here for the cash.”

Carpenters locals across the country are outsourcing their picket lines, hiring the homeless, students, retirees and day laborers to get their message across. Larry Hujo, a spokesman for the Indiana-Kentucky Regional Council of Carpenters, calls it a “shift in the paradigm” of picketing.

One hardly knows what to make of this.

Until 5 minutes ago, I was a John Edwards supporter. I’ve been following his career for years and, until he ran as Kerry’s VP in ‘04, liked most of what I saw. He understood what it was like to live in poverty because he had; he understood the way the poor and working class were scammed and ripped off by greedy corporations because he’d fought those corporations on behalf of their victims; and when he fought, he won. In fact, he got rich beating them at their own game and exposing their dirty tricks and callous disregard both for their customers and the truth. Insurance companies hated him, and that was a powerful recommendation as far as I was concerned.

His “Two Americas” message in ‘04 was strong, clear, and gave me a good deal of hope that the impoverishment of the US middle class and the War on the Poor that has been waged mercilessly for the past quarter century would finally and at long last get some attention from the nation as a whole. He was saying what needed to be said and people were listening.

And then he stopped saying it. Halfway through the campaign, his “Two Americas” signature theme just…disappeared. That troubled me but he was The Running Mate, not The Man, so I put it down to his being a good soldier and backing Kerry’s decisions. After all, you couldn’t reasonably expect him to buck his Principle in the middle of the battle. Still, I wasn’t comfortable at the ease with which he was willing to surrender his primary theme to the Democratic Leadership Council’s fear of corporate repercussions.

Now, three years later, it seems I was right to be uneasy and wrong to have given him the benefit of the doubt. Welcome to the latest Republican-Lite, DLC-approved Democratic candidate: John Edwards.

Auto workers took huge hits from the early 80’s to the mid-90’s, cutting back their wages, benefits, and pensions to keep the automakers alive when domestic sales went into a long slump. That the slump was due to mismanagement, shoddy materials, and glacially slow reaction times to changing market conditions (imports began stealing sales in the early 70’s and for the next 20 years US car makers simply ignored the reasons Americans were starting to buy foreign in great numbers) didn’t matter. They took the hits to save the companies and their jobs.

So they thought.

But even as the auto corporations were closing down plants in the US, they were opening them in low-wage countries overseas from Mexico to Yugoslavia.

Sholnn Freeman, writing in the Washington Post, seems to have forgotten all that - or doesn’t know it. S/he is apparently under a corporate-sponsored delusion that auto workers have been highly paid and securely fastened to exceptional benefits packages since Henry Ford.

Larry Boynton is slowly coming to a realization that would have been unthinkable for an American autoworker just a decade ago: that he will have to accept deep cuts in medical benefits or risk one day losing his job.

“We are almost understood that we are going to give up something, especially with health care,” said Boynton, 56, a Chrysler worker from Detroit. “It’s like they are slowing pulling the cover off you, and you got to be happy you got a little bit on.”

A decade ago, the UAW was just beginning to come back from 15 years of lay-offs, wage depression, and benefits that had been cut to the bone. Jobs were beginning to return to the US as corporate decision-makers began to realize that training foreign workers for the new high-tech jobs was costing them more money than the wages they’d been so desperate to chop down, and the union was able to gradually build up a decent wage structure for its members.

But corporate managers seem to have learned almost nothing from that experience. As soon as their sales began to improve in the mid-90’s as Americans realized that auto makers were finally taking quality seriously, the bean counters took power once again and began slicing off that quality one cheap part at a time. Upper-level management helped by ignoring design trends - or worse, copying them until there wasn’t an American car on the market with a unique look - loading up their cars with gizmos and doohickeys nobody really wanted much less needed, and by emphasizing segments of the market that were most vulnerable to economic change just because they were easier to sell to. Mercedes-Benz recently sold Chrysler primarily because it discovered it couldn’t make a dent in its corporate culture, a culture dedicated to cheap solutions, antiquated ideas, and hostility to labor. Ford is in trouble because it put all its eggs in the truck basket even as skyrocketing gas prices made trucks less viable and less attractive to consumers.

The result of all this cowardice, stupidity, greed, and laziness on the part of management has been yet another slump in the domestic car market and a concomitant windfall for foreign makers, and that, in turn, means that US auto workers are once again facing massive lay-offs and the loss of much of what they’ve managed to squeeze out of management.

When I was growing up in New Hampshire, the tax system was an embarrassment and a standing joke, on top of being seriously inadequate to serve the needs of an exploding population. The southern tier of the state was growing by leaps and bounds as both companies and individuals tried to escape the supposedly high tax rates in Massachusetts. Actually, the Mass rates weren’t all that high. The difference was that Mass had an income tax and a sales tax. NH had neither.

How did it get along without them? By replacing the sales and income taxes with high property taxes and a mishmash of what were generally known as “sin taxes” - taxes on cigarettes, liquor, and other commodities that related to “undesirable” behaviors. Even the Mass refugees who came to NH to avoid paying income taxes considered the state’s tax structure cowardly and unrealistic. They made fun of it at the very same time they were taking advantage of it.

The most consistent source of jokes among the Mass refugees (my family was one of that group) was “The Pledge”. The Pledge was an iron-clad promise every candidate for any office anywhere in the state had to take if they wanted to win because if they didn’t, they would lose. Period. It went like this:

“I pledge never to vote for an income tax or a sales tax. Never. So help me God.”

The absurdity of being forced up front to eliminate from consideration any reasonable taxation structure meant two things:

First, they had to keep raising the “sin taxes” because conservatives (NH was in those days an extremely conservative state, home to early far right-wing Xtianists and the strongest John Birch Society membership in the country - NH gave ultra-right-wing whacko Lyndon Larouche a solid third of its vote in presidential elections between 1952 and 1968) would only accept taxes on activities they considered sinful - smoking, drinking, looking at “pornography” like Playboy and Penthouse.

Second, they collected less in revenue than the average small city in Mass. Consequently, there was no money for maintaining roads, schools, or sewer systems; no money for cleaning up the water or the air; no money for modernizing hospitals or the university or police and fire departments. That, in turn, meant that schools were working with equipment so far out of date that history books ended with WW II, chemistry “labs” consisted of a couple of Bunsen burners and fewer chemicals than you’d find in a kid’s home chemistry set, police depts often had no radios and fire depts were trying to keep 30-year-old trucks running with spare parts cadged from junkyards.

So why am I telling you all this, you’re asking yourselves? Because in the last 13 years under conservative rule, the US Congress has been making itself into a philosophical copy of the NH legislature 40 years ago. It is adopting the same attitude toward taxes that made NH infamous - and unlivable - with one exception: they’re borrowing a lot more.

Case in point is the legislation - backed by Democrats - that would fund an expansion of the CHIP program by nearly doubling the federal cigarette tax.

If you want a clear, unambiguous picture of the stark difference between liberal and conservative values, all you need to do is focus for a moment on the attempt by Bush and movement conservative Republicans in Congress to derail a proposed Democratic plan to expand CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program).

The fight over a popular health insurance program for children is intensifying, with President Bush now leading efforts to block a major expansion of the program, which is a top priority for Congressional Democrats.

The seemingly uncontroversial goal of insuring more children has become the focus of an ideological battle between the White House and Congress. The fight epitomizes fundamental disagreements over the future of the nation’s health care system and the role of government.

Democrats have proposed a major expansion of the program, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, to cover more youngsters with a substantial increase in federal spending.

Administration officials have denounced the Democratic proposal as a step toward government-run health care for all. They said it would speed the erosion of private insurance coverage. And they oppose two of the main ideas contemplated by Democrats to finance expanded coverage for children: an increase in the federal tobacco tax and cuts in Medicare payments to private insurance companies caring for the elderly.

The rationales say it all. The Democrats want to expand the program to cover more uninsured kids, the Pubs want to protect the private - and extremely profitable - health insurance industry - and us - from “socialized medicine”. They would rather sacrifice the health - and possibly the lives - of poor, sick kids than risk lowering the profits of an industry already awash in greed, and all because it might lead, eventually, maybe, to the single-payer health insurance system that over 2/3 of us - the people the president and Congress work for and are supposed to represent - want to see enacted but that the insurance industry investors - the people Pubs really represent - are scared to death of.

Kill the kids to save the profits. That’s a conservative “value” - one of the few that remain consistent no matter what the polls say. Conservatives have raised selfishness and corporate profits to the level of a Molochian religion whose doctrinal slogan is “Dead Capital Over Living People”, and they’re not only no longer hiding that, they’re actively bragging about it, right out in the open.