Month: May 2008

Will Tomorrow Be The Day?

Saturday the Dems will be meeting to try and solve the problem of MI and FL delegates, to seat or not to seat that is the question.

As the primary season draws to a close, the dispute has become increasingly emotional, and Clinton supporters are planning an impassioned demonstration outside Saturday’s meeting.

At the heart of the mix are Roosevelt and co-chair Alexis Herman, two longtime Democrats little-known outside party circles, both trying mightily to keep things calm and easy as they gear up for the party machinery’s moment in the spotlight.

The 30 committee members must reach a decision on how many delegates to seat from the two states, which are being punished for having held their primaries in January, earlier than the party-set primary election schedule allowed, as well as how to allocate the delegates between the two candidates.

Clinton has been changing the goal posts for winning the nomination and the beginning of the end could come late Saturday.  That is if these guys grow some cajones and make a ruling.  Personally, I think it will go to the convention floor where it will do considerable damage to the Party and possibly assist in the Dems lose to McCain.

GI Suicides At Record High

This is a result of the Iraq War that few want to talk about in the media.

The number of Army suicides increased again last year, amid the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. An Army official said Thursday that 115 troops committed suicide in 2007, a nearly 13 percent increase over the previous year’s 102.

The 115 confirmed deaths among active duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops that had been activated was a lower number than previously feared. Preliminary figures released in January showed as many as 121 troops might have killed themselves, but a number of the deaths were still being investigated then and have since been attributed to other causes, the officials said.

More U.S. troops also died overall in hostilities in 2007 than in any of the previous years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall violence increased in Afghanistan with a Taliban resurgence and overall deaths increased in Iraq, even as violence there declined in the second half of the year.

Increasing the strain on the force last year was the extension of deployments to 15 months from 12 months, a practice ending this year.

The increases in suicides come despite a host of efforts to improve the mental health of a force stressed by the long and repeated tours of duty.

GM And The Workers

More than a quarter of General Motors Corp.’s hourly workers are expected to leave by the summer as a result of a recent buyout and retirement offer, the company announced today amid reports that Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner will announce additional restructuring measures at its annual meeting next week.

GM said 19,000 of its 73,000 hourly workers have signed up for buyouts and retirement offers, GM announced this afternoon. Workers will be expected to leave by July.

While the number leaving is far higher than that of a similar program at Ford Motor Co. earlier this year, it is a bit below the number GM targeted under its special attrition program offers, also called the SAP.

“We had hoped that 20-25,000 would take the SAP at GM – setting up at least 12,000 hires this fall,” said Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. “I think GM assumed this also. So GM is much closer to its target than Ford.”

GM still has the capacity to build 1.7 million of its largest vehicles, from Escalades to Silverados, in North America, McAlinden said. “They probably only need 1 million units at most due to the structural change in the market. … So, we worry. Pontiac East, Flint Truck & Bus, they are all at risk.”

GM already announced this week that it is speeding up the elimination of a shift each at those pickup plants, even though they had been down for weeks because of the UAW’s strike against American Axle & Manufacturing Inc., which supplies those factories. The latest announcements leave them each with just one shift. It is considered inefficient and costly to operate plants with just one shift.

The workers are paying the price for the ratification of the lame contracts that the auto industry gave them.  The Workers need to be more protected and their unions are failing them in the category.

Is The “Surge” Really Working?

Not according to these indicators:

**        The Iraqi government’s military offensive in Basra was designed to undermine Prime Minister al-Maliki’s major Shi’a political rival, Moktada al Sadr, but the offensive appears to have failed, and instead is strengthening Sadr’s forces and significantly weakening Bush administration strategy in Iraq.

**        The inability of Iraqi government forces to defeat or even halt Sadr’s militia in Basra, Baghdad or elsewhere even with massive U.S. military support, and the resulting escalation of overall violence in Iraq, also proves the failure of the so-called “surge.”

**        This power struggle between Maliki and Sadr is important because it represents Iraq’s linchpin fight between supporters and opponents of the U.S. occupation and the government kept in place by the occupation; it is particularly important in Basra because almost all of Iraq’s oil these days is exported through Basra.

**        The current fighting escalates the danger of a U.S. attack on Iran, because the undeniable failure of the “surge” strategy makes it much harder for the Bush administration to continue claiming “victory” in Iraq.

McCain keeps saying that he will not “surrender” Iraq.  What does that really mean?  Not a damn thing…it is just a pander to Americans who hate to lose…..he is a politician!

American Axel Workers Return To Work

Production resumed Tuesday at American Axle & Manufacturing Inc., as workers at five of the company’s U.S. plants returned to work after ratifying a concessionary contract that ended a three-month strike against the Detroit supplier

Work began with the plant’s first shift at 7 a.m. Tuesday. While it’s unclear how many workers returned to work, what is certain is not all workers were called back Tuesday.

At the company’s Detroit axle plant, it was mainly workers who set up machinery who returned to work, said Adrian King, president of UAW Local 235, which represents about 2,000 workers there.

More workers are expected to be called back throughout the week and early next week, as the company ramps up production.

Henry Nelson, 56, of Southfield is to return to work in Detroit tonight. Nelson said that his attitude will be negative.

“I used to have a positive attitude” and “tried to keep things going,” said Nelson, a millwright who, before the strike, was used to doing odd jobs that weren’t required of him.

With the prospect of a pay cut, Nelson said he won’t have the incentive to go the extra mile.

“It’s a different attitude,” said Nelson, who plans to take a buyout or retirement package.

Sorry to see the workers having to go back to work and lose all the progress that had been made in the past.  AAM stock rose and that is the answer to everything…..profits, not the workers, who by the way create ALL the corporations wealth.

Last Rites For Gravel

“I just ended my political career,” Mr. Gravel said at the party’s convention. “From 15 years old to now, my political career is over, and it’s no big deal.”

Mr. Gravel, 78, spent 12 years in the United States Senate from Alaska, pursuing even then an anti-war agenda and railing against the military industrial complex. His tenure was marked by dramatic procedural actions criticizing the Vietnam War, but his claim to fame came when he tried to release the Pentagon Papers by reading them on the Senate floor. He also waged a one-man filibuster that ultimately led to a compromise to let the draft expire in 1973. He lost his seat in 1980, after a contentious Democratic primary.

He lost the Dem nomination and now the Libertarian–this could well be Gravel’s last hurrah.

Environmentally Friendly Bombs?

Sorry when I read the story my first reaction was WTF?

TNT, RDX and other explosives commonly used in military and industrial applications often generate toxic gases upon detonation that pollute the environment. Moreover, the explosives themselves are toxic and can find their way into the environment due to incomplete detonation and as unexploded ordnance. They are also extremely dangerous to handle, as they are highly sensitive to physical shock, such as hard impacts and electric sparks.

To make safer, more environmentally friendly explosives, scientists in Germany turned to a recently explored class of materials called tetrazoles. These derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon as TNT and others do.

In initial experiments, G2ZT and HBT produced fewer toxic byproducts than common explosives. Still, they did generate some dangerous hydrogen cyanide gas. But mixing these compounds with oxidizers not only avoids making hydrogen cyanideThe research was financially supported by the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie, the European Research Office of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, and the Bundeswehr Research Institute for Materials, Explosives, Fuels and Lubricants., but also improved performance, Klapötke said.

After reading I had a good laugh, but really is not that an oxymoron or something like that?  An environmentally friendly bomb?

Labor’s Critical Election Role

This is a piece written by Dick Meister for ZMag.  This is timely since all the candidates, especially the Dems, are courting labor for the next election.  Labor could have a dominate roll in the general, but will they opt for a persoanlity instead of what is best for ALL labor?

Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, one of the best friends organized labor has ever had, has some wise words of political advice for unions and their supporters:

Throw all you’ve got into defeating John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, and unite tightly behind the Democratic candidate, presumably Barrack Obama, even though you may have supported other candidates in the primaries.

You might think Kucinich’s advice is unnecessary since, like virtually all Republicans, McCain has never been a friend of labor – and his policies as president would most certainly not be pro-labor. They’d most likely be as anti-labor as the policies of George W. Bush, one of the most anti-labor presidents in history.

Under Bush, for instance, the Labor Department has become an anti-Labor Department, adopting regulations designed to hamper union organizing and growth. The National Labor Relations Board has become an anti-labor relations board, allowing employers to openly violate the laws governing organizing. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been outrageously lax in enforcing the job safety laws, even as the number of serious on-the-job injuries and deaths has grown steadily. The union rights of federal employees have been seriously curtailed.

That’s just a small part of it. As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says, under Bush “working people have been losing income, good jobs, homes and hope in the future.”

Kucinich says that although working people may respect McCain as a former prisoner-of-war, they have to realize “there is no question that on the economy he is an extension of the Bush administration. We must challenge the economic system that is accelerating wealth upwards.”

A vote for McCain would clearly be a vote for four to eight more years of the same, four to eight more years of anti-labor, anti-working people policies in the White House. There should be absolutely no need for Kucinich or anyone else to urge labor to go all-out to defeat McCain.

Yet polls show that 57 percent of union members support McCain for president. That’s right, more than half of the country’s union members actually support John McCain for president — the highest labor support any Republican presidential candidate has ever had.

That’s surely evidence of a great need to do some heavy-duty political educating among the many union members who obviously should no better than to in effect support four to eight more years of Bush.

There’s also a great need to rebuild the labor movement. But with a Republican president, as Kucinich notes, that would be very difficult – if not impossible.

With a Democratic president, however, labor “will have a major influence on our national policy,” And it goes beyond labor. For labor, Kucinich adds, is “the vanguard of the effort to re-create America, to change the direction of history.”

He says Republican control of the White House has put “our entire way of life under attack. Our jobs are on the line, peace is on the line, our kids’ future is on the line, education, housing, everything. America is on the line.

Labor creates ALL wealth, then they should have a major stake in the election of the people who will lead the country.  The problem is the worker has spent years of giving back most of the progress from 100 years all in the name of retaining their employment.  Now is the perfect time for Labor to become the major player in the direction of the country.

SEIU: The Rest Of The Story

I realized after my last post that many of my readers may not be privy to what is going on within the SEIU, so I found a bit of info to assist all in seeing what is at stake.

As history has repeatedly shown, the rulers of “one party states” rarely concede power gracefully or quietly. When organized opposition emerges, such regimes often resort to a strategy of disinformation and intimidation to maintain their grip on power over a nation state or—in a context closer to home–a national union.

After the Landrum-Griffin Act was passed in 1959, union reform groups—the equivalent of an opposition political party–gained more legal protection for their electoral challenges and issue-oriented campaigning. Yet, in the last forty years, entrenched leaders of major unions have displayed a similar pattern of undemocratic behavior and heavy-handed treatment of internal dissent. In each instance, the incumbent administration focused its most intense attacks on an independent-minded official from its own ranks who “defected” to the cause of reform.

The latest case in point is United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW) and its president Sal Rosselli. Along with a new rank-and-file group called SMART (SEIU Member Activists For Reform Today), UHW has called for direct election of top officers of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and other changes that would give members a greater voice in bargaining. Rosselli’s very principled, even reluctant, break with SEIU President Andy Stern has, nevertheless, elicited a coordinated International Union counter-campaign, replete with personal vilification, legal harassment, threats of trusteeship, and/or dismemberment of 140,000-member UHW, SEIU’s third-largest affiliate.

If you have personal stories or info, please feel free to share with others, we all want to know what is the “real” story.