Day: July 30, 2008

Baghdad’s Amusement Park

Now here is a really good idea.  Let us concentrate people at an amusement park–there is a great idea in a country full of suicide bombers.  Please tell me this is just fanciful thinking.

Disneyland  goes to war-torn Iraq, with a multi-million dollar entertainment complex, to be built on a 50 acre lot adjacent to the Green Zone. (“Fun park rises from ruins of Baghdad zoo”, The Times, London, 24 April 2008)

The American-style amusement park will feature a skateboard park, rides, a concert theatre and a museum.

The occupation forces are of the opinion that Baghdad is “lacking in entertainment”. General David Petraeus, is said to be a “big supporter” of bringing Disneyland to Baghdad.

Fox News considers the project as a “market signal that the arrow is pointing up.: …We should not refuse to take notice when good things are happening in Iraq. Item number one, a Los Angeles entrepreneur said he plans to invest millions to create a vast entertainment and amusement complex in the center of downtown Baghdad.” (Fox News, April 26, 2008)

Supported by the Pentagon, an unknown Los Angeles based holding company C3 of unnamed private equity investors, will be developing the “Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience”. The park will be designed by Ride and Show Engineering (RSE)

Anything to turn a buck!

Dept. Of Labor Screws Workers

In an unlikely team-up, impartial investigators from the Government Accountability Office joined a low-income workers’ advocate at Congressional hearings July 15 to tell lawmakers that President Bush’s Labor Department has failed to enforce minimum wage and overtime laws and that low-wage workers are routinely being robbed of their earnings.

Enforcement of laws that require employers to pay at least the minimum wage and overtime rates has sunk to record lows under the Bush administration, they said.

Investigators for the GAO described for members of the House Education and Labor Committee how the Wage and Hours Division of the Labor Department routinely fails to count complaints, refers workers with legitimate complaints to private lawyers and closes half its cases with perfunctory calls simply requesting employers to settle the matters. Workers lose most of the cases, they said.

Kim Bobo, executive director of the Interfaith Worker Justice program in Chicago, joined GAO investigators at the hearing. Her group operates counseling centers and sponsors activities, including assistance with union organizing, for low income workers around the country. “The wage and hour division is so understaffed,” she said, “that it is actually now doing fewer investigations of wage and hour complaints than it did in 1941, the year it was founded. Wages are simply being stolen.”

What Will The Deficit Mean?

There is an overwhelming consensus in the economic and political establishment that ordinary Americans will have to pay for the crisis of American capitalism and a budget deficit that has been fueled by massive war spending, tax cuts for the wealthy and the provision of unlimited public resources to bail out major financial institutions.

“This is going to make it extraordinarily difficult for whoever’s going to become president,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (Democrat-North Dakota) told the Washington Post. “I don’t care who the president is—when they come and meet with their secretary of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve chairman, their top economists, it will be a sobering moment.”

If he wins the November elections, whatever minimal spending proposals Barack Obama has made during the campaign—including his so-called universal health care plan, tax credits for middle and low-income families and miniscule increases in infrastructure spending—will quickly be shelved in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

So what does that really mean?  That means that all those pie in the sky campaign promises will not be forthcoming.  And if McCain wins in the Fall it will be even worse for the programs that benefit the American people.  Sorry, to be the bearer of crappy news.

Today In Labor History

30 July

President Cleveland appoints a commission to investigate the causes of the Pullman strike. Four months later the commission issues its report, blaming Pullman and the railroads for the conflict – 1894

President Lyndon Johnson signs the Medicare Act, providing federally-funded health insurance for senior citizens – 1964

Former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa disappears. Presumed to be dead, his body has never been found – 1975

United Airlines agrees to offer domestic-partner benefits to employees and retirees worldwide – 1999

Is It Speculation?

After the binge comes the purge. Merrill Lynch (MER) announced after the close of trading on July 28 that it had sold $11.1 billion in collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), or nearly 60% of its exposure to mortgage-related securities, to private equity firm Lone Star Capital Management for $6.7 billion as part of its latest effort to repair its tattered balance sheet.

At the same time, Merrill reduced its exposure to troubled XL Capital (XL) and other bond insurers, who provided insurance on Merrill’s CDOs. This “purging of assets,” as Oppenheimer (OPY) analyst Meredith Whitney described the sale in a July 29 research note, places the Wall Street stalwart closer to the end of its mortgage related troubles.

NOw, The Prez and McCain have flatly stated that speculation would not be rewarded.  Does that mean, if things turn south will the company that bought the troubled loans be part of the bailout?  The buyer is gambling that things will get better–that is speculation in my book.

House Apologizes For Slavery

The House yesterday apologized to black Americans, more than 140 years after slavery was abolished, for the “fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow” segregation.

The resolution, which passed on a voice vote late in the day, was sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a white Jew who represents a majority-black district in Memphis. Cohen tried unsuccessfully to join the Congressional Black Caucus this year.

“I hope that this is part of the beginning of a dialogue that this country needs to engage in, concerning what the effects of slavery and Jim Crow have been,” Cohen said. “I think we started it and we’re going to continue.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is considering introducing a companion measure in the Senate, he said.

In February, the Senate apologized for atrocities committed against Native Americans, and the body apologized in 2005 for standing by during a lynching campaign against African Americans throughout much of the past century. Twenty years ago, Congress apologized for interning Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.