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A warning on prepared food items... Anything you buy that is "prepared" be it chopped up watermellons, soup, or something from the hot bar, is likely not something you would buy in its raw form. Which is to say, gnarly produce that wont sell, meat that is a day or two from spoilage etc... Dunno just something to think about before you cough up 7.99lb on some mashed potatoes and some asian inspired beef dish. I'm guessing that most stores do this though as it is a way to cut down on shrink and also adds value to an otherwise worthless product. As a decent to good cook, I refuse to buy anything that is not only more expensive but also less quality. (Go next time and see how many items use ground beef, sausages or bits and pieces of fish)

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Finally, each year employees vote on the new benefits package, what kind of health plan, what kind of personal days and how many, retirement and stock options etc... If you are savvy in the employment/legal fields you will realize that this is very similar to an in-house or owner sponsored union, which is a violation of the NLRB, but I have not done enough of the research to determine if this is a true violation, though I will say my labor law professor about had a heart attack when I told her. It's one of the things I liked about working there, but it is also the main reason why WF employees think unions are meaningless and just take your money for dues.MORE

What exactly does Obama's budget do? With 1,000 jobs being lost every hour and a tax system that favors the wealthy, our guests discuss what’s in the new budget and the limits to progressive reform.
David Cay Johnston former New York Times reporter and the author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense, Irasema Garza president of Legal Momentum, and Joel Berg Executive Director of New York City Coalition Against Hunger and the author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? discuss the budget battle.
Chris Bowers of Open Left on the netroots and Obama’s budget. Did they make a difference? And why healthcare will be at the heart of upcoming deliberations.
A report from Warehouse Workers in California organizing for living wages and fair treatment. Finally, the senate race that may at last be coming to an end. Part II of the Uptake’s documentary on Franken v. Coleman.
Thanks to the Uptake for video in tonight’s show.

It's a persistent notion: we're not like them, we're better, we're different.

As you heard on this program, it's the insidious notion from which genocides are made.

It also lies at the heart of what the Rev. James Lawson called the plantation capitalism on which our economy's based. The idea that some are expendable, that some are less human, that we are simply different, is wrapped up in our Afghanistan policy too.

The US, for example, since 9-11, seems to have believed that lives lost here in 9-11 were worth avenging even at a cost many times that of other people's lives. Each year that the combat mission continues, more Afghan civilians are caught in the combat. The US tried a troop surge in 2007 -- the number of US and NATO troops was increased by 45 percent. More civilians were killed than in the previous four years combined. MORE

In his new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani argues that the use of the word genocide is as political as ever and strategic ignorance about the history and current day politics of post-colonial Africa is just as great. Mamdani discusses the crisis in Darfur, the nature of Save Darfur advocacy, and what he sees as a dangerous collusion of colonialism and Anti-Terror rhetoric. Then, just in time for tax season, Robert Gates has reminded us just how much money we spend of foreign wars. Tax resisters, however, say that you don’t have to fund the imperial budget. Andy Heaslet of the Peace Economy Project, Ed Hedemann author of War Tax Resistance: A Guide To Withholding Your Support From the Military, and Robert Weissman editor of the Multinational Monitor and Co-Director of Essential Action discuss what you can do with your money and why it doesn’t have to end up as part of the defense budget.
Finally, part I of the Uptake’s documentary on the Al Franken/Norm Coleman senate race.

Three weeks ago, we sat down with workers and organizers at Republic Windows and Doors who staged a sit down strike in December after their employers literally vanished overnight laying off over 200 workers and denying them severance and vacation pay. Now it appears that the workers may have found a new buyer for the factory who will recognize the union and ensure that all workers "will be rehired at the former rate of pay," making union wages.
The new owners, California-based Serious Materials, produce eco-friendly windows and doors.

GRITtv spoke with Melvin “Ricky” Maclin, Vice President of United Electrical Workers Local 1110 and Raul Flores, a shop steward in the same Union about the difficulties of organizing in today's political climate and the excitement of building a strong shop that fought back against the threat of mass lay-offs. Now they're serving as a new example in a battered economy: that strong unions can bring closed factories, and solid jobs, back.
“We have all been working hard to get our factory re-opened since December 10, 2008. We are so glad this day has come,” said UE Local Vice-President Melvin Maclin.

The end of civilization as we know it? The worst bill ever? That is how the right and much of business have characterized the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). From Newt Gingrich to Mitch McConnell and business leaders including Warren Buffet the argument is being made that EFCA will in fact cost jobs. The 600,000 figure they’ve cited is based on a Chamber of Commerce funded study that uses questionable evidence to make the case that EFCA is bad for the economy.
Today on GRITtv Michael Goodwin, President of the Office and Professional Employees International Union, Irasema Garza Executive Director of Legal Momentum, Chris Kromm Executive Director of the Institute for Southern Studies, and Gene Carroll Director of the Union Leadership Workshop Series at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations discuss what is really driving the fear behind the right to unionize.
So how would EFCA actually affect workers? Gene Bruskin, a former strategist for the United Food and Commercial Workers Smithfield campaign, says that the 16-year battle for union recognition at the North Carolina meat packing plant would have happened a lot sooner if workers not employers had been in charge. Finally we hear from textile workers who make US military uniforms and Unite Here! organizers struggling to form a Union in Puerto Rico.
Thanks to Disorderly Conduct, Brave New Films and American Rights at Work for video in tonight’s show.

According to an AP article that appeared in our local daily this morning, one of the tools the federal government may use in going after Stewart Parnell and other management of the Peanut Corporation of America is the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Ironically, the 1938 law has its roots in an incident of corporate hubris and disregard for public safety not unlike the present salmonella-tainted peanut butter case.
"A spoonful of sugar," Julie Andrews sang in her role as Mary Poppins, "Helps the medicine go down." In the middle of the Great Depression, the S. E. Massengill Company found something much better than sugar. Or so they thought. The disaster unfolds on the flip.MOREblockquote>

Chicken in America: A Lesson In Irony (And Bad Taste).

There are a lot of reasons why chicken today has no taste, but the main one is because someone seems to have decided that chicken must be cheap. And for chicken to be cheap, each chicken must be cheap to raise, which is to say quick and easily-managed. Thus, for starters, you need to get rid of genetic diversity, which is what occurred in the 1950’s with the wide-scale commercial production of chickens. In a recently-published study by William Muir of Purdue University, it was found that more than 50% of the diversity of ancestral breeds has been lost. See Native birds might restock poultry industry's genetic stock, Add to this the fact of commercial chickens being fed a diet of "super-grow" chicken feed, which is typically 70% corn, 20% soy, and 10% other ingredients such as vitamins and minerals, and you have the perfect recipes for chickens that grow quickly but taste like nothing.
It need not be this way, however. And in France, it is not. There, chickens that have earned the designation "Label Rouge" are guaranteed to taste not just better than commercially-raised chickens, but to actually taste like chicken. The label started in the early sixties when French chicken farmers banded together in cooperatives to protect the traditional methods of raising chickens on small farms. To be entitled to the coveted red-sticker that is the Label Rouge, farmers must comply with a long list of strict requirements, including the raising of only slow-growing breeds suited for living outdoors, which is what the chickens do, roaming in the open air for their relatively long lives. For a longer discussion of Label Rouge and Chickens, and other quality-labels prevalent in the European Union, please see Sticker Shock, by Barry James MORE

Green Energy and the Stimulus - the details

The American Recovery and Investment Act contains $61.9 billion in energy-related public spending and industry building tax credits and bond provisions estimated at $20 billion over a ten year period (in reduced tax revenues).
So lets take a look at that $61.9 billion
1. R&D total : $8.2 billion
$8.2 billion has been set aside for research into renewable energy and improving energy efficiency. This will be administered by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).
Of this research funding, $800 million is to be spent on biofuel research, $400 million on geothermal projects, and $50 million on the integration of the grid with information technology. I assume this last provision is related to the "smart grid".
$3.4 billion of the R&D total is fossil fuels related including clean coal (what a waste) ... $1 billion for fossil energy R&D programs, $1.52 billion for carbon capture, $800 million for Clean Coal, and $70 million for geologic carbon sequestration.MORE

Meet the Stans: Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan lies on the Eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, with Iran to its southwest, Afghanistan to its southeast, and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to its north. The country is dominated by the massive, flat Kara Kum desert, which takes up over 80% of the country. The Kopat Dag mountain chain runs along the south of the country, forming the border with Iran and home to the capital city, Ashgabat (whose name, supposedly, means "city of love"). The other major mountain range is the Kugitangtau chain in the southeast, which contains the country's highest elevation, 10,290 ft, at Mt. Ayrybaba. In total land area, the country is slightly larger than California.
According to the CIA world factbook, most (85%) of the population are ethnic Turkmens. Their language, Turkmen, is similar to Turkish (I've read there is a degree of mutual intelligibility, but knowing neither language I can't say for certain). The country also possesses small minorities of Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Russians. Most Russians are Orthodox Christian, and the other inhabitants are mainly Sunni Muslim. The total population is slightly over five million.MORE

Steelworkers, Hip-Hoppers and Tree-Huggers Get It On at 'Green Jobs 2009'!

When you walk into a large and stately Washington, DC hotel lobby and find it teeming with thousands of smiling, buzzing people-half in labor union jackets and ball caps, the other half dressed in 30-something hip-hop causal-you know some special is happening.

This was the lively, energized scene for three cold wintry days this Feb 4-6 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, as nearly 3000 activists and organizers gathered for the "Good Jobs, Green Jobs" National Conference. The gathering was convened by more than 100 organizations, representing every major trade union and every major environmental group in the country, among others.

It's called the "blue-green alliance," the core of which is the United Steel Workers and the Sierra Club, which jointly launched the "Green Jobs" movement nationally at a conference in Pittsburgh, PA a year ago. The turnout this year is triple in size and highly energized by both the victory of President Barack Obama and the looming onset of an economic crisis unmatched in scope since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In addition to the steelworkers, the building trades were well represented, and the green groups spanned a wide range of concerns, for toxics to alternative energy to climate change. Also notable was the participation of a contingent of "high road" corporations rooted in the growing "green economy." Gamesa, a major Spanish firm specializing in wind turbines, and Piper Jaffray, a large paper company focused on recycled paper products, are two examples.

But a critical new dimension was added by Green For All, an organization rooted among inner city youth, and headed up by Van Jones. Jones is the author of "The Green Collar Economy" and an inspirational voice for a rising generation of multinational, multicultural insurgent youth.MORE

Going EV #13: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Aptera electric car (almost!)

How to obtain Medical/Prescription assistance in this financial crisis

Food Democracy Now: 10 Ideas for a Sustainable Future

Unschooling Instead of High Schooling

Solar vs Coal, Land Area Comparison.


Behind The Great Firewall

Historic firsts in labor history

Big business using civil rights imagery to fight EFCA/UPDATR

United Healthcare Workers Holding Our Ground

The Myth of Data Mining

In the aftermath of Hurricane's Katrina and Ike federal money was set aside for the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. What you may not know is that the Bush administration, at the same time, suspended regulations guaranteeing that federal employees receive a minimum wage. According to Kim Bobo, the author of Wage Theft in America, billions of dollars are stolen from workers every year, not only in times of crisis. And there are few incentives for employers to obey the law.
Roughly 2 million American workers are not paid a minimum wage. And some 3 million are mis-classified as independent contractors instead of employees and millions more are illegally denied overtime pay. As the recession deepens and the government pledges to create jobs will they be jobs that pay a livable wage?
GRITtv speaks to Kim Bobo, Cathy Ruckelshaus, Litigation Director for the National Employment Law Project, Terri Gerstein, Deputy Commissioner for Wages and Immigrants at the New York State Department of Labor, and Deborah Axt of Make the Road New York.

President Barack Obama, campaigning for his economic plan in East Peoria, Illinois, visited machinery giant Caterpillar Inc. where he said laid-off workers would be re-hired if Congress approved a sweeping stimulus bill.
The President visited Caterpillar's plant Thursday on the very same day that Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, became the first US college or university to divest from Caterpillar, along with five other companies involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Caterpillar provides the Israeli military with bulldozers that have been used to demolish thousands of Palestinian homes and orchards and build settlements and roads, and what Israelis call a Security Fence, but Palestinians call the apartheid Wall.
For years, international activists have called for a boycott of Caterpillar products, which include heavy equipment but also jackets and shoes. And one US family has brought a suit against the company charging them with complicity in human rights crimes. On March 16, 2003, US activist Rachel Corrie was crushed under bulldozer supplied by Caterpillar, as she tried to block its path towards a Palestinian home in Gaza...Rachel's father Craig Corrie joined us earlier today with this message to the president:

Even as congress denies billions in assistance to states, there is little if any talk of cutting US defense spending. Since the end of the Second World War, when Dwight Eisenhower warned of the ever expanding military industrial complex, military spending has been linked to the nation's economic well-being. In times of prosperity and economic distress, defense spending is pushed as economic stimulus. And it's a bipartisan affliction. But who benefits and what is their interest in maintaining a war time economy?
On GRITtv Pratap Chatterjee, the author of Halliburton's Army and Managing Editor of Corpwatch, Eugene Jarecki, documentary filmmaker and director of the acclaimed Why We Fight, and Scott Ritter the author of Target Iran examine the business of war and why stimulus and star wars are so hard to separate.

Indeed, it was Reuther's UAW that established the détente between organized labor and capitalists that engendered -- or at least facilitated -- the unprecedented post-war gains in both productivity and household income. By settling the 1950 Big Three contract, which became known as the "Treaty of Detroit," the UAW exacted gains for its members that allowed them to move firmly into a new middle class, with retirement and health security as the cornerstones of the new prosperity. In exchange, big business obtained a sense of relief, as the Treaty of Detroit represented a new, thoroughly American unionist approach to collective bargaining that eschewed the Marxist demand for ownership of the means of production. The right wing extremists who would begin their takeover of the Republican Party twenty years later excoriated the deal as creeping socialism, and Communists pilloried Reuther and the UAW as capitalist lackeys and sellouts. But as the radicals fumed, the nation prospered, and the hardworking men and women of the UAW -- and subsequently, the rest of blue-collar America, both union and non-union -- reaped the benefits of a mature labor peace that saw workers get their piece of the capitalist pie.
There's no question that other unions played a role in the establishment of the postwar peace, but the UAW played the leading role -- both because it bargained with America's biggest corporations, and because of Walter Reuther's charisma and ideological leadership. As a former socialist who spent a couple years in the Soviet Union, Reuther recognized the watershed importance of a labor union at the height of its powers, in the most critical industry in the nation, choosing to broker a mutually advantageous master agreement rather than pressing for gains that might kill the goose who laid the golden eggs. It's true that the building trades, among others, had been negotiating agreements that recognized the permanency of capitalism for decades prior to the Treaty of Detroit, but the leadership of the construction unions had always been fundamentally accepting of the idea of wage labor. Reuther and the UAW came out of a far more radical milieu, and their decision to embrace a sort of American social democracy -- to create an American social contract -- had ripple effects that essentially killed the Marxist left in America. But it also played a massive role in building a broad middle class that enjoyed real security, that didn't survive at the tender mercies of their employers. That was something new in American life, and it persisted for thirty years, give or take.

During the Reuther years, the UAW also used its resources to incubate every up-and-coming liberal movement in America. It was the UAW that funded the great 1963 March on Washington and provided the first serious financial backing for César Chávez's fledgling farm workers union. The union took a lively interest in the birth of a student movement in the early '60s, providing its conference center in Port Huron, Mich., to a group called Students for a Democratic Society when the group wanted to draft and debate its manifesto. Later that decade, the union provided resources to help the National Organization for Women get off the ground and helped fund the first Earth Day. And for decades after Reuther's death in a 1970 plane crash, the UAW was among the foremost advocates of national health care -- a policy that, had it been enacted, would have saved the Big Three tens of billions of dollars in health insurance expenses, but which the Big Three themselves were until recently too ideologically hidebound to support.

Narrow? Parochial? The UAW not only built the American middle class but helped engender every movement at the center of American liberalism today -- which is one reason that conservatives have always held the union in particular disdain.

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Deb already pointed out that the average line worker makes only about $28 an hour (or $56,000 per year). I don't think many people would try to argue that $56,000 is too much for a family with a couple of kids, a mortgage, and the usual needs of a typical American family. Bill Kav noted:

Several Senators have used a figure of $73 per hour to describe UAW labor rates. The actual UAW rates vary, from $14 per hour for new workers at the Big Three to $33 per hour for skilled trades workers. The Republican $73 per hour figure includes not only adding in benefits, but also adding a hefty additional total of ALL current retirees benefits from contracts of years gone by, divided by the number of current workers (a much smaller workforce). Somehow, this figure made it seem as if current workers were rolling in clover at a huge hourly salary— which none of them are actually drawing.

In stark contrast:

[E]xecutives have been redistributing shareholder wealth to themselves -- while the company headed toward a cliff -- and the executive-friendly board allowed them to do it.

For example, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner's 2007 pay ($14 million) breaks down to $7,000 per hour (based on a 2000-hour year). Yes, you read that correctly -- and that was a year that GM had $38 billion in losses.

If the average autoworker makes $28 per hour, then Mr. Wagoner's hourly pay could have instead paid 250 average GM workers -- people directly involved in making products that make money for GM shareholders.

Ford CEO Alan Mulally's 2007 pay was $21 million, which amounts to $10,500 per hour. A year earlier, Ford had record losses of $12 billion. Mr. Mulally's hourly pay could have instead paid 375 average Ford workers.

It doesn't stop with CEOs. Four of Ford's vice presidents were paid $39 million in 2007, an average of $9.75 million each or $4,875 per hour. The total hourly pay of all four execs combined could have instead paid 696 average autoworkers.

I don't have access to compensation data for the dozens -- or hundreds -- of other execs at GM and Ford... (BN-Pol)

But wait! There's more:MORE

1. “Unions are why all the jobs left the United States.”
No, not by a long shot. Many jobs evaporated as automation was introduced on a larger scale. Other jobs were outsourced not because of union wages, but because of United States wages; the option to relocate to nonunion areas of the United States wasn’t taken. Corporate greed, a tax code that provides preferential treatment for foreign earnings, the lack of a national healthcare system, desire to avoid environmental laws, avoidance of health and safety laws, helpful dictatorships (subsidized by the U.S., and assisted by the U.S. military) to torture and assassinate labor organizers, and federal programs designed to encourage foreign investment in the form of offshoring had/have far more of an impact than union wages (especially considering the precipitous decline in union membership). White-collar jobs in IT and financial services are outsourced, and those aren’t usually union jobs. It should also bear mention that the United States isn’t the only country that is hemmoraging jobs—the corporate-led race to the bottom is global.

2.“Unions raise the cost of goods and services.”
Because price gouging, market manipulation, monopolies, mergers and acquisitions couldn’t have anything to do with it. Besides, the price of clothing, shoes, food, etc. have all plummeted with outsourcing, right? (Right? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) And speaking of prices, what is the true cost of those “low, low prices”, hmm? Who is carrying the freight for corporations that don’t provide health insurance? What is the real cost of the impoverishment of communities? And…..why are those prices artificially low to begin with? Those “low prices” are paid for by the blood of women of color.

3.“Unions strike all the time.”
Not even close. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates there were 21 work stoppages (BLS does not differentiate between strikes and lockouts) in the U.S. in 2007. Less than 1/10th of one percent of work time is lost to strikes with employers involving 1,000 or more workers; in 98% of all collective bargaining negotiations, agreements are reached without a strike. Despite the rarity of strikes, media coverage of them dominates labor news. The days of newspapers having a “labor beat” are long gone (coinciding with newspapers becoming a nonunion environment).

4.“Unions slow productivity; union workers are goldbrickers.”
Actually, unionized environments in various industries are more productive. Unionized construction workers are more productive.

5.“Unions protect deadbeats; incompetant union workers can’t be fired.”
No union contract forbids an employer from firing a worker who is drunk, high, lazy, incompetant, etc. The union insures that such firings are for ‘just cause’, and not because of discriminatory purposes (too old, too black, too lesbian, speaks Spanish to co-workers, etc.) or because the employer is having a bad day. Union members should be aware of their Weingarten rights.

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