FedEx could cancel contracts for $10 billion in American-made planes if Congress makes it easier for unions to organize the delivery giant’s workers.
In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the Memphis-based company disclosed that purchases of Boeing 777s are contingent on FedEx Express’ continued coverage by the National Railway Labor Act.
The disclosure serves as a warning shot to lawmakers seeking to put FedEx Express workers under the National Labor Relations Act, a move seen as helping the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
[ . . . ]
Under the Railway Labor Act, a union like the Teamsters would have to organize FedEx Express employees nationally, rather than in local bargaining units. Drivers for FedEx’s chief domestic competitor, UPS, are largely represented by the Teamsters, but FedEx has fended off organizing attempts for years.
Category: Politics Page 19 of 73
Much longer piece coming on Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article about the mess we’re in, but I had to share this as soon as I read it:
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
Dead on.
So you’ve seen the leaked financial plan from Treasury? Not good:
The Treasury Department is expected to unveil early next week its long-delayed plan to buy as much as $1 trillion in troubled mortgages and related assets from financial institutions, according to people close to the talks.
The plan is likely to offer generous subsidies, in the form of low-interest loans, to coax investors to form partnerships with the government to buy toxic assets from banks.
To help protect taxpayers, who would pay for the bulk of the purchases, the plan calls for auctioning assets to the highest bidders.
Look at that again. To “protect” the taxpayer, they’re going to try to make sure that the highest possible price is paid for these assets. But look at the paragraph before that for how that purchase price is actually paid – with generous subsidies (i.e., taxpayer money). Clever, no? No. Paul Krugman:
To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.
But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.
Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard.
Krugman too shrill for you? Let’s go to the folks at Calculated Risk:
With almost no skin in the game, these investors can pay a higher than market price for the toxic assets (since there is little downside risk). This amounts to a direct subsidy from the taxpayers to the banks.
And at Naked Capitalism:
So presumably, the point of a competitive process (assuming enough parties show up to produce that result at any particular auction) is to elicit a high enough price that it might reach the bank’s reserve, which would be the value on the bank’s books now.
And notice the utter dishonesty: a competitive bidding process will protect taxpayers. Huh? A competitive bidding process will elicit a higher price which is BAD for taxpayers!
Dear God, the Administration really thinks the public is full of idiots. But there are so many components to the program, and a lot of moving parts in each, they no doubt expect everyone’s eyes to glaze over.
Now watch the noise machine go into full crisis mode, telling us that ThisIsTheONLYWAY.
Marshall writes:
What is so damaging about this isn’t the money — which is almost trivially small compared to the many hundreds of billions we’ve already committed. The problem is what appears to be the president’s mortifying impotence in the face of bankers and financiers who created the problem. The president speaks and acts for the federal government, which is to say, the American people, who have mobilized more than a trillion dollars and all powers of the state to repair the damage emerging out of the financial sector. And with all that, he’s jacked up on a employment agreement between a company the government now owns and derivatives traders who sank the world economy and may quite likely be looking at criminal charges for their activities in the not too distant future?
Anyone can look at that and see that the equation of power and accountability is all screwed up.
Quite.  And really, I hope you’ll click over and read the whole thing. It nails the current state of affairs. Here’s the end:
Whether Geithner and Summers are too close to the people on Wall Street, either through interest or affinity, is an interesting and possibly important question. But fundamentally Obama needs to start showing that he’s in charge, that he’s operating as the American people’s advocate and that he has the power to do it — which these stories of getting jacked up by some Gordon Gecko wannabes in London just terribly undermines. But to do that, to show that, it has to be true. And that might require some real changes in policy and possibly in personnel too.
Vivian Paige, in the context of some shameful personal attacks on a candidate for Lieutenant Governor, says:
The people have been lulled – by their own inaction – into a sense that politics is dirty and that’s just the way it is. But it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. If we wanted to, we could change the way politics is done. But far too many are “too busy†to get involved, the result being the kind of attacks that Pat Edmonson and others experience, attacks that divert the candidate’s attention away from the real issues of jobs, healthcare, education and others.
People like to blame the candidates for the state of politics, but the candidates do it for a reason – it works with voters. And it takes the focus away from things that are hard: jobs, healthcare, education; and onto things that are easy: playground insults and identity politics.  Now, as a fan of the occasional playground insult, I’m hardly hoping for some idealized world of policy debates (although if it could keep me from ever having to endure another pearl-clutching kabuki dance about how shocked and offended a Virginian was by language, all the while gliding over the ugliness of their ideas, I might sign up). Rather, I’d like us all to be a little more conscious of our own tolerance for the form-over-substance approach to politics.
The hits keep on coming:
Just when you thought it was impossible to find more proof of the bungling of the bailout … Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), chairman of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, announced this morning that his panel had found 13 of the top 23 recipients of TARP owing the government $220 million in back taxes.
Making matters worse was the fact that any company getting TARP aid had to certify to the Treasury Department that they didn’t owe back taxes before getting their share of the bailout, as Lewis explained. It appears that Treasury took the bailed-out businesses at their word rather than asking to actually see their tax records.
This was a foul-up under Bush/Paulson, but the Obama Administration needs to turn around and look at those posters that put them there.  They need to take that CHANGE a bit more seriously, or they’re going to take it on the chin. To be clear, they’re not approaching the financial sector in any fundamentally different way than did the Bush and Clinton Administrations, so it would be unfair to say that they’re any worse than what came before. But that’s not the measure they’ve set for themselves, nor is it one that anyone should be willing to let them skate on.
I have so little good to say about the UK’s Labour Party these days that I might as well get in a compliment where I can. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has, against all reasonable expectations, struck a blow for common sense and decency:
Gordon Brown today rejected controversial proposals from the chief medical officer to establish a minimum price for alcohol, which would double the price of many beers and spirits.
The prime minister said that he would protect the interests of the “sensible majority of moderate drinkers” when responding to proposals from Sir Liam Donaldson for a minimum charge of 50p per unit of alcohol to be imposed on beer and wine.
And Scotland, well, how do you like that devolution now?
The Scottish government is planning to introduce minimum prices for alcohol and these could come into force by the end of the year. It would make Scotland the first country in Europe to introduce minimum pricing, which would be accompanied by a ban on certain drinks promotions.
Cheers.
Mike over at Blueweeds says what ought to be said:
I have been trying to stay away from the increasingly odd temper tantrums promoted by the MacAuliffe “netroots” supporters over at Blue Commonwealth and  Blue Virginia. There is a level of self importance which I do not understand, which is bad for the party, and which makes folks like myself, whom I would describe as true neutral grassroots Democrats who have zero interest in being employed by any campaign, want to do anything other than support the candidate jammed at me by the self-described progressive netroots bloggers.
This sort of childishness has happened every cycle since the Miller-Webb primary, and every time, it does a little more damage. If you’re part of it, stop it. If you’re in the audience, get up and leave. And for fuck’s sake, Virginia Democrats, stop rewarding it.
Josh Marshall’s analysis here gets at why the situation with AIG bonuses is appalling:
We’re collectively taking our country’s future in our hands, spending vast sums of money to keep these companies from suffering the consequences of their own folly and (in many cases) criminality. And in return we’re receiving cavalier dictates about pay-outs and bonuses from executives who by any reasonable measure work for us — dictates we promptly accede to. There’s a beggars can’t be choosers problem there. And the disconnect is so mighty that it fuels the impression that the whole enterprise is not what it seems, not what we’ve been told, that in addition to picking up the tab we’re being played for fools.
Obviously, AIG and its ilk can’t be shamed, and aren’t at all worried about public perception or pressure. You know who should be more worried than they seem to be? The Obama Administration.  Their willingness to eat the shit sandwiches AIG keeps feeding them is nauseating.
Police detained the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, at his house in Lahore early Sunday morning hours before his address to a planned demonstration here, and arrested supporters protesting outside his home.