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Down with Tyranny:

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From Wonkette commenter Shanonigan:

Victory for Workers in KY Bourbon Strike

This happened three weeks ago, but it's still important because union solidarity and determination killed the devastating pro-owner contract provision that has destroyed unions nationwide for the last 40 years:  the two-tier contract.

From the Courier:

The Four Roses strike ended Friday afternoon (Sept. 21) after the unions representing striking workers and the bourbon maker reached a tentative agreement.

SNIP

"We're all just excited. It's a good day for Four Roses and it's a good day for workers," said Jeff Royalty, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 10d.

SNIP

The workers left the job Sept. 7 and had picketed outside both locations until Friday afternoon, when the parties emerged from a day-long bargaining session.

A major issue for the unions was a company proposal to change the sick leave policy for incoming employees, providing workers 10 sick days per year but prohibiting them from carrying them over to the next year or bank them, as current employers can.

Instead, the new hires would have been eligible for short-term disability. The unions balked at what they described as a two-tier package for benefits that treats current workers differently from those hired later.    

In the end, Royalty said, the parties agreed that workers would get the option to keep the current sick leave policy or sign up for short-term disability. Both new workers hired in and those now on the payroll can choose either program, he said.

"We stood our ground on two tier," Royalty said, adding that the company was receptive to reaching a compromise.

From an op-ed the week before by union organizer Richard Becker:

 Production work came to a halt at the Four Roses Distillery in Lawrenceburg on Sept. 7 and at the company’s bottling facility in Nelson County. The workers, who are represented by three different unions, have been in prolonged and fractious negotiations with the company for several weeks. After the company issued its “last, best, and final offer,” the workers nearly-unanimously rejected it and voted to go on strike. 

But this is no ordinary strike. What’s happening at Four Roses has implications for both the broader labor movement, as well as future generations of American workers.

Kirin Brewery Company, the parent company of Four Roses, has proposed a partial “two-tier” contract, in which future workers will have less paid time off than current workers. Two-tier union contracts have become increasingly common over the past several decades, but have only recently begun to capture the public’s attention. If you’ve followed the brewing unrest at UPS over their contract, you may have already heard of the concept. Essentially, a two-tier contract creates a second level of benefits and/or wages for workers hired after the effective date of the contract, while wages and benefits for current workers remain generally the same. 

Background: Union workers strike at Four Roses distillery just before bourbon fest

 

Obviously, companies seek to implement such systems in order to cut labor costs over the long term. And the evil genius of them is that their likelihood of passing in a vote by the workers is quite high because in theory, current workers have nothing to lose from such a setup. That’s what makes these workers’ resistance to the company’s proposal so uniquely selfless. These workers understand that two-tier contracts are potentially devastating for the survival of a vibrant American labor movement. 

These types of contracts create a divided workplace atmosphere. To give a hypothetical example, two workers on an assembly line working side by side and doing the same job, may have wildly different rates of pay, with the worker who’s been at the company three years making $25/hour with possible top-out pay of $40/hour over the course of his career, while the newer worker makes $17/hr with a maximum top-out pay of $30/hour by the time he retires. 

The story around this strike goes further than two-tier contracts, though. Generally, unions have come to expect companies to demand concessions during difficult times in the industry. But right now, the bourbon industry, and Four Roses in particular, is booming. Global demand for Kentucky’s signature spirit and profits for bourbon manufacturers are through the roof, and Four Roses has just completed a multi-million dollar expansion of their production facility. That leaves only one explanation for why Four Roses is offering its workers the worst contract since Prohibition: corporate greed. 

Just as President Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers nearly 40 years ago set off a new era of anti-union sentiment among American businesses, so too has Gov. Bevin’s relentless assault on workers’ rights – particularly passage of the so-called “Right to Work” law – unleashed a wave of anti-worker attacks by Kentucky employers. Emboldened by a government that tells them that, in the words of Gordon Gecko, “greed is good,” Four Roses and other employers across the commonwealth are waging a campaign of attrition on workers both union, and non-union. And at the end of the day, it won’t just be union workers who suffer. 

The whole country should be watching this strike. How the two sides end this dispute will likely help drive the next phase of negotiations at UPS and other companies locked in similar conflict. 

As Kentucky celebrates the Bourbon Heritage Festival this week, all Kentuckians should unite in supporting the workers putting it all on the line to ensure a brighter future for all workers.

First, Let's Kill All the Bosses

This weekend I saw an NBC promo that featured some CNBC analyst purporting to advise people who are having problems with their boss.

Short version: stop forcing your boss to "explain your behavior to other people."

Fact: If your boss is spending even five seconds "explaining your behavior to other people," then you do indeed have a big problem.  Your big problem is that your boss is an asshole.

Your boss is an asshole because your boss is undermining and sabotaging you by publicly disparaging your skills and professionalism.

More broadly, your boss is an asshole because 45 years ago repug/conservative capitalism began to flip the New Deal system of powerful labor/worker that prevented owners and bosses from abusing workers to one that allows employers to treat employees as serfs without rights.

It's Labor Fucking Day, people. Let's stop giving bosses power.  Let's stop putting employers in charge. Let's stop pretending owners are "job creators."

If every boss, employer, owner disappeared tomorrow, the work - the actual work of keeping the economy humming - the work would continue without a hiccup.

Workers create jobs. Workers build and run the economy.  Workers are irreplaceable.

What would a worker-centered economy look like?  Let's start with what we lost 45 years ago and build on that.

• Criminalize non-worker interference with organizing and collective bargaining. Every workplace that votes to unionize gets a union. Every unionized workplace requires collective bargaining.
• Repeal all pro-rentier, anti-worker legislation, regulations and tax breaks.
• Permanently bar from all government contracts, tax breaks and subsidies all corporations that take anti-worker actions (not just layoffs and off-shoring but also a worker-management pay ratio of more than 50 to 1). 
• Ban all future and reverse all previous mergers/acquisitions that give any entity control of more than five percent of any economic sector. Criminalize anti-trust behavior.
• Minimum wage of $25 per hour, indexed to inflation.
• Social Security equal to minimum wage, and available at age 55.
• Medicare for All or Single Payer medical insurance.
• Universal Child Care.
• Construct 100 million new units of affordable housing.
• Build mass transportation that gets every worker to their workplace.  

This is fun!  Let your imagination run wild!  No pro-worker policy or program is too much!

Hands Off Social Security, Motherfuckers

Killing Social Security is the repug holy grail.  Once the social program that allows workers disabled by destructive corporations and exhausted by decades of unpaid overtime to retire with dignity is dead, then the billionaires can force everyone who is not filthy rich to work literally to death without relief, and the New Gilded Age will be permanent.

Ddown with Tyranny:

The Resistance: Seeds Coming Up

From Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

Finally, as a budding gardener pinning for spring up here in the tundra, I love this!

When I Say Privatizaation Kills, I Mean That Literally

Via Zandar:

Kiera Feldman at ProPublica takes a long look at the most dangerous job in the Big Apple: working the private garbage trucks that roam the city in the darkness.

SNIP

 In New York City overall, private sanitation trucks killed seven people in 2017. By contrast, city municipal sanitation trucks haven’t caused a fatality since 2014. SNIP

$80 bucks a shift for 18 hours and no benefits whatsoever, paid cash off the books and you have to buy your own uniform and safety gear, if you get paid at all.  That's where "cheaper, private carting" gets you in NYC these days.  And that's just the start of this piece.

Less than $5 an hour.  That's a literal crime: one-third of New York's mandated minimum wage.  Those workers should be getting 10 times that much. The owners of this criminal enterprise - and the city officials and employees who authorized the contract - get more than that.

The Resistance: Solidarity

from Down With Tyranny:

And Repugs Want To Take It Away

Blatantly stolen from Down With Tyranny:



So with every bite of hot dog and sip of beer, thank those commie union agitators for:

The Weekend
The 40-hour Week
Safe Workplaces
Lunch Breaks
Overtime Pay
Minimum Wage
Workers' Compensation
Paid Vacations
Sick Days
Pensions

Unity, Not Compromise

Conservatives used to sneer at liberal "open-mindedness" by pointing out that an open mind lets your brains fall out.  

They were wrong.  But now I say that a too-open tent that lets your enemies in is suicidal.

People who fought for the other candidate in the Democratic presidential primary are not our enemy. 

 

People who want to deny our basic human rights are our enemy.

• People who think it's OK for cops to shoot and kill unarmed black people with impunity are not our allies.
• People who think women are mindless wombs who must be forced to give birth are not our allies.
• People who think it's OK to treat non-cis, non-straight people like criminals or sub-humans are not our allies.
• People who think it's OK to discriminate against somebody else's religion but demand special favors for their own are not our allies.
• People who think workers are drones who don't deserve a living wage or a union are not our allies.
• People who descended from immigrants but think all other immigrants should be deported are not our allies.
• People who think torture works are not our allies.
• People who support the death penalty are not our allies.
• People who think climate change is real but we need fossil fuels so there's nothing we can do about it are not our allies.
• People who think for-profit corporations can operate public services like schools and water and parks better than government can are not our allies.
• People who think rich people need more money are not our allies.
• People who think poor people are lazy, criminal drug addicts are not our allies.
• People who think health care is a privilege reserved for those who can afford it are not our allies.
• People who think the War on Drugs is a great idea are not our allies.
• People who think marijuana is worse than heroin but alcohol is not are not our allies.
• People who think war is the answer are not our allies. 
• People who think that some people shouldn't be allowed to vote are not our allies.

Open the Democratic tent to everyone who shares ALL our values.  And no one else.

Political Animal:

The issues that suddenly divide us? Apparently whether we, as a party, will be unyielding in a woman’s right to choose. Taking a page out of the right’s playbook, Jane Sanders called fighting for that right “political correctness.” I see it as core and just as central to who we are as a party as the bullet points above. We’re apparently arguing over whether economic equality would keep immigrant families from being torn apart by immigration authorities (it wouldn’t), or keep African Americans from being shot in the streets and killed in jail cells (it wouldn’t), or keep Donald Trump from grabbing a woman’s pussy (it hasn’t).

From there Markos discusses where he sees the current divide.

It is interesting to me that these are sometimes referred to as “cultural issues.” But if you are a woman whose economic survival is threatened by a pregnancy, I’m sure that the right to chose can’t simply be relegated to a cultural phenomenon. Same would be true if your family’s survival depends of what an ICE officer decides to do with his time, or if you are a black man in the middle of getting pulled over by a police officer. In all of those instances, these are life and death matters. That is why women and people of color react so strongly to being told that speaking up about them is divisive. It is actually the other sides trampling of their lives that is divisive. We need to be clear about that.

A lot of this discussion was reignited when Bernie Sanders chose to endorse a Democratic candidate who was openly anti-choice. I tend to think about that this way: would I vote for an anti-choice Democrat if the only alternative was the mini-me Trump that is my current representative? You betcha I would! That is what politics is often about in a two-party system.

On the other hand, this morning I read an article from Politico about why the Christian right is so thrilled with Donald Trump’s presidency and have become the one constituency he can rely on. It is all based on what we call “cultural issues” – and that is overwhelmingly about the steps this president has taken (and promised to take) to strip women of their right to chose. So let’s be honest…these are the battles we face right now. Any backing off from fighting them will destroy decades of progress that our predecessors fought for so valiantly.

The challenge Democrats have always faced can be summed up with questions like this:

• Are men prepared to fight for a woman’s right to chose?
• Are white people prepared to fight against racism?
• Are citizens prepared to fight for those who are undocumented?
• Are white collar workers prepared to fight for unions?
• Are the wealthy prepared to fight for the middle class?
• Are those who have good health insurance through their employer prepared to fight for those who don’t?
• Are members of the upper and middle class prepared to fight for those in poverty?
• Are the middle-aged prepared to fight for seniors?
• Are seniors prepared to fight for young people?

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point.

Whenever the answer to one of those questions is “no,” or when the message is sent either directly or indirectly that “my issue is more important than yours,” the divide widens. That is what makes the challenge more difficult for Democrats than Republicans. We can’t afford to play a zero-sum game. We have to care about people who aren’t like us because that is the definition of what “liberal” means.

Marcos ends his piece with a powerful quote from Australian Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson.

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.

But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

The over-arching goal of liberalism is that “your liberation is bound up with mine.” That is what it means to form a coalition. That was Bernice Johnson Reagon’s message way back in 1981 and it is what Rev. William Barber is talking about when it comes to “fusion politics.” It is the only path forward for Democrats.

The Orange Loser's Real Accomplishments

Down with Tyranny has them:

1- Protecting Wall Street profits that siphon billions of dollars from retirement savers. 

SNIP

2- Letting employers hide fatal injuries that happen on their watch. 

SNIP

3- Allowing potentially billions of taxpayer dollars to go to private contractors who violate health and safety protections or fail to pay workers. 

SNIP

4- Undermining important regulations that protect workers and consumers.

SNIP

5- Allowing employers to penalize employees who don’t want to reveal their private medical information. 

SNIP

6- Gutting the strength of labor organizing by forcing unions to represent and protect non-dues-paying workers. 

SNIP

7- Cutting pay for construction workers on federally funded infrastructure projects. 

SNIP

8- Putting the brakes on overtime pay for the middle class. 

SNIP

9- Slashing the budget for the Department of Labor, hindering its ability to enforce wage theft and worker safety laws or provide job training programs. 

SNIP

10- Declining to raise the minimum wage and lift pay for low-wage workers. 

SNIP

Read the whole thing for the infuriating details.

How Did KY Repugs Fuck You Over This Year?

 Every anti-worker, pro-rich, corporatist, freakazoid, homophobic, misogynistic, unconstitutional way they could.

Tom Loftus at the Courier:

Charter schools
House Bill 520 will allow publicly funded charter schools to operate in Kentucky beginning next school year, although none are expected to begin operation until 2018-19. (All students who need extra help because of disability or poverty will be shunted into unfunded public schools.)

Education reform
Senate Bill 1 is a sweeping measure streamlining how students are taught and tested and how teachers are evaluated. It will give local schools more control over teacher evaluations and create a new way for intervening in low-performing schools that gives more authority to local school districts. (There is no end to the mischief this law allows: creationism, bibble inerrancy, forcing trans students to piss and shit themselves in class, encouraging students to harass and attack non-straight, muslim and/or immigrant students ... the horrors are endless.)

Right-to-work
House Bill 1 prohibits membership in a labor union or payment of union dues as a condition of employment. (No, this law takes away the last protections workers have from wage-stealing employers.)

Prevailing wage repeal: House Bill 3 repeals a law that requires a regional prevailing wage rate be paid as a minimum for workers building public schools and other state or local public buildings. (Back to minimum wage, you workers!  Thanks to the above, your union is dead.)

Abortion: House Bill 2 requires doctors to display and describe the details of an ultrasound to a woman prior to an abortion procedure. Women can decline to look at the ultrasound image or listen to the fetal heartbeat if they choose. (This law mandates doctors commit object rape on their own patients.)

Abortion: Senate Bill 5 bans abortion beginning with the 20th week of a pregnancy. The prohibition does not apply when an abortion is needed to save the life or prevent serious risk of permanent bodily harm to the mother.

Planned Parenthood funding: Senate Bill 8 puts Planned Parenthood at the end of the line behind other health care providers for getting any federal family planning funds. (Are you a minimum-wage worker who needs a mammogram or a pap smear? Tough shit. Get back to work before your cancer metastasizes.)

Medical malpractice:  Senate Bill 4 will require that a panel of doctors review malpractice complaints before the complaint goes to court.  (Did your stoned-on-oxy surgeon cut off the wrong let?  Tough shit.  His doctor buddies will protect him from your lawsuit.)

And more.

Unfortunately, minimum wage hikes also help employers

When employers whine that they can't find qualified workers, what they really mean is that they can't find qualified workers stupid enough to accept slave wages.

But one ranch in California figured it out.

Mother Jones:

The LA Times reports that the biggest garlic producer in the country has adopted an intriguing new strategy:

Christopher Ranch, which grows garlic on 5,000 acres in Gilroy, Calif., announced recently that it would hike pay for farmworkers from $11 an hour to $13 hour this year, or 18%, and then to $15 in 2018. At the end of last year, the farm was short 50 workers needed to help peel, package and roast garlic. Within two weeks of upping wages in January, applications flooded in. Now the company has a wait-list 150 people long.

 “I knew it would help a little bit, but I had no idea that it would solve our labor problem,” Christopher said. He said the farm has been trying, without success, to draw new workers since 2014. Human resources frantically advertised open farm-labor positions, posting help-wanted ads online and urging employees to ply their networks for potential recruits. Nothing came of it. 

You get what you pay for, motherfuckers.

 

Bevin Lied to Justify Right to Slave Labor

Just like his hero. Repugs can never tell the truth about the anti-worker, anti-family, racist, sexist, greedhead and un-American policies they are shoving down our throats, because if they did, they'd never win another election.

From the Herald:

Automaker Volvo and Swedish officials dispute Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s recent claim that Volvo refused to consider locating a production plant in Kentucky in 2015 because the state did not have a so-called “right-to-work” law at the time.

Insider Louisville reported Friday that a spokeswoman for the Embassy of Sweden denied Bevin’s claim that Ambassador Bjorn Lyrvall told the governor that Volvo would have set up shop in Kentucky if it had a law that allows employees to work in unionized workplaces without paying union dues. Also, Volvo Car USA denied that a right-to-work law was a requirement as it searched for locations.

“I sat next to the ambassador from Sweden a couple of weeks ago who told me Volvo wanted to be here,” Bevin said during his State of the Commonwealth Address. “Volvo could have been here, would have been here, had we been serious about passing right to work, had we shown any interest in them as a company with any real significance, they would have been here. Those are the kind of companies that want to see this.”

In a response to Insider Louisville, the ambassador’s spokeswoman, Monica Enqvist, said “there must be some kind of misunderstanding with regard to what the Ambassador said during his talk with Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky.”

Insider Louisville also reported that Volvo Car USA replied to a tweet about Bevin’s comments by saying “We have never confirmed which locations we considered, but a ‘right to work’ bill was not a requirement.”

Volvo broke ground on a factory in Berkeley County, South Carolina on Sept. 25, 2015. Production of the Volvo S60 is expected to begin there in late 2018. The company must invest $600 million and create 2,000 jobs by Dec. 31, 2023, in order to get more than $200 million in incentives from the state and county, according to The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C.

 

Bevin’s office did not respond to a request for comment, according to Insider Louisville.

Kentucky’s Republican-led General Assembly approved a “right-to-work” law last month over the loud protests of union workers. Bevin immediately signed it into law.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article133826479.html#storylink=cpy

The Resistance: Solidarity

Scott Walker used this trick in Wisconsin six years ago, and it's not working any more.  Cops and firefighters know they can't trust elected repugs any more, and their only hope of survival is solidarity.

Zandar:

Cops and firefighters across America voted for the Trump and the Party of Law And Order® and all that, and they expect Republicans to treat them well.  The problem with that is cops and firefighters are still government employees with strong public sector unions, pensions, and benefits, and Republicans will not let those remain.  Iowa is a good example of this, where first responders are finding out the hard way that they voted themselves into oblivion.

.In the highly contentious battle to extinguish public worker rights, Iowa Republicans have attempted a divide-and-conquer approach to pit unions against each other. Their legislation splits public workers into two groups, one that’s “public safety workers,” and one that isn’t. The idea was to strip away nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public employees, but keep most of it for police and firefighters, who are politically more difficult to go after.

It didn’t work.

Hundreds of helmeted firefighters have flooded the Statehouse in the last week and police officers and sheriffs have lined up at committee hearings to speak against it. They don’t trust that this carve-out for their jobs will last long, nor do many of them feel it’s appropriate to deny the bargaining rights they have to fellow workers who have also had them for over 40 years.

Yes, working class white, repugs are fucking you with a barbed dildo

But they're really sticking it to the niggers and the spics and the ragheads, and making liberals cry, so it's all worth it, right?

Charlie Pierce:

All the bustle and noise has been on the Senate side for a couple of weeks, what with the brawl over nominations at all. But the real mischief is going on over in the House of Representatives. That's where all those white working people who have had major publications and networks buying them cookies for the past two months are getting sold down the river in one quick hurry. As I think I've said before, I empathize, but I do not sympathize. Not a lick.

They're going to be the ones that suffer when regulations get rolled back. It's their water and air that is going to get fouled when the regulations against mountaintop mining get eviscerated, which was debated on the House floor just Wednesday afternoon. It's their streams that will run green and purple. It's their landscapes that will get gouged and ruined.

SNIP

But the real whopper came in a press conference in the Rayburn building in which Congressman Steve King and Congressman Joe Wilson—now there's a pair to draw to—announced that they would be filing a bill to enact a national right-to-work law. Of course, this has been a corporate and conservative dream shot ever since the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935.

Needless to say, the enactment of this kind of law—which experience shows lowers wages precipitously, and which severely drains the ability of unions to lobby for themselves—would not do much for the president*'s image as a hero of the working class.

The Rich Stole Your Job, Too

Globalization done right could have made us more rather than less economically secure.  But the rich obscenities had to grab every last penny they could, everyone else, the nation and the world be damned.

Erik Loomis:

And let me reiterate, there is no such thing as market forces. These are not immutable laws like gravity. These are all a series of decisions made by humans. They have the option to make other decisions. They do not do so. But we should not naturalize this. We could have had a system of globalization that sought to share economic benefits equally. But because the process was controlled by the rich for the benefit of the rich (and let’s remember that the core reason for globalization in the last 50 years is CEOs and shareholders seeking to bust unions and escape environmental protection by moving overseas), that never happened. Today, the capitalists have naturalized the process to deflect how they control all of it. This is basically believed not only on the right and by elites in both parties but also by those liberal writers who believe that Paul Theroux is history’s greatest monster for pointing out the real costs of this to Americans. We have a long ways to go. Dean Baker is doing a lot of the work to help give us the tools to push back against this orthodoxy.

CEO: Nothing Raises Profits like Raising the Minimum Wage

Nothing creates jobs like raising the minimum wage, either.

Weird how liberal policies promoted and implemented by Democratic officials always help people.  Yet repugs always oppose them.

Crooks and Liars:

The CEO of a popular fast food chain said this week that he was "stunned" to see profits soar each time California passed minimum wage increases.

In an interview with KQED on Tuesday, Wetzel’s Pretzels CEO Bill Phelps admitted that his investors were worried about how a 2014 wage hike would impact the business.

“Like most business people I was concerned about it,” Phelps said.

For years, opponents of minimum wage increases have argued that wage hikes mean fewer jobs because businesses have to raise prices and cut hours to cover the additional expenses. But Phelps said that his sales skyrocketed after a California law forced businesses to raise wages in 2014.

“I was shocked,” Phelps recalled. “I was stunned by the business.”

The same thing happened earlier this year when California raised the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour, Phelps said.

Mike Jacobs, owner of a Wetzel’s Pretzels franchise in Concord’s Sunvalley Shopping Center, told KQED that the increased business can be attributed to the fact that his customers are making more money.

“My overall sales were something like 15 percent ahead after the first minimum wage bump, and now they’re about 12 percent ahead this year,” Jacobs explained. “It isn’t because I’m such a great manager or smart guy, but the buying public has more money in their pocket.”

President-elect Donald Trump's pick for secretary of labor, Andrew F. Puzder, has opposed President Barack Obama's efforts to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10.

KY Repugs Start By Killing Women and Workers

They've finally got the all-repug majority they need to destroy the Commonwealth, and they're starting with women and workers.

Tom Loftus at the Courier:

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Republicans in total control of the 2017 Kentucky General Assembly wasted no time Tuesday in moving conservative priority bills, including two measures to restrict a woman's ability to get an abortion.

SNIP

A new Senate bill would ban abortions for women after the 20th week of pregnancy, according to Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester.

Stivers told reporters that a mother has a "choice early on to make a decision to conceive or not conceive. But once conception starts, there becomes another life involved. And the legislature has its ability to control how that life may proceed or how it would be terminated."

He said he expects the bill to move through committee and be passed by an overwhelming majority on the Senate floor later this week.

Stivers is a lying piece of shit.  Women have no choice about conception when Stivers and his repugs close down Planned Parenthood clinics and make it impossible for Kentucky women to obtain birth control.  And no, blastocysts are not people, babies, children or anything other than a clump of cells as "human" as a cancerous tumor. Also, totally unconstitutional.

Amber Duke, communications director for the ACLU of Kentucky, said, "It's unfortunate after weeks of lawmakers promising business would be their top priority and social issues wouldn't be on the front burner that within hours of gaveling in we see two anti-abortion bills that seem to be on the fast track."

SNIP

The bill applies fines and suspensions to doctors for violating the ban but no penalty to the pregnant woman.

Duke said the ACLU is particularly concerned about the bill banning abortion after the 20th week of pregnancy. "Legislation about bans like this pose a serious threat because they ignore women's health needs in individual circumstances," she said. "We believe that women deserve dignity and should have the right to make personal and private medical decisions without interference from politicians."

Restrictions on legal and safe abortions do not reduce the number of abortions by a single one.  All they do is force women in desperation to seek out an illegal and unsafe abortion, which frequently ends up killing an actual, adult, living and breathing human being.

Hoover was more confident that two measures Republicans have sought for years but have been blocked when the House was controlled by Democrats will be passed by the full House later this week.

Those are the so-called right-to-work bill, which would ban membership in a union or payment of union dues as a condition for employment, and a repeal of a requirement that a regional prevailing wage be paid to construction workers on public construction projects.

SNIP

Also Tuesday, the Senate referred for committee consideration a bill Stivers sponsored that he said would require workers "to affirmatively opt in" to having union dues withheld from paychecks rather than the current practice where a worker must act to opt out of having an employer withhold dues.

But Bill Londrigan, president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO, disagreed.

"They are pursuing a policy to penalize unions," Londrigan said. "It's a low road to economic development that will actually end up costing all Kentucky workers in the form of lower wages."

RFK Shredded Trump's Economic Plan 50 Years Ago

Yeah, the Orange Menace is going to create 25 million jobs (sic) by eliminating the food and work safety regulations that keep us alive and turning the Treasury over to his billionaire friends so we can beat Somalia on the Galtian Paradise scale.

Think Progress:

Donald Trump is running on the erroneous belief that ending regulations, particularly environmental ones, is the key to faster economic growth. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), who was assassinated June 6, 1968, explained just how misguided that view was just weeks before he was killed.

U.S. economic growth has emerged as a major issue in the presidential campaign. Donald Trump has many untenable ideas, as the Washington Post explained in an April piece headlined, “There is math, there is fantasy math, and then there’s Donald Trump’s economic math.”

That article quoted an economist at the Tax Foundation (who helped model Trump’s tax plan) saying, “It’s not consistent with historical experience. It’s more consistent with a world where we’re hiring butlers for our vacation homes on Ganymede” [Jupiter’s largest moon].”

I wanted to zero in on one of Donald Trump’s fictional strategies for boosting economic growth: As he explained last month to CNBC, “we’re going to be getting rid of a tremendous amount of regulations.”

In particular, when Fox News’ Chris Wallace pressed Trump in March on how he’d cut the federal budget, Trump answered “Department of Environmental Protection [sic]. We are going to get rid of it in almost every form.”

In reality, slashing regulations, particularly regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, would be very counterproductive, as a 2015 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) report to Congress made clear. The OMB found that ten years’ worth of major Federal regulations provided annual benefits to the nation (in 2001 dollars) of between $216 billion and $812 billion, while the estimated annual costs were only between $57 billion and $85 billion.

Of that, EPA regulations delivered the majority of benefits ($132.5 to $652 billion) but only about half the costs ($31 to $37.5 billion).

Of course, lots of those benefits were things like reduced health care costs because the air got cleaner — and those benefits don’t show up in our primary measure of economic growth, GDP. Indeed, reducing sickness and death actually lowers GDP.

Who can doubt that our wildly unsustainable global economic system is now the biggest of Ponzi schemes — where the economy appears to grow faster the more we burn fossil fuels and destroy a livable climate?

Robert F. Kennedy explained why GDP is a useless measure of economic well-being back in the 1960s.

Robert Kennedy was one of the few national politicians ever to challenge our monomaniacal pursuit of GDP to the exclusion of true economic well-being. In Detroit on May 5, 1967 he pointed out: “Let us be clear at the outset that we will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods.”

 

Weeks before he was killed, he spoke on this subject at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 — in what President Obama called “one of the most beautiful of his speeches.”

Here are the key lines:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

When you take this view of economic well-being, a President Trump could well bring this country greatest depression we have ever known.