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States Revolt against Card Check

by Ivan Osorio on March 13, 2009

in Economy, Labor

State legislators are unhappy about the prospect of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) being imposed on their constituents’  businesses. That was a central theme of a news teleconference today, featuring former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Senator John Thune (R-S.D.), hosted by the Alliance for Worker Freedom. The bill would allow unions to circumvent secret ballot elections in organizing campaigns.

Seven state legislatures have passed resolutions opposing EFCA — Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Georgia, and Washington — and eight have had resolutions introduced — Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Alaska — with possibly more to come.

As Grover Norquist, president of American for Tax Reform, noted, these resolutions, by forcing a vote on the EFCA issue, put legislators on the record, which allows voters to better know where they stand on this.

Former Secretary Chao pointed out the stakes in this fight. “This is the most heated and passionate issue for organized labor,” she said. One reason for that is that, unlike during the last Congress, EFCA faces no threat of a presidential veto. Therefore, she noted, moderate Democrats could vote for EFCA during the last Congress and thus keep their union supporters happy without any fear of the bill’s real-world consequences, but they don’t have it so easy this time, as they’re firing “with real bullets.”

For more on card check, see here and here.

Alarmism increasing twice as fast as predicted

by Myron Ebell on March 13, 2009 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

The Independent in London this week ran with the latest claim about sea level rise. Their headline illustrated perfectly how ridiculous predictions quickly transform into facts. The story was headlined, “Sea levels rising twice as fast as predicted.” The first sentence did not agree with the headline: “Sea levels are predicted to rise twice as fast as was forecast by the United Nations only two years ago….” That is, the soothsayers have read their chicken entrails again and decided that their previous divinations were not dire enough. This has nothing to do with actual sea level rise. For the past several years, sea level rise has been below the average rate of the twentieth century, which in total was about seven inches.

Trade and special interests

by Fran Smith on March 13, 2009 · 2 comments

in International, Trade

A National Review Online editorial today takes President Obama to task for catering to Democratic special interests opposed to free trade. The editors note that of the three pending free trade agreements, the one with Panama is likely to pass. But the FTAs with South Korea and with Colombia will be thumbs down because of interest groups that are cloaking their protectionist positions with appeals about the environment and workers’ rights:

Debates over environmental impacts and workers’ rights in the developing world are smokescreens that mask an important facet of the trade debate: The Left is ideologically opposed to free trade, and that fact enters into Obama’s pragmatic political calculations.

The editorial points out the shortsightedness of his position in light of the national benefits of these agreements:

These deals offer a cost-free way to stimulate the economy and strengthen ties with important allies. If only Obama were a little more pragmatic in pursuing the national objectives and a little less so in pursuing his own.

Economists Give Obama Failing Grade; New Bailouts Demanded As Obama Breaks Promises

by Hans Bader on March 12, 2009 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, Labor, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

Obama gets a failing grade from economists. “U.S. President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner received failing grades for their efforts to revive the economy from participants in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey.”

Not content with the $8 trillion the Obama Administration has already committed for bailouts, pork, and welfare, Treasury Secretary Geithner, who was confirmed by the Senate despite cheating on his taxes, wants to spend $100 billion on IMF loans to bail out struggling nations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere — even though many European “officials doubt the wisdom of falling deeply into debt to create jobs and halt the plunge in consumer demand, as the United States is doing.”

Wal-Mart’s stock rating has been downgraded due to the possible passage of card-check legislation supported by Obama, which could lead to “diminished workforce flexibility” and pay based on “seniority” rather than merit, as a result of compulsory arbitration provisions contained in the bill. (The bill could also lead to intimidation of workers). The stock market has also fallen this year as investors have become disenchanted with the Administration.

The Federal Government may face increasing calls to bail out state governments, which have run up trillions of dollars in unfunded, and incredibly generous, pension liabilities to state employees in contracts negotiated with their unions using deliberately-deceptive accounting.

Obama broke his campaign promise to curb earmarks by signing a bloated, $410 billion appropriations bill that contained 8,500 earmarks totaling $7.7 billion. It also broke his campaign promise of a “net spending cut.”

Obama broke seven campaign promises dealing with transparency and clean government in signing the economy-shrinking, $800 billion stimulus package, much of whose contents were secret until shortly before Congress voted on it, and whose 1400 pages went unread by most Congressmen who voted on it.

Earlier, Obama repeatedly broke his promises not to sign bills without first giving the public five days to comment. “Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them,” Obama’s campaign Web site stated. “As president, Obama will not sign any nonemergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days.”

But Obama has repeatedly signed laws without providing such notice, such as the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, his very first law, which he signed less than 2 days after it was passed by the House, with no opportunity for comment. Moreover, in signing the Ledbetter law, Obama made false claims about both the facts of the Supreme Court case that the Ledbetter law overturned, and what the Supreme Court actually held in that case.

The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, finally losing patience with Obama, criticizes the Administration’s focus on anything but fixing the economy’s underlying ills, calling its economic policies a “phony war” characterized by economic “mismanagement.” “Economist David Smick had it right in The Post this week when he said the administration had a three-pronged strategy: delay, delay and delay. The administration announces a rescue package but doesn’t deliver details; it promises budget discipline but saves the hard decisions for later,” while stacking the Obama “administration with politicians and former government officials,” who lack “experience managing large organizations in crisis.”

Like us, Michael Barone says that the Treasury Department and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, through their arbitrary, “ad hoc” approach to the financial crisis (such as their unpredictable and inconsistent decisions about which companies to bail out), have exacerbated the current financial crisis by leaving “players in the financial markets full of uncertainty and fear.”

Eugene Scalia on Card Check

by Ivan Osorio on March 12, 2009 · 2 comments

in Economy, Labor

With passage of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) growing more in doubt, organized labor and its Congressional allies are resorting to pushing the claim that the bill would not actually do away with secret ballot elections in union organizing, but only offer employees an alleged choice between secret ballots and card check, whereby they sign union cards out in the open.

As I noted yesterday, this is a rhetorical sleight of hand, based on that EFCA does not explicitly outlaw secret ballots, ignoring the fact that it makes secret ballot elections a dead letter. In today’s Wall Street Journal, former labor solicitor Eugene Scalia drives home that point, along with the many other problems with EFCA:

Under EFCA, employers could no longer insist that unions wishing to represent their employees prove they have majority support through a secret-ballot election. Instead, as soon as a union collects “authorization cards” from a majority of employees, it can insist on immediate recognition as their exclusive bargaining representative. Unions could still ask for secret-ballot elections, but they seldom if ever would do so.

Under EFCA, union organizers will have no incentive to submit cards to the National Labor Relations Board before they’ve gotten 50 percent-plus-one of employees to sign union cards, at which point the NLRB would be required to recognize the union as those employees’ exclusive bargaining agent. Importantly, the union can keep going back to employees until they’ve gotten the number of signed cards it needs for certification.

For more on card check, see here and here.

Your Interests Are My Interests

by Cord Blomquist on March 11, 2009 · 2 comments

in Features, Regulation, Tech & Telecom, Zeitgeist

If you’re a fan of professional print journalism, you may be a little worried as of late.  Denver’s Rocky Mountain News just closed its doors after nearly 150 years in the news game.  Meanwhile the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are both on life support.  Even the New York Times, the largest newspaper in America, has cut its dividend and mortgaged its headquarters for $225 million.

It seems clear that the age of broadsheet newspapers is coming to an end, yet the web hasn’t come to its rescue.  Partially this is because ad rates from the old world of print were inflated to reflect the size of the total audience of the paper.  Online ads, by contrast, are micro-targeted at just those folks who advertisers believe are most likely to buy their products or services.  This makes sense, but the numbers involved are still staggering.

Consider that the New York Times online as of 2007 had about 13 million unique users.  Compare that to its weekday circulation of 1.1 million and its weekend circulation of about 1.6 million.  The Grey Lady’s web presence had tenfold the reach of the paper, yet online revenue made up only about 10% of the Times total revenue.  That means that a product with ten times the reach is getting only 1/10th of its old-school equivalent.

Long story short: the industry needs all the help it can get.

This is where Google comes in.  Along with being a giant in the search industry, Google is empowering a network of publishers to the tune of $4.2 billion in revenue passed to them in 2007—according to members of Google’s DC office, the 2008 numbers are even larger.  In fact, Google knows it is better to give than to receive—it gives more money out to its publisher network than it keeps for itself in profits.

Now this giant of monetization is introducing an even better advertising mechanism, Google’s “Interest Based Advertising” program.  IBA works by collecting information whenever a user visits a site that features a Google AdSense network ad.  This information is turned into a sort of a profile that helps to focus ads on a per-user basis, rather than just basing that ad on the content of the web page alone.

This means that advertisers will have a more effective means of getting their message out online—news that should be music to the faltering print news industry’s ears, not to mention their loyal readers.

Understandably, this news sounds ominous to many.  Tracking your browsing?  And we were worried about the Bush administration tapping our phones!

However, unlike when dealing with government looky lous, you have the choice to tell Google to mind their own business.  Also, Google is telling consumers about the program.  Folks concerned with privacy issues call these elements “notice” and “choice.”

The notice comes in the form of clear labels on all Google-based ads, something the company already does with the exception of some of their print ads.  Currently, all ads served by Google feature their name, but some don’t feature the name of company paying for the ad spot.  Now that will change.  Users will know that Google is serving the ad and who’s paying them to do so.

Additionally, Google is allowing users to choose—this is the control part—how they’re classified by the new program.  Their Ads Preferences Manager will let users view, delete, or add interest categories associated with their browser so that the advertising they see will at least be relevant to them.

Finally, Google is also giving consumers the ultimate control over the program in the form of a set of tools to permanently opt-out.  They have even designed plug-ins for browsers that will maintain your opt-out choice.

It remains to be seen how this program—and others started much earlier by Yahoo! and other Google competitors—will increase revenues for publishers.  However, since all of these systems are designed to serve more relevant ads to consumers, it would seem that all parties involved stand to benefit.

Yet, there is sometimes no satisfying the privacy alarmists. The AP relayed this comment from EPIC’s Marc Rotenberg:

“This is a very serious development,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I don’t think the world’s largest search engine should be in the business of profiling people.”

Yet, with all Google is doing to allow users to opt-out of this system, one wonders if Mr. Rosenberg and those who share his opinion believe there should be any innovation whatsoever in online advertising, or if the industry should simply come to a stand-still.

Criticism of Google’s plan seems especially dubious given the alternatives offered.  Mr. Rotenberg believes that the FTC should reexamine Google’s merger with DoubleClick.  Translation: consumers are too dumb to manage their privacy, so the FTC should do it for them by tearing apart business deals that are deemed unsavory.

The appropriate level of privacy in our lives can’t be set by the government. It can only be set by free people able to explore the full range of choices offered in the marketplace.  When you consider not only Google’s consumer-friendly ad program, but other products like pre-paid cell phones, nameless debit accounts, proxy servers, anonymous email accounts, and the like, privacy seems to be out there for those who want it.

The best advice for those who want privacy: don’t go online.  The Internet is the modern public square, no more a private retreat than is a public park.  Technologies can help to mask your identity, but ultimately much can be found out about who you are online.  The only thing stopping that now is the free market’s respect for contracts and the choices of consumers.  Attacking that very freedom to choose is no way to secure great privacy in the future.

Going Ballistic on Card Check

by Ivan Osorio on March 11, 2009 · 1 comment

in Economy, Labor

Today’s Wall Street Journal, in an editorial, notes organized labor’s latest hardball tactic in its effort to help enact the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, H.R. 1409), which would effectively replace secret ballot organizing elections with the card check process — whereby union organizers ask employees to sign union cards out in the open. Essentially, some unions want the Treasury Department to muzzle companies that have received any funds under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to keep from lobbying against EFCA.

We wrote on February 13 about the letter from the labor consortium Change to Win to the Financial Services Roundtable, demanding that banks receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program money keep quiet about union “card check.” To its credit, the banking lobby hasn’t backed down. Now Big Labor is escalating, demanding in a February 23 letter to Secretary Timothy Geithner that Treasury muzzle the companies if they won’t muzzle themselves.

“Firms receiving significant TARP assistance continue to lobby against the interests of hard working taxpayers,” says the letter from Change to Win Chair Anna Burger. “For example, these firms continue to oppose legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage loan terms, establish a Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights and protect consumers from corporations that bury mandatory arbitration clauses in fine print.”

Imagine that: Banks are daring to fight legislation that would reduce their profitability — and at a time when our public officials say they are desperate for banks to earn themselves out of trouble.

The TARP may be flawed policy, and this kind of partisan bullying can only make it worse.

Yet there’s another way in which EFCA supporters are taking the gloves off. With the possibility that Senate Democratic leaders may not have enough votes in  to end a Republican-led filibuster, EFCA supporters are peddling forcefully their biggest whopper of a distortion yet: That EFCA would preserve secret ballot organizing elections as a viable option. The Service Employees International Union argues:

Corporate interests are bent on lying about the Employee Free Choice Act – they’d have you believe that the bill means the end of the secret ballot – but nothing could be further from the truth. The Employee Free Choice Act simply gives employees the choice to join unions – not the employers.

Meanwhile, a statement from the office of House sponsor Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), says:

The bipartisan Employee Free Choice Act simply gives workers the choice of whether to form a union either through majority signup or an NLRB election.

Well, no, it doesn’t. It gives union officials the choice of which organizing methods to pursue. The bill unequivocally states:

If the Board finds that a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations designating the individual or labor organization specified in the petition as their bargaining representative and that no other individual or labor organization is currently certified or recognized as the exclusive representative of any of the employees in the unit, the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative described in subsection (a).

Under EFCA, union organizers can simply go back to the workers until they get to 50 percent-plus-one. For all of Rep. Miller’s and SEIU’s pointing to EFCA not explicitly abolishing secret ballot organizing elections in all cases, the process the bill creates would effectively make secret ballot elections a dead letter,  especially since unions have every incentive to go the card check route. (The version of EFCA in the last Congress featured the same language.)

Finally, there is a party whose interests not only have been ignored during much of the debate over this legislation, but are also the most under threat: Employers. EFCA would create a system in which employers would have no say in how they run an important part of their business.

EFCA supporters may deny it all they want, but look at what they actually say. SEIU states it wants unionization to be “the employees’ choice, not the employers.” [Emphasis added.] George Miller’s office decries the fact that, “employers can veto workers’ decision (sic) to organize through majority signup and force them into the divisive NLRB election process.” The same statement then goes on to give a nod to the  virtues of having the same “divisive NLRB process” it derides as an option, by claiming that EFCA doesn’t really do away with it.

There is no consideration here of who actually owns the business in question. As long as a business stays within the bounds of law and morality, under what definition of business ownership does the owner not have the last word? EFCA supporters will deny that they want to undermine business owners’ rights, but that is exactly what this bill would do.

For more on card check, see here and here.

Land Grab Bill on House Floor Today

by Richard Morrison on March 11, 2009

in Energy, Legal

UPDATE 1:15pm ET: Myron reports – “House narrowly defeats omnibus land grab bill under suspension. 282 yes to 144 no. Two thirds needed under suspension. Two votes short.” Huzzah!

The Republican Study Committee sent out this alert about the what I’m call the Federal Land Grab Act of 2009:

This legislation is more than 1,000 pages and would generally designate new wilderness areas, wild and scenic rivers, codify a National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS), and expand the National Park system. Conservatives may have concerns with many different provisions in the bill.

New Spending: The bill authorizes $5.5 billion of new discretionary spending and $900 million in new entitlement spending.

Blocks Millions of Acres for Energy Development: Some conservatives have expressed concerns that the bill blocks millions of acres from new oil and gas leasing, logging, mining, and all other business activity in designated areas. The bill eliminates 1.2 million acres from mineral leasing in and energy exploration in Wyoming alone—withdrawing 331 million barrels of recoverable oil and 8.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from domestic energy supply. The bill would also eliminate a proposed terminal site for importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Massachusetts by designating a river that runs through an urban city as “wild and scenic.”

Pork Projects: $3.5 million to the city of St. Augustine (FL) for a birthday party, $200,000 for a tropical botanical garden in Hawaii, $250,000 to study the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and $37 million for a park in New Jersey that the National Park Service does not want. The bill also codifies the National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS) within the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which creates a duplicative agency without a clear mission or structure.

Process: The bill is more than 1,000 pages, and contains many controversial provisions. Yet it is reportedly coming to the floor under suspension of the rules, which means that no amendments will be in order. Many conservatives believe that the process of bringing a bill to the floor under suspension of the rules should be reserved for noncontroversial measures.

My colleague R.J. Smith, who holds portfolios with both CEI and NCPPR, also weighed in on the bill on Amy Ridenour’s blog here. The legal threats posed to geologists and paleontologists is described by John Berlau here and Myron Ebell provides more details on the energy development impact here.

UPDATE: Myron reports – “House narrowly defeats omnibus land grab bill under suspension. 282 yes to 144 no. Two thirds needed under suspension. Two votes short.” Huzzah!

Al Gore Wants .eco Web Domain…

by Nick Brown on March 10, 2009 · 1 comment

in Regulation, Tech & Telecom

Since Dot Eco TLD announced that they were seeking establishment as a top level domain (TLD) at ICANN’s (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Mexico event last week with the cooperation of Al Gore, many have been asking why we need a new TLD.  Furthermore, why we needed a new TLD solely focused on environmental websites.

There are a lot of legitimate arguments out there against this proposal, consisting of this solely being about money, or asking why a TLD should be focused so specifically when current TLD’s are very broad in comparison.

But I say, ignore the questions, ignore the issues.  Don’t just open up .eco.  No, that’s not good enough.  I want a environmental wacko “red light district”.  Every alarmist blog, website, non-profit and lobby should be forced to move their web presence to .eco.  Which will make it so much easier for me to block out in my router so that I never have to see any of it ever again.

This will probably be as successful as the .xxx TLD, right?

Thanks Al, you’re finally doing me a favor!  …outside of creating the Internet of course.

Utah: Rated R for Ridiculous

by Nick Brown on March 10, 2009 · 1 comment

in Regulation, Tech & Telecom

Utah is on the verge of using it’s ‘Truth in Advertising’ bill to pass regulated enforcement of video game ratings.  The bill which was in some part drafted by Jack Thompson, the disbarred anti-violent games attorney from Florida, would fine retailers that sold games to underage customers up to $2,000 per incident.

The catch?  This only applies if they advertise that they conduct age verification, essentially encouraging retailers to remove all advertising that they check ID’s or age in some manner.  Retailers would be better off in this case not advertising in any way that they train employees to verify age before selling age restricted games.  This way if a slip up occurs—as it eventually will—the retailer wouldn’t be held accountable.

The legislation takes a giant step back considering that Patricia Vance, President of the not-for-profit ESRB ranking group, stated in an open letter to the Utah Congress that”

…the most recent such study reported in May 2008 found that national retailers refused to sell M-rated games to customers under 17 a remarkable 80% of the time, far surpassing the comparable rates of compliance for movies, DVDs, or music CDs rated for a mature audience…according to a recent audit, Utah video game retailers enforce their store policies regarding the sale of M-rated games an impressive 94% of the time — without any laws or requirements that they do so.  That level of compliance took many years to achieve, and speaks to the strong commitment of video game retailers to do the right thing.

Apparently a 94% success rate isn’t good enough for Utah who will ignore one of the best working models of self-regulation that any entertainment industry has ever seen or successfully implemented, and will instead take the opportunity to enforce government control in a way that will not prove successful and will cause greater problems down the line.

I whole heartedly agree with Matt Peckham of PCWorld when he says that,

Truth in advertising is important. No one wants to buy a “100% cotton” shirt that turns out to be 50% polyester or an LCD TV with a “full parts and labor three year warranty” that’s only honored for one. Retailers have basic authenticity obligations and consumers should have the right to take action and/or pursue remuneration when a retailer engages in deceitful advertising.

But voluntary self-regulation that hinges on an aesthetically amorphous value system resides in a legal gray area. No one’s going to disagree that selling a 50% polyester shirt as “100% cotton” is ethically wrong, deserving of legal consequences. But games ratings aren’t based on scientific analyses of the fiber content of a piece of fabric, and there’s plenty of disagreement over whether it’s the responsibility of stores or parents to enforce them. For some, game and movie ratings are simply advisory, and it’s up to parents to monitor what kids are up to, not some for-profit business, and most certainly not a bunch of at best tenuously culturally clued-in government bureaucrats.

Peckham’s insinuations that this is just the beginning are dead on.  And those like Jack Thompson that want to see violent or mature content banned from the face of the earth know just that, and are counting on it.  You see, when this model fails, politicians won’t return to the stage and admit they were wrong and redact the policy.  They will instead seek to legislate the issue even further and with a firmer grip.  This is simply the first flake in a snowball rolling down hill.

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