Clear-eyed conservative realism -- translated into English.

Republican apologizes; said gorilla, first lady related

NOTE FROM GREETINGS: This is just an unbelievable comment about anyone.. certainly racial.. and a horrible comment about our wonderful, charming First Lady, who clearly has more class in her little finger than this man has witnessed in his entire life. I wonder where the media is on this one. And where is the outrage from Republican Senators and Congressmen? I hope they quickly distance themselves from this. Calling Sarah Palin? Share your outrage for fairness.

Monday, June 15, 2009 10:10 EDT, Salon.com

One of the perils of the Internet age, for people who weren't using things like Facebook during their formative years, is the tendency to forget that almost nothing you say on the Web is truly private. Anything can come out, if the right people are watching.

For example, as South Carolina Republican activist Rusty DePass found out over the weekend, if you comment on Facebook about a report on a gorilla that's escaped from a zoo and write, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors -- probably harmless," someone will find out.

DePass, who has chaired one county GOP organization in South Carolina and was co-chair of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign for his county, has now made an apology, of sorts. ""I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest," he told one local television station. He added, "The comment was hers, not mine," meaning that the first lady had previously said something about animals like gorillas being ancestors of humans, evolutionarily speaking. The New York Daily News reports, however, that it can't find evidence of Obama saying anything like that.

― Alex Koppelman

Promised Help Is Elusive for Some Homeowners

By PETER S. GOODMAN

MESA, Ariz. — She had seen the advertisements for the new government program offering relief. She had heard President Obama promise that help was on the way for homeowners like her, people who had lost jobs and could no longer make their mortgage payments.

But when Eileen Ulery called her mortgage company — Countrywide, now part of Bank of America — the bank did not offer to alter her mortgage. Rather, the bank tried to sell her a new loan with a slightly lower monthly payment while asking her to pay $13,000 toward the principal and a fresh $5,000 in fees.

Her problem was that she did not yet present a big enough problem to merit aid.

Yes, she was teetering toward delinquency. She was among millions of homeowners rapidly sliding toward danger for whom the Obama administration had devised an aid program — some already in foreclosure proceedings, others headed that way as they ran out of means to make their payments. But unlike those in imminent peril of losing their homes, Ms. Ulery had never missed a payment.

“I don’t know who this bailout is helping,” she said. “We’ve given these banks all this money and they’re not doing what they say they’re doing. Something’s not working right. They keep saying they’re doing all this, but we don’t see it down here at this level.”

More than three months after the Obama administration outlined a new program aimed at rescuing millions of distressed homeowners by compensating banks that modify mortgages, Ms. Ulery’s experience illustrates the mixture of confusion, frustration and limited assistance that now reigns.

Through many months of wrangling over the fate of the financial system, with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars dispensed on bailouts, distressed homeowners have waited for their own rescue amid talk that it was finally on the way. Modifications of so-called subprime and Alt-A mortgages — those made to people with tarnished credit — actually fell by 11 percent in May from April, according to research by Alan M. White at Valparaiso University School of Law.

A Treasury spokeswoman, Jenni Engebretsen, confirmed that homeowners like Ms. Ulery — current on their mortgages yet grappling with a hardship like unemployment — were eligible for loan modifications under the program. She said mortgage servicers had offered to modify more than 100,000 loans since the department announced the program.

But how many loans have been modified? Ms. Engebretsen declined to say, noting that the Treasury was working with mortgage companies to “fine-tune reporting systems.”

A spokesman for Bank of America Home Loans, Rick Simon, confirmed that the bank offered Ms. Ulery refinancing and not loan modification. The bank is now focusing on modifications only for those borrowers “who are already in severe threat of foreclosure,” he said.

“We’re still putting the systems in place to handle people who are current on their loans,” Mr. Simon said, declining to say how many loans Bank of America had modified. “It’s still very, very early in the program.”

Ms. Ulery, 63, is the face of the latest wave of troubled American homeowners, a surge of people in financial danger not because of reckless gambling on real estate, but because of lost income.

Far from being one of those who used easy-money loans to speculate on homes proliferating across the desert soil of greater Phoenix, she has lived in the same modest, stucco-sided condo in suburban Mesa for a dozen years. She bought the two-bedroom home in 1997 for $77,500.

For two decades, she worked as an executive assistant at nearby Arizona State University, bringing home more than $1,000 every other week — enough to pay the bills.

Round-faced, wry and given to staccato bursts of laughter, Ms. Ulery regularly visits yard sales, seeking out plates and patchwork quilts for her collections. She takes pleasure in her two grandchildren and her beagle. She enjoys an occasional glass of wine, favoring a $6 merlot that comes in a screw-top bottle.

“I’m not an extravagant-type person,” she said. “I see these big houses all around, and they’re beautiful, but I’m comfortable in my little condo.”

Like tens of millions of other American homeowners, she added to her mortgage balance as the value of her condo swelled, at one point exceeding $200,000. She refinanced to pay off some credit cards and settle into a 30-year, fixed-rate loan. Later, she took out a home equity line of credit to buy a new Hyundai. She refinanced again in 2007, borrowing $20,000, mostly for a new roof.

Over the years, her monthly payment swelled from about $600 to more than $1,000. With planning and self-control — she tracks her monthly expenses on a color-coded spreadsheet — she always came up with the money. “I’ve never been late,” she said.

But the equation broke down last year, when she lost her job in university budget cuts. Ms. Ulery received six months of severance. She arranged a monthly $1,500 Social Security check. But when the severance ran out in October, her mortgage finally exceeded her limited means.

With so many people out of work, and with her doctor counseling rest for a stress-related illness, she did not pursue another paycheck, negotiating to have her university pension begin earlier. She has been leaning on credit cards.

Across the country, millions of homeowners in similar straits have been sliding into delinquency. Some owe more than their houses are worth.

Ms. Ulery is among that unhappy cohort — her house is worth about $122,000, and she owes $143,000 — but walking away is not for her.

“In my family, we don’t do that,” she said. “You pay your bills. And I wanted my home.”

In March, she heard about the Obama administration program. The Countrywide Web site directed her to a government site, makinghomeaffordable.gov, she said. There, she took a test to determine her eligibility for a loan modification.

Was her home her primary residence? Check. Was she having trouble paying her mortgage? Check again, and so on until the screen told her that she might qualify.

In April, she called the bank. The representative said the bank was not doing modifications for people like her, she recalled. He shifted the conversation: if she handed over $18,000, he could lower her payment to $967 from $1,046. Her interest rate would actually increase slightly, with the drop largely because she was putting down more money.

“I just laughed,” Ms. Ulery said. “It was a really good deal for them.”

To which she poses her own question: What sort of deal is it for the American taxpayer? As she sees it, the same banks that generated the mortgage crisis are now getting public money to fix it, while doing little more than seeking new fees.

“I don’t think the government gets it,” she said. “These are the same people you couldn’t trust before.”

A War Against Organizing

Note from Greetings: Does anyone notice a pattern between this story and the following one on China's overtaking of the U.S. as a superpower? Perhaps maintaining a viable middle class... AND our own manufacturing.

By Kate Bronfenbrenner, washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Angel Warner, an employee at a Rite Aid distribution center, sat next to me recently in a congressional briefing room and described what happened when she and her fellow workers tried to form a union in their California workplace. She talked about the surveillance, constant threats and harassment they endured; how she and other workers were repeatedly taken aside and interrogated, one on one, about how they planned to vote; how two co-workers were fired; and how the rest lived in fear that any day they, too, might get a pink slip. The union filed numerous charges of unfair labor practices and eventually won the organizing election. But three years after the campaign began, Warner and her fellow Rite Aid workers still don't have a contract.

Like most U.S. companies, Rite Aid takes full advantage of current labor law to try to keep workers from exercising their full rights to organize and collectively bargain under the National Labor Relations Act. Far from an aberration, such behavior by U.S. companies during union organizing campaigns has become routine, and our nation's labor laws neither protect workers' rights nor provide disincentives for employers to stop disregarding those rights.

Late last month I published a study, "No Holds Barred," that was presented at the hearing at which Angel spoke. I looked at a random sample of more than 1,000 union elections over a five-year period to determine the parameters of employer behavior during union representation elections in the private sector and the limitations of the labor law system established to regulate that behavior.

In 34 percent of the elections I studied, companies fired employees for union activity. In 57 percent of elections, employers threatened to shut down all or part of their facilities, and in 47 percent, employers threatened to cut wages and benefits.

In 63 percent of campaigns, supervisors met with workers one on one and interrogated them about their union activity or whether they or others were supporting the union. In 54 percent of the elections, supervisors used these one-on-ones to threaten individual workers.

The bottom line is that there has been a steady decline of workers' rights in the past several decades. Colleagues and I have examined this issue in a series of studies over the past two decades. My new data show that employers are more than twice as likely as they were in the 1990s to use 10 or more tactics -- including threats and firings -- to thwart workers' organizing efforts, and they are more likely to use more punitive and aggressive tactics such as interrogations, discharges and threats of plant closings, while shifting away from softer tactics such as social events, promises of improvement and employee involvement programs.

For the vast majority of workers who want to join unions today, the right to organize and bargain collectively -- free from coercion, intimidation and retaliation -- is at best a promise indefinitely deferred. In election campaigns overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, it is now standard practice for companies to subject workers to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance and retaliation for union activity.

The failure of the system to defend workers' rights in a timely manner multiplies the obstacles workers face when seeking union representation, creating delays that favor employers. Employers appeal a high percentage of the cases to the NLRB, and in the most egregious instances, the employer can count on a final decision being held up by three to five years.

A key aspect of proposed labor law reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, concerns revisions to the rules surrounding arbitration of the first contract. My findings show that this provision may be among the most crucial of the legislation. Fifty-two percent of workers who form a union are still without a contract a year after they win an election, I found, and 37 percent remain without a contract two years after the election. For employers, labor law provides yet another means to indefinitely delay unionization.

It doesn't have to be this way. My survey data from the public sector portray an atmosphere in which workers may organize free from the kind of coercion, intimidation and retaliation that so taints the election process in the private sector. Most of the states in the public-sector sample have laws allowing workers to choose a union through card check or voluntary recognition. And more than a third of public-sector workers in the United States are members of unions.

Unless Congress passes serious labor law reform with real penalties, only a small fraction of the workers who seek union representation will succeed. If recent trends continue, there will no longer be a functioning legal mechanism to effectively protect the right of private-sector workers to organize and collectively bargain. Our country cannot afford to make workers defer their rights and aspirations for union representation any longer.

The writer is director of labor education research at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her paper "No Holds Barred -- The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing" was published last month by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.

Beijing's Favorite Capitalists

By Harold Meyerson, Washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Marx railed against "the idiocy of rural life," by which he meant its isolation and its lack of social differentiation, but 20 years ago, it was that very "idiocy" on which the Chinese Communist Party depended to maintain its hold on power. Once Deng Xiaoping decided to suppress the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square by force, the challenge for the Chinese leadership was to find army units that wouldn't shy from shooting unarmed Chinese students.

Deng's henchmen quickly despaired of finding such soldiers in the cities; they had been contaminated by too much contact with the very kinds of people they'd be called upon to kill. The military units that rolled into Beijing 20 years ago today came chiefly from the sticks. Isolated by geography and indoctrination from the liberalism flowing through Chinese cities and packed into Tiananmen Square, they were the perfect shock troops for Deng's murderous reassertion of authoritarian power.

Two decades later, however, the troops who pulled the triggers have reason to wonder who won and who lost in the class-and-culture war in which Tiananmen was but the bloodiest battle. Today, the Communist Party has proven itself, in all but one particular, a friend to the urbanites and professionals who now prosper in China's cities -- socioeconomically, the very kinds of people it gunned down in Tiananmen Square. All it asks of them in return is that they not actively seek democratic rights. For their part, the hundreds of millions of beneficiaries of China's new prosperity have kept up their end of that bargain. Knowing that they'd face the brute wrath of the party and state if they did, they've made an understandable decision.

In the countryside, where hundreds of millions of Chinese still reside, the benefits of the nation's economic miracle are far harder to detect. For many, the backbreaking drudgery of peasant life persists as it has for centuries. Some Sinologists believe that one reason the urban Chinese haven't demanded more rights is their fear that in a democratic China, they'd be outvoted by a peasantry that would demand a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth.

According to the nostrums of Reagan Age America, the current Chinese system -- in equal measure capitalist and authoritarian -- cannot actually exist. Capitalism spread democracy, we were told ad nauseam by a steady stream of conservative hacks, free-trade apologists, government officials and American companies doing business in China. Given enough Starbuckses and McDonald's, provided with sufficient consumer choice, China would surely become a democracy.

And yet, it hasn't. And this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has traveled there to assure its government that America won't permit China's massive investment in our government's notes to diminish in value, even if that means we have to cut back on needed public programs.

In explaining China's rise and America's decline, historians may well note that capitalism -- American capitalism, anyway -- far from spreading democracy, actually has played a key role in transforming China into an authoritarian superpower. The transfer of manufacturing from the United States to China -- driven by the rise of mega-retailers such as Wal-Mart that have been able to enforce a regime of low wages all along their global supply chains -- has diminished our middle class and expanded theirs. American companies such as Wal-Mart have not been deterred in the slightest by China's authoritarian practices; indeed, before China enacted a law that infinitesimally increased workers' rights last year, the American chambers of commerce in China joined with communist hard-liners in opposing the statute.

The attraction of authoritarian regimes to America's more authoritarian business executives is long established, if seldom noted. Henry Ford, who routinely spied on and abused his employees until the United Auto Workers came along, built and owned factories in Stalin's Soviet Union. Wal-Mart, which used to lock its night-shift stock clerks and janitors inside a number of its stores until the morning managers arrived, prefers production in Guangdong to manufacturing in the Midwest. Indeed, the director of purchasing for Wal-Mart is based in China.

As historian Nelson Lichtenstein and others have documented, Wal-Mart inspires in its managers an almost fanatical allegiance to the company's cause. In Wal-Mart world, the provincialism (if not "idiocy") of rural life is fused with a brilliance in the art of low-cost, low-wage logistics to create a company that is both authoritarian in its inner workings and a friend of authoritarian regimes abroad. The butchers of Beijing could not have found any more compatible capitalists.

meyersonh@washpost.com