Monday, August 15, 2016

LOCAL

► In the P.S. Business Journal — Union leaders vote to discuss early contract extension at West Coast ports — ILWU leaders, who represent workers at different ports from Bellingham and Seattle to San Diego, met in San Francisco and voted to enter into talks with Pacific Maritime Association officials “regarding the concept of a contract extension and report back to the membership.”

► In the News Tribune — Tacoma union local leads U.S. in representing recreational cannabis workers — Tacoma-based United Food and Commercial Workers Local 367 is leading the nation when it comes to pleasing pot smokers who have lately been looking in vain for the union label. Consumers can now find just such a label on cannabis processed by the Tacoma firm Perma.

ALSO at The Stand — Look for that union labor — on your cannabis

► In the Seattle Times — Teachers tackle racial bias: ‘We’re tired of waiting’ — In the first effort of its kind sponsored by the state’s largest teachers union, a group of 40 teachers spent last week focusing on the racial inequities in education and how to reduce them.

► In today’s Seattle Times — Billionaire developer Selig racks up $2M in unpaid Seattle City Light bills — Seattle developer and billionaire Martin Selig has racked up nearly $2 million in delinquent electric bills with Seattle City Light, records show.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Maybe that’s why Selig is such a big fan of Donald Trump. The Don doesn’t like paying his bills either.

BOEING

► In the (Everett) Herald — Pentagon approves production of Boeing KC-46 tanker — The Pentagon has approved Boeing’s KC-46 refueling tanker for production, a key point known as Milestone C in the military plane’s development timeline. The KC-46 is based on Boeing’s 767 freighter. Both planes are assembled at the company’s Everett plant.

STATE GOVERNMENT

► In the Seattle Times — Tim Eyman violated order to turn over campaign-finance documents, judge says — Judge Ellen J. Fair granted Attorney General Bob Ferguson the authority to seek documents directly from the federal government and the banks of Tim Eyman’s committees. Last fall, the state PDC said it discovered several potential violations of campaign-finance law, including allegations that Eyman used $170,000 in contributions to a political committee for living expenses.

STATE ELECTIONS

► In the Peninsula Daily News — State Supreme Court justices decry tactics — An orchestrated effort is attempting to unseat three state Supreme Court justices over two controversial school-funding rulings. “If people think they should unelect a sitting justice because of one case, then that is a very bad precedent,” said Justice Mary Yu, who called attacks against incumbent justices as “vicious.”

ALSO at The Stand — VOTE: Support labor-endorsed justices

► In the Seattle Times — Carbon-tax initiative backers press campaign despite green opposition — Initiative 732 backers hope to persuade Washington voters to approve one of the world’s most far-reaching taxes on fossil fuels. But they have been unable to gain broad support from the environmental community. And, they have been hampered by a state forecast that finds, instead of being revenue neutral as intended, I-732 would bring at least a short term cut to the general fund.

ALSO at The Stand — WSLC opposes Initiative 732 carbon tax

► In the News Tribune — Does I-732 go far enough? Progressives can’t seem to agree. (by Matt Driscoll) — The naysayers, including the Washington State Labor Council and many other labor and minority groups, contend that the initiative fails to invest in the conversion to a clean-energy economy that’s required to really effect change. They say a carbon tax alone will be just one more regressive tax in a state full of them, arguing that those who make the least will end up being hardest hit.

► In the Tri-City Herald — Carbon tax proposal wrong approach for state (by Tony Umek and Mike Bosse) — This is not a debate about whether to reduce carbon emissions; it’s a debate about how we do it. The No on 732 Campaign, supported by the Washington Farm Bureau, Tri-City business leaders, the Association of Washington Business and labor groups, seeks a collaborative solution, based on the fact that innovative technology and incentives, not new taxes, are the keys to environmental progress. Presented with these two approaches, we believe Tri-City voters will soundly reject I-732.

► In the Peninsula Daily News — Candidates for 24th District state Senate seat clash on minimum wage — Democrat Kevin Van De Wege of Sequim said he supports statewide Initiative 1433, while Danille Turissini of Port Ludlow, who calls herself an “independent GOP” candidate, is against it.

► In the Spokesman-Review — Live from Spokane, it’s the first governor’s debate — Incumbent Jay Inslee and challenger Bill Bryant have their first debate Wednesday at Spokane Falls Community College. KHQ will be carrying the debates live on their SWX digital channel, and the station and The Spokesman-Review will be streaming them live on their websites.

NATIONAL ELECTIONS

► In the NY Times — Secret ledger in Ukraine lists cash for Donald Trump’s campaign chief — Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, from the pro-Russian political party of former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych from 2007 to 2012.

► In today’s NY Times — I support you, Donald Trump. Now release your tax returns. (by GOP Rep. Mark Sanford) — Equipping voters with more, not less, information as they pick those who run for the highest offices in our land seems, to me, a reasonable requirement for anyone aspiring to those positions.

► In the Washington Post — How progressives are putting Hillary Clinton in a tough spot on trade (again) — Attention, Bernie Sanders supporters: Hillary Clinton wants you to know she does NOT support President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Not now, not ever… Democracy for America praising Clinton’s latest comments on trade as “the strongest we’ve heard from her to date and will undoubtedly help build the support necessary to kill this miserable trade deal once and for all.” But they also called on her to directly challenge Obama by demanding that he stop trying to get Congress to pass his trade deal before he leaves office.

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

► From Politico — Obama puts Congress on notice: TPP is coming — Friday’s notification is the clearest signal yet that the White House is serious about getting Obama’s legacy trade deal — the biggest in U.S. history — passed by the end of the year, as he has vowed to do despite the misgivings of Republican leaders and the outright opposition of a majority of Democrats in Congress.

► From The Hill — Sanders to Democrats: Rule out lame-duck vote on trade deal — “It is now time for the leadership of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the House to join Secretary Clinton and go on the record in opposition to holding a vote on this job-killing trade deal during the lame-duck session of Congress and beyond,” Sanders said in a statement.

► From The Hill — Liberals rally to sink Obama trade deal — Liberals are amping up their opposition to the TPP on and off of Capitol Hill, amid escalating concerns that the package will get an 11th hour vote after the November elections.

PRIVATE PRISONS

► From Vox — A federal report just confirmed it: for-profit prisons are more dangerous than public ones — If you’re a prison guard or inmate, your safety may hinge on whether you’re positioned at a privately run, for-profit prison or a public facility. That conclusion comes from a new report by the US Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which looked at federal prisons run by three companies — the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation — to compare them with similar public prisons. And the findings don’t look good for private prisons.

► In the Washington Post — Inside the administration’s $1 billion deal to detain Central American asylum seekers — As Central Americans surged across the U.S. border two years ago, the Obama administration skipped the standard public bidding process and agreed to a deal that offered generous terms to Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison company, to build a massive detention facility for women and children seeking asylum. The four-year, $1 billion contract has been a boon for CCA, which, in an unusual arrangement, gets the money regardless of how many people are detained at the facility.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Chains we can believe in?

ALSO from Mother Jones — My four months as a private prison guard, where journalist Shane Bauer takes the job because “it’s nearly impossible to get an unconstrained look inside our penal system. When prisons do let reporters in, it’s usually for carefully managed tours and monitored interviews with inmates. Private prisons are especially secretive. Their records often aren’t subject to public access laws; CCA has fought to defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure rules as their public counterparts. ”

NATIONAL

► From Bloomberg — United attendants back first combined contract since Continental merger — United Continental Holdings Inc.’s flight attendants (AFA) approved a labor contract that will allow the carrier to put attendants from its two predecessor airlines on the same jets for the first time in the merged company’s six-year history.

► From Mother Jones — Why did Black Lives Matter, NAACP call for an end to more charter schools? — Along with “an end to the privatization of education,” the Movement for Black Lives organizers are demanding increased investments in traditional community schools and the health and social services they provide. The statement came several weeks after another civil rights titan, the NAACP, also passed a resolution, calling for a freeze on the growth of charter schools.

► In today’s NY Times — Health insurers use process intended to curb rate increases to justify them — After the ACA took effect in 2010, it created a review mechanism intended to prevent exorbitant increases in health insurance rates by shaming companies that sought them. But this summer, insurers are turning that process on its head, using it to highlight the reasons they are losing money under the health care law and their case for raising premiums in 2017.

► In the NY Times — Sisterhood is not enough: Why workplace equality needs men, too — Some leaders have moved past women-only conferences and motivational speeches aimed at improving the status of women in business and are now engaging men in the effort.

TODAY’S MUST-READ

► In the Washington Post — The world is getting better at paid maternity leave. The U.S. is not. — In the United States bearing a child comes at a high price for many women. Despite having one of the world’s most advanced economies, the United States lags far behind other countries in its policies for expectant mothers. In addition to being the only highly competitive country where mothers are not guaranteed paid leave, it sits in stark contrast to countries such as Cuba and Mongolia that offer expectant mothers one year or more of paid leave.

The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.