DAILY NEWS
No quotas under I-1000 ● Union-busting Labor boss ● Scorched earth
Friday, September 27, 2019
ELECTION
ALSO at The Stand — WA Fairness explains why voters should approve I-1000 / R88
BOEING
► From Reuters — Boeing CEO to testify before Congress about grounded 737 MAX — Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg has agreed to testify before Congress next month on the grounded 737 MAX that was involved in two fatal crashes that killed 346 people.
GENERAL MOTORS STRIKE
► In the Detroit News — GM strike, day 12: Negotiations go into the late evening — Negotiations between General Motors Co. and the United Auto Workers resumed Friday morning after talks went into the late evening. Bargaining on Thursday continued past 10:30 p.m., according to a source familiar with the negotiations. It is the latest since the strike began 12 days ago that negotiators have stayed up talking, a signal that a tentative agreement could be reached soon.
► In the Detroit Free Press — UAW: ‘Pay hasn’t caught up with inflation’ after ‘bankruptcy sacrifices’ — The UAW hourly worker strike against General Motors, with its debate over wages and health care benefits, spotlights the compensation received at the top and the bottom, which ranges from nearly $22 million per year (CEO Mary Marra) to $15 per hour
THE WAR ON UNIONS
EDITOR’S NOTE — AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka:
“It is insulting and dangerous that lifelong union-buster Eugene Scalia is the country’s top labor official. His track record is well documented, and it’s clear he has yet to find a worker protection he supports or a corporate loophole he opposes. Making the Labor Department—whose mission is to defend the rights of workers and enforce the law—a satellite office of a corporate right-wing law firm flies in the face of working people’s clearly expressed desires. We will not forget this betrayal by the Trump administration, and we will never stop fighting to ensure all working people have the safety protections on the job they deserve.”
ALSO at the Stand — Janus: The fix is in at the Supreme Court (March 6, 2018) — Meet Mark Janus. Under his union contract, Janus makes $71,000 a year in a state where both the average pay for social work and the statewide median income is less than $60,000. He also earns time-and-a-half for working overtime. Almost every year he gets a step pay increase and/or cost-of-living increase. He gets paid holidays and paid vacation time. He gets his choice of several health care plans and is also eligible for retiree health care coverage. He gets paid sick leave and paid paternity leave. He is eligible to receive a defined-benefit pension that, when he retires, will pay him a portion of his salary for the rest of his life. He has job security and the peace of mind that if some manager violates his rights or tries to fire him without cause, the union will represent him to protect his job and his family. That job would be a dream come true for most social workers — and for most Americans. And for all that, Janus pays a fair-share fee of $45 per month to the union, about what the average American pays for a gym membership. None of his money goes to political campaigns, or lobbying, or any other community and charitable activities his union is involved in. Just the contract.
IMPEACHMENT
► In today’s Washington Post — Whistleblower, working in stealth, almost single-handedly set impeachment in motion — The whistleblower has by some measures managed to exceed what former special counsel Robert Mueller accomplished in two years of investigating Trump: producing a file so concerning and factually sound that it pushed into motion the gears of impeachment.
EDITOR’S NOTE — Washington Republican Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Jaime Herrera Beutler, and Dan Newhouse have all joined in the circling of GOP wagons around Trump. Herrera Beutler and Newhouse have released statements or told reporters that they believe the president did nothing wrong — echoing the White House’s accidentally released talking points. “There was no quid pro quo,” they say, an obvious red herring. And all three have suggested Democrats’ hyper-partisan attacks on the president are the issue, not the president’s actions.
► In today’s Washington Post — Four debunked talking points used to discredit the whistleblower complaint — To defend President Trump against the whistleblower allegations, Republicans in Congress are having to dodge or misstate some key facts. Here are the most common talking points they are using to discredit the complaint and why those don’t hold up.
► Today’s MUST-READ from The Atlantic… on Aug. 24, 2018 — How this will end (by Eliot Cohen) — To really get the feel for the Trump administration’s end, we must turn to the finest political psychologist of them all, William Shakespeare. The text is in the final act of Macbeth as one of the nobles who has turned on their murderous usurper king describes Macbeth’s predicament:
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
T.G.I.F.
► Gather ’round, kids, while The Entire Staff of The Stand shares a cautionary tale that could have inspired Bad Company’s “Shooting Star” (but didn’t).
Born and raised in Scotland, Jimmy McCulloch started playing the guitar at the age of 11. In 1969 at 16, he became the youngest guitarist to ever play on a UK #1 single, “Something in the Air” by Thunderclap Newman. He subsequently did concerts and session work with the likes of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Harry Nilsson, John Entwistle, and others. When McCulloch was 21, the guitar phenom was recruited by none other than Sir Paul McCartney to join Wings, a band he played with for three years. But 40 years ago today, on Sept. 27, 1979, the 26-year-old was found dead in his London apartment from a heroin overdose.
Here McCulloch performs a song he composed for Wings, the first song the band released with someone other than McCartney on all lead vocals. It’s a song that warns of the dangers of drugs.
The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.