The unprecedented Republican and corporate attacks on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are a direct attack on workers’ rights and an effort to put the nation’s labor laws “into cold storage,” Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) said Wednesday during a special AFL-CIO forum examining the assault on the board and workers’ rights.
“This is the right wing on steroids,” he said. “They went to work immediately after the 2010 elections — not on jobs—but on taking rights away from American workers.”
Since January, said Kimberly Freeman Brown, executive director of American Rights at Work, congressional Republicans have made nearly 50 separate assaults on the NLRB from bills to gut its power and funding to hearings and subpoenas.
In fact later today, the House will vote on bill that would deny workers the right to fair union elections by blocking the modest changes proposed by the NLRB earlier this year in the way union elections are conducted.
Assistant Attorneys General Thomas E. Perez and Tony West of the U.S. Justice Department Civil Rights Division were in Birmingham on Monday in the continuing investigation into the impact of Alabama’s strict new immigration law, H.B. 56. It is a separate investigation from the pre-emptive lawsuit to keep the law from being enforced, according to remarks issued after the press conference by the office of U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.
“The more we hear, the more concerned we are about the impact of Alabama’s immigration law on a wide range of federal rights,” Perez said. “This is why we have returned to Alabama to gather additional information.”
The department is receiving lots of calls and e-mails on the impact of the law. A hotline has been setup at 855.353.1010 and people can send e-mails about it to hb56@usdoj.gov.
Perez said they are concerned about kids dropping out of school or being chronically absent, that the law is being used as an excuse not to pay workers, as well as racial profiling on the part of police.
The people of Alabama have barely had time to digest their Thanksgiving turkey and do a little Christmas shopping for their families before the radical Republicans in the Legislature and their corporate media mouthpieces start talking about doing more damage to the state after the first of the year.
Could it be that House Speaker Mike Hubbard of Auburn is so pissed off at his favorite football team for losing to Alabama on Saturday that he just had to call up the Army Corps of the Associated Press to drop another bombshell on the people on Cyber Monday?
I mean, can’t we just sleep late every now and then on a rainy Monday before the forces of darkness spoil everything with more gloom and doom?
Due to all the whirlwind of activity since Thanksgiving, I am just now getting around to thanking the friendly folks at the Veranda restaurant on Highland Avenue on Birmingham’s Southside for the scrumptious meal on Thanksgiving Day.
Since I’m not one for large family gatherings, I posted a notice on Facebook asking my friends to recommend a restaurant that would be open on Thanksgiving. My friend Louis Baxley, who I found out used to work at Veranda, recommended the place.
So I invited videographer Hippie Stew and a couple of other friends out to dinner, and the experience was well worth the price. The meal was delicious and the service top notch.
It is a gorgeous fall Saturday morning as most of the people in my home state prepare for the Alabama-Auburn game, still referred to as the Iron Bowl only because no one has come up with a better name for it since it moved out of the iron city of Birmingham in 1989.
Everything takes awhile to change in the South, so give them time. It is amazing the game doesn’t already have a corporate name attached to it. Every other bowl game in America has been corporatized.
Is it possible that Occupy Wall Street might survive long enough to change our thinking on such things? I hope so, but I don’t have any faith.
Someone with a defeatist attitude accused me of having faith on the porch of the Hippie House the other day, while I was having a conversation (or a conversion) with Walter Simon of the Occupy Birmingham movement. I’m pretty sure I’ve explained this before, but over my morning coffee today, I feel the need to explain it again.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys General Tony West and Thomas E. Perez of the Civil Rights Division will be in Birmingham, Alabama, on Monday, Nov. 28, to meet with business and community leaders and discuss the impact of H.B. 56, Alabama’s immigration law, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorneys office in Birmingham.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
