ANNISTON, Ala. — Several hundred union workers showed up at a “Save Our Jobs” rally here Monday night in the face of a threat by Republicans in Congress to claim reductions in the federal deficit by slashing up to 1,000 civilian jobs at the Anniston Army Depot. The American Federation of Government Employees and the Alabama AFL-CIO led the rally and are launching a campaign to get the public involved to try to save the jobs.
The Republican plan, which goes far beyond the deficit reduction proposal and military spending cuts put on the table by the Obama administration, could also result in a hiring freeze, furloughs for workers, pay freezes, a drop in the pay of the remainder of the depot’s 4,000 workers and an increase in employee contributions to their pension funds.
Everett Kelley, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the union leadership are trying to figure out how to combat the “travesty” and the “disaster” such drastic layoffs would have on the community.
The American Federation of Government Employees Local 1945 in the Anniston-Jacksonville area of Alabama says about 1,000 U.S. government workers are about to be laid off and their work assigned to contractors in other locations. So they are planning a “Save Our Jobs” rally for Monday, Jan. 30, at the Anniston Meeting Center Monday beginning at 5:30 p.m.
“Union member or not, we are in this fight together,” the union says in a press release announcing the event. “When one employee is cut the entire community is affected. With everyone’s help we can stop this attack on federal employees. We need to fight back and this meeting is the first step.”
Massachusetts Mormon Mitt Romney released his tax returns on Monday, finally, showing he is a billionaire who only paid 13.9 percent in taxes on $42.5 million in income last year, all of it earned not from labor but from paper, interest on investments. At the same time, he was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in Florida making crazy, false statements to get media attention, saying America is in decline and blaming it on President Barack Obama, because he is “a failure.”
A look at the facts below shows otherwise.
Meanwhile, President Obama went on national television to make his annual State of the Union Address before Congress, and made a number of factual statements about the situation and his record. Here is our analysis of some key points.
The key quote?
“Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” the president said, and the facts show he is right on this, not the Republicans.
President Obama’s new consumer watchdog Richard Cordray made his first public
appearance — after his controversial recess appointment — at a public hearing on
the predatory practices of payday lenders in Birmingham, Alabama (see video and story below).
by Glynn Wilson
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The Obama administration’s controversial new consumer watchdog Richard Cordray made his first appearance outside of Washington, D.C. here Thursday to take part in a public hearing on the predatory practices of payday lenders, which critics say rip off consumers and hurt the economy.
Cordray was appointed director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by President Barack Obama during the holidays in December while Congress was adjourned. Some Republicans, including Senator Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa and Rep. Spencer Bachus of Birmingham have opposed the nomination on procedural and philosophical grounds, so the case has landed in court.
While protesters outside the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex carried signs opposing Shelby and Bachus, Cordray led a discussion to a standing-room-only crowd about loan shark-style collection practices and illegal access to the bank accounts of borrowers in some cases. The executive branch agency gets its authority from the Dodd-Frank Act to regulate financial institutions that are not banks, and due to the impact of the sometimes “outrageous” interests rates customers end up paying, Cordray said, the activity needs to be investigated and perhaps even outlawed.
“We know that some payday lenders are engaged in practices that present immediate risks to consumers and are clearly illegal,” Cordray said. “The illegal practices are outrageous. We want to root them out where we find them. We are here to make sure that fundamental fairness for all consumers is assured when they need to borrow money.”
President Obama discusses steps he’s taking to ensure that more goods and products stamped “Made in America” are sold in the United States and around the world.
Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard showed up to speak to firefighters and police officers in Huntsville on Friday and to launch a trial balloon about a new Republican plan to raid the state retirement system, which most people learned about on Facebook because the people of Alabama love to share the links to the near-monopoly Newhouse news Website al.com.
Of course even though this mega news organization that owns the three largest newspapers in the state in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile, not to mention television stations and other media properties, readers really didn’t learn much of anything about the plan from the report.
It took two bloggers to report and write this story, and this is about all we know.
Hubbard said “changes must be made” to the current Retirement Systems of Alabama, which includes more than 300,000 active and retired members. (As an ethical disclaimer, that includes my 85-year-old mother : ) About 100,000 people receive checks from the retirement fund, while 170,000 active members contribute to the system, but of course the Republicans would not only like to rob the fund. The party members would also love to shrink the size of government and get rid of some of those state employees, especially those who vote for Democrats, making the fund even more insoluble.
Two steelworkers tell their story about how they lost their jobs when Mitt Romney and Bain Capital took over the steel plant in Kansas City and eventually shut the place down.
On the final day of 2011 as I sit here sipping my coffee trying to remember, perusing the other top story lists and trying to figure out a way to sum it all up from here, one thing occurs to me. While the protesters in the Arab world and the Occupy protests are making all the lists, I can’t find one single mention of the protesters in Wisconsin or the reenergized efforts of organized labor across the U.S. on any of the lists.
Could it be that the American news media’s anti-union bias is at work here?
A federal appeals court has balked at deciding a controversial legal case pitting the Alabama Education Association and its ability to raise membership dues against the new Republican administration dead set on weakening public employee unions and suppressing votes for Democrats.
According to a court filing that just popped up online from the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, the federal appeals court panel tossed the state’s appeal in the case back to the all Republican Alabama Supreme Court. The professional organization for teachers won a victory in a lower court and obtained a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a law passed by the new so-called “Super Majority” of Republicans in the state Legislature, a law written to prohibit payroll deductions to groups that use some of the money for “political activity.”
The appeals court panel indicated it would be “constitutional” for the Legislature to block the payroll deduction if the organization is guilty of “electioneering.”
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.
