In Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You, an OpEd for the NY Times takes on the idea that unions discourage exceptional workers. It strikes a few chords with me:
When I flew to Dublin in early November, the Irish government was busy helping the Irish people come to terms with their loss. It had been two years since a handful of Irish politicians and bankers decided to guarantee all the debts of the country’s biggest banks, but the people were only now getting their minds around what that meant for them. The numbers were breathtaking. A single bank, Anglo Irish, which, two years before, the Irish government had claimed was merely suffering from a “liquidity problem,” faced losses of up to 34 billion euros.
I loved this job, especially the interaction with the readers. I admired the moral seriousness of their questions and the astuteness of their criticism — often fierce, occasionally discourteous, never sufficiently threatening to report to the police. But close. And that’s fine. Ethics is a subject about which honorable people may differ. I was less sanguine about readers who disparaged not my argument but my character or my shoes or my nose, attacks that generally concluded, “You should be ashamed.” I blame the anonymity of e-mail. And underprescribed medication. ...
However, I would like to warn the democratic activists in Egypt and even more so their would-be followers in the Middle East that democracy is not the solution to all problems. Democracy does not necessarily solve problems related to poverty and economic inequality, nor does it resolve cultural conflicts related to the common identity of the nation's citizens.
The image of Western liberal democracies is spreading and it is hard to deny the allure. Through a rich vein of Enlightenment thinking, they claim to represent a way of reconciling man’s natural autonomy with the subjection to authority that citizenship requires. In empowering people to have a say in the matters that affect them, many have come to view them as the panacea to a global economic market that systematically generates vast inequalities in living standards. ...
The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up. And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime. Barry was the person who first introduced me to the Internet in the early 1990s, and we have remained friends ever since.
The manufactured Madison, Wis., mob is not the movement the White House was hoping for. Both may find themselves at the wrong end of the populist pitchfork. While I generally defend collective bargaining and private-sector unions (lots of airline pilots in my family), it is the abuse by public unions and their bosses that pushes centrists like me to the GOP. It is the right and duty of citizens to petition their government. The Tea Party and Republicans seek to limit government growth to protect their pocketbooks.
Under the budget-repair bill passed by the Assembly on Friday, no bids would be required for the state to sell up to 37 heating and cooling plants across the state.
The bill would empower the secretary of the state Department of Administration to sell the plants, which primarily serve University of Wisconsin campuses, including those in Madison and Milwaukee, as well as state prisons and other facilities.
I don't want to make too strong a claim about those particular details. It's very hard to claim precise statistical evidence in support of one choice of a threshold over another. But, this particular model has held up fairly well since its original publication in 2003. So I'm not about to abandon it just yet.
With hundreds still missing, and 75 already confirmed dead, rescuers struggled to find survivors on the second night after a devastating earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand's second largest city Tuesday. Buildings crumbled into the streets after the 6.3 magnitude earthquake, which geologists consider an aftershock to a 7.1 earthquake that caused no casualties in September. Tuesday’s temblor was more devastating and deadly because it was centered only six miles from the city's center and hit during the middle of a workday.
U.S. officials have admitted an American detained in Pakistan for the murder of two men was a CIA agent and a former employee of the private security firm Blackwater, now called Xe Services. Up until Monday, the Obama administration had insisted Raymond Davis was a diplomat who had acted in self-defense. The arrest of Davis has soured relations between the United States and Pakistan and revealed a web of covert U.S. operations inside the country, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. The Guardian of London first reported Davis’s CIA link on Sunday and noted that many U.S.
But it is not just Democratic officials who should be standing with Wisconsin movement leaders: all progressives should. Conservatives want to roll back the clock on more than a century of social progress, and they are only going after the unions first because they are the strongest progressive institutions in America. They figure if they can take out the unions first, everything after that — outlawing abortion, ending progress on LGBT and other civil rights, privatizing Social Security and Medicare, etc. — will be relatively easy.
Maybe Gasland, Josh Fox’s film about fracking, should have been classified as a horror movie, because it appears to have the oil and gas industry running scared.
Most gun owners interviewed said they had never drawn their weapons in self-defense. But John A. Catsimatidis, the owner of the Red Apple Group and Gristedes supermarket chain, recalled a chilling episode from the mid-1980s, when he intercepted a robber fleeing one of his stores in the Bronx.
