The Chronicle of Higher Education assesses the chances that the NLRB’s Brown decision would be overturned under a Kerry administration:

It’s possible. University administrators see the last four years as the aberration and argue that the NYU case was simply wrongly decided. Union leaders, however, maintain that the NYU decision was correct and returning to the previous precedent is out of touch with the current labor situation in academe. If the Republicans lose control of the White House, the majority control of the labor board would also switch. The board’s five members are appointed to five-year terms, with one member’s term expiring every year. The two Democrats currently on the board wrote a sharply worded dissent in this month’s decision. “The developments that brought graduate students to the board will not go away, but they will have to be addressed elsewhere, if the majority’s decision stands,” they wrote. “That result does American universities no favors.”

Having decisions bounce back and forth from one administration to the next is not uncommon, says William B. Gould IV, a Democrat and former chairman of the board under President Clinton. He emphasizes that the board is a “quasi-judicial” agency whose members serve relatively short terms rather than lifetime appointments. “Congress has really placed its imprimatur on the idea of precedent reversal to a greater extent with the board than would be true in the judiciary,” Mr. Gould says.

Droughts and monsoons strike India:

Mr Singh told parliament that rains were 25-50% below normal in some parts. His comments came as rain in Bangladesh and India’s north-east showed no sign of abating – Guwahati, capital of Assam state, is the latest to be hit. And in Bihar, at least 15 people drowned when an overcrowded boat sank on the Gandak river. Mr Singh told parliament that vast swathes of northern, western and central India had experienced insufficient rainfall, and that crops could be affected. He said he had asked India’s highest ranking civil servant, cabinet secretary BK Chaturvedi, to review the situation every week.

Officials say grain stocks are being increased in areas of low rainfall and measures are being taken to provide adequate drinking water. “The government shall spare no efforts in providing all possible assistance to people in the eventuality of a drought,” Mr Singh said. At the same time, Bihar and Assam are experiencing their worst floods in 10 years. More than 300 people have lost their lives in India’s floods and more than 19m have been affected.

Democratic Convention protesters declare a free speech zone of their own:

The streets around the Democratic National Convention site resembled an armed camp on Sunday – helicopters overhead, bomb-sniffing dogs and their handlers, police officers and soldiers lining the intersections, many kinds of barriers, and an officially designated “Free Speech Zone” sealed off with cyclone fencing and razor wire. It looked like an empty cage. The designated demonstration area, a dank place under abandoned elevated tracks, failed its first test on Sunday when what will probably be the largest demonstration of the convention period simply walked right by it…Indeed, the Free Speech Zone is rapidly becoming the hottest local issue of the convention, with most of the protest groups vowing to boycott it. The only protesters to embrace it were members of a pro-Palestinian group that says the cyclone fencing and barbed wire provide an ideal visual backdrop to their message of opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

…After the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild filed suit against the zone, Judge Douglas P. Woodlock of Federal District Court toured the site last week and said that while he intitially doubted the lawyers’ claim that the site resembled “an internment camp,” he concluded that the comparison was “an understatement.” “One cannot concieve of other elements put in place to create a space that’s more of an affront to the idea of free expression than the designated demonstration zone,” he said in a ruling on Thursday. Nevertheless, Judge Woodcock said, there was no alternative. He told the lawyers: “There really isn’t any other place. You’re stuck under the tracks.”

On the eve of the Democratic Convention, the solidarity of public employees and the commitment of delegates not to cross their picket lines secure contracts:

The firefighters were the last big city union left without a contract. In the days leading up to the convention on Monday, there had been concerns that union strife might interfere with the four-day event….The convention begins Monday, but delegates began descending on Boston over the weekend. Scores of welcoming parties were planned throughout the city Sunday. Unionized city police officers reached a four-year deal with the city several days ago, but had said they would still picket Sunday night delegation parties to show support for firefighters. Firefighter union leaders said they no longer intend to picket. And unionized police officers said they were backing off the threat as well…The agreement with police officers was reached last week after it was sent to expedited arbitration. The police had sought 17 percent pay increase over four years, while the city’s last would have provided 11. 9 percent. The independent arbitrator picked a figure roughly in the middle, 14.5 percent. The firefighters’ union, like its brethren nationally, has strong ties to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Boston’s municipal labor unrest has presented a problem for the party, its labor-friendly delegates and Kerry for months. Faced with protesting officers at a recent mayor’s conference, Kerry declined to cross their picket line to deliver a speech. “Everybody looked around the room and smiled and felt like, finally, we can concentrate fully on the convention,” Josh White, executive director of the Maryland Democratic Party, said Sunday. The 99-member Maryland delegation had said it would not attend any function that required crossing a picket line. Other state delegations had issued similar threats.

The Democratic Convention schedule is on-line here.

So much for Diebold’s stated plans to deliver Ohio to Bush:

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell today halted deployment of Diebold Election Systems’ electronic voting devices in Ohio for the 2004 General Election. The decision is based on preliminary findings from the secretary of state’s second round of security testing conducted by Compuware Corporation showing the existence of previously identified, but yet unresolved security issues. Hardin, Lorain and Trumbull counties had selected to use new Diebold equipment this November. Those counties will use their current voting devices in 2004. “As I made clear last year, I will not place these voting devices before Ohio’s voters until identified risks are corrected,” Blackwell said. “Diebold Election Systems has successfully addressed many, but not all, of the problems that were identified in our first security review. The lack of comprehensive resolution prevents me from giving county boards of elections a green light for this November. “I look forward to working with Diebold Election Systems and our other qualified election system vendors as they continue to bolster security and develop voting devices that meet Ohio’s requirement for voter-verifiable paper audit trails.”

In December 2003, Secretary Blackwell released results from two comprehensive examinations identifying 57 potential security risks within the software and hardware of the voting devices offered by Ohio’s qualified electronic voting systems vendors: Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems and Software, Hart Intercivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems. He ordered the voting machine manufacturers to resolve all of the identified issues or face a halt in deployment. Diebold Election Systems was the only vendor to submit revised voting software and hardware for retesting.

Wal-Mart Watch: Bloomberg reports on Wal-Mart’s investment in re-electing George Bush, and Costco’s in unseating him:

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer and owner of Sam’s Club warehouse stores, gives more money to Republican candidates than any other company. Its top three managers, including Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott, donated the individual maximum $2,000 to President George W. Bush, and Jay Allen, vice president for corporate affairs, raised at least $100,000 to re-elect the president, earning him the Bush campaign’s designation of “Pioneer.”…Costco CEO Jim Sinegal, 68, is a Democrat who says Bush’s $1.7 trillion in tax cuts unfairly benefit the wealthy. He opposed the Iraq war and supports Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts for president. And he’s the only chief executive of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to donate money to independent political groups formed to oust Bush, Internal Revenue Service records show.

Costco wouldn’t have to raise salaries with Kerry’s proposal to increase the minimum wage to $7 an hour, from $5.15 now. It already pays hot-dog vendors as much as $16 an hour. The lowest wage it pays — $10 an hour — is still higher than Wal-Mart’s average wage of $9.96, even after Wal-Mart raised it from $9.64 last month for full-time workers. And the 1.4 million-member Teamsters Union said its workers at Costco have the “best retail contracts in the country,” according to Rome Aloise, head of Teamsters Local 853 in San Leandro, California, which represents 1,000 of the company’s workers…Wal-Mart has benefited from the president’s opposition to raising the minimum wage, since some employees make less than $7 an hour, and from the Republican-controlled Congress’s reluctance to make it easier for workers to unionize…Sinegal makes no apologies for Costco’s policies, saying higher wages reduce employee turnover, which lowers training costs. “I’m not a social engineer,” he said in an interview. “Paying good wages is simply good business.”

In other words, Kerry is proposing vital steps towards what some political scientists call “paving the high road” – increasing the benefits and decreasing the costs of more just, more sustainable business practices like investing in better compensation for employees and lower turnover rather than the low road of investing in continually hiring and training a casualized, high turnover workforce in hopes of stifling worker militancy. Costco supports Kerry for the reason we should support Kerry over and Costco over Wal-Mart: Because the high road is better for Americans as workers, consumers, and citizens. Wal-Mart supports Bush because both have a stake in perpetuating the race to the bottom.

Kucinich endorses Kerry:

For the past two and a half years, I have led a national effort for peace, for social and economic justice and health care for all. My campaign reached every state and territory. We participated in every primary and caucus. We pointed our party towards new directions. I am here to say that the next critical step we must take is to help elect John Kerry the next President of the United States. Today I am happy to endorse the Kerry-Edwards ticket. And I look forward to helping to lead the way to elect John Kerry President and John Edwards Vice President of the United States.

John Kerry is a good friend and a decent man. He has a lifelong commitment of honorable service to our nation as a military officer and as a Senator. He can be trusted with power. He will help heal America. He has outstanding intellectual gifts he will bring to the White House and to world affairs. I am proud to stand here to say I will do everything possible to make John Kerry the next President of the United States. With your help and mine we will make sure he wins my home state of Ohio, the industrial Midwest and the White House.

Wal-Mart Watch/ Ehrenreich Lovefest Combination Post: In her second-to-last planned column for the Times, Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the invasion from Wal-Mars:

It’s the velocity of growth that you need to measure now: two new stores opening and $1 billion worth of U.S. real estate bought up every week; almost 600,000 American employees churned through in a year (that’s at a 44 percent turnover rate). My thumbnail calculation suggests that by the year 4004, every square inch of the United States will be covered by supercenters, so that the only place for new supercenters will be on top of existing ones. Wal-Mart will be in trouble long before that, of course, because with everyone on the planet working for the company or its suppliers, hardly anyone will be able to shop there. Wal-Mart is frequently lauded for bringing consumerism to the masses, but more than half of its own “associates,” as the employees are euphemistically termed, cannot afford the company’s health insurance, never mind its Faded Glory jeans. With hourly wages declining throughout the economy, Wal-Mart – the nation’s largest employer – is already seeing its sales go soft.

But a creature afflicted with the appetite of a starved hyena doesn’t have time for niceties. Wal-Mart is facing class-action suits for sex discrimination and nonpayment for overtime work (meaning no payment at all), as well as accusations that employees have been locked into stores overnight, unable to get help even in medical emergencies. These are the kinds of conditions we associate with third world sweatshops, and in fact Wal-Mart fails at least five out of 10 criteria set by the Worker Rights Consortium, which monitors universities’ sources of logoed apparel – making it the world’s largest sweatshop.

Matt Drudge is trumpeting a New York Post report that Sandy Berger is trying to hide the fact that he’s responsible for September 11. This could spell real trouble for the Kerry-Gephardt ticket.

Tom Hayden on Bolivia’s vote against privatization:

Bolivia’s fragile government gained temporary breathing room in Sunday’s referendum over the nation’s natural gas and oil reserves, but the “yes” vote also strengthened the position of Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) which can revise the measure that will be sent to the legislature on August 7. In the run-up to the July 18 vote, radical Indian and labor leaders threatened boycotts and the burning of ballot boxes against a referendum that left out the option of state nationalization. Nevertheless, the referendum also meant a continued rejection of the free-market policies championed by the former president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, the University of Chicago economist who was driven into exile last October after police killings of nearly one hundred Indians who protested his rule.

Early returns indicated an 80 percent majority in favor of repealing the existing hydrocarbons law pushed in the 1990s by the hated Sánchez de Lozada (or “Goni”), whose political consultants were the star liberal Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg and former presidential campaign manager James Carville. The Washington-based Greenberg firm represents British Petroleum, one of the multinationals with billions invested in Bolivia. BP supported the referendum, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as did US Embassy officials, because the possible alternative–an Indian-led revolution–was even worse…It appears that the Greenberg-Carville axis attempted to export the Clinton Administration’s free-trade policies to Latin America, with disastrous political results. Prompted by popular resistance from Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil, however, the Clinton-era policies are being re-examined, from the New Deal tone of this week’s Bolivian referendum to the language of Senator John Kerry’s platform recommendation for “review” of trade policies.