“Do not abandon me in my old age”: Hundreds of thousands of current and future European pensions rally to demand that their governments keep faith with those whose decades of service built their nations:

In Rome, pensioners arrived on buses, special trains and even boats from the island of Sardinia to demonstrate against the rising cost of living. Various German cities saw people march against welfare cuts introduced to combat economic stagnation. And in Paris they demanded more jobs and social justice.

Matt Yglesias makes short shrift of David Brooks’ faux populism:

Take a look at his “One Nation, Slightly Divisible”, the article that spawned a million Red America vs. Blue America clichés. The general thrust is that Blue America is rich, sophisticated, and liberal while Red America is working class, moral, and conservative. This theory is a bit hard to square with the actual data indicating that if you slice America up into six income brackets Gore won the three at the bottom and Bush won the three at the top, even while Gore voters tended to live in high cost of living areas.

Papering over these inconvenient facts isn’t just sloppy journalism; it serves to obscure the persistence of class division in American life — a theme that’s quite explicit in the article. Painting conservatism as the ideology of ordinary working people pitted against hoity-toity liberal elitists while the Republican Party puts forward budget after budget geared toward the needs of the super-rich looks to me like a deliberate effort to obscure what’s really going on.

At long last, the Yale Daily News web-folks have put the missing articles from the first two issues since break up on-line. You may not have noticed that they were missing but obsessive 1-AM-YDN-website-scanner-for-the-next-day’s-issue that I am (the better to critique you with…), I’m certainly relieved. Especially because I can finally link two great and relevant op-eds from the Tuesday before last.

This one, by Marissa Levendis, slams Mike Morand of the Office of New Haven and State Affairs for his absurd smear of the movement for Yale to pay New Haven its fair share:

I find it personally offensive that an associate vice president of an institution with an $11-billion endowment would characterize $6 million as financial-aid benefits and staff-position payments. Our university has an $11-billion endowment. $6 million is .055 percent of Yale’s endowment. If my parents were required to pay more taxes and they had $11 billion in assets, would they choose to pay the taxes out of my college-tuition fund or from the money in the bank? It is a question of integrity. I know how my parents would respond; unfortunately, I’m not confident of my university’s response.

Attempting to make Yale pay taxes on property where profit is earned is not an attempt to punish Yale for New Haven’s problems. It is not an attempt to cut PILOT funding. It is not an attempt to bring to the surface “adversity left behind three decades ago”. It is an attempt to make Yale a more responsible citizen of its city and give its city an improved ability to fund basic services. SB 454 may have been defeated a week ago, but the fight for Yale to pay its fair share is not going away. If Morand wants to help his city, than he will join those of us who advocate for a greater fair-share payment to the city from Yale and an increased PILOT payment from the state.

My response on this site to a few of Morand’s more outrageous claims is archived here.

Also on the now-available March 30 YDN op-ed page, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson compares Duke’s and Yale’s responses to calls for investment disclosure:

Model A: Students submit a list of companies about which they have concerns to the university investment office. The investment office informs the students how much exposure the endowment has to each company, either through direct investments or through private investment managers.

Model B: Students express concern about a controversial private investment, identified through the university’s tax forms. Weeks later, the university alters the way it fills out its tax forms, making it more difficult for members of the public to identify similar problems in the future. When students attempt to deliver a letter of concern to the university’s investments office, the staff turns off the elevators, expels the students from the building and calls the police.

I’m hoping to post an account of yesterday’s meeting of Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility here – right after I finally post a write-up of dinner with Yale – New Haven Hospital Board Chairman Marvin Lender Wednesday night.

As we say in Lashon HaKodesh, HaMeshech Yavo…

Wal-Mart Watch: In These Times explores the Walton family’s campaign to destroy public education in America – and how it plays into their campaign to drive down wages and benefits worldwide, and calls for the opposition to mobilize with the same urgency:

If evil could be branded, its emblem would be the Wal-Mart logo. The retailer has become so large, and behaves so aggressively, it sometimes appears as a force of nature, like weather. Three huge grocery chains with a 70 percent combined national, big-city market share ambushed the United Food and Commercial Workers union this winter, all the while crying that Wal-Mart’s low-wage, few-benefits “model” made them do it. After more than three months on strike and lockout, UFCW President Doug Dority accepted a two-tier, higher premium health coverage settlement. If the Wal-Mart model is a private-sector inevitability, then larger circles of solidarity are the only defense…Labor can’t beat the Wal-Mart model piecemeal, or even if it were united. A larger mobilization is needed.

Wal-Mart shifts the burden of its exploitation to the public, causing federal taxpayers to pay more than $2,000 per employee in social safety net costs to subsidize John, Jim, Sam, Alice and Helen’s profits. In Georgia, Wal-Mart employees’ kids wind up in disproportionate numbers on the state program for uninsured children. Wal-Mart is Georgia’s No. 1 employer, and the state can’t fight that kind of power—not alone.

NewAlliance Bancshares Update: A busy day for the uber-rich.

I don’t know whether this satire from Planned Parenthood is, as we say, on message. But it is clever.

Jacob calls the New York Times on its failure to write the impact on workers into its narratives of business dealings, and brings the mighty Grey Lady to its knees. Yasher koach.

Wal-Mart Watch: Chicago Aldermen refuse to back down from demands that Wal-Mart commit to labor standards in exchange for zoning approval:

…on Wednesday, allies of organized labor on Chicago’s City Council scored at least a temporary victory over Wal-Mart, securing a one-month delay in zoning approval for Wal-Mart to open its first two Chicago stores, on the South and West sides.

Banks and Ald. Edward Burke (14th) predicted labor leaders would reach an accord by the next City Council meeting allowing the projects to go forward. “A commitment by Wal-Mart not to get into the grocery and food business would go a long way toward resolving this controversy,” Burke said. A commitment by Wal-Mart to pay Chicago employees a “living wage” and not punish them for trying to unionize would also help, other aldermen said.

So much for the conventional wisdom that you (or City Hall) can’t fight Wal-Mart.

Now he tells us:

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Friday that part of his dramatic testimony to the U.N. Security Council before the Iraq war was based on intelligence that appears to have been unreliable…Powell told reporters at a press briefing that his testimony about Iraq possibly using mobile biological weapons labs “was presented to me … as the best information and intelligence that we had” but “now it appears not to be the case that it was that solid.”

Stephen Greenhouse reports on American employers’ widespread theft of employees’ overtime compensation:

Mr. Pooters quit, landing a job in 2002 managing a Family Dollar store, one of 5,100 in that discount chain. Top managers there ordered him not to let employees’ total hours exceed a certain amount each week, and one day, he said, his district manager told him to use a trick to cut payroll: delete some employee hours electronically. “I told her, `I’m not going to get involved in this,’ ” Mr. Pooters recalled, saying that when he refused, the district manager erased the hours herself.

Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees’ time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect — a simple matter of computer keystrokes — and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.

Sam Smith compiles a sampling of bad news for our democracy: From the TSA scheming in Chicago to track travelers with radio chips to Maryland legislation to bar the “disruptive” from libraries to heavy fines levied against drug legalization advocates in DC. Oy.

Good news: More jobs. Bad news: Less work.