Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
NewAlliance Bancshares Update: Those with money to burn who bought NewAlliance Bancshares should find out this week just how many NewAlliance Bancshares they’ll get.
Protestors call for Rove to push substantive immigration reform rather than election-year sleight-of-hand:
Several hundred people stormed the small yard of President Bush’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove, yesterday afternoon, pounding on his windows, shoving signs at others and challenging Rove to talk to them about a bill that deals with educational opportunities for immigrants. Protesters poured out of one school bus after another, piercing an otherwise quiet, peaceful Sunday in Rove’s Palisades neighborhood in Northwest, chanting, “Karl, Karl, come on out! See what the DREAM Act is all about!”
Rove obliged their first request and opened his door long enough to say, “Get off my property.”
…sirens shot through the neighborhood and Secret Service agents and D.C. police joined the crowd on the lawn. Rove opened his door long enough to talk to an officer, and the crowd serenaded them with a stanza of “America the Beautiful.”
As Alyssa observes:
This, and the organizers’ subsequent visits to several Cabinet Secretaries, reveal how callow and cyncial the Bush administration’s “committment” to immigration reform is.
MA’s legislature votes for a constitutional ammendment against gay marriage and for civil unions, as the state’s Attorney General refuses the Governor’s request to stop implementation of the court decision that’ll see at least six months of gay marriage before the vote and demonstrate fully how absurd the legislature’s attempt to slow history is.
Looks like after Philadelphia’s unions refused to validate Bunim/Murray’s plans to dodge organized labor and stood down their threat of capital flight, the Real World producers decided to come back to the table and negotiate a deal after all. So much for those who said it was anachronistic for Philly’s unions to make demands of business to protect workers.
To those who, like John Ashcroft, believe that the ACLU is simply fabricating “phantoms of lost liberty”: It’s naive and historically blind to give government agencies expanded powers, remove mechanisms for public oversight, and not expect them to take advantage of them.
Michael Sharer on “Medicare’s Hidden Bonanza“:
For conservative leaders, the best part of the Medicare bill President Bush signed in December had absolutely nothing to do with Medicare. Rather, the provision that House Speaker Dennis Hastert calls “the most important piece in the bill” and former Speaker Newt Gingrich considers “the single most important change in health care policy in 60 years” is a little-noticed tax rebate set to cost the Treasury $6.4 billion over the next decade. The measure allows Americans to open tax-free “health savings accounts,” which can be used to pay medical bills—in effect removing their owners from the shared risk that has been the core of the health-insurance system since World War II.
Conservatives claim health savings accounts will encourage people to more closely monitor their health care spending and bring down medical costs. Critics call the accounts a tax shelter that will benefit the wealthy and draw young, healthy workers out of health care plans, potentially doubling the cost of insurance for everyone else. But no matter who is right about the long-term impact, there is little doubt about the biggest short-term winner. He is J. Patrick Rooney, a major Republican campaign donor from Indiana who has done more than anyone else to make health savings accounts a reality. Rooney is the chairman emeritus of the Indianapolis-based Golden Rule Insurance Co., which has been selling health savings accounts through a now-expired pilot program that Rooney helped convince Congress to approve in 1996. Just days before the new Medicare bill passed, UnitedHealth Group, the largest insurer in America, paid $500 million in cash for Rooney’s family-owned company—a move that analysts said was directly tied to the Medicare bill’s provisions broadening the market for health savings accounts.
Evan, like me, founded yesterday’s GESO speak-out on diversity in the graduate school radicalizing and empowering.
Evan, unlike me, got to top it off by speaking justice to Graduate School Dean (and future Yale College Dean) Peter Salovey:
I asked if he was planning to ever respond to the letter 58 of my colleagues had signed and on which I was the contact person. He says the listening tour will be coming our way soon. What followed was a lengthy conversation about pay equity (“I prefer to call it a question of pay and not of equity”), this whole financial aid idea, the ideal world in which Yale would have tons of money (as if it doesn’t right now?) in which the graduate school would give us all $40k in the first three years and let us save or – worse -invest the money. Jennifer said she’d rather have a wage that would pay the rent. Dean Salovey said he thinks we should do only what teaching is necessary for our education; I told him about the Kutsinski Report’s reminder that staffing requirements should not impact teaching loads, and the Prown Report which states that hadn’t happened, and which also says our time to degree is longer because of our teaching. The dean replied that the point is to try to get you out sooner. I talked about the job market and how we are presently teaching ourselves out of jobs and that we’re looking at lectorships and adjuncting, and he said he likes to keep that a separate issue, so I pointed out again that the Prown Report shows the only reason grad students teach as PTAIs and TF IV’s is because the language requirement made the staffing need so great in the first place and that an adjunct caste had grown up around it… he was friendly as usual and we had some laughs that we fortunately kept interrupting with really disturbing facts about our standards of living (me: “If you want us to finish, what is the logic of financially supporting us less as our responsibilities to teaching and research increase in the later years of the program?”) Props also to Shalane Hansen for showing up in time to rip into the dean about mentorship and the gender imbalance in Religious Studies. It was amazing.
As an undergraduate, my education and my community are degraded as long as Yale’s institutional inertia and lack of institutional support keep women, working people, and people of color out of opportunities to be my teachers and to graduate and go on to teach others. And I have a stake in making that change.
New York State Senate Minority Leader David Patterson, after counting union cards signed by Columbia University graduate students, has certified what everyone knew – particularly the Columbia administrators who’ve appealed and had impounded the ballots from the election to stop them from being counted – that the majority want to be represented by the UAW:
Following on the heels of last week’s vote by members of Columbia’s clerical workers’ union, part of Local 2110 UAW–which authorized a strike by nearly 85 percent–the latest union activity represents a new tactic in the graduate students’ long fight for unionization.
…GSEU spent last semester and the beginning of this semester going to graduate students individually, explaining their new tactic of appealing directly to the University and asking students if they wanted to fill out union authorization cards. On Friday morning, they gathered to oversee Bill Batson, Patterson’s chief of staff, count the cards, finding that a majority of graduate students support a union, according to the GSEU.
Today, Patterson will present University President Lee Bollinger with a letter indicating that he found there to be a majority of students in support of a union, and that because of this majority he believes the students should be able to unionize. “The onus will be on the University to respect the voice of the majority; it’s hard to ignore a majority,” Carpio said.
…At noon on Friday, the Student Affairs Committee presented a resolution to the University Senate that asked for recognition of this new majority of pro-union graduate students.
Guess who wasn’t invited to Yale’s Sixth Annual Teaching Forum and Innovation Fair, focusing on teaching section?
That’s right: the people who teach section.
The Yale Daily News write-up, of course, didn’t talk to any of them either.
Bob Herbert on urban priorities:
I guess it’s a matter of priorities. The mayor can’t find the money to pay the city’s cops or teachers what they deserve, but he can sure come up with the cash for a stadium. “If you don’t have a smile on your face today,” said the mayor, with the Jets’ billionaire owner Woody Johnson looking on, “you’re never going to have one.”
He then proceeded to outline a West Side development plan that would include a 75,000-seat stadium for the Jets, complete with a retractable roof and a halo of full-service cocoons (known as luxury boxes) for the very rich and famous. One of the things that didn’t come up during the announcement was the fact that the city can’t afford to fund some of its most basic services.
For example, the bathrooms in many of the public schools are a scandal. Toilets are broken and filthy. Ceilings leak. Toilet paper is often nonexistent. The Times’s Elissa Gootman wrote in January that youngsters at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn use the toilets down the road at Coney Island Hospital. A student at a high school in Manhattan, Diola Castillo, said, “I just try to wait till I get home.” You can bet that Woody Johnson’s bathrooms will be pristine.
Our country makes an ill-advised struggle against European calls for the OEDC to encourage industrial democracy:
The dispute, which appears to pit France against the United States, centers on whether the organization will endorse giving workers a role in corporate management, as they have by law in some European countries but do not have in the United States.
It had appeared that the organization would remain neutral on that issue, but France has proposed adding language that says giving workers such roles should be “encouraged.” That has drawn the ire of business groups but has the strong support of trade unions. An official at the United States mission to the organization said on Friday that he had just learned of the dispute and said he was not sure how the organization would proceed. He declined to state the American position.
The O.E.C.D. is made up of 30 countries, most of them highly industrialized, and operates by consensus. As a result, any country that is strongly opposed to an initiative can block it. The organization has had principles of corporate governance since 1999 and announced plans in January to expand and enhance them. It had planned to announce the final version of those principles last week, but that announcement was canceled, ostensibly because of a scheduling conflict…Unions hope, and some businesses fear, that if the organization were to support rights of workers to be involved in corporate governance, it would make it easier to establish and protect rules requiring such a role in both developed and developing countries.
Josh Eidelson 