A question: Which of these bills do you think the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is more likely to pass? The Outsourcing Accountability Act, which would require “large U.S. companies to disclose how many of their jobs are based on U.S. soil and how many are based abroad”? Or the version of the surface transportation bill increasing the weight limit for tractor-trailers from 80,000 pounds to 97,000 pounds and maybe even more, and allowing “the largest rigs, which comprise two and sometimes three trailers, to be as much as 10 feet longer—a total length of more than 100 feet”?

On the one hand, you have a bill introduced and sponsored by Democrats that would require companies with revenues over $1 billion, exempting ones that had been public for less than five years, to let us know how many employees they have working in the United States, how many employees they have working overseas and in which countries, and how the percentages changed from year to year. It’s data you know corporations already have; most of them just don’t want to tell us. Giving the public the right to this information would create informed consumers—and maybe give corporations a moment’s pause when they thought about moving another set of jobs overseas.

On the other hand, you have the Republican transportation bill that would put heavier trucks with longer stopping distances onto the same roads as families in compact cars, after 2010 saw a 9 percent increase in truck crash fatalities. The trucking industry tells us that these heavier trucks would be made so they stopped as quickly as the ones on the roads now. Do you believe them on that? And how will they address the effects of putting tens of thousands of pounds of extra weight on our nation’s 70,000 structurally deficient bridges? Oh, and wouldn’t this just be a way for companies to pay fewer truck drivers to move the same quantity of goods?

Your House, ladies and gentlemen. Where the party in control wants to put massive killer trucks on the roads but has thus far blocked every effort to discourage jobs offshoring. Here’s hoping the Outsourcing Accountability Act is the bill that breaks through that resistance. But it’s a dim hope.

(Via DougJarvus Green-Ellis and Atrios)

When Joe the Plumber Samuel Wurzelbacher announced he was running for Congress against Democratic incumbent Marcy Kaptur, the big question was why he’d bother. As David Nir wrote, Ohio’s “new 9th District was drawn as a deliberate Democratic vote sink … It’s a clever gerrymander, which means any Republican who would try to run here just isn’t very clever at all.”

But it turns out Wurzelbacher had a solid plan, in the grand tradition of Republican grifters: He’s paying himself a $5,000 monthly salary as a candidate. According to a campaign spokesman:

“The salary is significantly less than what he made as a plumber,” Schroeder told The Plain Dealer. “The reason why candidates accept salaries from campaigns, particularly working-class candidates, is that they can’t run unless they can support themselves.”

Which would be a decent reason—you shouldn’t have to be wealthy to run for office—except that Wurzelbacher wasn’t a licensed plumber in 2008 when he became a semi-celebrity and given that he’s spent the years since on the wingnut welfare circuit, writing books and making motivational speeches, it’s unlikely he was doing a lot of plumbing in the weeks before he kicked off his campaign. But a run for office puts him back in the public eye just as his least last shred of relevancy was expiring, so the campaign should pay off beyond the salary it pays him.

The blog, Twitter and Facebook blowback to the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s pullback of Planned Parenthood funding hasn’t died down yet. Watching this debacle unfold through social media, I was struck by how poorly managed and organized the SGK response was.

Social marketing professional Nedra Weinreich of Weinreich Communications and the Spare Change blog makes some good points to Daily Kos on how this is all playing out on line:

Once the news started to spread and outraged former Komen fans began chiming in across social media, the Komen Foundation’s social media silence was deafening. While people beat them up far and wide online, they lost their prime opportunity to make their case and stave off the blood flow.

No matter what they had said, many would have turned against them because of the implication that this new policy was politically motivated in a direction that many who supported the organization disagree with. But there would have also been people — especially those who invested their time, energy and identity in their support for Komen — who would look for reasons to continue their support and defend the organization. But by not even posting an explanation on Twitter or Facebook for over 24 hours in response to the uproar, it felt like they were hiding and hoping it would all blow over, not even confident enough to stand up for their decision. Every minute the message “Komen hates poor women” was amplified without any counter-message, it lost more context, and turned into a huge brand implosion.

Twenty four hours or more without any response from Komen undid the organization’s lifetime of development of brand goodwill. For it to turn into a “war” between Komen and Planned Parenthood that made many feel like they had to choose sides only hurt Komen. At this point, they will be lucky to salvage any positive feelings toward them by those who are pro-choice and who watched this play out in real time.

Another interesting view of the failure of SGK to anticipate and utilize the internet comes from Netroots Foundation/Netroots Nation’s executive director Raven Brooks:

A lot of people have been writing that Komen didn’t have a communications strategy and that was their problem. Well that was one problem. Others include a complete lack of understanding of the Internet, how news spreads during a news cycle, and the temperature of progressive activists after a lot of backsliding on this issue specifically, and more generally with things learned from the ACORN fight. But the biggest issue is they completely changed their mission without even realizing it.

Raven makes some great points in this post, but I have to ask how much of this was deliberate mission changing (i.e deciding to choose conservative donors over pro-choice ones and expecting but being unprepared for the magnitude of the blowback), and how much was complete unanticipated reaction to a political move they committed themselves to make.

Whereas I am always ready to assume incompetence over maliciousness, here’s one case where that may not apply. Even so, it may be that it’s a case of which kind of incompetence was dominant: expecting but mismanaging fallout, or not anticipating it in the first place.

[Update 2/3/2012]:

Outcry Grows Fiercer After Funding Cut by Cancer Group

The nation’s leading breast cancer advocacy organization confronted the growing furor Thursday over its decision to largely end its decades-long partnership with Planned Parenthood, with rising dissension in its own ranks and a roiling anger on the Internet showing the power of social media to harness protest.

[Update 2/4/2012]: The debate is now about what the apology from Komen means, and what it means for them to have their mask ripped off. You can’t inject abortion politics into this as Komen clearly did, and then claim to be a victim of people injecting politics into women’s health. Think Progress describes Bush veteran Ari Fleisher’s involvement:

Fleischer’s high-level involvement with Komen further complicates its image as an apolitical cancer charity. Fleischer is a prominent partisan commentator and a longtime critic of Planned Parenthood. In his book, Taking Heat, Fleischer criticized Planned Parenthood as a partisan, ideological organization that receives undeserved positive coverage in the press. In 2001, Fleischer said that the Clinton administration verged too far to the left on family planning efforts because “if Planned Parenthood wanted it, the previous administration favored it.”

Please, contribute to Planned Parenthood on Act Blue.

While the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, there’s a lot of controversy over how poverty should be measured, and still more over how we should view proximity to poverty, the people who aren’t poor but are dangerously close to it. Here’s another way of looking at that. The Corporation for Enterprise Development has released its annual assets and opportunity scorecard, scoring the states on how well they promote household financial security through jobs, education, health care, housing and financial assets. Do states support very small businesses? Do they provide quality public education and incentives to college savings? Do they have a minimum wage above the federal minimum and provide cost of living adjustments? Do they provide tax credits to low-income families and prohibit predatory payday lenders?

The scorecard finds that the asset poverty rate of American households is 27.1 percent—these families don’t have enough savings or other assets to subsist at the poverty level for three months if they lost their income, even if they were able to liquidate every asset they had in that time. Liquid asset poverty, a measure that excludes hard-to-get-rid-of things like houses and cars, is still higher, at 43.1 percent. That means a great many people who are working now, who aren’t showing up on traditional poverty measures, are leading incredibly fragile lives and could easily be thrown into poverty by any crisis. As with almost every measure of this kind, there are huge racial gaps—34.1 percent of white households are in liquid asset poverty, in contrast to 64.6 percent of households of color.

These things don’t just happen in isolation, as the scorecard shows. States can take action through policy to make it easier for low-income people to save money, strengthen their financial position, educate their children. Expanded eligibility to Medicaid or access to COBRA coverage can mean that a medical crisis doesn’t become a financial devastation. But too few states do adopt the policies that would help families achieve the security to weather a job loss or medical crisis or to help their kids get the education to achieve greater security themselves.

The war on workers is waged at all levels, from seemingly individual intimidation in the workplace to corporations stiffing pensions and laying off thousands of workers to Republicans writing anti-union legislation at the federal and state levels. Most of the time, by contrast, the ways workers have to fight back are relatively low-profile. But fight they do, from small individual acts of defiance to informal organizing to solid victories that few people outside the immediate workplace notice to the occasional action that cracks into the public eye.

The press isn’t reporting it, but the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports says that truck drivers at the Port of Seattle parked their trucks and stopped work this week to protest unsafe working conditions. Late last week, meanwhile, Los Angeles port truck drivers working for the Toll Group, an Australian company, filed for a union representation election. The Toll Group’s Australian workforce is unionized, but in the United States the company has taken advantage of lax labor laws to keep down wages and working conditions and try to stifle organizing attempts.

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against retaliatory firings of California warehouse workers who had sued Schneider Logistics for wage and hour violations.

At a Kansas City plant, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers had the first union win at GE in 10 years.

Thousands of workers waged a one-day strike at Kaiser Permanente in California over contract negotiations between Kaiser and mental health and optical workers represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers. And in New York, inspired by last week’s union victory for Cablevision technicians, 120 more technicians at a Cablevision contractor engaged in a wildcat strike that won them a raise. They hope to follow up by unionizing.

Taking another approach, a former unpaid intern at Harper’s Bazaar is suing Hearst Corporation for violating labor laws by essentially treating her as a full-time employee though she wasn’t paid. She and her lawyers are trying to make the case a class action suit.

And more:

• How to throw a worker-friendly Super Bowl party.
• Here’s a great way to keep your workers desperate and your workforce young: A new Atlantic City casino is going to hire workers for set terms of four to six years, then make them reapply for their jobs—no matter how good their performance has been.
• Project Labor Agreements (explanation of what a PLA is) that the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority recently signed will require that 40 percent of work hours on the projects will go to people from economically disadvantaged communities, while 10 percent of work hours will go to homeless or chronically unemployed people, among other challenges.
• Yet another reason more workers need unions:
  

  …government workers who were not represented by unions were about four times as likely to lose their jobs last year as unionized public sector workers were. (The trends are similar even if you strip out workers who were represented by unions but were not members themselves.)

Ari Berman has another must-read article on the systematic effort of the GOP to disenfranchise millions, focusing in this installment on redistricing—and resegregation—in the South.

In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.

If there ever was a strong argument for a 50-state strategy for Democrats, in which strong parties are fostered and competitive in every single state, this is it. The GOP is hell-bent on cheating its way to a permanent majority, whether by voter suppression or a return to segregation. And it’s largely happening because of the concerted effort by Republicans in the last 30 years to begin working at the local level, dominating local politics and creating a strong infrastructure to take over first state legislatures, then governorships, secretaries of state, and federal offices.

The fight is in the courts, too, with no fewer than five suits currently pending against Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 is the provision that requires states covered by the act to receive pre-clearance from the Justice Department or a three-judge District Court in Washington for any election law changes that affect minority voters. One of these challenges could well make it to the Supreme Court, where its fate is at best uncertain.

For more of the week’s news, make the jump below the fold.