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• General Visitor Comments: Due to a lack of membership growth the comment sections will be closed until we see sufficient growth in full membership, associate membership or donations. Many of you that visit our site have not yet joined, but seem to value its existence. The only comment section that will remain open will be Job Cuts Reports. If you have information that you want the Alliance to know about please send to ibmunionalliance@gmail.com. Information of importance will be put on the front page of this web site. To join go here: Join The Alliance! or here: Join The Alliance!
• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 12/06/10: Interesting tidbit about the assumed "older workers on the old pension plan get out or get converted"... Heard this from a well informed person (even tho I'm ex-IBM, I still have some good friends on the inside) that IBM backed off this plan primarily (solely?) because when they looked at the targets, they saw that doing this would crater GTS because of the massive number of "older" workers there and would kill the GTS business. So you want a powerful group to help form the core of a union IBM would pay attention to? Focus on getting GTS workers signed up! To: I Won't Be Invited - 500 employees along with the other luminaries to be invited? So in other words, it's a full US workforce party then :-/ Sorry, just HAD to get that in... -RAed Jan 09-
  • Comment 12/07/10: Palmisano has cut thousands of jobs yet the Republicans and some turn coat Democrats want to give him and other wealthy CEO's a tax cut because they are the job creators? In India maybe. Working people sold down the river again. -hadit-

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

• Wall Street Journal: Republicans Block 9/11 Health-Care Bill. By Devlin Barrett. Excerpts: Long-stalled legislation to provide health care for sick Ground Zero workers failed a key test vote in the Senate Thursday, as Republicans remained united in opposition to the measure until after the passage of a massive tax-cut package. The vote was 57-42, short of the 60 votes in favor needed to proceed under Senate rules. Prior to the vote, Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer sought the two Republicans votes needed to win passage. “I beg, I plead, I implore two brave colleagues from the other side to join us. Put aside the political considerations,” Schumer said. ...

  After the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, a government-backed compensation fund provided nearly $6 billion for those injured or killed. But eligibility for that program ended in 2003, before many of the illnesses developed that advocates now say were caused by exposure to the toxic World Trade Center dust and debris. The most recent death blamed on Ground Zero exposure was retired NYPD detective Kevin Czartoryski, 46, who died last week after a battle with lung disease.

• USA Today: Executives keep health perks while workers' benefits are cut. By Gary Strauss. Excerpts: Though millions of workers face rising health insurance costs and dwindling benefits in 2011, many CEOs will retain employer-paid medical plans and health benefits worth thousands of dollars. Hundreds of top corporate managers get medical benefits and supplemental coverage far beyond what's offered to rank-and-file employees. Benefits include "executive" physicals and reimbursements for out-of-pocket costs, deductibles and co-payments, according to corporate filings.

  "The great hypocrisy is this is going to the people best able to pay for this stuff," says Nell Minow of The Corporate Library. "Executives should pay for this on their own or be covered by the same plan as everyone else at the company."

News and Opinion Concerning the "War on the Middle Class"

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

• truthout: A Modest Proposal to Transition to a "Cater to the Rich" Economy. By Dan DiMaggio. Excerpts: In an article in The New York Times titled "Some Very Creative Economic Fix-Its," New York University economics professor Andrew Caplin calls for workers to put their stakes in a "cater to the rich" economy.(1) According to Caplin, growing inequality is a fact of life in the future of the US and global economy - "some people will succeed and others will not." Rather than judging this to be bad or good, the poor and middle class would do best by trying to "understand the needs" of the wealthy and attempting to provide services to meet their demands.

  Rand Paul recently expressed a similar sentiment in the immediate aftermath of his Senate victory. "We're all interconnected in this economy," he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "There are no rich, there are no middle class, there are no poor. We all either work for rich people or sell stuff to rich people." For Paul, the "cater to the rich" economy is already here. The key now is to expand it, starting with extending tax cuts for the wealthiest to spur their spending and investment and create more jobs.

• Wall Street Journal: Fed Emails Are Sought. By Maya Jackson Randall. Excerpts: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) has a slew of questions for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in the wake of new emergency-lending data the central bank released last week. In a letter Monday to Mr. Bernanke, the senator who played a leading role in getting the Fed to unveil the loan data is demanding access to more information—including certain Fed officials' emails and phone logs as well as new details on the securities banks pledged in exchange for cheap loans. Mr. Sanders asked about potential conflicts of interest between bank executives and Fed officials, and he asked the Fed to explain its rationale for lending to foreign banks.

  He also wants to know exactly how much money the Fed lent to millionaires and billionaires during the financial crisis. He specifically asked for information on loans given to businessman H. Wayne Huizenga, billionaire hedge-fund manager John Paulson, Dell Inc. founder Michael Dell and Christy Mack, the wife of former Morgan Stanley chief executive John Mack and dozens of other borrowers.

  "The emergency response appears to any objective observer to have been a clear case of socialism for the rich, and rugged free-market capitalism for everyone else," the Vermont Independent wrote. "Much of the information that you have provided on your website raises bigger questions than it answers, and some of the information mandated by the law appears to be missing."

• Reuters: Chart of the day: U.S. taxes.

  

  Excerpts:

  • Federal taxes are the lowest in 60 years, which gives you a pretty good idea of why America’s long-term debt ratios are a big problem. If the taxes reverted to somewhere near their historical mean, the problem would be solved at a stroke.
  • Income taxes, in particular, both personal and corporate, are low and falling. That trend is not sustainable.
  • Employment taxes, by contrast—the regressive bit of the fiscal structure—are bearing a large and increasing share of the brunt. Any time that somebody starts complaining about how the poor don’t pay income tax, point them to this chart. Income taxes are just one part of the pie, and everybody with a job pays employment taxes.
  • There aren’t any wealth taxes, but the closest thing we’ve got—estate and gift taxes—have shrunk to zero, after contributing a non-negligible amount to the public fisc in earlier decades.
• New York Times editorial: Freshman Party. Excerpts: Adam Kinzinger of Illinois is one of the new Republican lawmakers swept into office last month on a promise to change the ways of Washington. “If we look like we’re doing business as usual,” the congressman-elect told a reporter last month, “then obviously the American people will say, ‘Well, what was that all about?’ ”

  That’s a good question because one of the first things Mr. Kinzinger and many of his fellow freshmen did after examining their new offices on Capitol Hill was to hang out an “open for business” sign to the world of big-money lobbying and corporate fund-raising.

  To pay off his campaign deficit, Mr. Kinzinger held a “debt retirement breakfast” on Nov. 19 at the Capitol Hill Club. Suggested donation: $5,000 for political action committees, and $2,400 for individuals. The political action committee of the National Automotive Dealers gave him $2,500 after the election, among other corporate givers.

  As The Washington Post reported on Monday, several dozen freshman lawmakers have held these fund-raisers around town in the days after the election, raising at least $2 million in just the last month. The high-spending campaign that ended in November was odious enough, but there is something even more unsavory about giving to a candidate after the election, when the outcome is known and the link between power and currying favor is even more evident. ...

  Representative Eric Cantor, the incoming Republican leader who has also vowed to shake up the ways of Washington, is having a fund-raiser this week at Ceiba, a high-end Washington restaurant, to celebrate the Seinfeld-inspired holiday of Festivus. The minimum contribution to Mr. Cantor’s political action committee is $500, although it is free to those who have already maxed out their donations.

• The Christian Science Monitor: Estate tax deal: worst part of a bad tax compromise. Estate tax provision would exempt first $5 million and charge only 35 percent on the rest of wealthy estates. Excerpts: Remember the virtuous talk of fiscal prudence that washed over Washington for, oh, three days last week. Forget it. Forget as well the promises of change that Republicans (and Obama before them) brought to Washington. This is business as usual and at its worst: You have a bad and expensive idea. I have a bad and expensive idea. Let’s compromise and pass both of our bad ideas. ...

  As of this morning, I have not seen any revenue estimates, but the leaks suggest the price-tag will be $700 billion to $900 billion. And while the package is being spun as much-needed stimulus, it contains an awful lot that will do little or nothing to boost the economy. Among those provisions that are a waste of money if you are interested in short-term economic growth: extending the patch on the Alternative Minimum Tax, continuing the high-bracket tax cuts, extending dozens of expiring tax provisions, and restoring the estate tax at extremely generous levels. Add it up, and one-third or more of this new “stimulus” will do little if anything to boost growth. ...

  The worst element of the deal is the proposal to resurrect the estate tax, but at a rate of 35 percent. This is unconscionable given the nation’s fiscal mess. Never mind the proposed exemption of $5 million, which is bad enough. If you are among the mega-rich, that is merely a bauble on your Christmas tree of life. The real gift here is the proposal to let the richest of the rich pass on estates to their heirs at an even lower rate than in 2009. Obama now gets to explain to GS-3 federal clerks why they get to take one for the team while those estates of up to $10 million pay no tax and estates of $100 million pass on nearly $70 million free and clear. Restoring the estate tax to 2009 law would increase the national debt by $265 billion over 10 years. This version will cost lots more than that.

• Washington Post opinion: Obama: On the way to a failed presidency? By Katrina vanden Heuvel. Excerpts: On the economy, the president has abandoned what Americans are focused on - jobs - to embrace what the Beltway elites care about - deficits. His freeze of federal workers' pay, of more symbolic than deficit-reducing value, only reinforced right-wing tripe: that federal employees are overpaid; that overspending is our problem, as opposed to inane tax cuts for the top end; that we should impose austerity now, instead of working to get the economy going. ...

  This is political self-immolation. Blue-collar workers abandoned Democrats in large numbers in the fall; wait until they learn what the trade deal means for them. Seniors went south, probably because of Republican lies about cuts in Medicare; wait until anyone over 40 who's lost their savings hears about Alan Simpson's plan to take it to the "greedy geezers." The $60 billion each year in Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans could pay for universal preschool for America's children, or tuition and board for half of America's college students.

• AlterNet: How Our Trillion-Dollar Empire Is the Cause of Our 'Deficit Problem.' We could make the budget deficit disappear and fully fund Social Security and Medicare without raising taxes, if we only outspend our biggest military rival by threefold. Excerpts: The United States spends more on its military and security services than the rest of the world combined, yet in the midst of a major debate over our fiscal situation, that enormous drain on our national treasure isn't really "on the table" in any serious way. Obama's deficit commission recommended cutting the Pentagon's purse, but the thrust of its focus was on veterans' pensions and health-care -- rather than, say, maintaining costly bases to defend such imperiled allies as Italy and Germany -- and the spending reductions were largely symbolic relative to the level of bloat that plagues our security budget. ...

  So while next year’s defense spending, narrowly defined, is expected to come in at $711 billion, when you include all the extra dollars hidden away in other parts of the budget, that number will rise to as high as $1.45 trillion. That would represent around 40 percent of next year’s budget. ...

  Nonetheless, America’s elites have coalesced around the idea that in order to keep our tax rates among the lowest in the wealthy world, we’ll need to swallow some painful “shared sacrifice” (which in Washington usually means working people sacrificing some economic security and the wealthy getting another tax cut). But it’s important to recognize that it’s an ideological choice to view the projected “budget gap” as a structural, economic problem driven primarily by the growth of “entitlements” -- it’s not a belief grounded in objective fact. ...

  In large part, the status quo is maintained by the influence of the defense industry -- it lavished $136 million on law-makers last year. It’s almost comical at times, like when money for a new jet engine was forced through Congress over the objections of the Pentagon, which insisted that the costly project was “unnecessary and a waste of money.”

  And in part, it’s driven by what may be the greatest false dichotomy in our national discourse: that we must choose between cutting our military spending and “maintaining a strong defense.” The flaw in that is a matter of simple math: we not only spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined, we spend six times what second-place finisher China does on its military.That means we could cut our military spending in half -- making the budget deficit disappear in a few years, without raising taxes and while fully funding Social Security and Medicare -- and we’d still outspend our largest rival by threefold.

• Wall Street Journal: Movies at Home, for $20,000. By Lauren A.E. Schuker. Excerpt: A proposed service aims to bring movies to homes the same day they hit theaters, a milestone that Hollywood has long anticipated with a mixture of fear and fascination. But there's a catch: At the prices currently being discussed by Prima Cinema Inc., the start-up that is touting the service, those movies will reach only world's the best-appointed living rooms. Prima plans to charge customers a one-time fee of about $20,000 for a digital-delivery system and an additional $500 per film. The Los Angeles-based company has around $5 million in backing from the venture arm of Best Buy Co. and General Electric Co.'s Universal Pictures, and hopes to start delivering movies to customers as soon as a year from now.
• Huffington Post: Why the Obama Tax Deal Confirms the Republican Worldview. By Robert Reich. Excerpts: Excerpts: Apart from its extraordinary cost and regressive tilt, the tax deal negotiated between the president and the Republicans has another fatal flaw. It confirms the Republican worldview. Americans want to know what happened to the economy and how to fix it. At least Republicans have a story -- the same one they've been flogging for thirty years. The bad economy is big government's fault and the solution is to shrink government.

  Here's the real story. For three decades, an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth have gone to the top 1 percent. Thirty years ago, the top got 9 percent of total income. Now they take in almost a quarter. Meanwhile, the earnings of the typical worker have barely budged.

  The vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going. (The rich spend a much lower portion of their incomes.) The crisis was averted before now only because middle-class families found ways to keep spending more than they took in -- by women going into paid work, by working longer hours, and finally by using their homes as collateral to borrow. But when the housing bubble burst, the game was up.

• Washington Post: Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks for 8 hours against tax cuts, while Congressional Black Caucus joins opposition. By Paul Kane and Felicia Sonmez. Excerpts: At 10:24 Friday morning, Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont took to the floor of the Senate to share a few thoughts about the tax-cut plan brokered by President Obama and Republican leaders. Well after the sun had set and most of his colleagues had flown home, Sanders was still sharing - about taxes, bad trade deals and "the crooks on Wall Street," among many other topics. ...

  Democrats have privately admitted that they were prepared for Obama and newly empowered Republicans to agree to an extension of tax breaks for the wealthy, but added that they never expected the generous estate tax deal and some other provisions in the package.

• The Smirking Chimp: Watch the Outfielders in Baseball, Watch the Corporate Lobbyists on Taxes. By David Sirota. Excerpts: When I went to Phillies games as a kid, my dad would always remind me that if you want to know what's going on in the game, it's more important to watch the fielders than to watch the ball after the ball is hit. Watching the fielders like Von Hayes and Lenny Dykstra and how they reacted told you if the ball hit by Tim Raines or Ron Gant was going to be a foul, an out, a base hit or a homer.

  It's sorta the same thing in politics -- if you want to know what a bill really does, it's more important to watch corporate lobbyists' reaction than to listen to the politicians pushing the bill. That's because whereas politicians have a vested interest in making themselves look good for purposes of reelection and party advancement, lobbyists jealously represent Big Money, without regard for partisanship or electoral maneuvering.

  It's particularly important to keep this axiom in mind as President Obama now insists that his tax cut "deal" is a big win for average Americans. Because as much as we'd all like to believe the president, the real truth about who this bill serves is embedded in this story from Bloomberg, "Obama Tax Deal Wins Praise From Business-Lobby Critics":

  "President Barack Obama won praise from business groups that have criticized his labor, health and financial regulatory policies after he agreed to extend (all Bush) tax cuts... "