#or enough workers to pay pensioners

[awkward-teabag]

So tired of everything being derailed by racists.

Want to talk about jobs? Blame immigrants.

Want to talk about the state of housing? Blame immigrants.

Want to talk about post-secondary education? Blame immigrants.

Want to talk about healthcare? Blame immigrants.

Want to talk about the state of the economy in general? Blame immigrants.

And it's never about the systems in place that lead to immigration or the how companies exploit young workers from elsewhere in the world (by taking advantage of their inexperience, their lack of support network, taking their money, and so on), it's all about how those dastardly non-whites are trying to screw honest Canadians out of everything by taking advantage of us, and they're personally going after you.

You can be talking about something and even be open to talking about the complex issue that is immigration but it immediately gets taken over by THEY TOOK OUR JERBS! assholes.

It's at the point where as soon as immigrants/immigration comes up, I peace out unless I know the person and can expect them to have a point beyond bigotry and fascism.

Because it's never about our systems, decade(s) of neglect, neoliberalism or conservatism, or anything like that, it's about how selfish, rich, and anti-white brown kids are and things would be perfectly fine if not for them.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Biden wants to ban ripoff “financial advisors”

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Once, American workers had "defined benefits pensions," where their employers promised to pay them a certain amount every year from their retirement to their death. Jimmy Carter swapped that out for 401(k)s, "market" pensions where you have to guess which stocks will be valuable or starve in your old age:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

The initial 401(k) rollout had all kinds of pot-sweeteners that made them seem like a good deal, like heavy employer matching that doubled or even tripled the value of every dollar you put into the market for your retirement. But over the years, as Reaganomics took hold and workers' power ebbed away, all these goodies were clawed back. In the end, the market-based pension makes you the sucker at the poker table, flushing your savings into a rigged casino that is firmly tilted in favor of finance barons and other eminently guillotineable plutocrats.

Neoliberalism is many things, but most of all it is a cult of individualism. The fact that three generations of workers are nows facing down retirement without pensions that will provide them with secure housing and food – let alone money to see the odd movie, buy birthday gifts for their grandkids, or enjoy a meal out now and then – is framed as millions of individual failures, not a systemic one.

In other words, if you are facing food insecurity and homelessness after a lifetime of hard work, it's because you saved wrong. Perhaps you didn't save enough (through a 40-year run of wage stagnation and skyrocketing housing, health and education costs). Or perhaps you saved wrong, making the wrong bets on the stock market. If you can't afford to run your air conditioner during a heat dome, that's on you: you should have been better at stocks.

Apologists for this system will say that you don't have to be good at stocks – you just have to pay an Independent Financial Advisor to pick the stocks for you and you'll be fine. But IFAs don't work for free! What if you can't afford one?

Enter "predatory inclusion" – the practice of offering scammy, overpriced and substandard products to poor people and declaring it to be a good deed, because otherwise, those poor people would have to do without. The crypto bubble relied heavily on this: think of Spike Lee and others shilling for pump-and-dump scams as a way of "building Black wealth":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/business/media/cryptocurrency-seeks-the-spotlight-with-spike-lees-help.html

More recently, Intuit and other scammy tax-prep services have argued against the IRS's plan to offer free tax preparation as bad for Black and brown people, because it will deny them the chance to be deceived and ripped off with TurboTax:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

Back in 2018, Trump won the predatory inclusion Olympics, when his Department of Labor let the Fifth Circuit abolish the "Fiduciary Rule" for Independent Financial Advisors:

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/dol-fiduciary-rule/

What was the Fiduciary Rule? It said that your IFN had to put your interests ahead of their own. Like, if there were two different funds you could bet on, and one would pay your IFN a big commission, while the other would be a better bet for you, the IFN couldn't put your retirement savings into the fund that offered them a bribe.

When Trump killed the Fiduciary Rule, he proclaimed it a victory for poor people, especially Black and brown people. After all, if IFNs weren't allowed to accept bribes for giving you bad financial advice, then they would have to make up the difference by charging you for good advice. If you couldn't afford that advice, well, you'd have to make bad retirement investments on your own, without the benefit of their sleazy self-dealing.

The Biden Administration wants to change that. Biden's Acting Labor Secretary is Julie Su, and she's very good at her job. Last spring, she forced west coast dockworkers' bosses to cough up the contract they'd stalled on for a year, with 8-10% raises for every worker, owed retroactively:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

Su has proposed a way to reinstate the Fiduciary Rule, as part of the Biden Administration's war on junk fees, estimating that this will increase retirees' net savings by 20%:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-11-07-julie-su-labor-retirement-savers/

The new rule will force advisors who cheat their clients to pay restitution, and will require them to deliver all their advice in writing so that this cheating can be detected and punished.

The industry is furious, of course. They claim that "The Market (TM)" will solve this: if you get bad retirement savings advice and end up homeless and starving, then you will choose a different advisor in your next life, after you are reincarnated (I guess?).

And of course, they're also claiming that forcing IFNs to stop cheating their clients will deny poor people access to expert (bad) advice. As the Financial Services Institute's Dale Brown says, this will have a "negative impact on Main Street Americans’ access to financial advice":

https://www.fa-mag.com/news/legal-challenge-predicted-for-new-dol-fiduciary-proposal-75257.html

Here's that rule – read it for yourself, then submit a comment expressing your views on it. The government wants to hear from you, and administrative law requires them to act on the comments they receive:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/03/2023-23782/proposed-amendment-to-prohibited-transaction-exemptions-75-1-77-4-80-83-83-1-and-86-128

Su is part of a wave of progressive, technically skilled regulators in the Biden administration that resulted from a horse-trading exercise called the Unity Task Force, which divvied up access to top appointments among the progressive wing and the finance wing of the Democratic Party. The progressive appointments are nothing short of incredible – the most competent and principled agency leaders America has seen in half a century:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

But then there's the finance wing's appointments, like Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, who ruled against Lina Khan's attempt to block the rotten Microsoft/Activision merger (don't worry, Khan's appealing):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

Perhaps the worst, though, is Biden's Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, a private equity ghoul who did a stint for the notorious wreckers Bain Capital before founding her own firm. Raimondo has stuffed her department full of Goldman Sachs alums, and has sidelined labor and civil society groups as she sets out to administer everything from the CHIPS Act to regulating ChatGPT.

As Henry Burke writes for the Revolving Door Project and The American Prospect, Raimondo's history as a corporate raider, her deference to the finance sector, and she and her husband's conflicts of interest from their massive stakes in companies she's regulating all serve to undermine Biden's agenda:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-11-08-commerce-secretary-gina-raimondo-undercutting-bidenomics/

When the administration inevitably complains that its popular economic programs aren’t breaking through the media coverage, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The Unity Task Force gave us generationally important policymakers, but ultimately, it's a classic "pizzaburger." If half your family wants pizza, and the other half wants burgers, and you serve them something halfway in between that makes none of them happy, you haven't made a wise compromise – you've just made an inedible mess:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/08/fiduciaries/#but-muh-freedumbs

[eelhound]

"We live in a time of crisis. Consider three interwoven ones.

First, climate change. Every year brings more forest fires and less breathable air, the result of an economic system predicated on burning fossil fuels and working long hours to fuel energy-intensive consumption.

Second, overwhelmed families. Even though people in the Global North live in the richest societies the world has ever known, the majority still find themselves overworked and overwhelmed. Practically every family, especially with young kids, is stressed and strained, struggling to balance the unbalanceable demands of care with no support and work with no flexibility.

Third, millions of poor and working-class people are profoundly unfree in that they have no time for anything but the constant scramble to stay ahead of the bills. In Europe, the average woman in a couple with children works a massive seventy-one hours per week when you include her unpaid care labor. In New York, a single mother on minimum wage would need to labor for an astounding (and impossible) 117 hours every week to meet her basic needs. We live in an epidemic of time poverty, where compulsory overwork defers dreams and crushes aspirations under the relentlessness of Sisyphean toil.

Imagine, for a moment, a different kind of society where the standard job was part-time, but also a good job, offering decent pay and benefits as well as flexibility and career advancement. Public provision of essential services would provide a background of economic security: from health care to childcare, pensions to transit (and, ideally, a basic income as well). With their basic needs met, individuals wouldn’t have to rely on their jobs nearly as much to get by — and working substantially less than forty hours would be something to be desired rather than feared.

The Research on Part-Time Work

Recent scholarly evidence shows that slashing work hours is key to confronting climate change. For example, Jonas Nässén and Jörgen Larsson find that “a decrease in working time by 1% may reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by about 0.7% and 0.8%, respectively.” David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot find that if the United States were to slash its working hours to Western European levels, energy consumption would drop by 20 percent. The most rigorous study to date is probably that of Jared Fitzgerald and colleagues, who performed a longitudinal study on fifty-two countries. They confirmed the results of other studies that more working time leads to more energy consumption, and that this relationship is intensifying over time for both rich and poor countries.

We know that under regular conditions, capitalist economies grow and grow, but so far only by producing more and more emissions. Global emissions have only fallen four times over the last sixty years — 1981, 1992, 2009, and 2020 — precisely when the world was in the throes of economic recession. This is the cold reality of neoliberal capitalism: it forces us to choose between environmental destruction or the social misery of mass unemployment.

Good part-time work offers us a structural escape hatch — a new model to immediately reduce emissions without putting people out of work.

Of course, part-time work isn’t enough by itself. A pro-worker climate agenda must also include national and global agreements on carbon caps, a Green New Deal that unleashes massive state investment fueling decarbonization (for instance, shifting toward clean energy and building new public transit infrastructure), and so on. But good part-time work is a necessary, if insufficient condition, for preventing ecological disaster.

In terms of work-life balance, the evidence is even stronger. The academic literature finds again and again that bringing down work hours alleviates family stress and strain. To cite one of many examples, Rosemary Crompton and Clare Lyonette report in a 2006 paper that in every one of the five countries they studied, “working hours were the most significant predictor of work-life conflict.”

We also know that free time is foundational for individual freedom. To live the life one wants, free time is essential to devise and accomplish any of one’s life goals. One cannot be deeply engaged with family, friends, art, activism, sport, music, education, or any of the variegated projects that animate people’s aspirations if one is always on the clock.

The US vs. Western Europe

For hundreds of years, a vibrant strand of socialism has aspired to build a world with substantial freedom from toil — a world where machines do much of the work so humans don’t have to, freeing us to pursue our aims, develop our capabilities, and flourish in whatever directions we see fit. This is a world where artificial intelligence and robots actually make human life better and easier, rather than ushering in unemployment, fear, and inequality.

But is good part-time work really possible?

For those of us living in North America, part-time employment usually means poorly paid and precarious, with few benefits and even less autonomy. However, there’s nothing inevitable about this. Western European examples show that it’s completely possible to transform crappy part-time jobs into good, secure jobs.

In Denmark, for example, part-time work is usually good work. Whereas the hourly wage gap between full-time and part-time women is more than 20 percent in Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, in Denmark, it is about zero. Danish part-timers also enjoy robust benefits and pensions; a person who works part-time at 75 percent for ten years then full-time for the rest of their career, will end up with a pension worth 98 percent as much as someone who worked full-time their whole career.

A single mother working at the lowest wage (there is no official minimum wage in Denmark, since wages are set through collective bargaining) for thirty hours per week earns €27,600, while the living wage is roughly €15,000. Danish part-timers appear to be very happy with their situation. The percentage of part-time women who say they are “dissatisfied” with their job is only 4 percent, and the percentage of part-time workers who are dissatisfied with their life as a whole is just 0.4 percent.

The Netherlands is another illuminating example. It is the world’s first so-called “part-time economy,” with the highest proportion of part-time jobs in the world. Amazingly, close to 50 percent of the entire labor force works part-time (compared to only 18 percent in the EU27).

Since implementing the Equal Treatment (Working Hours) Act in 1996, it has been illegal for Dutch employers to discriminate between full- and part-time workers in the provision of pay, benefits, holidays, and employment opportunities. Part-time jobs are mostly open-ended contracts, not a precarious form of nonstandard employment — part-timers are not significantly more likely to work unsocial hours like evenings, nights, or weekends — and the country boasts the highest proportion of firms in Europe with part-time positions at high levels of qualification (47 percent). The result is that the gap between hourly part-time and full-time wages is only about 5 percent, with very little part-time work being involuntary (only 5 percent of female and 10 percent of male part-timers would prefer to be full-time).

Crucially, the cluster of policies boosting part-time work exists against a background of relatively robust economic security. The country’s National Old Age Pension guarantees every citizen a flat-rate pension by sixty-five, regardless of previous employment or earnings. A living wage for a single mother in the Netherlands is today about €15,000, whereas her income from working thirty hours per week on minimum wage is roughly €19,000. A family with two adults, both working thirty-hour weeks, earns a median income of roughly €60,000 — easily surpassing the living wage floor for the whole family (two adults, two kids) of €43,000. Part-time work, in other words, is perfectly feasible for everyone.

Things could hardly be more different in the United States.

In California, a living wage for a four-person family is roughly $110,000. If both adults worked part-time (thirty hours per week) the family would take in a median income of just $70,000. If part-time work is unattractive for the bottom half of the population, the situation is far worse for the poorest. A single mother in Los Angeles working thirty hours per week at a minimum wage job will bring in only $24,180 — pitifully short of a living wage, which for such a family is more than three-times greater, at over $80,000.

The reason the living wage in the United States is so much higher than in Europe is because social democratic welfare states provide their citizens with free or subsidized health care, childcare, transport, housing, etc. The amount of private money that anyone needs to acquire their basic needs (the “living wage”) is therefore much less. A good life based on part-time work is completely feasible in many parts of Europe.

Germany is another example. Although the country has many fewer part-time jobs than the Netherlands, they have done an excellent job of shrinking the number of hours worked in standard full-time jobs. Germany currently has the shortest working hours in the world — an average of 1,341 a year — which is, remarkably, 26 percent, or the equivalent of eleven full working weeks, shorter than in the United States. In Berlin, a living wage today is about €15,000 — within reach of anyone on a part-time income, since even a minimum-wage part-time worker makes €18,720.

A Transformative Demand

The bottom line is that constructing an economic system where part-time jobs are both good and widely available is possible. Doing so requires the standard social democratic tools of unions, high taxes, and progressive governments willing to regulate the market on behalf of workers. None of this is easy to achieve, particularly in countries with as weak a labor movement and as powerful a business class as the United States. But political will, not technical feasibility, is what is standing in the way of a good life for the majority.

In these times of crisis, it is easy to feel dispirited and hopeless. And when hope departs, cynicism grows. The vision of a freer society built around good part-time work is one antidote to such cynicism. It is a bold, feasible demand — at once radical and realistic in the medium term. The elements that are required already exist in various places around the world.

The result would not be a utopia. It would not solve all our problems. But it could transform our lives."

- Tom Malleson, from "We Should All Be Working Part Time for Full-Time Pay." Jacobin, 22 November 2023.

[kp777]

By Edward Carver

Common Dreams

July 25, 2024

"We have a duty to protect patients from greedy corporations that are prioritizing their bottom line over patient care," Rep. Pramila Jayapal said.

Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Thursday introduced legislation that would tighten the rules on private equity firms in the healthcare industry.

The Health Over Wealth Act would increase the powers of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to monitor and block private equity deals in the healthcare industry. It would require private equity firms buying healthcare providers to set up escrow accounts large enough to fund five years of operations, and would require more transparency on debt, executive pay, and other financial data, while prohibiting the "stripping" of assets.

"Private equity firms and greedy corporate executives are using the healthcare system as a piggybank," Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Subcommittee on Primary Health and Retirement Security, said in a statement. "Putting profit over patients' results in substandard care, while health workers suffer, and communities are left to clean up the mess."

Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, emphasized the toll that the private equity approach has on patients.

"Private equity firms buying up health care systems are simply bad news for patients, leading to worse health outcomes and higher bills," said Jayapal, who had previously introduced narrower legislation on private equity in healthcare. "We have a duty to protect patients from greedy corporations that are prioritizing their bottom line over patient care."

The bill's introduction came as the Senate HELP Committee on Thursday voted to launch an investigation into profit-first practices at Steward Health Care, a for-profit system formerly owned by a private equity firm and now in bankruptcy.

HELP voted to subpoena Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, whom CBS News, which has conducted a series of investigations into the negative impact of private equity firms on community hospitals, described as "reclusive." De la Torre bought a 190-foot megayacht even as Steward's hospitals failed to pay their bills and keep supplies of life-saving equipment available, CBSreported.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), HELP's chair and a cosponsor of the Health Over Wealth Act, called out de la Torre on social media on Thursday.

"Private equity vultures are making a fortune by taking over hospitals and leaving them in shambles," he wrote. "It's time for the CEO of Steward Health Care to get off his yacht and explain to Congress how he got rich while bankrupting the hospitals he manages."

The other cosponsors of the new bill include only a handful of progressive senators and representatives, but concern about the role of private equity in healthcare goes beyond progressive circles. The HELP Committee, which includes 10 Republicans, voted 20-1 to launch the investigation into Steward. And a Bloomberg columnist on Thursday published an opinion piece entitled "Steward Health is a case study in executive greed" and subtitled: "Why is populism on the rise? The gutting of a community hospital system illustrates why so many Americans feel betrayed by big business."

The negative impact of private equity's role in the healthcare industry is significant. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found an "alarming increase in patient complications" at private equity-owned hospitals in a study published in December in JAMA, a leading medical journal.

The new bill, which Markey previewed at a field hearing in Massachusetts in April, may be a long-shot for passage, given corporate influence in Congress. Axios called it "more aspirational than legislative" at the time.

[jack-of-crowns]

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'You Know What They're Like' by @jack-of-crowns

"Can you believe this?" Gladys was pointing with exasperation at the hapless grocer's assistant, who was replacing the price ticket on the Jerusalem artichokes for the fourth time that month "I really can't believe this, Edna", she said again to her friend.

"Absolutely unbelievable", Edna murmured, gloved fingers absent-mindedly stroking the pearls of her necklace like prayer beads. "You would have thought that when Zenith let all of those people stay here because of the farm worker shortage, well-"

"Well, ladies, can I help you with anything?" Burt, the grocer, had come out from the cooler at the back of the Superette, rubbing his hands dry on the front of his grease and fat-stained butcher's apron. "You know how it is these days", he added, nodding sideways at the assistant to take themselves a break.

Gladys, in no mood to be appeased, shot Burt a sharp look. "Now see here, we've been shopping here since you were knee high to a grasshopper and your father would never have run the Superette like this and he CERTAINLY wouldn't hire one of...them!" Edna was shaking her head up and down vociferously in agreement, and a few other regulars had begun to pay attention to the commotion.

"Now Gladys," Burt began a bit nervously, "None of the high school kids want to work here these days and anyone else healthy enough from the contagion goes to the mill. We're all doing our best here."

"Doing our best? When my dear Donald's pension can't even buy us a decent meal anymore!?" Now Lou and Joey from the mill had moved in behind Gladys and Edna, scowling and clenching thei fists. "And what's next, Burt," Lou snarled, "your little helper or one of their buddies comes for my job?"

Burt's face began to redden with frustration as his voice pitched up with nervousness. "Everyone take a step back now." He had a chef's knife in the pocket of his apron if it came down to it, but he was feeling a bit light-headed from all the commotion and was afraid that he wouldn't be able to handle the situation if Lou and Joey kept escalating their anger.

Just then the grocer's assistant darted out from where the storage room where they had been hiding and bolted off down the street, determined not to be another statistic in the ongoing epidemic that was slowly consuming the city of Zenith. Burt sank down on a stool as the four patrons returned to their shopping, seemingly unaware of his condition. Only Gladys seemed to take notice once she had added a clutch of Jerusalem artichokes to her shopping bag.

"There, there, Burt," she smiled down at him reassuringly. "Catch your breath a moment and you'll be just fine." Burt's face was beginning to darken and swelll as he sat gasping for air, then his eyes closed as he slumped and stilled. Obliviously, Gladys concluded, "You'll do much better without that sort around. You know what they're like."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dave Whammond

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 23, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 24, 2024

In the past two days, the Biden-Harris administration has announced a wide range of new rules to protect ordinary Americans. 

Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the administration has finalized two new rules affecting patients in nursing homes and receiving home care, as well as the workers who care for them. The first sets minimum staffing requirements for facilities funded by Medicare and Medicaid, and the second concerns how home healthcare companies account for Medicaid funding. 

In a speech at the Hmong Cultural and Community Agency in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Harris noted the extraordinary value of healthcare workers. She also explained that about 1.2 million Americans live in federally funded nursing homes, which make up about four fifths of the nursing homes in the country. But the majority of those homes—about 75% of them—are understaffed. This is dangerous and isolating for patients and demoralizing for workers, who have high rates of burnout and turnover.  

Now, nursing homes that receive federal funding will have to provide at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident every day, less than the 4.1 hours the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services advocate but enough to require the hiring of about 12,000 registered nurses and 77,000 aides, at an annual cost of almost $7 billion. 

Consumer organizations and labor unions pushed for the new rule, but nursing home operators strongly oppose the new mandate, saying it will force facilities to close because of a shortage of nurses. In response, Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra told Tami Luhby of CNN that no one should live in facilities that are unsafe or should receive inferior care. Luhby noted that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in September launched a $75 million campaign to increase the number of nurses in nursing homes.

The second rule the vice president announced had to do with home health aides. Medicaid currently pays about $125 billion a year to home healthcare companies, which employ hundreds of thousands of workers providing services for elderly and disabled Americans. These companies have never been required to report how that money was being spent. Now they will be required to spend 80% of the federal dollars they receive on workers’ salaries rather than administrative overhead.

Also yesterday, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a final rule that strengthens the HIPAA medical privacy rule for people from states that ban abortions who seek reproductive health care in states that permit them. In response to threats by Republican state officials to charge women who cross state lines to obtain abortion, contraception, or fertility treatments, the new rule prohibits health care providers, health plans, and other entities from disclosing patients’ reproductive health care records to state officials when they are being sought to investigate or charge patients, doctors, or others.  

Today, the Labor Department announced a new rule that would guarantee that salaried workers who make less than $59,000 a year are compensated fairly for overtime work. The Trump administration set the salary threshold for those who did not have overtime protections at $35,568. As of July 1, 2024, the threshold will be $43,888, and on January 1, 2025, it will rise to $58,656. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), former chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, said the change could affect 4 million workers.

“Too often, lower-paid salaried workers are doing the same job as their hourly counterparts but are spending more time away from their families for no additional pay,” acting secretary of the Department of Labor Julie Su said. “That is unacceptable. The Biden-Harris administration is following through on our promise to raise the bar for workers who help lay the foundation for our economic prosperity.”

Also today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted 3–2 along party lines to ban the noncompete agreements that prevent workers from minimum-wage earners to top executives from changing jobs within the industry in which they work; senior executives can still be bound by such agreements. Initially used to protect trade secrets, noncompete clauses have expanded to cover what the FTC estimates to be 30 million people—one in five U.S. workers. They take away workers’ ability to improve their wages and conditions by quitting their jobs and moving to another company or starting their own. The FTC estimates that the end of such clauses could add almost $300 billion a year to workers’ wages. 

“Robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. Neil Bradley, head of strategic advocacy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, countered: “If they can issue regulations with respect to unfair methods of competition, then there’s really no aspect of the U.S. economy they couldn’t regulate.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to sue over the rule. 

A CBS News/YouGov poll released Monday found that, although Biden and Harris have made addressing climate change a centerpiece of their administration, only 10% of the people who say they think climate change is a very important issue had heard or read a lot about what the administration has accomplished, and 49% said they had read not much or nothing about it. When told some of the things the administration has done, a strong majority of those who care about addressing climate change support those policies. 

“Even people who feel the administration has done too little on climate change support these policies,” reporters for CBS News note. They conclude that the disconnect “may be more about Mr. Biden needing to get his message out there than having to convince this ‘climate constituency’—those who call the climate issue very important—of the substance of his policies.” 

Meanwhile, today is the fourth anniversary of the press conference in which former president Donald Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to get rid of Covid, prompting the maker of Lysol to warn people not to use their disinfectant cleaning products internally. Four years later, Trump spent the day in a Manhattan courtroom, where his former friend David Pecker, who ran the company that published the National Enquirer tabloid magazine, testified for the prosecution. 

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin summarized Pecker’s testimony, noting that the big takeaways were that Trump and Pecker were transactional friends for decades and that “the agreement they struck in 2015 went way beyond the ‘catch and kill’ aspect of the scheme that has been known for years.” Together, they not only killed stories damaging to Trump, but also pushed fake stories about Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, who were running against him for the 2016 Republican nomination, as well as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

As the trial grabs headlines, Trump’s power seems to be diminishing. He is demonstrably not in power in the courtroom, where he must do as the judge tells him and reporters say he has often fallen asleep, and none of his family members have shown up to support him.

Trump seems aware that his power is waning. Early yesterday, he called for supporters to “RALLY BEHIND MAGA,” but only a handful of people gathered outside the courthouse. Today he claimed that the turnout was low because police had “completely CLOSED DOWN” the streets around the courthouse. That was a lie: the streets, the sidewalk, even the courthouse have remained open to the public. 

Pennsylvania’s primary election today revealed Trump’s real electoral weakness. He won about 83.5% of the Republican votes, but Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race in early March and has not campaigned since, won 16.5%. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, the so-called “collar counties,” Haley won closer to 25% of the Republican vote. 

Biden, meanwhile, took the fight against MAGA Republicans to Trump’s home state of Florida. There, an extreme abortion ban signed into law by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will take effect on May 1, but in November, Florida voters will have the option to add protections for abortion before fetal viability to the state constitution, returning the state to the standards it had before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That measure is expected to energize Democrats in the state.

And then, tonight, by a vote of 79–18, the Senate passed the $95 billion national security supplemental bill that provides funding, mostly for military supplies, to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific and humanitarian aid for war-torn countries; requires the sale of TikTok; and permits confiscating Russian assets. MAGA Republicans are still adamantly opposed to aid for Ukraine, but a strong bipartisan majority has finally gotten the chance to weigh in.

As soon as the measure passed, Biden issued a statement, saying: “Tonight, a bipartisan majority in the Senate joined the House to answer history’s call at this critical inflection point. Congress has passed my legislation to strengthen our national security and send a message to the world about the power of American leadership: we stand resolutely for democracy and freedom, and against tyranny and oppression.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

One Man’s Opinion on Retirement

Stephen Jay Morris

5/12/2024

©Scientific Morality

            Once again, I must remind you that every human being is different. However, one gender has trouble with retirement: male. Why? The male ego. Thanks to the constant haranguing by advocates of masculinity, some men think that retirement is a death sentence to their identities. It’s part of the male castration complex. Upon retirement, you lose the respect of people who now view you as a useless, babbling nobody. You are regarded as a child again. Some dudes must be forced into retirement because they refuse to go there. In a capitalist society, you are either a master or a slave. Capitalists (masters) never have to retire because they have enough money to allow them 10 lifetimes. Now, as a worker (slave) who retires, you can no longer make any capitalist rich. However, your body ultimately breaks down from arthritis and heart disease, and you can no longer function without physical discomfort.

            A lot of retirees do not have any savings or investment income, so they are dependent upon pensions and/or Social Security. As such, they are on fixed incomes. Plastic conservatives point their boney fingers at them and declare it was their fault: “You didn’t handle your money right! You spent it on capricious stuff like a sports car or a 500-dollar pair of sneakers. You should have invested your money or saved more!” So, like a good little flunkey, you feel guilty for having burdened rich, White guys to pay taxes to fund your Medicare or Social-Security benefits. Even when you lost your job during your working years and were eligible for unemployment benefits, you didn’t sign up because of feeling embarrassed over your plight.

            Some men go through the extremes of depression and then suicide. Others become hermits and withdraw from society. Why is this? Because we live in society that celebrates wealth and downplays the proletariat. Plus, old people are viewed as annoying and useless, like children.

I am glad I have a different attitude towards retirement.

I am a subject of Gerontology. I state my case here. After an anfractuous life and being yelled at by alarm clocks, I am here to state: I love retirement! The money sucks, but the freedom is priceless. Many seniors go to Las Vegas and sit in front of those one-armed bandits all day, hoping for a big payoff. As for me? I was never good at making money. Plus, I never cared for it. To me, money was something you needed to buy art supplies and chilidogs. I had a passion for the arts and other things, like musical instruments. You needed money to buy birthday presents or other gifts to show your friends that you valued their friendship. Well, not me. A lot of people I knew thought I was a cheap asshole. Maybe I was.

            Retirement to me is living in freedom. I sleep as long as I want. I don’t have anything scheduled. I can literally stop and smell the roses. The only notable difference in my activities is that I see medical doctors more. But nobody points at me and tells me to be a man! I couldn’t even if wanted to. It takes me two minutes to get up from my couch. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. I can walk away from anything and not care. I am happily married and in love.

In this country (USA), nobody has respect for elders. We are just a nuisance. President Biden is one those men who refuses to quit, just like Donald Trump. The selfishness of these two men is astounding! Should one of them die of natural causes during their term in office, it would put the entire nation in political crises. But, do they care? Hell no! They’re dead!

As for me, I am still alive, and I can take a long lunch if I want to!  Retirement: plan for it and have fun year-round!

[ukrainenews]

Daily Wrap Up November 22, 2022

Under the cut:

Russia’s Gazprom has threatened to cut its gas flows to Europe via Ukraine as early as next week. In a statement, the Russian state-owned energy giant said some gas flows being kept in Ukraine were actually meant for Moldova, and accused Kyiv of obstructing the delivery of 52.52m cubic metres from transiting to Moldova. Ukraine has denied the allegations.

The head of Ukraine’s national power grid operator, Ukrenergo, has described the damage dealt to Ukrainian power-generating facilities by Russian missile attacks as “colossal”. Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the chief executive officer of Ukrenergo, told a briefing that practically no thermal or hydroelectric stations had been left unscathed by the Russian attacks.

Iranian, Ukrainian experts meet to discuss Russia’s use of Iranian drones.

Russia's attacks on the liberated southern city of Kherson killed three people on Nov. 22, Oleksandr Leshchenko, the head of the civil protection department of the Kherson City Council, told Suspilne media outlet.

“Russia’s Gazprom has threatened to cut its gas flows to Europe via Ukraine as early as next week.

In a statement, the Russian state-owned energy giant said some gas flows being kept in Ukraine were actually meant for Moldova, and accused Kyiv of obstructing the delivery of 52.52m cubic metres from transiting to Moldova.

It said:

The volume of gas supplied by Gazprom ... for transit to Moldova via Ukraine is more than the physical volume transmitted at the border of Ukraine with Moldova.

It went on to say that would “begin reducing gas supply” on Monday 28 November if the “transit imbalance through Ukraine for Moldovan consumers persists”.

The Ukraine pipeline is the last remaining pipeline still bringing Russian natural gas to western Europe after Gazprom shut off its flows via Nord Stream 1.

Ukraine has denied the allegations, saying that all the gas volumes bound to Moldovan consumers have been transferred “in the full amount”.”-via The Guardian

~

“The head of Ukraine’s national power grid operator, Ukrenergo, has described the damage dealt to Ukrainian power-generating facilities by Russian missile attacks as “colossal”.

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the chief executive officer of Ukrenergo, told a briefing that practically no thermal or hydroelectric stations had been left unscathed by the Russian attacks.

Kudrytskyi said:

The scale of destruction is colossal. In Ukraine there is a power generation deficit. We cannot generate as much energy as consumers can use.

He said Ukrainians could face long power outages but that his company wanted to help provide the conditions for people to stay in the country through winter.

Ukraine had enough fuel reserves after building them up before Russia’s invasion, he said, and was working hard to repair damaged infrastructure but was hoping to secure some spare parts abroad.

He dismissed the need to evacuate civilians, after Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced on Monday the evacuation of residents from recently liberated areas of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions.

People from the two southern regions, which were shelled regularly by Russian forces in the past months, have been advised to move to safer areas in the central and western parts of the country, amid fears that the damage to infrastructure caused by the war is too severe for people to endure the winter.

Asked about the proposals to evacuate some cities worst hit by energy shortages, Kudrytskyi said such calls were “inappropriate”.”-via The Guardian

~

“The World Bank will give $4.5 billion in additional aid to Ukraine to help it “sustain essential services and core government functions at the national and regional levels” while fending off Russian forces, according to a statement.

The money, provided by the US, will help “pay wages for hospital workers, government and school employees, pensions for the elderly, salaries for public servants, and social programs for the vulnerable,” the World Bank said in a statement.

“Amid the ongoing war and the escalating destruction of infrastructure, our commitment to deliver urgent assistance to the people of Ukraine is strong as ever,” said World Bank Group President David Malpass.

“This generous additional grant from the United States comes at a critical time as the country faces severe energy supply disruption and colder weather. The World Bank Group will continue to mobilize all available resources to help the Government of Ukraine meet vital needs for its citizens," Malpass added.”-via CNN

~

“Ukraine has informed Iran that the consequences of complicity in the Russian aggression will be incommensurable with the potential benefits of cooperation with Russia,” Oleh Nikolenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's Foreign Ministry, told CNN.

A spokesperson for the Iranian Mission to the UN previously told CNN that a request had been made for a “joint meeting of experts” to look into the accusations.

The Washington Post reported on Nov. 19, citing intelligence, that Iran and Russia had “quietly” reached an agreement to assemble “hundreds of unmanned weaponized aircraft” on Russian territory.

Russia has been using Iranian-made Shahed-136 kamikaze drones against Ukraine since September, launching waves of attacks that killed civilians and destroyed energy facilities nationwide.”-via Kyiv Independent

~

“Russia's attacks on the liberated southern city of Kherson killed three people on Nov. 22, Oleksandr Leshchenko, the head of the civil protection department of the Kherson City Council, told Suspilne media outlet.

According to Suspilne, 12 sites have been hit in Kherson as of 3:30 p.m.

Russia has been repeatedly striking at civilian infrastructure in the city on Nov. 21-22, according to multiple reports by local officials.

Ukraine liberated Kherson on Nov. 11, after eight months of the Russian occupation.”-via Kyiv Independent

[somber-tone-man]

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it

[mostlysignssomeportents]

UAW strikes created the middle class, this one can bring it back

Big strikes like this one are about more than the striking workers. When the UAW struck GM in 1945/46, they transformed the American labor bargain. That strike gave birth to the defined-benefits pension, employer-provided healthcare, the cost-of-living allowance, and worker pay raises linked to employer profits. The UAW strike of ’45 created the American middle class.

Today, that middle class is an endangered species. American oligarchs have spent decades siphoning away the wealth of workers and gathering it into fewer and fewer hands. Today, “autocrats of trade” have replaced the aristocrats that American revolutionaries overthrew at the nation’s birth.

These new aristocrats are powerful and ruthless, but they’re also vulnerable. They lack the executive function and the solidarity to stop draining the American economy as it grows increasingly brittle. The plute’s “efficiency” comes from long, fragile supply chains, skeleton crews working punishing overtime, and regular federal bailouts for companies that are designed to be both too big to fail and too big to jail.

The UAW only has enough money in its strike fund to support all its workers for 90 days. Car bosses — like other C-suite sociopaths — are prepared to halt production for years in order to smash worker power.

But the UAW doesn’t need to send all of its workers to the picket line to shut down production. Their bosses have made themselves terribly vulnerable, by eliminating backup suppliers and by relying on workers accepting “voluntary” overtime to meet production quotas. Simply by shutting down just a few facilities and refusing overtime at a few more, UAW members can immobilize US car production while barely touching the strike fund.

-Joe Biden is headed to a UAW picket-line in Detroit: “I want to do it, now make me do it.”

Image: Fabio Basagni https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/:Sahara_desert_sunrise.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[anafajardo]

The Advantages of Planning for Retirement

Many individuals begin their retirement planning by saving and making investments. Most employers often provide these plans. They might be anything from pensions to 401(K) plans. Additionally, you have the choice of combining these programs. To make the most of these alternatives, discussing them with your employer is crucial.

A professional financial planner might aid your retirement planning. These experts will examine your current assets, income, and projected living expenses. They can assist you in creating a plan to satisfy your financial needs and avert upcoming economic issues. Up to one-third of Americans who are working age are thought to face financial hardship. Financial stress is one of the leading causes of sleep loss and a factor that might affect your quality of life. But you can lessen many of the critical financial stress caused by developing a retirement plan.

Planning for retirement has advantages that go beyond improving your financial stability. You should consider using about 80% of your working income in retirement if you are a full-time worker. For instance, a worker earning $50,000 yearly must have around $40k saved up for retirement. By setting up a retirement savings plan, you can prepare ahead of time and ensure that your family has enough money to meet their needs. You may feel more at ease as a result. It can benefit your kids as well. Children of retirees frequently worry about their parent's financial stability.

Early purchases of long-term care insurance are frequently more affordable. The costs for these insurance policies might be decreased by two to four percent annually by buying them when you are younger. However, waiting until retirement could result in higher rates and denial of coverage. The price of nursing home care may be covered in part by long-term care insurance. Long-term care insurance is crucial for future planning because sudden medical expenses could eliminate your retirement funds.

Planning for retirement might help you reduce taxes in addition to investing for the future. Diversifying your assets among several types of accounts is best because tax laws are subject to change. You may pay more taxes than you would otherwise if you have one tax-deferred account. A mix of standard and Roth IRA accounts might be the best choice for your purposes.

Your employer may provide one of several retirement savings options. Some employers offer matching funds. The 403(b) plan is another preferred option. Payroll deductions can be used to set up these programs automatically. With these programs, taxes won't be applied to your savings until you take them out. So you'll be able to maximize your benefits if your company matches your contributions.

The ability to save more for retirement is crucial for firms and people. Employees are more likely to stay with the organization if they are prepared for retirement. In addition, employer-sponsored retirement plans benefit your company by luring in fresh talent. Without these programs, workers could continue working until retirement for payment rather than contributing new ideas.

Even though self-employed people may not have access to this or PPFs, they can still benefit from retirement planning. You can make plans for the future and begin saving and investing as soon as you've evaluated your family's needs and your income flow. In addition, many businesses now provide insurance vehicles as retirement benefits.

Stress reduction is also another gain of retirement preparation. With a retirement funds, you can maintain discipline and stay on track with your retirement savings objectives. It is easier to get sidetracked with a project and bear sight of your dreams. You'll have a higher chance of achieving your objective and taking advantage of your golden years if you have a solid plan to keep you motivated.

[greenerteacups]

Re economy question it tickles me how the Ministry looks like the biggest employer of Wizarding Britain…their economy is a mishmash of preindustrial commerce and landholding held together by a kleptocracy

The number of people employed by the Ministry is like, absurd. To the point where I assumed it was overrepresented for Plot Reasons. Like, we need Arthur to have a Ministry job so he has the inside scoop on Bertha Jorkins and a bunch of stuff in fifth year, we meet a lot of Aurors because this is a story about a war, a lot of the bureaucrats who get involved with Harry's hearing/school administration are a result of the Umbridge Arc, and I take it as implicit that most of all jobs Just Happen Somewhere Else, because like.

Okay sidebar about the Ministry. Let me talk to you about the Ministry. Can I talk to you about the fucking Ministry? Put aside the fact that there are more named Ministry employees in this story than there are normal taxpayers. Put aside the fact that the banking system being run exclusively by a disenfranchised underclass that you happen to treat like shit is a policy move that ranks up there with "invading the Soviet Union in December." Put aside the fact that this is basically a modern welfare state stapled on top of a market that's still hammering out the kinks of industrial economics in 19-fucking-91. Here's my question, alright:

WHERE IS THE MONEY GOING?

Let's do an exercise. In 1990, public sector employment was 27% of the British national workforce (and growing). The population dynamics of Harry Potter are irrevocably fucked, so this is only going to even-sort-of-work if we fudge it, as I'm about to do: I'm setting the number of Ministry workers, e.g. salaried bureaucrats, at 10,000. Base pay for a government bureaucrat in 1990, is, what, £25-30,000? Let's say so. Multiply that by 10k, you get a personnel budget of £300 million. Sounds like a lot of money, right?

Except what the fuck does the Ministry do? The reason employment costs balloon in the late twentieth century is because we see the rise of social services that require a lot more administrators to vet and deliver — social security in the United States, the NHS in Britain, public education, etc., etc. Public housing! This is why Maggie Thatcher goes postal and starts hack-sawing the national budget. But what, exactly, does the Ministry of Magic deliver? We don't see any poverty relief programs being administered to the Weasleys. Pensions are a thing, but only for Ministry workers. Health services? Sure, let's say St. Mungo's is a public hospital, fair enough. And Hogwarts is free for all British citizens, that's cool, that's probably some expense. But those are two institutions. Where's the rest of it? Where are the big-ticket items that justify this huge corpus of employees? A pure regulatory state does not require this much personnel! There's a whole Department for Games and Sports (e.g. quidditch — oh wait, that's a private league sport!), but not a Department of Energy, or Department of Housing? Fuck off! There is not!

That's not even the biggest problem, though. There's a much, much bigger issue with Ministry organization: There's no fucking Inland Revenue! It doesn't matter how the budgets are balanced, frankly, because unless IR is hidden somewhere in a secret department we don't know about, nobody is paying the government for fuck!

Admittedly, this is pedantry, at some point. JKR was frankly under no obligation to explore the finer points of tax collection in her series of children's novels. I get that, I do. But I'm reminded of what George R. R. Martin said about his annoyance with fantasy novels — the fact that you never got to judge these mythical kings and Chosen Ones by their actual leadership choices. You never see what Aragorn's tax policy is like. And in reality, that's much more important than how good you are with a sword. So — especially in things like The Cursed Child, which actually does try to explore the "adult" world of Harry Potter — it's fascinating that there are so are so many parts of the universe that just live in the world of inference.

[fraldarrius]

remember when i said i wouldn’t make any more posts about money? 🤡🤡🤡

hi. i really hate to be doing this, as always, but i’m in a real pickle 🥲 my mom currently has no income other than a tiny pension that covers basically nothing. she’s waiting for workers comp to re-review her case that was wrongfully terminated last year due to a negligent case worker, and they’re supposed to be paying her in the meantime but they keep giving excuses about needing more information to recalculate her wages (info that she literally mailed to them last winter). because of this, she didn’t have any money to pay her car payment, which is $220 biweekly, so i lent her the money to pay it hoping that she’d finally get paid this week and i’d be able to get maybe half of it back before my minimum payment on my visa is due, but it doesn’t really look like that’s going to happen and now i’m $160 short 🥴 i managed to pay the last of what i owed on my mastercard minimum payment today with what i got from gst, but there isn’t enough to cover my visa (i only have about $30 left lmao, and i need that to survive until next friday 🥲).

if anyone is able to help, my payment is due october 12th (making this post as of the 5th, so i have one week to come up with the $160). i would be so beyond grateful 😭 i’ve never been late on my visa (which is why i prioritized my mastercard, since i’ve been late on that one once already this year and could not afford to miss another one and have my interest rate jacked up) so technically i CAN miss this one without repercussions but i would really like to avoid that if at all possible 🥲 pls reblog this to get more eyes on the post, it’s super helpful!

p*yp*l

k*fi

[beardedmrbean]

Helsinki Mayor Juhana Vartiainen (NCP) told Helsingin Sanomat (siirryt toiseen palveluun) that Helsinki—like other parts of Finland—is home to too few working age people in relation to general "welfare promises" made.

Boosting productivity among city workers is one way to stretch funds, according to Vartiainen, who told HS that he favoured a performance pay system.

The mayor also suggested the city should also stop producing its own school and hospital meals, outsourcing the food instead.

"It's generally acknowledged that the motive to turn a profit in a privately-owned business raises productivity," he told the paper.

Borrowing power

Business daily Kauppalehti (siirryt toiseen palveluun) reports that the value of energy imports in Finland grew by 141 percent during the first half of this year. Statistics Finland's data indicates that energy imports between January and June were valued at 9.1 billion euros, representing a 141 percent increase over the same period last year.

More than half of Finns meanwhile say they worry about the rising price of electricity. That said, many people, particularly those living in electrically heated homes, are adjusting their habits ahead of winter.

Riina and Uffe, who live in an electrically heated home in Espoo, told Hufvudstadsbladet (siirryt toiseen palveluun) that they've made several changes to keep electricity costs down.

The couple said they run their dishwasher at 10pm and recently installed a geothermal heat pump. Their row-house co-op is also adding more roof insulation to all of its units to prevent heat from escaping.

The leading daily Helsingin Sanomat (HS (siirryt toiseen palveluun)) meanwhile talked to Juha Koskinen, a retiree, living in a 110m2 house in Lieto, near Turku, who said that just the price increase in his electricity bill exceeded his pension.

While Koskinen's solar panels cover around half of his home's electricity needs, he said solar output diminishes as summer turns to autumn, dropping to zero by November.

Koskinen said he may have to seek a consumer loan to cover his electricity bills.

"It's very likely I'll need to go to the bank and ask for a loan. At least I'm in a good position in the sense that I have enough collateral to get a loan. There's also people who will have to resort to payday loans," he said.

[harpianews]

Boeing strike: 'My $28 an hour wage isn't enough to make ends meet'

BBC Devon Smith says his salary doesn't compensate for the danger of his job More than 30,000 Boeing workers are on strike after their union rejected an agreement that would have given them pay raises in exchange for lost bonuses and pensions. This is the second week of the workers' strike and there are no signs of any agreement with Boeing management. We asked workers picketing outside the…

[calliopesink]

Hard Work is their Homework: Struggles and Hurdles of a Teacher

Indeed, being a teacher or a professor is a hard task and job to do. Especially that they're the instruments for all of us in our learning and education process. From being a toddler up until we grow as an adult, they are there to guide us in our career and life track all the time. It is challenging especially with our system here in the Philippines, it is tough for them. Personally, I witness every single hardship that they experience, especially my mother who also belongs to that profession.

My mom has been a teacher for almost 30 years now here in Cavite. She admitted to me that while she enjoyed teaching students, the salary doesn’t fit our expenses enough. These challenges along with the workload that they do every day, it is tough to surpass. My mother would go to class in the afternoon from 12 to 6 PM. She focuses on the Technology and Livelihood Education (TLE) subject, and the exhaustion gets to her due to the heat of the classroom

Even with her exhaustion after teaching school, she comes home to a load of paperworks such as lesson plans, activity sheets, and reports. Sometimes, she wakes up at midnight or even early in the morning before going to work just to finish the work she must accomplish. I am lucky as she still has time for our family even with her busy schedule. Despite a lot of things that she is doing, her monthly pay is approximately P29,000 which does not include some deductions such as government pensions. This despite the low salary rate, is a sad truth for all Filipino workers, especially teachers.

I hope that the Department of Education, as well as the government give teachers the right benefits and compensation for their hard work. The government should raise their pay, to manage or lessen their workload, especially the time they render in even after class hours. For me, even it is hard for them, I'm loudly proud with my mother as she is an indeed a hero for the students and also for us her family, which every one of us must salute and praise our "second parents" in school for their courage, patience, and love for their profession which is teaching to every children for their better future.

Written by: John Rain Corre

Pubmat by: Jackielou Almajose