If you live in PA, call your state reps

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Mike Stack sworn in as Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor

As you can see with this vote, elections do have consequences! Let’s not let them turn Pennsylvania into Wisconsin, no matter how many Koch-loving hacks we have in the state house:

An attempt to pass a controversial amendment to a bill that would restrict union dues collection from state and school employees’ paychecks narrowly failed in the state Senate on Monday.

But most likely, we haven’t seen the last of this amendment to this so-called paycheck protection bill.

Immediately after Lt. Gov. Mike Stack cast his first tie-breaking vote to defeat the amendment 25-24, the Senate voted 29-19 to reconsider it at a later time to keep it alive.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. John Eichelberger, R-Blair County, would have made it illegal for government to deduct union dues from state and school employees’ paychecks. The amendment offered on Monday narrowed that restriction to only ban governments from deducting money for unions that is used for political purposes while still allowing dues collection to support for general union operations.

The libertarian delusion

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Atlas shrugged and said "what blizzard?"

Bill Moyers. You should go read the rest:

The free market doesn’t live up to its billing because of several contradictions between what libertarians contend and the way the real world actually works. Fundamentally, the free-market model assumes away inconvenient facts. Libertarians presume no disparities of information between buyer and seller, no serious externalities, no public goods that markets can’t properly price (Joan Fitzgerald’s piece in our special report in the Winter 2015 issue of The American Prospect magazine discusses one — water), and above all no disparities of power. But in today’s substantially deregulated economy, bankers have far more knowledge and power than bank customers (witness the subprime deception); corporations have far more power than employees; insurers have more power than citizens seeking health insurance. Labor markets can’t compensate for disparities of power. The health insurance “markets” created by the Affordable Care Act can’t fully address the deeper problem of misplaced resources and excessive costs in our medical system.