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Naked Capitalism

Naked Capitalism

Supreme Court limits workers' discrimination, retaliation suits Loading... April 22, 2014 Sign in Sign Out Create an Account Subscribe Text Size Normal Large Extra large Latest News L.A. Coachella Music Festival In Case You Missed It Sports Basketball College Sports Photos California Cookbook State news HomicideReport Business Entertainment Nation Politics World Technology Science Health Movies Television Music Celebrity Arts & Culture Food Travel Fashion Obituaries Opinion Games Circulars Close Ad x 1 of Related Content Recent Columns

Executive Orders: The Famous, The Infamous & The Ridiculous Critics call them "legislation by other means." Supporters defend them as a necessary tool for leading the country "“ especially in the face of a Congress unwilling or unable to make tough choices. Whatever your position, the Executive Order has been used by presidents for good, for ill, and sometimes for just plain odd reasons. Constitutional Basis Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. These orders went largely unchecked until President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 10340, which placed all U.S. steel mills under Federal control. Since then, presidents have exercised more restraint and usually cite specific laws when signing an Executive Order. Famous, Infamous & Ridiculous Executive Orders You might have read about these executive orders in Mrs. Emancipation Proclamation: Perhaps the most famous of all executive orders, the Proclamation freed all slaves living in the Confederacy. The Proclamation was actually President Lincoln's last attempt to bring the Civil War to a speedy close.

House Approves Derivatives Deregulation Bills That Would Open More Loopholes For Wall Street WASHINGTON -- The U.S. House of Representatives passed a slate of bills Wednesday intended to roll back recent financial reforms and deregulate derivatives, the complex financial products at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis. The legislation aimed at the 2010 overhaul of financial regulation known as Dodd-Frank cleared with broad bipartisan backing. One bill passed despite strenuous objections from the White House, leading regulators and senior lawmakers such as Maxine Waters (D-Calif), the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. Nearly two-thirds of House Democrats opposed that measure, which aims to curb U.S. supervision of overseas activities by U.S. banks, even though nearly two-thirds of Democrats on the banking committee voted for it last month. The measures are unlikely to advance in the Senate or be signed into law by President Barack Obama. Rep. "I hope this bill passes with a large majority that cannot be ignored by the Senate," Rep. Also on HuffPost:

Living Wage Calculator - Introduction to the Living Wage Calculator Rich Entrepreneur: The Wealthy Aren’t Job Creators, Middle Class Workers Are By Bryce Covert "Rich Entrepreneur: The Wealthy Aren’t Job Creators, Middle-Class Workers Are" Nick Hanauer On Thursday, entrepreneur and self-described one percenter Nick Hanauer warned Congress that rich people like him aren’t the engines of the economy. In the same way that it’s a fact that the sun, not earth is the center of the solar system, it’s also a fact that the middle class, not rich business people like me are the center of America’s economy. […]As an entrepreneur and investor, I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. He described what he calls a “virtuous cycle” in which middle class consumers have money to buy goods, which increases demand and therefore hiring. But the country’s policies pretend otherwise. Corporate profits and unemployment are simultaneously at 50-year highs.The share of income for the richest 1 percent has tripled since 1980 while their taxes have only risen by 50 percent.

The 2 Supreme Court Cases That Could Put a Dagger in Organized Labor - Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker Amid the ruckus over its voting rights and gay marriage rulings, the justices quietly accepted a pair of cases that could make it nearly impossible for private sector unions to organize new members. During the last half century, private sector unionism has endured a rather brutal death march. Almost every year, we learn once again that the percentage of private sector workers who are union members has declined to a new record low. For the most part, the decline has been a gradual affair, with private sector unions slowly suffocating under America's uniquely terrible labor laws. In the coming year, however, this slow demise could hasten considerably, courtesy of the Supreme Court. In the shadow of the intense media coverage last month surrounding the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, the Defense of Marriage Act, and Proposition 8, the justices quietly agreed to hear two cases that could devastate unions in the private sector. The first case, Noel Canning v.

Irony and the Grand Ole Party 101 Posted by Erin Nanasi on Tuesday, July 9, 2013 · 4 Comments Dr. Elwin Snarkmeister's supply list and synopsis for a compulsory Republican training course Welcome to Irony and the Grand Ole Party 101. For new students, Irony and the Grand Ole Party 101 covers the slow erosion of America’s GOP from within. Supply list: Box of #2 pencilsThesaurusContainer of paper clipsPaint gun with paint pellets, any colorTurpentine (to remove the paint from the desks and walls; Dean Wormer refuses to let me use drop cloths)The King James bibleThe Fountainhead by Ayn RandA copy of the ConstitutionMotorcycle helmet with visorSoldering iron (I will proved the solder)The gay agenda (extra credit to the first student who actually finds it) Since the unholy union of the Republican party and fundamentalist Christianity, the GOP has taken a truly bizarre turn down the road of American history. This year, we will be dissecting GOP irony from the past 12 months. Topics of discussion will include:

Rep. Mark Takano Corrects Republican Letter, Proves He Will Always Be A Teacher (PICTURE) When Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) started circulating a letter that complained about the Senate's immigration reform bill, he may have expected some grumbling from Democrats, but he probably did not expect to get a failing grade. However, when Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) received the letter and found the content to be “weak," he did what any self-respecting former teacher would do. He got out his red pen and gave the document a straight-up F. (Takano taught high school for more than 20 years, reports Southern California Public Radio station KPCC, and it appears he still has quite a bit of teacher left in him.) Penned back in April, Cassidy's letter was addressed to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and complained that the Senate bill was "unfair" and that it had been written in secret. Earlier on HuffPost:

IRS Audited Liberal Groups Under President Bush, No Outrage from GOP While Republicans attack the Obama administration over some IRS agents auditing conservative groups with the words "Tea Party" and "patriot" in their names, they weren't particularly outraged when the IRS targeted liberal groups during President George W. Bush's presidency, noted Salon.com . “I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told MSNBC on Monday (video below). One of the liberal groups targeted by the IRS under the Bush administration was All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, reported the Los Angeles Times . The IRS actually threatened to revoke the church's tax-emption because Pastor George Regas said: ‘Mr. Ironically, conservative churches that actively campaigned for President Bush in 2004 were not audited by the IRS, reported the New York Times .

Either job creation is the top priority or it isn't I’d very nearly given up trying to convince the political world that sequestration cuts still matter. But then yesterday, something changed my mind. For those who still care about the policy that was designed to hurt the country on purpose, there’s been quite a bit of news lately, all of it showing the sequester doing what it was intended to do. In addition to the voluminous list of documented problems, just over the last few days we’ve gotten a better sense of the ways in which the policy is hurting the military, public schools, parks, and the justice system. Did the political world care about these stories? So what made yesterday different? The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Thursday estimated that keeping the spending cuts from sequestration in place through fiscal 2014 would cost up to 1.6 million jobs.Canceling the cuts, on the other hand, would yield between 300,000 to 1.6 million new jobs, with the most likely outcome being the addition of 900,000, the CBO said.

How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled by Paul Krugman The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin Penguin, 430 pp., $29.95 Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $24.95 The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David A. PublicAffairs, 742 pp., $35.00 In normal times, an arithmetic mistake in an economics paper would be a complete nonevent as far as the wider world was concerned. Why? Indeed, Reinhart-Rogoff may have had more immediate influence on public debate than any previous paper in the history of economics. The real mystery, however, was why Reinhart-Rogoff was ever taken seriously, let alone canonized, in the first place. So why wasn’t there more caution? In the beginning was the bubble. All that was needed to collapse these houses of cards was some kind of adverse shock, and in the end the implosion of US subprime-based securities did the deed. Why is this a problem? So was a second Great Depression about to unfold?

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