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Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

by MarianneTejada Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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As deadly sectarian violence continues to sweep through Iraq, the country’s oil industry is reeling from a brazen attack on one of its key domestic refineries. Here are five things you need to know about the role of oil in the current conflict, and what it means for the United States and the global economy.

UPDATE Thursday, June 19, 2:50pm EST: In a press conference this afternoon in which he announced the deployment up to 300 additional military advisers to Iraq, President Obama was asked how Iraq’s civil war affects the national security interests of the United States. In response, Obama listed several factors, including “issues like energy, and global energy markets.”

1. Oil infrastructure is a major flash point in the Iraq crisis. After a week-long siege, Sunni extremists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, fought their way into Iraq’s largest oil refinery in the northern city of Baiji on Tuesday and Wednesday. There are conflicting reports about how much of the facility was seized by the militants in the ensuing chaos, and whether Iraqi forces have in fact repelled the attack, as Iraqi military officials claim. Previously, repeated attacks shut down the major Turkey-bound Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline in the north.

A 2003 photo shows a guard tower outside the Baiji oil refinery. Ivan Sekretarev/AP

2. The Iraq crisis is already affecting oil and gasoline prices. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the country has steadily increased its oil production. It’s now the second biggest producer of crude oil in OPEC, exerting a growing influence on the global price of oil. And while the White House said Wednesday that there have been no “major disruptions in oil supplies in Iraq,” the crisis has clearly spooked the global market. Bloomberg reported last week that one international benchmark used by traders surged above $114 a barrel for the first time in nine months.

USA Today reported that even before the battle over the Baiji refinery, Iraq’s oil production had already fallen by about 10 percent, or 300,000 barrels a day, since March. The China National Petroleum Corporation, the giant state-run company that is the biggest foreign investor in Iraq’s oil industry, is now nervously watching for any threats to its $4 billion worth of oil interests.

And there are signs that oil market worries are already being reflected at your local gas station.

“I warned people on my Facebook, friends and family,” says Robert Rapier, an energy analyst and regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal. “I said: If you need to get gasoline, go get it now, because gasoline prices will be going up this week.”

3. But long-term impacts on global oil supply are unlikely, unless the insurgency spreads. For now, the insurgency is limited to the part of the country north of Baghdad. Unless there’s an increased threat of instability in the south, deeper and longer-lasting seismic shocks to the world energy market are unlikely, according to Luay al-Khatteeb, an energy and politics analyst with the Brookings Doha Center and a senior adviser to the Iraqi parliament. While Baiji is the country’s largest refinery, the overwhelming bulk of oil production in Iraq is centered around the city of Basra, in the country’s south, “far from the fault lines,” he said. Khatteeb called the recent oil price increases “baseless,” adding that “there is zero threat whatsoever to oil production.”

But if the conflict does spread south, the effect on oil markets could be severe. “If all Iraq’s production got taken off line, for example, I’m pretty sure you’d see oil prices rise very quickly to $120, $130, maybe even higher,” Rapier said.

Moreover, the battle for the Baiji plant is likely to make the situation in Iraq worse because Baiji mainly refines oil for the domestic market. “The lack of oil products is likely to further the misery and discontent and my prediction is that a lot of that will be directed toward the central government,” said James F. Jeffery, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former US envoy to Baghdad, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

President Barack Obama speaks about energy security and his climate plan at a Walmart in Mountain View, California. Jeff Chiu/AP

4. America imports much less Iraqi oil than it used to. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he said that America’s dependence on the “tyranny of oil” helped fund terrorism in both Iraq and around the world. “One of the most dangerous weapons in the world today is the price of oil,” he said. “We ship nearly $700 million a day to unstable or hostile nations for their oil. It pays for terrorist bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut.” His opponent that year, John McCain, said at a town hall that his plan to “eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East” would “prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

As president, Obama has continued to emphasize independence from foreign oil. “Today, America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades,” he told an audience at Walmart in Mountain View, California, last month. “And for the first time in nearly 20 years, America produces more oil here at home than we buy from other countries.”

Indeed, in October, domestic crude oil production surpassed imports for the first time since 1995. More specifically, even though Iraq’s oil production has increased, the US now imports far less Iraqi oil than it did around the time of the 2003 invasion.

That’s not just the story in Iraq. America is now importing less oil overall—20 percent less, in fact—than in 2003. “We’re getting more of that oil domestically,” Rapier said, pointing to increased local production facilitated by the fracking boom, especially in Texas and North Dakota.

And America’s own neighbors are also chipping in to help, says Rapier, pointing to Canadian crude. “We’ve got lower cost production in our neighborhood here.”

This means the United States is now somewhat insulated from big shocks to the market like the 1970s oil crisis, in which oil-producing Arab states imposed a crippling embargo against the US.

“The increase of unconventional oil supplies from new emerging assets in the US, all of this has created some sort of a comfort zone,” said Khatteeb from the Brookings Doha Center.

John Duffield, who authored a 2008 book called Over a Barrel: The Costs of US Foreign Oil Dependence agrees: “I would say we are not as much over the barrel.”

5. But the United States is still tied to global oil markets, and that means what happens in Iraq can have an economic impact here. One thing every expert I spoke to agreed on is this: Even with decreasing oil imports, the US is inextricably linked to world markets. That means that if the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, the US economy may not be immune.

“The cost to the United States of a big oil shock…will be lower than they were in the past,” Duffield said. “Our main vulnerability is not so much the direct impact on oil, but the impact on the rest of the world’s economy, if there’s a big oil supply disruption.” He added that “as long as the world oil market is pretty highly integrated, the US is vulnerable to an oil supply disruption in the Middle East or the Persian Gulf, regardless of the amount of oil it imports from the region.”

Why? Because even though the United States has reduced its use of Middle Eastern oil, many of America’s key trading partners have not. “The oil production in Iraq has risen for seven years in a row,” Rapier said, and that oil is going somewhere. Much of it’s going to Asian economic powerhouses whose economies are deeply tied to our own.

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A US soldier stands guard at a burning oil well at the Rumeila oil fields after the 2003 American invasion. Ian Waldie/Pool/AP

“The United States, strategically, is a major trading power,” said Anthony Cordesman, an energy analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It is particularly dependent on the import of manufactured goods from three countries which are extremely dependent on energy imports. Those happen to be China, South Korea, and Japan.”

That’s why Middle Eastern oil still plays an important role in US policy, says Cordesman. “It is precisely because US security is global. It is not a matter of direct US dependence on foreign oil,” he said. “Because what really counts is global prices, and what counts is the steady and predictable flow of oil to a global economy.â&#128;&#139;”

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Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

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Chart of the Day: There’s Still No Wage Pressure in the US Economy

by JaimeLockett Posted on June 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is just a reminder from Jared Bernstein, who analyzed five different measures of wage growth to produce the chart below. Ever since the end of the Great Recession, wage growth has been under 2 percent. It’s still under 2 percent, and shows no signs of increasing. This is yet another indication that the recovery is weak, the labor market has a lot of slack, and there’s no inflation in sight.

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Chart of the Day: There’s Still No Wage Pressure in the US Economy

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STUDY: Economic Hardship Makes People More Racially Biased

by HattieSpellman Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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The economic collapse of the late 2000s hurt most Americans—but not equally. In fact, according to a 2011 Pew study (visualized above), while median household wealth dropped by 16 percent for white Americans, it dropped a stunning 53 percent for African-Americans.

What accounts for this dramatic disparity? Traditional explanations tend to focus on structural economic factors, such as the fact that African American families had a higher proportion of their total wealth tied up in the vulnerable housing market, and that they were targeted by predatory lenders. But according to a new paper just out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that may not be the full explanation. It looks as though a more subtle form of racial bias may have played a role as well—thanks to psychological factors that, in a recession, tend make those biases worse.

The new study is by Amy Krosch and David Amodio of New York University. Amodio in particular has extensively studied what are called “implicit” racial biases: Uncontrolled prejudices that manifest themselves in our split-second reactions to images or in other cognitive tests. According to one estimate, for instance, 75 percent of whites harbor these subtle, subconscious biases in favor of other whites, and against blacks.

The study adds a new twist to this large and well established literature on unconscious biases. It finds that when people are made to think about economic scarcity—as they inevitably are during a stressful recession—their subconscious perceptions of race change as well. In particular, they are more likely to internally visualize African American faces as being darker in color and more “stereotypically black”—perceptions related, in prior research, to the expression of higher levels of discrimination. The study even found that when asked to divvy up money between two people, white study participants allocated less money to an individual who was perceived as being more stereotypically black.

What might that mean in the real world? Racial biases, heightened by the downturn, might have filtered into “hiring or firing decisions, or decisions about home ownership loans, dealing with foreclosure, or other things that came out of the recession,” Amodio speculates.

The new study consists of four separate experiments, which bulwark this central conclusion using a variety of methodologies. In one of them, white study participants were asked to play a money allocation game. In some cases, they were told that it was possible to distribute up to $100 to a partner; in others, they were told that it was only possible to distribute up to $10. Either way, the participants were ultimately given the same amount of money—$10—to distribute. Thus, the scenario in which that $10 looked like only a small slice of the available pie (just 1/10 of the possible total) created perceptions of scarce resources. (The two scenarios were pretested on a different group of subjects to confirm that having only $10 out of a possible $100 to distribute made individuals feel that resources were scarce. It did.)

Afterwards, the research subjects were asked to looked at a series of images of paired faces. All of the images were actually based on the same original composite image, a mixed-race “morph” created from 100 black and 100 white faces, and then randomly degraded in quality by different patterns of visual noise. Here’s a helpful visualization, from the study, of how the process of creating the images worked:

Krosch and Amodio, “Economic scarcity alters the perception of race,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014. David Amodio

Individuals were then asked to pick which version of the face was “black.”

“We let them choose which faces most accurately matched the image of a black person in their minds, from a range of subtly different face images across hundreds of trials,” says Amodio. The subjects’ choices were then all combined together to make two new composite images: One of the research participants’ perceptions of a black person under conditions of scarcity, and one of their perceptions under control conditions. This was the result:

Economic conditions affected how study participants perceived race. David Amodio.

Sure enough, in the “scarcity” experimental scenario, research subjects collectively produced a very different picture of what they thought that a black person looks like. Their version was judged, by independent observers, to be both darker in skin color, and also more “stereotypically black.”

“Together, our results provide strong converging evidence for the role of perceptual bias as a mechanism through which economic scarcity enhances discrimination and contributes to racial disparities,” the authors wrote.

That conclusion is underscored by the final experiment of the paper. In it, a new group of white research subjects were shown the two images above, and asked to divide $15 dollars between the fictional people pictured in them (in whole dollars; thus, giving each $7.50 was not a possible option). In this scenario, people generally tried to be relatively egalitarian, but they could not divide the money 100 percent evenly. At best, somebody had to get $8, and somebody had to get $7. Sure enough, the research subjects ultimately gave the person with the lighter colored, less “stereotypical” face more money.

We already knew, based on a large body of science, that subconscious racial biases filter into our behavior in innumerable ways. The new research presents striking evidence that in times when we’re all facing hardship, it can be even worse.

We recently interviewed David Amodio about the emerging science of prejudice on the Inquiring Minds podcast; you can stream below:

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STUDY: Economic Hardship Makes People More Racially Biased

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Will California’s Drought Bring About $7 Broccoli?

by ConsuelStarling Posted on June 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration: Christoph Hitz

When people tell you to “eat your veggies,” they’re really urging you to take a swig of California water. The state churns out nearly half of all US-grown fruits, vegetables, and nuts; farms use 80 percent of its water. For decades, that arrangement worked out pretty well. Winter precipitation replenished the state’s aquifers and covered its mountains with snow that fed rivers and irrigation systems during the summer. But last winter, for the third year in a row, the rains didn’t come, likely making this the driest 30-month stretch in the state’s recorded history. So what does the drought mean for your plate? Here are a few points to keep in mind:

The abnormally wet period when California emerged as our fresh-produce powerhouse may be over. B. Lynn Ingram, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California-Berkeley and author of The West Without Water, says the 20th century was a rain-soaked anomaly compared to the region’s long-term history. If California reverts to its drier norm, farmers could expect an average of 15 percent less precipitation in the coming decades, and climate change could exacerbate that. Less rain means more irrigation water diverted from already dwindling rivers—bad news for river fish such as the threatened delta smelt. Wells won’t save the state, either: Farmers are already pumping the groundwater that lies deep under their farms much faster than it can be naturally recharged.

Cotton out, orchards in. California farmers have increasingly turned toward orchard crops like nuts, grapes, and stone fruit. That’s because those crops bring more return for the water invested than lower-value row crops like cotton, rice, and vegetables. But they also make for less flexibility: A broccoli farmer can let land lie fallow during a drought year, but an almond farmer has to keep those trees watered or lose a long-term investment.

California will keep getting nuttier. According to US Geological Survey hydrologist Michelle Sneed, it’s not family farms that are sucking up the most water. Rather, it’s large finance firms like Prudential, TIAA-CREF, and Hancock Agricultural Investment Group. To cash in on surging demand for nuts among China’s growing middle class, these companies are buying up California farmland and plunking down nut orchards; acres devoted to pistachios jumped nearly 50 percent between 2006 and 2011, and the almond orchard area expanded 11 percent. Nuts are some of the thirstiest perennial crops around, with a single almond requiring a gallon of water and a pistachio taking three-quarters of a gallon. So when the finance companies snatch up farms in the Central Valley, they’re also grabbing groundwater—and California places no statewide limits on how landowners can exploit the water beneath their land. Even Texas, a state known for its deregulatory zeal, has stricter rules.

Mexico and China won’t fix this for us. Nearly half of the fruit and almost a quarter of the vegetables we eat come from abroad, mainly from Mexico, Canada, China, and Chile. But water supplies are dwindling worldwide. Mexico, for example, supplies 36 percent of our fruit and vegetable imports, almost all of it in the winter months. Most of that produce is grown in Sinaloa and Baja California, states that also are under intense water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Parts of the Mediterranean have a California-like climate suitable for year-round farming, yet those places, too, have severe water issues (and an already-ravenous market for their goods in Europe). Even Southern Hemisphere countries like Chile, from which we get 8 percent of our imported produce, face serious water challenges.

But the Midwest could. According to a 2010 Iowa State University study, just 270,000 acres of land—about what you’d find in a single Iowa county, and a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of acres devoted to corn—could supply everyone in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin with half of their annual tomatoes, strawberries, apples, and onions, and a quarter of their kale, cucumbers, and lettuce. Add another 270,000 acres and the region’s farmers could grow enough for the parts of the country that aren’t as well suited for expanding fruit and veggie production, such as the Northeast, where land is too expensive and development pressures too high.

So why aren’t we seeding the heartland with lettuce already? The problem is that fruits and veggies would require a far different kind of infrastructure from the huge mechanical harvesters and grain bins used for corn and soy (most of which goes to feed livestock, not people). The transition would be pricey, and so far, few farmers have taken the chance. But the calculus could soon change: The US population will continue to grow, and, if current nutritional recommendations hold, so should our appetite for produce. This year, for example, a Harvard study found that after a 2012 change in federal school lunch standards, US students consumed 16 percent more vegetables. Eventually, California’s water issues will mean “large and lasting effects” on your supermarket bill, the US Department of Agriculture warned in February. Once the era of $7 a pound broccoli dawns, setting up the Midwest to grow fruits and veggies might not look so expensive after all.

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Will California’s Drought Bring About $7 Broccoli?

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Here’s One Big Reason the Economy Is Still Treading Water

by AlysaConstance Posted on June 6, 2014

Mother Jones

David Leonhardt passes along this chart today, and it’s one of the most important ones you’ll see. It was my candidate for chart of the year in 2013.

What it shows is unprecedented: government employment fell during an economic recovery. This has never happened before in recent history. Employment rose during the Reagan recovery. It rose during the Clinton recovery. It rose during the Bush recovery. And that’s one of the reasons those recoveries were fairly strong.

Only during the Obama recovery did austerity fever force government employment to fall. It’s not the only reason this recovery has been so weak, but it’s certainly one of the leading causes. More here.

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Here’s One Big Reason the Economy Is Still Treading Water

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Even Republican voters support Obama’s new climate rule

by Lovell Mao Posted on June 3, 2014

Even Republican voters support Obama’s new climate rule

By

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Republican politicians are railing against President Obama’s new draft power-plant pollution rules, portraying them as job killers that will leave the economy in unrecognizable tatters.

But their rank-and-file voters haven’t yet gotten the message.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, conducted from Thursday to Sunday as the media was ramping up coverage ahead of the rules’ release, included this question: “Do you think the federal government should or should not limit the release of greenhouse gases from existing power plants in an effort to reduce global warming?”

Not only did 70 percent of all respondents reply in the affirmative, but more than twice as many Republicans said “yes” as said “no.” Check it out:

Washington PostClick to embiggen.

There’s more good news from the poll on whether Americans would be willing to pay more for their electricity if it meant cleaner air and a more stable climate. From The Washington Post‘s write-up:

The cross-party agreement extends to a willingness to pay for such limits with higher energy bills, a flashpoint for debate and a key area of uncertainty in new regulations. Asked whether Washington should still go forward with limits if they “significantly lowered greenhouse gases but raised your monthly energy expenses by 20 dollars a month,” 63 percent of respondents say yes, including 51 percent of Republicans, 64 percent of independents and 71 percent of Democrats.

(And it’s not clear that the rules even would cost Americans anything; the Natural Resources Defense Council argues that they’ll save Americans money by increasing energy efficiency.)

This from a national electorate that’s better known for yawning at climate change — relegating it close to the bottom of their list of national concerns — than for caring about climate action.

It seems that even Republicans are tiring of boys who cry wolf.


Source
A huge majority of Americans support regulating carbon from power plants. And they’re even willing to pay for it, The Washington Post

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Big Oil Won’t Let the Developing World Kick the Habit

by HannaDabney Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In the 1980s, encountering regulatory restrictions and public resistance to smoking in the United States, the giant tobacco companies came up with a particularly effective strategy for sustaining their profit levels: sell more cigarettes in the developing world, where demand was strong and anti-tobacco regulation weak or nonexistent. Now, the giant energy companies are taking a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook. As concern over climate change begins to lower the demand for fossil fuels in the United States and Europe, they are accelerating their sales to developing nations, where demand is strong and climate-control measures weak or nonexistent. That this will produce a colossal increase in climate-altering carbon emissions troubles them no more than the global spurt in smoking-related illnesses troubled the tobacco companies.

The tobacco industry’s shift from rich, developed nations to low- and middle-income countries has been well documented. “With tobacco use declining in wealthier countries, tobacco companies are spending tens of billions of dollars a year on advertising, marketing, and sponsorship, much of it to increase sales in… developing countries,” the New York Times noted in a 2008 editorial. To boost their sales, outfits like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco also brought their legal and financial clout to bear to block the implementation of anti-smoking regulations in such places. “They’re using litigation to threaten low- and middle-income countries,” Dr. Douglas Bettcher, head of the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO), told the Times.

The fossil fuel companies—producers of oil, coal, and natural gas—are similarly expanding their operations in low- and middle-income countries where ensuring the growth of energy supplies is considered more critical than preventing climate catastrophe. “There is a clear long-run shift in energy growth from the OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of rich nations to the non-OECD,” oil giant BP noted in its Energy Outlook report for 2014. “Virtually all (95 percent) of the projected growth in energy consumption is in the non-OECD,” it added, using the polite new term for what used to be called the Third World.

As in the case of cigarette sales, the stepped-up delivery of fossil fuels to developing countries is doubly harmful. Their targeting by Big Tobacco has produced a sharp rise in smoking-related illnesses among the poor in places where health systems are particularly ill equipped for those in need. “If current trends continue,” the WHO reported in 2011, “by 2030 tobacco will kill more than 8 million people worldwide each year, with 80 percent of these premature deaths among people living in low- and middle-income countries.” In a similar fashion, an increase in carbon sales to such nations will help produce more intense storms and longer, more devastating droughts in places that are least prepared to withstand or cope with climate change’s perils.

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Big Oil Won’t Let the Developing World Kick the Habit

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Will The Supreme Court Kill Public-Employee Unions?

by GeorgeDeHamel Posted on May 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Forget Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow union-bashing governors. Forget the partisan Republican attacks on organized labor. The gravest threat today to public-employee unions—which represent cops, firefighters, prison guards, teachers, nurses, and other city and state workers—is a Supreme Court case named Harris v. Quinn, which could be decided as early as this Tuesday. And, strangely enough, it is the court’s most sharp-tongued conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, who could ride to organized labor’s rescue.

The case pits several of the nation’s mightiest labor unions, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), against their longstanding foe, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which helped bring the case. National Right to Work is funded by some of the biggest names in conservative philanthropy: the Bradley family, the Waltons of Walmart, Charles Koch, and DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark-money ATMs. Labor officials see Harris as an effort by the deep-pocketed conservative movement to wipe public-employee unions off the map—and to demolish a major source of funding and support for the Democratic Party. “This is an attempted kill shot aimed at public-sector unions,” says Bill Lurye, AFSCME’s general counsel.

The origins of Harris date to July 2003, when the Illinois legislature passed a bill recognizing certain home-care providers as “public employees” and designating a Midwest branch of SEIU to exclusively represent those workers. Before that, these workers were deemed independent contractors with no union representation, even though the Illinois government paid them with federal health-care funds. In June 2009, Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, went one step further. By executive order, Quinn declared the state’s disability-care providers, another type of home-care worker, eligible for exclusive union representation. (Ultimately, the disability providers voted against unionizing.)

Organized labor hailed these moves. Unions see a huge opportunity in the rapidly growing population of elderly Americans—what SEIU president Mary Kay Henry calls the “silver tsunami.” Labor leaders believe that organizing home-care workers across the country could slow the decline in union membership.

When the Illinois labor bill passed in July 2003, no home-care worker was forced into SEIU. But if they chose not to join, the union still was allowed to deduct a small amount of money from their paychecks. Why? It was the union’s responsibility to represent every home-care worker impacted by the new law. To pay for representing union and non-union home-care workers, the union began taking what it calls a “fair share” fee. (This money cannot be used for political activity.) The Supreme Court has upheld a union’s right to collect fair share fees. (This is where so-called right-to-work laws come in. Such laws ban unions from collecting fair share fees from non-union workers even if the employees benefit from union-negotiated contracts.)

Home-care workers, consumers, and advocates in Illinois say union representation has led to higher quality care, safer workplaces, and more stability. Flora Johnson, an 85-year-old home-care worker in Chicago and SEIU member, says union-funded training sessions taught her how to properly lift a person and how to feed patients without choking them. Johnson points out that the union brought a level of professionalism to her industry. “Before we got the union, it was like we was babysitters,” she says. “We had no dignity.”

But there was a backlash. In April 2010, a group of Illinois home-care workers, led by plaintiff Pamela Harris, filed a class action arguing that the state had infringed on their First Amendment rights by forcing them to be represented by a union and pay fees. (The suit named two unions, SEIU and AFSCME, as defendants.) A district court and the US Seventh Court of Appeals each dismissed the case.

The case lay dormant until last October. That’s when, at National Right to Work’s urging, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Harris. Until that point, Harris was narrowly focused on the Illinois home-care workers; it posed no existential threat to the likes of SEIU and AFSCME. But after the high court intervened, National Right-to-Work expanded its argument to threaten all public-employee unions. As SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston wrote, Harris “mushroomed…into a major test of the continuing validity of the Abood precedent.”

Cue organized labor’s freak-out. Abood v. Detroit Board of Education is the 1977 Supreme Court decision that, in effect, upheld the constitutionality of the public-employee union model. The majority in Abood said these unions did not infringe on the First Amendment by collecting representation dues and collectively bargaining on behalf of public workers.

During oral arguments in January, the Obama administration contended that overturning Abood would result in “radically reshaping First Amendment law.” Yet several of the court’s conservative justices appeared to want just that. Writing for the majority in 2012’s Knox v. SEIU, Justice Samuel Alito all but invited National Right to Work to challenge Abood. During the oral arguments in Harris, Alito and Justice Anthony Kennedy seemed eager to demolish Abood. The court’s four liberal justices questioned National Right-to-Work’s arguments at every turn, with Justice Elena Kagan saying that tossing out Abood would lead to a “radical restructuring of the way workplaces are run.” John Roberts, who has used his time as chief justice to push a pro-corporate agenda, gave few hints about where he stood on the fate of public-employee unions.

That leaves Justice Antonin Scalia. A conservative who says he interprets the Constitution through an originalist lens, Scalia would make for a strange ally of organized labor. Yet it was Scalia who asked some of the toughest questions of William Messenger, the lawyer for National Right to Work, challenging Messenger’s argument that public-employee unions are lobbying organizations focused mostly on influencing public policy. Forcing workers to be represented by a lobbying outfit, Messenger argued, infringes on the First Amendment rights of workers who don’t agree with the union’s positions.

Scalia didn’t appear to be buying it. He seemed to lean more toward labor’s argument: that unions exist to better the working conditions of the workers they represent. “Listening to Scalia’s voice in oral arguments made me feel like he really doubted that there was a need to go so far right now,” says Lee Adler, an expert on public-employee unions at Cornell University. “He couldn’t follow National Right to Work’s logic.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Harris could cut several ways. It could affirm the lower court’s decision—a big loss for National Right-to-Work. It could issue a more narrow opinion, saying, for instance, that Illinois home-care workers aren’t public employees and shouldn’t be unionized without touching Abood. Or the high court could take that kill shot: Eviscerate Abood and gut public-employee unions.

Like many other court watchers, Cornell’s Lee Adler says the fate of Harris—and, potentially, the fate of public-employee unions—rests with Scalia. For the labor movement, Adler says, “He’s the great white hope.”

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Will The Supreme Court Kill Public-Employee Unions?

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WATCH: The Logic of Monopolies, Debunked Fiore Cartoon

by NanYNBBcalr Posted on May 22, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: The Logic of Monopolies, Debunked Fiore Cartoon

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In California, Climate Issues Moved to Fore by Governor

by Myrna Posted on May 19, 2014

Gov. Jerry Brown is at the forefront of state leaders who are grappling with ways to deal with climate change through legislation and infrastructure changes, rather than waiting for coordinated efforts from the federal government. Link:   In California, Climate Issues Moved to Fore by Governor ; ;Related ArticlesBillionaire Democrat Sets Eye on Senate RacesDot Earth Blog: Hefty Global Goals from a Vatican Meeting: Stabilizing the Climate, Energy for All and an Inclusive EconomyCalifornia Wildfires Spread Across Hills, Leveling Homes ;

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In California, Climate Issues Moved to Fore by Governor

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