New Hampshire AFL-CIO Endorses HR 676

“On Saturday, May 4th the New Hampshire AFL-CIO unanimously passed a
resolution supporting HR 676 and the adoption of a national single payer
health care system that covers all Americans for all necessary medical
care including prescription drugs and dental,” reported President Mark
MacKenzie.

New Hampshire is the 42nd State AFL-CIO Federation to endorse HR 676,
Expanded and Improved Medicare for All, sponsored by Congressman John
Conyers (D-MI).

“HR 676 will save hundreds of billions of dollars by eliminating the
private health insurance industry with its high overhead and profits,”
said MacKenzie.

“As President of the New Hampshire AFL-CIO I am proud to have our members
actively participate in the movement to win passage of HR 676 and to make
health care a human right.”

On May 21, 2013, HR 676 gained another co-sponsor in Congress with the
addition of Danny Davis (IL-7). HR 676 now has 42 co-sponsors.

Continue reading New Hampshire AFL-CIO Endorses HR 676 →

The Labor Movement across Pennsylvania flexed its muscle on primary election day, propelling many of our endorsed candidates to victory.  In municipal, school board, and judicial races, and in two special elections for state house, it was a good day for working families, and for the candidates who support us.

“Elections have consequences;” said Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Rick Bloomingdale.  “After seeing the consequences of recent election cycles, labor members and a majority of voters from across the Commonwealth stood together yesterday in so many of these elections, and delivered victories for Pennsylvania’s workers.”

In the special election for House District 42, Dan Miller (D – Allegheny) won a commanding 20-point victory over his opponent to fill the seat of newly elected State Senator Matt Smith.   Kevin Schreiber (D – York), running in the 95^th House District to replace Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, also won on Tuesday by an impressive 15-point margin.

“The voters in HD 42 and HD 95 spoke loud and clear, in what will become a referendum opposing the failed policies of the Corbett Administration, in favor of a pro-worker, pro-community agenda;”  added Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Frank Snyder.  “The PA AFL-CIO would like to give special credit to the Allegheny and York / Adams Central Labor Councils, who spearheaded these Special Elections through their early recommendations and affiliate-field mobilization.”

Central Labor Council bodies from across the Commonwealth also endorsed in many local elections, and worked hard to propel their candidates to victory.

Continue reading Labor Endorsed Candidates Advance in PA Primary →

Oil, gas drilling damage in 161 Pa. water supplies

SCRANTON (AP) — Oil and gas development damaged the water supplies of at least 161 Pennsylvania homes, farms, churches and businesses between 2008 and the fall of 2012, according to state records obtained by a newspaper.

The (Scranton) Times-Tribune first requested the records in late 2011 under the Right to Know law, but the Department of Environmental Protection mounted legal challenges and didn’t release the records until late last year.

The Times-Tribune analyzed nearly 1,000 letters and enforcement orders written by DEP officials. The determination letters are sent to water supply owners who complained that drilling activities polluted or diminished the flow of water to their wells.

About 17 percent of the investigations across the five-year period found that oil and gas activity disrupted water supplies either temporarily or seriously enough to require companies to replace the source. According to the letters, faulty wells channeled natural gas into the water supplies for 90 properties. Three of those cases were tied to old wells, one of which caused an explosion at a home after gas entered through a floor drain and accumulated in a basement.

The department repeatedly argued in court filings that it does not count how many determination letters it issues or track where they are kept in its files. The DEP has also fought efforts by The Associated Press and other news organizations to obtain similar records.

Continue reading PA DEP Forced to Reveal Drilling Damage in 161 PA Water Supplies →

Representatives Pocan and Ellison Introduce “Right to Vote” Constitutional Amendment

Saturday, 18 May 2013 11:25 By Brendan Fischer, PRWatch | Report

(excerpt)

The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.