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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008 Posts: 5181
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Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2014 11:26 am Post subject: |
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You call it hypocrisy.......a less emotive term would be compromise. If you think that governors of all stripes don't make exactly the same types of compromise.........sorry, hypocritical.........decisions, you are delusional. You laud Hillary for her apparent ability to compromise, then slam Republican governors for doing the same thing. Let me think, what's the word for that? |
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boggsman1
Joined: 24 Jun 2002 Posts: 9122 Location: at a computer
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Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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Duly Noted... |
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DanWeiss
Joined: 24 Jun 2008 Posts: 2296 Location: Connecticut, USA
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Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 11:02 am Post subject: |
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As former GC to a large, regional automobile dealership consortium, I've witnessed first-hand the political power that employing hundreds or thousands provides. While the employees are real people with others depending on their income, the traditional franchise system reduces local advertising cost to the dealers while removing those jobs from the local market.
A Tesla sales store would employ sales and technical staff, finance and marketing professionals not to mention highly trained repair and maintenance technicians, plus a new line of auction guys, new used-car lots to deal with trade-ins and admin staff.
Pushback from traditional dealer networks and the decision to ban non-franchise stores contradicts government's role to promote new businesses. Banning a certain model of distribution likely will be challenged as a violation of the Commerce Clause. _________________ Support Your Sport. Join US Windsurfing!
www.USWindsurfing.org |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999 Posts: 17751 Location: Berkeley, California
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 10:39 am Post subject: |
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I was on the Board of the San Francisco Estuary Institute when their scientists discovered that flame retardants were bio-accumulating to alarming levels in the biota of San Francisco Bay. Here is the "high integrity" response of the chemical industry. To be sure, the chemical and oil industries keep an arms length from the liars they fund, but that doesn't make them honest citizens.
Quote: | By John DiazMay 16, 2015
Grant David Gillham, former legislative staffer and veteran political consultant, knows how to work the system. Three major manufacturers of fire retardants went to the right person in 2007 when they enlisted him to help defeat legislation that would ban two classes of retardants believed to cause cancer.
“This sent shock waves through the chemical industry,” Gillham said of the proposal. “I was on the phone with CEOs pleading for help.”
Their instructions to him: Don’t worry about the science, the evidence supports their position that the chemicals are safe. His job was to run a political campaign.
Oh, and by the way, he was not to reveal his association with the industry.
Now Gillham is speaking out in a big way, and his story of creating a bogus front group, saturating the state’s airwaves and mailboxes with fear — and even bringing in a physician whose testimony was later found to have been fabricated — illustrates the extent to which the legislative process can be manipulated by a well-heeled special interest with no bounds of ethics.
State Sen. Mark Leno, the San Francisco Democrat who wrote several measures on fire retardants over the past eight years, said the chemical industry’s tactics were as reprehensible as anything he’s seen in his 13 years in the state Capitol.
“To learn of Mr. Gillham’s revelations really just confirmed what I had suspected — these guys will stop at nothing,” Leno said.
The chemical industry’s main trade group, the American Chemistry Council, denied any connection with Gillham after a 2012 Chicago Tribune series exposed that the advocacy group he created, Citizens for Fire Safety, was not as it claimed, “a coalition of fire professionals, educators, community activists, burn centers, doctors, fire departments and industry leaders.” It was funded by three manufacturers who controlled 40 percent of the global market for the targeted chemicals.
As first reported by the Center for Public Integrity, Gillham now has detailed how representatives of the chemistry council were closely involved in the campaign from the moment he was interviewed in Sacramento to lead the advocacy campaign.
The industry group tried to give the impression after the expose on Citizens for Fire Safety that “this was some rogue organization run by some cowboys out west,” Gillham said.
“All the lobbyists I hired knew exactly where the money was coming from,” he told me in a phone interview. “The companies thought they were being too cute by half, I guess, to think this was going to hoodwink anyone. A group run by Grant Gillham with a staff of two, including my puppy, just doesn’t spend $22 million (as it did in 2007) on an advocacy program. It just doesn’t happen.”
However, the strategy worked in California — Leno’s bill to ban chlorinated and brominated fire retardants died on the Senate floor on Aug. 26, 2008 — and Citizens for Fire Safety went on to help defeat similar bills in other states.
The manufacturers’ claims of the lifesaving benefits of fire retardants have been contradicted by scientific studies that suggests their flame-resisting properties are minimal, and are more than offset by their negative effect in making fires more toxic. Firefighter groups have been among the prominent advocates of Leno’s bill.
One of its most egregious lobbying acts involved the testimony of Dr. David Heimbach, Seattle burn surgeon and former president of the American Burn Association, who told of treating a 7-week-old girl who was burned in a fire when a candle ignited a pillow that was not treated with fire retardants. The Chicago Tribune concluded that no such victim existed. Heimbach told the Tribune that his Sacramento testimony was “an anecdotal story rather than anything which I would say was absolutely true under oath, because I wasn’t under oath.”
Heimbach was paid $240,000 from the flame retardant manufacturers.
Gillham insisted that he was not aware that the doctor was using “composite cases” instead of actual patient experiences.
“It wasn’t a conspiracy to give false testimony,” Gillham said. However, in March 2014, the state of Washington issued disciplinary charges against the doctor for his testimony at hearings in Washington, California and Alaska.
Gillham is again getting involved in flame-retardant legislation, but this time guided only by his conscience, and in support of Leno’s new bill (SB736) to require a disclosure tag when fire retardants are used on child products ranging from bassinets to booster seats to play mats.
The manufacturers had plenty of scientists on the payroll, but they were unable to persuasively back up their claims about the safety of the fire retardants, Gillham said.
“When it came time to put up or shut up with their science, then these guys either wouldn’t do it or their science was old and dated,” Gillham said. “We spent millions of dollars on public advocacy, but they wouldn’t spend a few thousand to have their science peer-reviewed.”
Also spent is the industry’s credibility in Sacramento. |
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MalibuGuru
Joined: 11 Nov 1993 Posts: 9300
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Posted: Thu May 21, 2015 10:03 pm Post subject: |
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On Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council passed a minimum wage law by a 14-to-1 vote margin that continually cranks-up wages for the next five years to $15 an hour. Meanwhile, employers are responding by investing in machines over people.
Four in 10 employers surveyed in the eighth annual poll by the Los Angeles County Business Federation say they expect to hire more people this year, up 10 percent over last year. But the numbers of employers that say they intend to make the type of capital investments that eliminate jobs through automation doubled, to 59 percent…
Due to anti-business burdens and costs, the City of Los Angeles won the booby-prize last year as America’s Poorest Big City, according to an analysis by the American Community Survey-based Census Bureau data. L.A.’s poverty rate of 17.6 percent made California the top poverty state overall, with a 16.8 percent rate.
So now restaurants will go to technology made in China, and eliminate half of their jobs. Genius! Other businesses will move to Glendale and Burbank. More genius! |
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KGB-NP
Joined: 25 Jul 2001 Posts: 2856
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Posted: Fri May 22, 2015 11:22 am Post subject: |
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Locally, the mailman was replaced by a box. You know, like a box you walk to to pick up your mail. $65K with benefits, pension, sunshine blown up rear, civil servant replaced by a box. Well it does have a little key latch, so a box with a lock (read- as low tech as it gets) essentially replaced an uber-entitled civil servant. That's like "self employed" porn! |
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isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935
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Posted: Fri May 22, 2015 1:18 pm Post subject: |
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The last time a mailman came to our house was in 1978. For the past 37 years it's been a mailbox out on the street, anywhere from 20 to 100 yards from the house, fed by a person in a car. Only the one 100 yards away had any kind of lock, and only after 10 years without locks until the kids at the school bus stop right there got bored.
I'm guessing the same decline in personal service from businesses will follow on the heels of higher minimum wage laws. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999 Posts: 17751 Location: Berkeley, California
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Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 10:12 am Post subject: |
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Our energy companies, fighting regulations and overpaying executives--and lying about climate change. Is corporate ethics a contradiction in terms?
Quote: | FINANCE:
Arch Coal paid execs $8M in bonuses on eve of bankruptcy
Benjamin Hulac and Dylan Brown, E&E reporters
ClimateWire: Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Arch Coal Inc. paid its top executives more than $8 million in bonuses the business day before the company filed for bankruptcy in January, according to U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri filings published last week.
Securities and Exchange Commission records also show that 12 company insiders exercised or converted about 88,000 "phantom stocks" -- a type of financial derivative used to incentivize employees -- worth more than $70,000 that same Friday, Jan. 8, 2016.
On the following Monday, Jan. 11, Arch announced it had filed for bankruptcy protection.
Arch declined several written and telephone requests for comment about financial transactions made as the company stood on the brink of bankruptcy.
No agency has accused the company of wrongdoing in making the payments or in connection with the phantom stock activity. Several experts, however, said the timing of the payments and the activity by company officials so shortly before Arch filed for bankruptcy raises questions.
The most notable transactions Arch made in the days before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to court and SEC filings, were payments of $8.12 million in bonuses to seven of its corporate officers, including its CEO, chief financial officer and president.
Chairman and CEO John Eaves received $2.78 million the Friday before the bankruptcy announcement. Arch President and Chief Operating Officer Paul Lang received $1.75 million that same day, while Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer John Drexler received $1.17 million. |
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