See Ya Later, Eight-Hour Work Day

The Article: They Want to Take Away the 8-Hour Day and 40-Hour Week by Dave Johnson in AlterNet.

The Text: Republicans are trying to pass an “alternative” to overtime pay. This is really about taking away the eight-hour workday and 40-hour workweek. Will weekends be next? What about an “alternative” to paying workers at all?

House Republicans are pushing a bill that takes away extra pay for overtime, substituting “comp” time instead. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 is the law that brought us the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek. This law does not prohibit employers from requiring workers to work over 40 hours. Instead, it gives employers an incentive to instead pay extra or hire more people, and gives employees a premium if they do have to work longer. (Note that this is also the law that brought us a minimum wage and outlawed child labor.)

There is proof that overtime pay works: workers like domestic workers and agricultural workers – jobs not covered by the FLSA – are twice as likely to have to work more than 40 hours in a week. And even with this law, Americans already work more hours than in almost any other industrialized country.

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Obama’s Student Loan Policy Under Scrutiny

The Article: Obama Student Loan Policy Under Scrutiny As Congress Tackles Student Borrowing Costs by in The Huffington Post.

The Text: Congressional Democrats have pounced on a nonpartisan government report showing the Department of Education this year is forecast to earn a record $51 billion profit off student borrowers, denouncing the Obama administration and urging for structural reforms.

Members of the House of Representatives including George Miller (D-Calif.), John Tierney (D-Mass.) and John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) cited news reports in The Huffington Post that highlighted the Tuesday estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, which showed that the Education Department was forecast to report higher earnings this year than Exxon Mobil and nearly as high as those of the four biggest U.S. banks by assets combined.

“We don’t see students or their parents as profit centers, and we don’t think it’s an appropriate concept to be acting like a market-driven bank here,” Tierney said.

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When “Alternative” Becomes Mainstream

The Article: Sunny Uplands by Geoffrey Car in The Economist.

The Text: Rebranding is always a tricky exercise, but for one field of technology 2013 will be the year when its proponents need to bite the bullet and do it. That field is alternative energy. The word “alternative”, with its connotations of hand-wringing greenery and a need for taxpayer subsidy, has to go. And in 2013 it will. “Renewable” power will start to be seen as normal.

Wind farms already provide 2% of the world’s electricity, and their capacity is doubling every three years. If that growth rate is maintained, wind power will overtake nuclear’s contribution to the world’s energy accounts in about a decade. Though it still has its opponents, wind is thus already a grown-up technology. But it is in the field of solar energy, currently only a quarter of a percent of the planet’s electricity supply, but which grew 86% last year, that the biggest shift of attitude will be seen, for sunlight has the potential to disrupt the electricity market completely.

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Obama Attacks Press Freedoms…Again.

The Article: Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian.

The Text: It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined – in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week’s controversy over the DOJ’s pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ’s attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests – something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist – something done every day in Washington – and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for “espionage”.

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Paula Deen, Voting Rights, And The “New” South

The Article: Paula Deen, voting rights and the ‘New South’ by Rob Tornoe in NewsWorks.

The Text: People have changed.

That seems to be the imputes behind a divided Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. The court ruled 5-4 that Section 4 under the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, twisting logic to determine that discrimination isn’t rampant enough in Southern states to warrant continued restrictions.

Considering it took the Attorney General of Texas just two hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling to advance a voter ID law and redistricting map that was blocked last year for its discrimination against black and Latino voters, I’m not sure their ruling was sound. Texas isn’t the only state to quickly move to restrict voting rights – North Carolina and Mississippi also plan to pass strict voter ID laws in the wake of the court’s ruling. ??”Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissention. “When confronting the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination, and the most fundamental right in our democratic system, Congress’ power to act is at its height.”

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