Monthly Archive for September, 2008

Are you registered to vote?

Are you sure?

There’s a great web site where you can put in your information and it will tell you whether everything is good to go with your ability to vote.  Unfortunately, many people have issues on election day voting, often in discriminatory ways.

Protect yourself by checking your registration at VoteForChange.com.  The site is paid for by Barack Obama, but it works whether you are registered democrat, republican or whatever.

SmartVoter.org is another great site that can tell you where your polling place is and also show you all the ballot measures that you’ll be voting on so you can prepare yourself.

I just saw Michelle Obama’s post on BlogHer about Lilly Ledbetter, and was inspired to dig up some more details on the situation.

Backstory:

Lilly Ledbetter, who worked at goodyear for 20 years as a factory supervisor, and who earned as much as 40% less than her male co-workers for that entire period, sued her employer for discriminatory pay and won. However the supreme court overturned the decision, claiming that she had only 180 days to complain. Since the decision to set her salary at a lower rate than her male colleagues happened 20 years ago, the statue of limitations had passed and she was not entitled to sue.

According to the highest court in the land, the law says that it’s discrimination for your employer to set your pay at a rate lower than your male colleagues, but that actually paying you that smaller amount every month is NOT discrimination. Which means if you find out you’re being paid less than your male co-workers 181 days after your pay rate is set, you are screwed.

Thankfully, congress acted and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 which changes the law so that every paycheck would be considered a discriminatory act, and it was passed in the House on July 31, 2007.

But here’s the rub:

It moved on to the Senate, where it needed a 60/40 vote to go ahead in the Senate, but it was blocked by Senate republicans in a 56 – 42 vote on April 23 of this year. And Bush said he would’ve vetoed it anyway. The republicans claim that the poor companies would be swamped by litigation from all the women who are being shafted and they’d have to pay all that back pay, and it’d be bad for the economy.

Um, no, it’d be bad for the bullshit sexist patriarchal segment of the economy. And what’s wrong with that? While honest businesses have been paying their women employees properly, these shady companies have been exploiting women to get ahead in the market. Why shouldn’t they have to answer for that?

Anyway, the republicans introduced a bill this summer to try and solve the same problem, called the Title VII Fairness Act.

Let’s look at the differences between the bills:

The bill favored by republicans changes the law so that women have 180 days to file, starting “on the date when the person aggrieved has, or should be expected to have, enough information to support a reasonable suspicion of such discrimination.”

The bill favored by democrats says that discrimination happens not just when the pay rate is set, but “when an individual becomes subject to a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, or when an individual is affected by application of a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, including each time wages, benefits, or other compensation is paid, resulting in whole or in part from such a decision or other practice.”

The problem with the republican version is that it places the burden of proof on the employee. The employee has to prove that they could not have known about the discrimination, which opens up the door for employers to say, basically, “she worked her for 20 years, how could she not have known what other people were getting paid?”

The truth is, every time an employer pays a woman less than a man doing the same work, that’s discrimination. The democrat’s bill is a better bill because it reflects the reality of pay discrimination.

Seven awesome (or vote-grubbing?) republicans voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:

Coleman (R-MN), Yea
Collins (R-ME), Yea
Lieberman (ID-CT), Yea
Smith (R-OR), Yea
Snowe (R-ME), Yea
Specter (R-PA), Yea
Sununu (R-NH), Yea

If they are your senators, you may want to support them for that. The rest of the republican senators voted against, including John McCain. If one or both of your senators is a republican, know that they don’t think that unfair paycheck you may be getting every month is a crime.

One democrat voted against the act:

Reid (D-NV), Nay

If you live in Nevada, you may want to ask Harry Reid why he didn’t support the bill.

And if you are voting in the presidential election in November, know that when the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is passed in the congress (which it probably will be, given that there will be at least 56 democrats in the Senate next year), McCain will veto it.

Obama won’t.

And that’s a real policy difference.

So far this year the US Government has given $30 billion to the investment bank Bear Stearns Cos., $200 billion to finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and $85 billion to American International Group Inc. It is currently considering rushing out $700 billion in bailouts for…. well I don’t even know who.

I haven’t looked at the details of these bailouts, and this might be grossly misguided, but I have a bad feeling about them. These institutions, and the ones currently being considered for further bailouts, are being called “too big to fail”.

“Too big to fail.”

I keep turning that over in my head, and wondering why we want to have our economy built on companies which are “too big to fail.”

We used to put our money in neighborhood banks, buy from neighborhood stores, work for neighborhood companies. These have been constantly bought up and consolidated over the years and now we are dependent on entities which are “too big to fail.”

Isn’t that the point of the market, that one institution can fail while another survives and we get along? Suppose we can keep these massive institutions afloat for another few years… what’s to prevent the next crisis?

We’ll surely create legislation that will create huge government oversight bodies that will create huge beurocrasies and “prevent” the same kind of crisis from happening again.

But isn’t it the nature of crisis that it’s always something you didn’t expect? I don’t think our current problem is that we didn’t see this one coming. Our current problem is that when we’re blindsided, our institutions are “too big to fail.”

The fact is, these institutions are not sustainable. They are ready to fail, and we made the mistake of putting all our eggs in one big basket.

I will point out that our food crops are also “too big to fail”. One bad tomato blight and the country has to go without pizza for a few years. But you know what? I look forward to that day. At some point we need to start recognizing as a country that there is value to diversity and that mono-culture always ends in failure.