... downtown this Saturday, sponsored by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.
And consider saving on parking and extra walking by following our instructions and taking the Red Line.
(As I write this they're saying 50% chance of rain for the afternoon, so take an umbrella.)
The thoughts and observations of the leaders of The Animation Guild (TAG), Local 839 IATSE. Jason MacLeod is the Business Representative, KC Johnson is the President. Mike Sauer is Assistant to the Business Representative.
This weblog reflects their individual personal opinions and does not necessarily represent the official position of the Animation Guild.
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26 comments:
what's the federation of labor?
http://launionaflcio.org/
Boy, Wisconsin must have really scared you guys.
Wisconsin should scare any educated middle class American.
The agenda of the modern-day Republican Party is the most serious threat America has ever faced.
Yes, rally for the 12% of the workforce that is union.
YEEAAAH!
"The agenda of the modern-day Republican Party is the most serious threat America has ever faced."
No, I'd say spending 1600 billion dollars more than we take in every year is the most serious threat American has ever faced.
Other than Nazism or Communism of course.
But then again, hey, my kids and grandkids can pay for my lifestyle. I'll be dead and their banker will be China.
What the hell do I care?
the largest tax increase in decades was the unpaid for war in Iraq. That, along with tax breaks for millionaires to ship jobs overseas. Didn't hear you bitching then. Corporate Communism is alive and well, buddy, thanks to dick and bush and republikkans. Like it or not, we're in this financial mess because of them.
Oh, and dick and bush let terrorists attack America.
You think Minnesota was bullying by the GOP?!?
Minnesota is everyday people standing up to the extortion being perpetrated by government unions. To wit:
Teachers in Oshkosh had 90 sick days per year.
No, really. Thats what collective bargaining allowed them to bend over the tax payers for - NINETY sick days per year. As with most of these concessions government unions have strong armed through the legislatures, it is indefensible.
*and those are sick days that they can cash in when they retire if they don't use them(at a higher rate then when they were granted).
http://tinyurl.com/6gj3dzy
Its time to knock these government unions down a peg or two so that they work as hard as the rest of us.
No .. it isn't about too many sick days or what one union got in benefits you dolt.
Unions get what the can through leverage. If they have enough juice, they bargain for and get benefits and wage increases and 90 sick days a year. Face it, it was proposed and accepted. You want to blame the union for the fact the state accepted 90 sick days?
This is about the stripping of of collective bargaining as a whole in order to never let a union get something like "90 sick days" again. Its fear mongering and an attack on the ability for a work force to attain something through the strength of the collective.
Is 90 Sick Days wrong? Arguably. Should collective bargaining be stripped away because the teachers got it? Fuck no.
And, don't even start to tell me this is only about public sector unions and will never translate to the private, middle class unions. Its a precedent and everyone needs to stand against it.
Even you .. you corporatist teat-sucker.
The PEOPLE of the state did not accept 90 sick days for teachers.
CORRUPT politicians did. You're a dunce.
Money swindled from tax payers by unions is a good kind of rip off(especially when our children's educations suffer)
Money swindled from tax payers by corporations is an outrage.
Wrong, they are both outrages. You're a union stooge who probably has a relative working for the LA Unified school district.
Federal workers do not have collective bargaining. And there is no problem with them, so stop trying to sell the idea that the sky is falling if we, as tax payers, stand up and say we can't pay for this crap. No one is buying it. And the money is not there.
90 SICK DAYS PER YEAR for teachers who make 35% more than the average worker and get free health care and pensions. LOL! How pissed are you that you have no argument to counter that?
This is the end of their free ride.
Write ten more posts, its funny because people are going to vote against these government unions in every election for the next ten years. You LOSE.
Good day sir.
"Its fear mongering and an attack on the ability for a work force to attain something through the strength of the collective."
Voters who pay taxes have the ability to attain something through the strength of the collective too.
Its called voting, and I'm sure that if you had your way, you'd want it eliminated.
"How pissed are you that you have no argument to counter that?"
How pissed are you that you have no answer for trillions of dollars wasted on two unpaid-for wars or the top six wealthiest corporations not only paying ZERO in American corporate taxes, but getting tax subsidies as well?
No, the real problem is a handful of greedy teachers. By the way, those phony statistics (35%? "average?" Average what? Secretaries, sanitation workers?) have been thoroughly debunked. It's just crap Fox News makes up, and there are internal memos to prove it.
And I am SO tired of hearing about these hypothetical "future generations," who are, somehow, MORE important than the millions who are unemployed, bankrupt and/or homeless in THIS generation.
Yadda, yadda, talking points. Yadda, yadda, talking points.
It's amazing, when Republicans want to spend, "deficits don't matter" (Chaney). When Democrats want to spend, suddenly spending ITSELF is the problem. Pure hypocrisy.
There are a lot voters right now suffering buyer's remorse after you guys spent millions of dollars of Koch brothers soft money selling them the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't wait for the next election. That's when YOU lose.
"Unions get what they can through leverage..."
And banks get what they can through leverage. So all's fair in love and war, correct? The public servant collective bargaining argument is simply 'they got theirs, don't take my mine.'
I'd buy that argument if there was anything left to take. There is not, it is gone. You're a bit late. I certainly don't have the money. When did Paulson drive his line of limos onto Capitol Hill? 2008? You are no different than banks - playing with money that does not exist. You are just another part of the sideshow that will amount to nothing, as usual.
Now if public service unions picketed defense spending and brought a state to a standstill over their defense contracts, that would be an entirely different story. Teacher pension vs. bomb makers. That's an argument. If you want to pay the bill for the endless war, go see the morons who make them. Just leave me the f**k out of it.
"It's amazing, when Republicans want to spend, "deficits don't matter" (Chaney). When Democrats want to spend, suddenly spending ITSELF is the problem. Pure hypocrisy."
Could you at least learn to spell? I know you're ignorant of facts, but perhaps your ranting would come off as being more valid if you actually googled the name of the person you're trying to demonize.
Sigh.
@ Sam's Adam. Excuuuuuse me: Cheney. Of course, that proves that I'm an idiot and you're right. How about addressing the points, smart-ass? Exactly which "facts" am I "ignorant" of?
Typical, whenever you bring up corporate tax loopholes and the two unbudgeted trillion dollar wars the righty ditto heads change the subject. Answer those points SPECIFICALLY instead of hiding behind an ad hominem insult counter attack. I can't wait.
Oh, and by the way, Mr. Sensitive, I wasn't "demonizing" Mr. ChEney, I was merely quoting him. If his own words demonize him, it ain't my fault.
I find it funny that you are blaming the GOP boogeyman for tax loopholes when GE just revealed that they paid exaclty ZERO taxes this year after making hundreds of billions of dollars.
And CEO Jeffrey Immelt's relationship with Obama is perhaps the coziest between the head of a company and a president in the last 25 years. Obama made him his jobs czar for crying out loud. I paid more taxes than GE.
But don't let that stop your little partisan rant...
You are still avoiding the points. I have yet to hear anything resembling Republican outrage over the free tax ride of major corporations, or any specific, direct plan to create jobs. I hear a lot about "freedom" "over-regulation" "the market,""predictability," and "creating a positive atmosphere to encourage investment." Things like that; indirect solutions based on idealized theories.
Partisanship is beside the point. The question is, which is doing more damage, unconditional big corporate tax vacations that have no positive net effect on the economy, or collective bargaining by public unions?
I'm not sure what the argument here is. Are you suggesting that California should not provide tax incentives for corporations to keep high paying jobs here instead of going to other states and countries for cheap labor?
Corporations and labor have failed everyone in their inability to cooperate for the common good. Neither have been able to keep jobs from sliding away from home. No one is really asking the hard questions about why this has happened. It's just too easy to get caught up in the same tired cyclical argument of the last century. Last time I checked, it was 2011.
The Wall Street financial empire has been destroying wealth and jobs since 1980. They are what 'pulled us out' from the brink, out from the post-Vietnam downward slide and killer inflation of the 70's. They sold the farm to do it, but it happened. The Reagan small tax revolution is myth - the revolution was credit, and we all knew it. We knew it happened. Now, we live in an entirely consumer-based service economy. If we don't spend money, and spend it like mad, we don't have jobs - simple as that. IN fact, every single animation job in Hollywood completely depends upon that reality. Madison Avenue is a giant Wall Street machine that demands that you whip out your credit card to buy Simpson's beach towels. If you don't buy that towel, you lose your job. It has nothing to do with corporate dominance and corporate tax breaks, blah, blah, blah. The problem is us and we won't get it fixed unless we let the entire house of cards crash and start over again.
Capitol Hill had the chance in '08 and could have told Paulson to go shove it the second time. They sent him packing once, and the house began collapsing before everyone's eyes. Our government could not stomach the consequences. It was, in fact, many times worse than 9-11 in that on the surface, it did not seem like anything tectonic happened - well, it did. And in the end, we again gave our entire future back to the same consumer economy that destroyed all of our real jobs in the first place. Now it is too late, and this latest labor/corporate posturing is the tiniest of footnotes in the chapter that has already been written.
Ironically, had Paulson's house of cards been allowed to fall, none of us would even have jobs in animation anyway, since we would all be back to the fields and the manufacturing assembly lines again trying to relearn what the real American economy looks like without disposable income. There is certainly no cable television and internet in that economy. No flat screen televisions. Maybe a movie once a month. Certainly no Simpson's towels. So cut the crap already.
I see, your a Libertarian. We agree on some of the diagnosis, but almost none of the prescription.
First of all, for the second or third time, corporate tax BREAKS are being conflated with tax INCENTIVES, two COMPLETELY different animals. Preemptive breaks, like Wall Street manipulation and speculation, I agree, remove wealth from the economy and only benefit CEOs and speculators. Incentives, on the other hand, are tied to investment in production, or anything they are applied to and depend, for their success, on a tax structure with high rates and ZERO loopholes.
"Corporations and labor have failed everyone in their inability to cooperate for the common good."
Conflating the motives of corporations and labor is so insanely wrong headed, I can't even begin to comment. Any perceived equivalency between the two is illusory and serves no purpose other than to help you make an ideological point.
You also conflate animation with consumer products. You talk about "manufacturing assembly lines;" isn't animation a form of product, made on a kind of assembly line? Aren't people who go to movie theaters, or watch TV, consumers, spending their "disposable income" on entertainment? Isn't entertainment a product? Aren't consumer products made in manufacturing assembly lines? Your vision of a future in which people only spend money on necessities is already coming true. Your truer, supposedly more authentic future sounds like a living hell.
The system needs to be cleaned up, for sure. It needs to be made transparent and honest, not eliminated altogether. Your the one who needs to "cut the crap."
Incentives/breaks. Taxes/fees. Call it what you will, it's still top down economic 'stimulus' to replace stagnated and unproductive local economic health and activity.
"You also conflate animation with consumer products. You talk about "manufacturing assembly lines;" isn't animation a form of product, made on a kind of assembly line?"
No, it is a derivative of a product. (And we love derivatives in America...) Mass entertainment in the American consumer economy first functions to sell other things - cars, televisions, computers, beer, fast food, toys, and leisure vacations. Movies as the entrance point for the consumer often only promote popcorn, soda, and local restaurant activity, but down market ancillary activity is predominately fueled by the same hard products. Certainly animation production mirrors a traditional manufacturing product, but it is not, in and of itself, a core economic driver. Entertainment is a very, very small portion of the overall consumer economy.
People absolutely must have disposable income, which means cheap mass produced food, cheap mass produced fuel (all of which requires massive oil, water, and the war that goes with it) and most importantly, cheap, cheap, dirt cheap credit.
You will notice that corporate profits are at a record while unemployment is still well over 10%, if not even 20%. We are not spending enough money b/c we lost our jobs. Our jobs disappeared b/c we are not spending enough money.
However, an American company like GE or Caterpillar does not care if you can or cannot buy a new car this year or the next or the next after that. Only your neighbor does. Locally we are all screwed. You cease to have income if you cannot buy the corporate crap that awaits you when you get in your car. That is if you can afford to fill it up to go buy the crap in the first place.
"Your vision of a future in which people only spend money on necessities is already coming true. Your truer, supposedly more authentic future sounds like a living hell."
It is, which is why we bailed out the banks. Ta da! We can keep our consumer economy just a little longer. Labor didn't say boo. Well, to be fair, GM worked out a small deal - to keep selling cars to China and a few nostalgic rednecks. But all in all, labor shut their mouths b/c their pensions were held hostage with everyone else.
So no, this is not something collective bargaining with state governments can fix.
Assessing blame before calculating casualty is the footprint of a small mind.
You are barking about the eeeevil corporations when the fact remains that 70% of the businesses in this nation are small businesses. You pay money to large corporations when you consume media, buy a car, buy gas, or buy medicine. In very other instance you are spending money on a combination of small, medium and large businesses - or small businesses entirely. All of these small businesses - the majority of businesses in America pay their taxes. In fact, they are getting crushed by taxes and the current administration was so misguided in their effort to get the economy back on track that they assembled a team of businesses that excluded all small ones.
70% of the businesses in the nation had no representation when this administration wanted to have a roundtable about steps to help the economy.
Is it any wonder we've still got massive unemployment and stagnant growth?
Well, yes, agreed. Small business shouldn't suffer paying higher taxes for public benefits they do not receive. However, the 70% number is part of the American 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' mythology. Small business is no jobs and productivity machine. It certainly isn't behind the projection of American imperial might. Your local Chevron owner is in some small way. But by himself, he's no 'magical' beast of individual American freedom and democracy. Part of the bigger equation of the American consumer, yes.
Seriously doubt he's going union anytime soon, either.
Here comes the tired old spin, again. No one said anything about "eeeevil." I'm not the knee-jerk ideologue here. All I said was that they should pay their fair share of taxes, actually pay them, commensurate with their actual income and profits. The fact that we pay money to these companies by buying their products only reinforces the point; they don't need the additional tax breaks, (or, yes, subsidies!). Is sending American jobs overseas "evil?" Would anyone argue that it hasn't had a detrimental effect on the general economy?
By the way, no one in this administration raised taxes on small businesses; more lies, more spin. If you disagree, give me numbers.
To the previous poster: Entertainment, in and of itself, is absolutely a product, no matter what it's used for afterwards. It's absurd to deny it. You are just bending over backwards logically, just to make a point. It happens to be Americas most reliable export.
"By the way, no one in this administration raised taxes on small businesses; more lies, more spin. "
Here is a CEO that has been very supportive of this administration, Starbuck's Howard Schultz, explaining how the health care law that was passed will end up hurting small businesses.
Q: Starbucks was vocal about [wanting] health-care reform. How do you feel about how it worked out?
A: We have been a leader for almost 20 years now in demonstrating our heartfelt commitment to making sure that we provide health coverage for the majority of our people.
That cost last year was $250 million. We have faced double-digit increases for almost five consecutive years with no end in sight.
So, when I was invited to the White House prior to health care being reformed, I was very supportive of the president's plan, primarily because I felt it was literally a fracturing of humanity for almost 50 million Americans not to have health insurance.
There's no plan that would be a perfect plan, but the intent of the bill and the heartfelt commitment to insure the uninsured is the right approach. I think as the bill is currently written and if it was going to land in 2014 under the current guidelines, the pressure on small businesses, because of the mandate, is too great.
There is no "spin" there. It is a man with a brilliant mind for business, who represents a company that goes out of their way to provide health insurance for their workers, who lobbied for this administration, telling it like it is.
Truth hurts.
" Entertainment, in and of itself, is absolutely a product, no matter what it's used for afterwards."
Well, it's a product in the same sense that Jim Cameron's Navi are real actors, I suppose. Entertainment contributes about as much value to the overall American economy as those creepy ghosts did in Avatar. Look, all I'm trying to point out is that the traditional legal union avenues of promoting jobs and wages in the US has been gutted by the financial engineering that is your world economy, of which we are all a fully committed partner of - no - willing participants of. We lead the pack! Gee willikers! You know whut! Come to think of it, didn't we invent it? Both the number of jobs and the amount those jobs pay is entirely dependent upon how much you owe [insert name of any central bank here] - ie, how much leverage you do not have. Tell me, how do you collective bargain with a computer sitting in the basement of the [insert name of your local central bank here]? How exactly does that work? What is it now, $45,843.41 is what each US citizen owes the second they are born? By the time I finish typing it will be $50,000. Yes, why aren't the 'evil' banks lending? It's their fault, right? If they would just 'lend' the continent (which you own, by the way) more money I could get this whole upward mobility thing moving again and both my business and my home will be above water and on the way to the moon. Well, I for one am not wishing they open up that big ol' freedom-and-democracy credit spigot once again to find out what's on the other side. I've been to the circus already. This losing 9-5 treadmill is not going to be fixed by picketing state governments more broke than ourselves. Perhaps throwing a few bricks through windows at WTO conferences. At least you would be hitting the right target. The super-highway of international commerce is where the big bucks come from that make the world go round and round. It's how the top 1% make and maintain their generational legacies, American and otherwise.
Ok, now it's $50,000.
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