@Mark from Queens

At one time this was illegal and if an employer fired anyone who was on workers compensation from a work place injury, they would be fined $10,000 for doing it. If this guy had opened a workers comp claim, then Walmart should have had to cover it anyway, but people aren't aware of what their rights are. If anyone is injured at your work place, try to go through your medical insurance instead. This has gotten much worse since I was injured 20 years ago. And make sure that you have a designated doctor to treat you on file. If not, your employer can send you to one of those factory injured workers places where you will be told that nothing is wrong with you. Fighting for treatment is very difficult.

Instead of our government going against the constitution and censoring us, they are telling the corporations to do it. Google, Twitter and Facebook are helping them do it, and rolling back net neutrality will finish it.

As to the Jane Sanders FBI investigation, this is how Bernie is going to be neutered if he runs again.

labor reporter for the NY Times (which is a position I think they ironically eliminated).

Just picked it up at the library. It's quite an extensive book of one harrowing story after another of how workers across the board have been getting destroyed by the korporate kleptocracy enshrined by "free market" capitalism. Just read the intro and chapter one and my blood was boiling. Here's an excerpt:

In his job at a Wal-Mart in Texas, Mike Michell was responsible for catching shoplifters, and he was good at it, too, catching 180 in one two-year period. But one afternoon things went wildly awry when he chased a thief—a woman using stolen checks—into the parking lot. She jumped into her car, and her accomplice gunned the accelerator, slamming the car into Michell and sending him to the hospital with a broken kneecap, a badly torn shoulder, and two herniated disks. Michell was so devoted to Wal-Mart that he somehow returned to work the next day, but a few weeks later he told his boss that he needed surgery on his knee. He was fired soon afterward, apparently as part of a strategy to dismiss workers whose injuries run up Wal-Mart’s workers’ comp bills.

•

Immediately after serving in the army, Dawn Eubanks took a seven-dollar-an-hour job at a call center in Florida. Some days she was told to clock in just two or three hours, and some days she was not allowed to clock in during her whole eight-hour shift. The call center’s managers warned the workers that if they went home, even though they weren’t allowed to clock in, they would be viewed as having quit.

•

Twenty-eight-year-old John Arnold works in the same Caterpillar factory in Illinois as his father, but under the plant’s two-tier contract, the maximum he can ever earn is $14.90 an hour, far less than the $25 earned by his father. Caterpillar, long a symbol of America’s industrial might, insists that it needs a lower wage tier to remain competitive. “A few people I work with are living at home with their parents,” Arnold said. “Some are even on food stamps.”

•

At a Koch Foods poultry plant in Tennessee, the managers were so intent on keeping the line running all out that Antonia Lopez Paz and the other workers who carved off chicken tenders were ordered not to go to the bathroom except during their lunch and coffee breaks. When one desperate woman asked permission to go, her supervisor took off his hard hat and said, “You can go to the bathroom in this.” Some women ended up soiling themselves.

•

Don Jensen anticipated a relaxing life of golf after retiring from his human resources post with Lucent Technologies in New Jersey, where he was in charge of recruiting graduates from Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and other top universities. But when Lucent increased its retirees’ health insurance premiums to $8,280 a year, up from $180, Jensen was forced to abandon his retirement. He took a job as a ten-dollar-an-hour bank teller.

•

As part of her software company’s last-lap sprint to get new products out the door, Myra Bronstein sometimes had to work twenty-four hours straight testing for bugs. She felt great loyalty to the Seattle-area company because its executives had repeatedly promised, “As long as we’re in business, you have a job.” But one Friday morning the company suddenly fired Bronstein and seventeen other quality assurance engineers. The engineers were told that if they wanted to receive severance pay, they had to agree to spend the next month training the workers from India who would be replacing them.

One of the least examined but most important trends taking place in the United States today is the broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers—white-collar and blue-collar workers, middle-class and low-end workers—that began nearly three decades ago, gradually gathered momentum, and hit with full force soon after the turn of this century. A profound shift has left a broad swath of the American workforce on a lower plane than in decades past, with health coverage, pension benefits, job security, workloads, stress levels, and often wages growing worse for millions of workers.

That the American worker faces this squeeze in the early years of this century is particularly troubling because the squeeze has occurred while the economy, corporate profits, and worker productivity have all been growing robustly. In recent years, a disconcerting disconnect has emerged, with corporate profits soaring while workers’ wages stagnated.

In 2008 when the book came out he was on Democracy Now.

What would be a great idea, I think, is if the 99% had a repository of shared grievances of how folks have been personally effected by this economic depression caused by corporate and banking greed and malfeasance. Nothing is more effective in getting to a solution than for people reading to see and recognize themselves in these stories, and then being motivated by shared experience to see power in their solidarity and then finding the gumption to stand together to fight against these scumbags.

One of my favorite examples of this was during OWS when as part of the Move Your Money protest, people were given the emails of the CEO's of the Big Banks and told to email their stories directly to them. It resulted in a book called "The Trouble Is The Banks," which for a while was also a website featuring these well-written, often witty stories. Of course it appears that the Economic Terrorists, flush with bailout money, sought to wipe clean any critical challenges by small entities of their dominance - and now this good website can't be found anymore.

Bernie Sanders did a similar thing, in asking his constituents to share their stories of how the economic crash of 2008 has effected them.

Question, why when I do a duckduckgo search of "bernie sanders vermont stories of economic crash," do I get all these negative RW stories about Jane Sanders, FBI probe, etc?

And also, why, in the search that only turned up a HuffCompost story on it, is the link to, what the article says are 700 personal stories collected by Bernie, now a 404 Page Not Found?

Starting to worry about this whole Net Neutrality thing more and more, along with fascist oligarch money used to wipe sites out and records off the internet.
Even more reason to hold onto your books, folks.

@snoopydawg

Obama did nothing to help the people who it affected.

To help the plutocratic thieves who created it. As I remember it, he gave them all immunity deals where needed and a crap-load of money for their service.

In a sane world that would embarrass our government, but we haven't lived in a sane world for many decades. The minimum wage was $3.25 when I started working after high school and it's gone up $4.00 in 40 years? Now companies and Herheinous think that a $15.00 minimum wage is too high?

Republicans know that the tax bill is going to effect so many people who are already living on the edge, but they don't care. They're proving that by telling us that they are going to cut our social safety networks.

I had a graphic that showed how the increasing income inequality got worse from 2008-2015 which showed how it was during the Great Depression. It's now the same as it was then. Clinton teed it up for Bush who did nothing to stop it and then Obama did nothing to help the people who it affected. Now Trump gets his turn on the wheel and the FDR New Deal is being finally being dismantled.

Next up is the cashless society where the banks get to nickel and dime us to death for keeping our money in their banks. Yippee! I'm hoping that I shuffle off this mortal coil before that happens and when the republicans get to gut the social programs I rely on, it shouldn't take long...

@eyo

Ds help write the bill they know will pass, then vote nay to pad their records. I think that is wrong.

It absolutely is wrong. Unfortunately with the media covering this as they do (McResistance style), they’ll probably get away with it. Just like they planned. Heads, they win. Tails, we lose.

North Coast wineries, breweries, distilleries benefit under GOP tax package

Local wineries, breweries and distilleries are big winners in the GOP tax package, which would slash their tax bills following a concerted lobbying effort by the alcohol beverage industry to reduce the federal excise tax on its products.

The package, which is expected to be voted on by Congress this week, would help small boutique wineries and craft brewers as well as large producers like Jackson Family Wines of Santa Rosa and Lagunitas Brewing Co. of Petaluma.

A winery could receive a maximum tax credit of $451,700 annually under the bill, said Robert P. “Bobby” Koch, president and chief executive officer of the Wine Institute, which represents California wineries.

Ds help write the bill they know will pass, then vote nay to pad their records. I think that is wrong.

The provisions were from a bill named the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act, which was co-sponsored by Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, was key to the victory as he placed the provision in the Senate version that was ultimately accepted by House conferees and added to the tax package, which was released Friday night.

Thompson, however, opposes the overall tax package despite his support for the alcohol-related provisions.

Heineken owns Lagunitas, they are a global brand not a small business. Pelosi owns a vineyard, what does she get? Newsom is a PlumpJack partner, etc.. California D-Values are all about exploiting immigrants, couching it as opportunity for all. I don't think so, I think it stinks. PU