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4% or 30% – Depends on Who You Ask
How many Iraqi troops deserted during the fight with al-Sadr?
Ask a ‘senior American military official’ and he will tell you some 4%. Ask a ‘senior official in Iraq’s Defense Ministry’ and you will hear 30%.
Quite a difference in perception. Or in spin?
A British military official said that Mr. Maliki had brought 6,600 reinforcements to Basra to join the 30,000 security personnel already stationed there, and a senior American military official said that he understood that 1,000 to 1,500 Iraqi forces had deserted or underperformed. That would represent a little over 4 percent of the total.
More Than 1,000 in Iraq’s Forces Quit Basra Fight, NYT, today
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A senior official in Iraq’s Defense Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss military operations publicly, said Iraqi troops were overwhelmed by the second day of fighting.
"I was afraid the Iraqi forces would break," he said.
The official said he estimated that 30 percent of the Iraqi troops abandoned the fight before a cease-fire was reached. He also said that soldiers had been hindered by ammunition and food shortages and that some Iraqi police troops, who were supposed to be backing the Iraqi army, had actually supported the militias.
Basra Assault Exposed U.S., Iraqi Limits, WaPo, today
Lincoln Asset Management Group, a New York-based hedge fund firm, has launched a leveraged buyout fund focusing on the defense and intelligence sectors. The firm rolled out the Lincoln Orion Fund this month, said Christian Bailey, managing director. Lincoln had been pre-marketing the fund and has obtained commitments of $ 100 million from six institutional investors, whom Bailey declined to name. The investors include two private equity funds of funds, three corporations and one foreign investor, he said. The fund will be capped at $ 300 million.
The fund will buy companies in the defense and national security industries in the U.S., Bailey said. “Timing is extremely good to look at defense companies. There is huge demand from the Department of Defense and the intelligence community,” he noted.
The minimum for investment is $ 1 million with a 1% management fee and 20% performance fee. Lincoln manages $ 100 million in assets in a global macro hedge fund and a macro fund of funds.
people like ‘defining moments’. if anyone choses to define when the pentagon or christian baily became involved in these propaganda programs or why, and chooses to define that time w/a certain defining contract date, that is their prerogative. if they chose to define why based on the official definition given in the contract, that is also their prerogative.
Excuse me … Hello? Hello? Can we please get back to substance that really matters?
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The Strange Case of SEIU
Do unions prefer civil war to immigration reform?
By Carl F. Horowitz
If numbers were all that mattered, Andrew Stern would be America’s most successful labor leader, hands down. For over two decades, he’s led the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — first as president John Sweeney’s chief strategist, and since 1996 as Sweeney’s successor. Under Stern, SEIU’s membership has nearly doubled to around 1.9 million, a feat all the more remarkable given that most unions during that period shrank or held steady. Union members held nearly a third of all non-farm private-sector jobs between 1950 and 1965; now they hold about 12 percent, and a mere 7.5 percent of private-sector jobs.
SEIU’s dramatic increase has persuaded Stern that he’s found a model for organized labor to regain its clout at the bargaining table and in the corridors of power — what he calls a progressive business model, a rough hybrid of Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs. By working with rather than against employers, Stern believes, unions can regain their long-declining share of the U.S. workforce.
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KPFK Radio: Hundreds of UHW members rally in Los Angeles for union democracy
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Hundreds of members of United Healthcare Workers-West gathered at their Los Angeles union headquarters Wednesday and declared with one voice that they will not tolerate attempts by SEIU International officers to centralize power and subvert union democracy.
The rally came on the heels of a similar gathering last Thursday at UHW’s Oakland headquarters; both events saw a massive turnout demonstrating the resolve of members to resist attempts by SEIU President Andy Stern to chill internal dissent, marginalize political opposition and thwart union democracy.
Leilani Albano of Los Angeles radio station KPFK filed this report. (Use the player above to listen.)
http://www.seiuvoice.org/2008/04/hundreds-more-uhw-members-rally-in-los.html
Between 2001 and 2006, UHW added more members – 64,826 – than did any other SEIU local in the nation, more than doubling in size in this period (excluding any growth from mergers). Read more
UHW President’s Resignation
Click here to download Sal Rosselli’s resignation letter from SEIU’s Executive Committee on Feb. 9, 2008. [PDF document]
http://seiuvoice.org/documents/Rosselli_resignation_letter_2-9-08.pdf
Top Links
* UHW Executive Board on Sal Rosselli’s resignation (2/13/2008)
* Facts debunking Andy Stern’s letter of pretext for a hostile takeover of UHW
* “SEIU scapegoating UHW doesn’t work for workers” by Barbara Lewis
* SEIU Voice on YouTube
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Andrew L. “Andy” Stern (born November 22, 1950) is the president of the Service Employees International Union, the largest and fastest-growing union in the United States and Canada. Elected in 1996 to succeed John Sweeney, Stern has become known as something of a firebrand in the labor movement, adopting a strategy of aggressive organizing while sometimes vocally criticizing other union leaders and the AFL-CIO’s organizing structure. One of the co-founders of the New Unity Partnership, Stern publicly suggested his and other unions would split from the AFL-CIO if it failed to make major organizational changes. On July 25, 2005 the SEIU, along with the Teamsters, announced that it was officially disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO. The two unions, and others, would form the Change to Win Federation.
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United Mechanics Vote In Teamsters For Representation
Wed, 02 Apr ’08
Say AMFA Failed To Curtail Outsourcing
Monday’s vote by mechanics at United Airlines to change union representation was nothing short of a referendum against the carrier’s practice of outsourcing maintenance… and the perceived failure of the last mechanics union to stop it.
The Teamsters were voted in by the majority of the 6,500 mechanics at United, ousting the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association. AMFA is expected to step aside following certification of the vote results by the National Mediation Board.
The successful vote was the culmination of a two-year wooing effort by the Teamsters, according to Reuters, during which time the union pledged to fight United’s ongoing efforts to outsource greater percentages of its maintenance operations to foreign-owned shops.
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JOHN SWEENEY & JAMES LEAMAN: Without labor unions, who speaks for the worker?
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
WASHINGTON —
Let’s just put the skunk on the table. America’s economy is in real trouble. We didn’t get into this economic crisis overnight. We need real long-term solutions to our deep-rooted economic problems – not the status quo and a $300 Band–Aid.
More than ever, we’re living our daily lives in an economy that puts corporate profits over real people. You can see it in our lopsided trade policies, the outrageous expense of health care, mounting personal debt, and in our crumbling bridges, roads and schools. Thanks to Bushonomics, this is the America the next president will inherit.
How did we get to this point? Before the 1970s, our economy was growing strong, which meant rising wages for the vast majority of America’s workers.
More money in our pockets meant more spending capacity – and so we spent. That spending encouraged companies to invest more, and a cycle of prosperity was born.
It was good while it lasted, but for the last three decades workers’ productivity has continued to go up, up and away – while wages have stagnated. There are many reasons, including the deregulation of the airline, telecommunications and trucking industries, which drove wages down for those workers. Unfair international trade policies (like NAFTA) also played a significant role, providing incentives to send jobs overseas.
But that’s not the whole story. Another key reason workers aren’t seeing wages that match their productivity is the sustained attack against workers’ freedom to form unions to bargain for better deals.
The Employee Free Choice Act is a piece of national legislation that would level the playing field for America’s workers – mitigating corporate greed and repairing the broken labor-law system that has stripped away the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively.
Joining a union has become far more difficult than it should be. Employers routinely harass, coerce and fire people who try to form unions. Studies show that a quarter of all employers illegally fire workers for supporting a union, and union activists stand a one-in-five chance of getting fired during organizing campaigns.
More than 30,000 workers were discriminated against by their employer while trying to form a union in 2005. And a whopping 75 percent of employers get themselves a team of expensive hired guns to teach them how to prevent their workers from organizing a union.
About 60 million of America’s working men and women say they would join a union today if they could. And it’s no surprise. A union card is every worker’s ticket into the middle class.
Union members earn 30 percent more than workers who don’t have a union – that’s $200 a week, or more than $10,000 per year. Union members are also more likely to have health care and pension benefits.
Without the counterbalance of worker power in the economy, the relationship between wages and productivity unravels. Wages stagnate while living expenses rise. When that happens, workers become over-reliant on borrowing in order to make ends meet or get ahead. That’s why the average American household owes $8,000 of their future income to a credit card company – up from $3,000 in 1990. And that’s why Americans are so vulnerable to predatory lending in the housing industry.
But now, debt-driven consumer spending has reached its limit. Some of us are losing our homes because we can’t afford to pay higher interest rates on our mortgages. The rest of us are tightening our belts because we no longer have equity in our homes against which we can borrow. In our consumption-based economy, when people stop spending, we’re in real trouble.
Demand goes down, the values of our homes go down, and it’s the average American left holding the IOU.
The economy is in real trouble, and we all know it. The question is whether we keep marching to the beat of the same old tired drummer, or whether we decide it’s time to change our tune.
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[DISCLAIMER: I only joined the union once … and have refused to join ever since.]
Posted by: Terrence Micheals | Apr 5 2008 1:43 utc | 17
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