By ROBERT PEAR
Published: January 9, 2009

WASHINGTON — The House voted on Friday to give women powerful new tools to challenge sex discrimination by employers who pay women less than men for the same or substantially similar work.

The action shows how Congress, working with President-elect Barack Obama, intends to make a swift, sharp break with civil rights policies of the Bush administration.

“In the first week of the new Congress, this is the legislation we are putting forward: pay equity, fairness to women in the workplace,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. “These are our priorities. This Congress has heard the message of change in the election.”

The House passed two related bills on Friday. One, approved 247 to 171, would give workers more time to file lawsuits claiming job discrimination.

The bill would overturn a 2007 decision by the Supreme Court that enforced a strict 180-day deadline, thwarting a lawsuit by Lilly M. Ledbetter, a longtime supervisor at the Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Ala. Three Republicans voted for the bill.

The other bill — passed 256 to 163, with support from 10 Republicans — would make it easier for women to prove violations of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which generally requires equal pay for equal work.

President Bush threatened to veto both bills, saying they would “invite a surge of litigation” and “impose a tremendous burden on employers.” Congress will not give him the opportunity.

Mr. Obama is eager to sign the bills, and it appears he will be able to do so. Supporters of the legislation said they believed they could come up with the 60 votes needed to ensure passage in the Senate, after two vacant seats are filled.

The United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers opposed the bills. Jeri G. Kubicki, a vice president of the manufacturers group, said the bills would “open the floodgates to unwarranted litigation against employers at a time when businesses are struggling to retain and create jobs.”

In the Ledbetter case, a jury found that Goodyear had paid her less than men, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, threw out her complaint. It said she should have filed her claim within 180 days of “the alleged unlawful employment practice,” the initial decision to pay her less than men performing similar work.

“The Ledbetter decision is unacceptable and must not stand,” said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor. Under the decision, Mr. Miller said, employers can get away with years of pay discrimination “if they hide it for the first 180 days.”

The bill would relax the statute of limitations, making clear that each new paycheck violates the law if it results “in whole or in part” from a discriminatory pay decision made in the past.

Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the senior Republican on the committee, said: “This bill would allow an employee to bring a claim against an employer decades after the alleged initial act of discrimination occurred. Trial lawyers, you can be sure, are salivating at this very prospect.”

Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said that while women had made gains since passage of the Equal Pay Act, pay disparities persisted.

“The Paycheck Fairness Act closes numerous loopholes that have enabled employers to evade liability,” said Ms. DeLauro, the chief sponsor of that bill. “It stiffens penalties for employers who discriminate based on gender. And it protects employees from retaliation for sharing salary information.”

Under the 1963 law, an employer can justify paying women less than men if it shows that the disparity is based on any factor other than sex. Employers have successfully used this defense in many cases, arguing that unequal pay was justified by the education, training or experience of male employees.

Some courts have also held that a company can legally pay men more than women because of “market forces” or the higher salaries that men received in previous jobs. Democrats said those factors — market forces and prior salaries — were themselves sometimes tainted by discrimination.

The bill would make it harder for employers to use such defenses. Employers would have to show that the pay disparity was based on “a bona fide factor” other than sex, and that the factor was “consistent with business necessity.”

The bill would also allow women to obtain compensatory and punitive damages from employers who violated the equal pay law.

The White House said the bill would allow “unlimited compensatory and punitive damages, even when a disparity in pay was unintentional.” Under the new standard, it continued, “judges and juries would supplant the free market system” in determining wages.

Supervisor Grace Bennett Sworn In

Yesterday’s swearing-in ceremony at the Yreka Community Theater brought out a crowd of county constituents to mark the new look of the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors.
Jim Cook, who remained the District 1 Supervisor after last November’s election, joined Ed Valenzuela, new District 2 Supervisor and Grace Bennett, new District 4 Supervisor as they were sworn in by Siskiyou County Clerk Colleen Setzer.
Yreka City Council member Rory McNeil began the ceremony, followed by an invocation by Michael Canny and a welcome speech from District 5 Supervisor Marcia Armstrong.
Bennett said, “I really appreciate all the people who voted for me. We must remain positive and focused.”

www.siskiyoudaily.com

Many folks across the country, particularly those who have worked on the inside of the struggle to stop the use of electronic voting systems, held our collective breath as we watched election results on the evening of November 7th.  I count myself among those who were sceptical that the Democrats could pull out a win.  Greg Palast predicted that a 4.5 million-vote thumb had been placed upon the vote-tally scale.

Between the robo calls (here and here), rampant voting machine failures and other dirty tricks, I was inclined to take Karl Rove at his word that the Republicans would walk away being declared the winners yet again. So did he… 

As a programmer, and recognizing that one number is as easy to program as the next, I found it compelling to believe that if the 2006 election were to be stolen, it would not matter how many votes the Dems managed to encourage out to the polls.  But folks like Thom Hartmann simply insisted that if 4.5 million votes were going to be erased, we would simply have to come with 5 million votes.

Imagine the collective sigh of relief as the returns failed to disappoint the sceptics.  

Did Democrats turn out such massive numbers that to steal sufficient votes would have been too obviouis?  Jonathan Simon thinks so.

Jonathan Simon, who did a lot of the analysis of exit polls and statistics in 2004, was hard at work capturing the National Election Poll (NEP) data that night.  Surprisingly, just like in 2004, he discovered that unadjusted NEP data was publicly revealed for a period of time before being “adjusted” later that night.

Simon and the Election Defense Alliance have published a report that has led to this article, claiming that they have demonstrated that an attempt was made to steal the November 2006 election.  And TruthIsAll, a poster at Democratic Underground who likes to study such numbers, has performed this analysis.

Was the election closer than it might have been without some illicit help?  Dunno…  I really don’t.  But I know that until we return to a point where we have verifiable elections that elicit trust and confidence in the process, and use equipment that can withstand scrutiny and recounts, such questions will linger with every future election.

Demand meaningful election reform!

Click here to find out!

An interesting read, courtesy of The Conservative Voice:

It is now three days after the Nov. 7 election. I have read one Republican analysis of the party’s failure after another, most of which seem at a loss as to where the blame might squarely be laid. Like President Bush, no one could see how the Republicans had done anything wrong, or how they might have done anything significantly different.

Well, I am just one of the small, average shmoes out in middle America who, like most of the small average shmoes with whom I associate, has no trouble at all giving a prompt, accurate and much-needed diagnosis of why we voted Blue. I am registered as a Democrat currently, not because I have any great love, or even infatuation, for the leaders of that party, or even because I have great admiration for the Democratic agenda. I voted Democrat because of all the things I noticed about the Republican party.  Story here…

From GreenIsTheNewRed.com, the lame duck Congress is moving quickly to regain its pace at passing unconstitutional legislation.  Read this one carefully as it describes how the language of this bill has been used to prosecute non-violent activists, charging them with terrorism, for the simple act of running a web site.

They did it. Corporations, industry groups and the politicians that represent them rushed through legislation labeling activists as “terrorists” on the first day back from Congressional recess. Just moments ago the House passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act as part of the suspension calendar: in other words it was put on a list of non-controversial bills to pass with one swoop by voice vote.  More here. 

Looking around a bit, I found this article about the AETA bill, and here is discussion over at Democratic Underground.  Here is the House bill that passed.  And here is the ACLU’s take on it.

Combined with the Military Commissions Act that recently passed, we have now potentially lost (at the whim of the President) Habeas Corpus as well as free speech. 

I thought the President swore an oath the DEFEND the Constitution!

As we know, California’s 11th Congressional District has a new US Representative (Just why do you so hate the environment Mr. Pombo?)  His replacement is Jerry McNerney.

But we get more than a replacement for the environment-hating, slash and burn Pombo - we get an expert in alternate energy!  McNerney is a wind energy guy.  Read this article.

It simply gets better and better.

David Sirota served as a top strategist and researcher for Ned Lamont’s U.S. Senate campaign.  His insightful thoughts on the Lamont/Lieberman race, and how the entrenched DC power base worked to disregard the democratic process, is a worthwhile read when planning future campaigns.

As mentioned in this 1998 story, it was the exagerated analysis of intelligence provided by Robert Gates that led us to arm Afghanistan fighters (thus creating Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda) so that they coud combat the Soviet Union.

The CIA, ever mindful of the need to justify its “mission,” had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director Robert Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities in its annual “Soviet Military Power” report right up to 1990.

Given that context, a decision was made to provide America’s potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.

Late in the 80’s, the guy who lied about the strength of the Soviet Union and helped create Al Queda was deeply involved in the Iran Contra scandal:

Gates was investigated during the late 1980s and 1990s by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh over whether Gates had told the truth about the Iran-contra affair, which occurred during his tenure as deputy to Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey. Questions about Gates’s knowledge of secret arms sales to Iran—and the diversion of proceeds to support the Nicaraguan contras—caused Gates to withdraw his nomination to succeed Casey as CIA director in 1987. 

Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  According to him:

Gates is the one most responsible for institutionalizing the politicization of intelligence analysis by setting the example and promoting malleable managers more interested in career advancement than the ethos of speaking truth to power.

So now the Bush Administration has decided that the best replacement for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is a man who is a known liar, and whose legacy is the politicization of intelligence.  As if the US has not suffered enough but such politicization of intelligence which led us into the Iraq war - now we have the guy who refined the process.

That decision is going to come home to roost.

Interestingly, the ties to the Bin Laden family run deep.  On September 11, 2001, George HW Bush and the Carlyle Group were meeting in Washington.  What was “41″ doing that fateful morning? 

On 11 September, while Al-Qaeda’s planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Carlyle Group hosted a conference at a Washington hotel. Among the guests of honour was a valued investor: Shafig bin Laden, brother to Osama.