UAW/Chrysler deal slowly not failing…

Chrysler workers at three of four key United Auto Workers union locals voting Wednesday approved a new contract with the company, the presidents of the locals said.

…

Votes were still being tallied Wednesday night at Local 1700 in Sterling Heights. That local represents 2,500 workers who make the Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Avenger midsize cars.

The votes were good news for UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, who has faced serious challenges from some members opposed to the deal. The tentative agreement must be ratified by a majority of members to go into effect.

The four union locals voting Wednesday represent more than 8,600 workers – or roughly 19 percent of the 45,000 workers who would be covered by the historic four-year agreement.

It is interesting to see that which, usually, has indicated success, across the board. This time, however, mere percentages aren’t helping. Somebody get Dan Rather.

Eight local unions representing more than 16,000 workers have now turned down the landmark pact, while nine locals representing about 15,200 workers have approved it. It’s nearly impossible to keep a running total because most local union officials give out only percentages and not the number of people who voted. Also, officials of some smaller locals could not be reached or would not give out results.

Gary Chaison, a labor specialist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said the discontent with the contract is a sign of a union in disarray.

“Each local is looking out for themselves now,” Chaison said. “The larger locals, the big assembly locals, see the most to lose in terms of job cuts. They feel they can oppose the national officers.”

Interestingly, little to no importance (either in reporting or negotiation) has been given to the (new) Cerberus ownership of Chrysler. I’m not suggesting this is related – it could have just been that such ownership made up the impetus needed to really push back against the UAW and extract some real concessions (and I’m not even convinced that manufacturing cars people only want thanks to tax cuts is in America’s real interests, anyway).

One has to hand it to them, though: a fractured union, two-tiered workforce, self-interested locals displaying little cohesion or solidarity. If Cerberus’d made a list of cool things to do when they bought Chrysler, these would have rated well above whiskers on kittens.

The economy is an inflationary powderkeg waiting to explode

So says SMH political editor Peter Hartcher:

All they need do is pay the tax cuts into our superannuation accounts. That way the money is not spent in an inflationary way in the next couple of years, but stored up and invested for the future.

It’s a good way to help prepare for the ageing of the population, and it boosts national savings. But no, like trained monkeys that know only one trick, all they can do is keep doing what they’ve done before.

After Howard announced his plan to offer an extra $34 billion in tax cuts over the next three years, three things happened.

First, the futures market re-evaluated from 70 per cent to 85 per cent the likelihood that the Reserve Bank would have to raise interest rates over the year ahead to contain inflation.

Second, the headmaster of the global economic system, the International Monetary Fund, warned Australia to restrain spending to contain inflation.

And third, Rudd ignored both of these and went ahead and aped Howard’s inflationary tax cuts. Yes, Labor did return to the surplus $200 million more than the Government plans to do over three years. This allows Labor to claim it’s being more responsible. But this is 0.02 of 1 percentage point of the federal budget. It’s a fig leaf of responsibility, not a laurel.

It is, as he says, a fairly simple metric. If no part of federal government helps out the Reserve Bank in containing purchasing power/inflation, the Reserve has to apply all the brakes it has. It appears, moreover, that said braking is coming soon:

Home owners – and John Howard – are bracing for the sixth successive interest rate rise since the last federal election after underlying inflation slammed to the top of the Reserve Bank’s target band of 2 to 3 per cent.

A predicted decision on Melbourne Cup day for a 0.25 percentage point increase, only weeks before the election, would boost the average home loan rate above 8.5 per cent for the first time since November 1996.

Payments on a $400,000 loan would rise by $67 a month, bringing to $395 the cumulative impact of six rate rises since the last election when Mr Howard campaigned to keep rates low.

What a shame he can’t get some Federal Reserve governors to play along with artefactually inflationless inflation statistics. We can look forward to seeing more calculations coming out, concerning specific increases in costs of living, since Howard won his last election on the promise that interest rates would hold steady, under him.

White House edited statement to Congress on climate change

From the International Herald Tribune, via World News (.com):

The White House significantly edited testimony prepared for a U.S. Senate hearing on the impact of climate change on health, deleting key portions citing diseases that could flourish in a warmer climate, documents obtained by The Associated Press showed Wednesday.

… a draft of the testimony submitted for White House review shows that six pages of details about specific disease and other health problems that might flourish if the Earth warms were not delivered at the hearing.

Two people familiar with the documents told the AP on Tuesday, after the Senate hearing, that the White House Office of Management and Budget edited the CDC director’s congressional testimony, removing specific scientific references to potential health risks.

Those bloody Management and Budget people. And here I thought the only damage they did was screw around with budget deficit estimates.

The deleted sections of the draft, covering more than half of the original text, included a list of specific impacts on which “climate change is likely to have a significant impact on health.”

The list included the effect of more frequent hot spells on vulnerable populations, the impact of extreme weather, more air pollution in drought areas, and greater likelihood of vector-borne and waterborne diseases as well as mental health problems.

While these impacts would be expected to be less significant in the United States than in the developing world, one deleted section says, “nevertheless many Americans will likely experience difficult challenges.”

“Climate change-driven ecological changes such as variations in rainfall and temperature could significantly alter the range, seasonality and human incident of many zoonotic and vector-borne diseases,” the draft says in another section deleted.

Crap

If you’re going to write reviews for journals in Scientific Workplace, just bear in mind that it doesn’t save automatically. So keep an eye on your laptop’s battery.

Dammit.