“The Republicans senators emerged from their meeting an hour later having decided they would not agree to a deal. Several blamed the autoworkers union.

“It sounds like the U.A.W. blew it up,” said Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana”

and another tidbit:

“The automakers would also have been required to cut wages and benefits to match the average hourly wage and benefits of Nissan, Toyota and Honda employees in the United States.”

Wow, interesting how the union is getting blamed for the fall out, sounds like another capitalist spin on things. Can you really blame the workers union for not agreeing with the notion of their workers taking on the cuts to support the bailout? How about if for the next two years each white collar worker in the industry takes a big old cut of 30% of their salary and the unionized workers keep their salaries at the same rates for the period, we’d at least see wages coming closer together.

I find this outrageous, just the fact alone the CEO’s first flew in on private jets and then drove to Washington in their hybrids is stupid enough! Jesus, we can’t get our shit together here. We need a workers revolution. Here you can see, it can work, we can come together! 

One more thing, Bank of America received $25 billion in bailout money and just announced today they are cutting 35,000 jobs over 3 years “as it digests its acquisition of Merrill Lynch.” Yeah digests the aquisition deal they did with money from our government. Brilliant, get the funds, get even bigger and then dump 35,000 people. What exactly are these companies  getting our money for? Each of us needs to start asking. Take time to read the news, business section too!

Image caption:

“During the Great Depression, unemployment was high. Many employers tried to get as much work as possible from their employees for the lowest possible wage. Workers were upset with the speedup of assembly lines, working conditions and the lack of job security. Seeking strength in unity, they formed unions. Automobile workers organized the U.A.W. (United Automobile Workers of America) in 1935. General Motors would not recognize the U.A.W. as the workers’ bargaining representative. Hearing rumors that G.M. was moving work to factories where the union was not as strong, workers in Flint began a sit-down strike on December 30, 1936. The sit-down was an effective way to strike. When workers walked off the job and picketed a plant, management could bring in new workers to break the strike. If the workers stayed in the plant, management could not replace them with other workers. This photograph shows the broken windows at General Motors’ Flint Fisher Body Plant during the Flint sit-down strike of 1936–37.”

** Until divorce do us apart ** (Thanks GG)

We had a commenter the other day comment on how terrible it is in the us — that we soon will not only allow same-sex marriage, but we will *encourage* it, and the commenter felt the urge to move abroad to avoid such liberal thoughts (now, unless he/she plans moving to China or somewhere in the middle east, he should know that he’ll be less home there than here…). Let me just say we here at KIOSK encourage daycare kids to become gay, we even called your parents and encouraged them to divorce and hook up with someone with the same set of genitals as they themselves. Aren’t we terrible, we liberals.

Anyway, if you live in California and have any form of sanity, you need to vote no (NO, niet, non, nej) to proposition 8 on November 4th.  In short, that prop is trying to overturn the right to same sex marriages that got granted in the summer. (I might have gotten the facts wrong, but maybe wikipedia does it better -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008) )

Maybe the poster meant “Gray” marriage? Yes, he’s right, they are really sad.

Speaking of which, something really sad would be if proposition 4 would pass: It would block any teenage abortion until 48 hours after the teenagers parents would be notified. In my days I knew many sage teenage girls (I mean, is the law designed to notify the teenage fathers parents?) who would rather cut of their hands than tell their parents they were stupid enogh to get knocked up. I don’t think anyone sees lightly on abortion, teenager or not, and I encourage a teenager to have a talk with an adult before taking a decision on these matters, but it really is the persons own decision, not their parents.  I don’t think I need to explain all this to you — KIOSK customers seem to be 98% very reasonable people.  Just, if you are in California, do give these amendments a thought. Talk to your neighbors and friends about it.

I am not involved enough in politics — especially Californian — to know if there are other points that needs a steady think-through, but these two had been passed up to me and they are very, very dangerous amendments should they pass.