We posted a piece last week that alerted everybody what the televangelists and GOP were doing to our aviation safety and jobs because they want to ultimately go union-busting against the workers. Tea Party Crazy Dominated GOP Threaten Aviation Safety While Engaging In Union Busting

Now that their plan is taking effect, we're already seeing the odious results of the endeavor.

Daily Kos:

As anticipated, the Federal Aviation Administration's operating authority expired at midnight Friday and the agency partially shut down. While air traffic controllers are still on the job and air travel continues more or less normally, nearly 4,000 other FAA employees are currently furloughed without pay. Additionally, nearly 87,000 construction jobs are affected as FAA-funded airport construction projects are forced to shut down. This includes projects from $10,000 to tens of millions of dollars, scattered across the country.

All of which is probably fine with House Republicans, since the whole purpose of this exercise was to make things more difficult for workers, anyway. By trying to make union representation elections operate by undemocratic rules, they put people out of work instead—maybe that's a job well done in their eyes.

The FAA is also unable to collect taxes on airline tickets bought, depriving the government of $200 million a week in revenue. But the great little coda to this story is that consumers aren't seeing savings:

[I]nstead of passing along the savings, the airlines are pocketing the money while customers pay the same amount as before.

American, United, Continental, Delta, US Airways, Southwest, AirTran and JetBlue all raised fares, although details sometimes differed. Most of the increases were around 7.5 percent.

It's like the Republican dream: Not only is the government not collecting revenue, that same revenue is going straight to corporations, for no reason. Why would they ever agree to end this shutdown?

The AFL-CIO sent out an email urging people to take action:

Last weekend, House Republican leaders proved just how far they are willing to go to achieve their ideological goals.

At 12:01 a.m. Saturday morning, they shut down the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). As if bringing America to the brink of default hasn’t done enough damage already. Are they out of their minds?

Because of the extreme ideological agenda of House Republicans and their political game-playing, 4,000 workers were furloughed over the weekend and more than 90,000 jobs across the country are on the line—including 1,026 in DC.(1)

Meanwhile, the government is out $200 million a week in airline ticket fees that normally fund our aviation infrastructure. That loss now will be added to the national debt.

Tell your members of Congress the FAA needs to get up and running immediately. Republican House leaders’ hostage-taking needs to stop.

And if you've been following the media, whenever a TV pundit asks a GOP politician about the FAA shutdown, they just lie in their responses. I really don't expect many hosts or anchors to have much of a grasp on the story, but some basic knowledge wouldn't be a bad idea to counter the spin.

Laura catches the WaPo of doing Karl Rove's handiwork for the GOP.

I've written about Delta Airlines' anti-union positions earlier: Anti-union campaign goes to Washington -- helped by airlines like Delta

From mcjoan of Dkos:

The House will vote on the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization and the provision in it which would essentially codify vote fraud in organizing elections.

A recap: last year the the National Mediation Board that oversees those elections ruled that the railroad and airline industries would have to end their practice of counting non-votes in these elections as no votes. Previously, any eligible worker who chose not to vote was automatically counted as a no. Which would be fraud in any other election in the United State. The industries, and most House Republicans, want the rule back.

Fast forward. The anti-union push is building, in part fueled by one particular airline's zeal to kill fairness in the workplace.

I'm at the point that I will never fly Delta again. I think you should consider it too. Air travel is no day in the park and many people want to book a flight and be done with it, but there comes a time when even if it causes us more inconvenience, we have to do the right thing....read on

Since I wrote this, Delta has only upped the ante and become the Scott Walker in the skies airline:

Around The World Blog:

Delta has been the #1 worst U.S. airline every year in a row since the founding of this blog-- and that's just based on their service. Turns out, though, there's more to Delta's unsuitability as a reliable travel partner than how badly the management runs their operations. As yesterday's Wall Street Journal pointed out, the airline is a bastion of right-wing anti-worker extremism. No wonder their employees always seem so down in the dumps and resentful! The National Mediation Board is now investigating charges by flight attendants that Delta, the only non-Union U.S. airline, illegally interfered in unionization elections by pressuring employees to vote against the unions. As Joe Sudbay observed at AmericaBlog yesterday, "Delta is like the Scott Walker of airlines. It wants to be known as anti-worker."

We can probably expect even more skullduggery from Delta in the coming weeks as they double down in their anti-union jihad. They've been a lead driver in pushing Republican extremists in the House to rescind fair election rules for air/rail workers for elections conducted under the National Mediation Board. For progressives who care about keeping elections fair, giving workers the choice whether or not they want to join a union, and supporting companies who operate under basic standards of decency, there are a number of reasons for progressives to be outraged about Delta Airlines:

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Like Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and many other states, Alabama has a big, new Republican legislative majority working hard to undermine unions. The House passed HB 64 yesterday, which would amend Alabama's 1901 constitution to require secret balloting for workplace unionization. Democrats objected to the bill, challenging sponsor Kurt Wallace on the relevance and necessity of such an amendment. Wallace had few answers to offer, but to his credit he never wavered from insisting the bill was "common sense." Part Two and notes below the fold:

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Scott Walker is a wingnut dream. He opposes abortion, including in cases of rape, incest, or saving the life of the mother. He backs sexual abstinence education in public schools. He also supports the right of pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives on the religious or moral grounds, and opposes stem cell research using human embryos.

Oh, and he hates unions. Finally, circumstances have provided him with a cover story for his wider agenda. No wonder the Koch brothers poured so much money into his gubernatorial campaign!

Wisconsin may seem to the rest of the country like an unlikely catalyst, but to people who have watched the governor’s political rise through the years, the events of the week feel like a Scott Walker rerun, though on a much larger screen and with a much bigger audience.

Critics and supporters alike say Mr. Walker has never strayed from his approach to his political career: always pressing for austerity, and never blinking or apologizing for his lightning-rod proposals.

He regularly clashed with the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors over the past decade when he was that county’s elected executive. He pushed to privatize cleaning and food service workers and sought changes to pension and health contributions and workers’ hours. At one point, he proposed that the county government might want to consider, in essence, abolishing itself. It was redundant, he suggested.

“All I can think is, here we go again,” said Chris Larson, one of 14 Democratic state senators who fled Wisconsin last week to block a vote on Mr. Walker’s call to cut benefits. Mr. Larson knows the governor well, having served on Milwaukee County’s board when Mr. Walker was the executive. He says that Mr. Walker is a nice guy on a personal level, “a good listener,” but that his politics are another matter.

“Unions have always been his piñata, over and over,” Mr. Larson said. “And this time I think he’s trying to out-right-wing the right wing on his way to the next lily pad.”

Mr. Walker’s supporters cheer the governor for what they see as delivering on the campaign pledge of frugality that got him elected in November and forced a surprising makeover, at all levels of government in the state, from Democrats to Republicans.

“This doesn’t faze me one bit,” Mr. Walker said Friday as thousands of protesters from around the country marched and screamed and filled every unguarded cranny of the Capitol, just as they had all week.

He said he had seen plenty of labor protesters before. Crowds of them in green T-shirts once even showed up when he presented a Milwaukee County budget proposal — one of nine proposals in a row, he boasts now, that included no tax increase over the rate the board had settled on the year before.

“I’m not going to be intimidated,” Mr. Walker said, “particularly by people from other places.”

Fox News broke this bulletin about an hour ago. It stems from a video posted by the MacIver Institute Wisconsin alleging that a doctor is signing bogus excuses for teachers protesting in Madison. Because it is illegal for teachers to strike, they called in sick and have been told they will have to produce a valid doctors excuse in order to be excused for their absences.

So isn't it interesting that a right-wing organization would produce a news report saying such excuses are fabricated? Usually, the way this works is that part of the final negotiation also forgives the days missed for protests, by the way, so this is ginned up nonsense from the start.

Here's some information about the MacIver Institute:

In December the domain maciverinstitute.com was privately registered with no one willing to lay public claim to the new org. They also have set up a super duper secret Twitter account that you can’t follow without special permission. When I visited their actual website last night, it was still largely lacking substance. Right now I am having problems accessing it but here is a cached version. The site did give some important information however. It gave a glimpse of some of the people involved with this operation - a motley crew indeed. First you have Scott Jensen who still is awaiting his second criminal felony trial. Then you have Michael Dean, from the wild-eyed First Freedoms Foundation, listed as a contact person. Listed as treasurer for the org is Mark Block, the guy that got the stiffest penalty for political campaign violations ever handed down in the state. This new right wing org is also listed on a national directory and it lists Block as also being a contact for the organization.

Speaking of Mark Block, he posted an interesting entry on his Twitter account on January 30, 2009 at 3:18pm. I’m wondering if that Tweet inadvertently tells us a few more things about this new right wing outfit. It states the following:

“Klauser and Grebe will be calling meeting for Saturday, March 7th. Very important.”

Klauser is of course a long-time disciple of former Governor Tommy Thompson and Grebe is surely the right wing Bradley Foundation sugar daddy Michael Grebe. Michael Grebe and the Bradley Foundation are notoriously partisan and have funded some of the most extreme and narrow right wing outfits in the country.

The doctor on the form they show in the video is James H. Shropshire. A lookup of his political contributions shows $200 to Russ Feingold in 2000 and $200 to the DNC in 1998. Otherwise, nothing.

The MacIver "news wire" has an interesting quote, however:

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A little more background on the Senate Republicans who sandbagged the auto industry bailout - and why:

The fiercest opposition to the loan proposal -- and nearly a third of the 35 votes against ending debate on the deal -- came from Southern Republicans, and the ringleaders of the opposition all come from states with a major foreign auto presence. Not coincidentally, nearly all of those states -- except Kentucky -- are also "right-to-work" states, which means no union contracts for most of the employees at the foreign plants. The Detroit bailout fell victim to a nasty confluence of home-state economic interests and anti-union sentiment among Republicans.

This week Southern Republicans had a chance to go to bat for foreign automakers while simultaneously busting a union. At a hearing last week, Corker explained that his constituents "have a tough time thinking about us loaning money to companies that are paying way, way above industry standard to workers." Which may explain why his proposed alternative to the loan agreement between Congress and the White House would have required the United Auto Workers to agree to significant wage cuts next year, based on a spurious claim that union workers earn significantly more than non-union workers.

Even George W. Bush's White House didn't push to crush the UAW the way Corker and his buddies did, say Democrats involved in the negotiations with the administration. "It was all about the unions," one senior Democratic aide said. "This is political payback for lots of things, and probably even more to come." Labor officials expect Republicans to keep taking shots at unions whenever they can. "This cynical stance they took last night -- they're willing to jeopardize 3 million jobs so they could gain some advantage in their war against unions -- is appalling," said Bill Samuel, the chief lobbyist for the AFL-CIO.

As the Republican Party consolidates in the South, the fight this week could turn out to be a preview of many battles to come over Barack Obama's economic plans. If those plans involve the domestic auto industry, the GOP pushback will come from somewhere down I-65, the new auto corridor that runs from Kentucky south to Alabama. Expect to hear more not just from the very vocal Bob Corker, but from the rest of a core group of Southern senators whose bread is buttered by the Japanese, Germans and Koreans.

Go read the rest. You'll want to know the players in the years ahead.

Countdown obtained a new memo that explains the GOP's strategy for blocking a bridge loan to the auto industry:

Countdown has obtained a memo entitled "Action Alert - Auto Bailout," and sent Wednesday at 9:12am, to Senate Republicans. The names of the sender(s) and recipient(s) have been redacted in the copy Countdown obtained.

The Los Angeles Times reported that it was circulated among Senate Republicans. The brief memo outlines internal political strategy on the bailout, including the view that defeating the bailout represents a "first shot against organized labor." Senate Republicans blocked passage of the bailout late Thursday night, over its insistence on an immediate union pay cut.

From: Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 9:12 AM

To: Subject: Action Alert -- Auto Bailout

Today at noon, Senators Ensign, Shelby, Coburn and DeMint will hold a press conference in the Senate Radio/TV Gallery. They would appreciate our support through messaging and attending the press conference, if possible. The message they want us to deliver is:

1. This is the democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

2. This rush to judgment is the same thing that happened with the TARP. Members did not have an opportunity to read or digest the legislation and therefore could not understand the consequences of it. We should not rush to pass this because Detroit says the sky is falling.

The sooner you can have press releases and documents like this in the hands of members and the press, the better. Please contact me if you need additional information. Again, the hardest thing for the democrats to do is get 60 votes. If we can hold the Republicans, we can beat this.

The GOP sent the first shot across the bow of the upcoming Obama administration as they killed the auto rescue plan Thursday night. It never was about trying to help the automakers or the economy, but an effort to crush the working class and punish unions. There are many more people in line to suffer if the Big 3 go out of business, but Shelby and his band of brothers couldn't care less.

"Union Busting" is a high priority for these Conservatives fools that have allowed our country to be run into the ground. Can you name anything good that has come out of the eight years of Bush and Conservative dominance? So what is their solution? To take it out on the blue collars of America.

If anything this memo should be used as a reminder that the Employee Free Choice Act should be one of Obama's "high priorities" just after he takes office. Check out this video that explains a few things about it.

In an impassioned press conference today, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger upped the ante in the auto bailout fight as he urged the White House and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to help prevent the "imminent collapse" of the auto industry by using TARP funds.

He spelled out a last-minute negotiating process in which he says the Senate GOP caucus blew up a compromise agreement hammered out by the White House and Sen. Bob Corker.

The UAW chief said they knew going in that negotiating with an individual senator was a difficult challenge - that Corker "really didn't have a knowledge of the industry."

"And then the other thing was, quite frankly, we wondered if we were just being set up," he told reporters. (Looks like there's something to that theory: Corker is now blaming the UAW, claiming the union refused to strike a deal because the White House made it clear they'd get the money, anyway.)

Who to believe? Hmm.

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