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The Labor Department says it is cracking down on firms that fail to pay interns properly and expanding efforts to educate companies, colleges and students on the law regarding internships.

“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division.

The Times found, for example, that “employers posted 643 unpaid internships on Stanford’s job board this academic year, more than triple the 174 posted two years ago.”  This led the U.S. Department of Labor to create a new set of six guidelines for companies to use in “determining whether interns must be paid the minimum wage with overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act for the services that they provide to ‘for-profit’ private sector employers.”  They include:

1.  The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment;

2.  The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;

3.  The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;

4.  The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded;

5.  The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and

6.  The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

Which brings me to the Washington Post, and their new “Fan Blog” program.  Here is a new opportunity they are offering for Washington, DC sports fans to apply for writer positions to cover each of the Washington, DC teams:  Two writers for The Wizards, two for the Redskins, two for the Capitals, two for the Nationals, two for the United, and two for the Terps.  Only, they have no intentions of paying them even a minimum wage for their work.

On the Post’s “Fan Blog” FAQ page, they announce their guidelines for these writer positions they are trying to fill.  Here were two which happened to catch my eye:

2. Some commenters have asked if the new fan blog will replace content on our current staff-written blogs, or other Post-produced content. The answer is an unqualified “no.” We are doing this to supplement our current coverage, because it’s obvious that we have a lot of smart fans who use the web site and might like a bigger platform than the current format allows.

3. Other commenters have asked if we will pay fan bloggers. Sadly, the answer is no. We hope that for some people, the large audience a site like washingtonpost.com could provide is enough motivation to post here, but we understand that may not work for everyone.

Now I know some out there are going to protest my concerns and state that newspapers today are losing money — that they are barely scraping by and need to do whatever they can to provide content in a way that reduces their costs.  Well, on the contrary, the Washington Post Co. recently announced their second quarter earnings have gone gangbusters:

Second-quarter earnings at The Washington Post Co. rose nearly eightfold, compared with the same period of 2009, as profits soared at the company’s education division and advertising rebounded at The Post Co.’s six television stations.

The company earned $91.9 million ($10 a share) on $1.2 billion in second-quarter revenue this year, compared with $12.2 million ($1.30) in profit on $1.1 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2009. [...]

The company reported that “although print ad revenue at The Post was down 6 percent. Online newspaper ad revenue was up 14 percent.”  This led to a total 2% increase in revenues for the Newspaper division for this second quarter.

As a Washington Wizards fan who checks in daily at the Post for team news, I’ve noticed that one of the biggest gripes from some of the regulars who flood the comment section is that the paper never delivers enough Wizards content, and doesn’t ever seem to ‘break news’ on the team.  They’re always late, and seemingly out of touch with team insiders.  Other Wizards-devoted blogs such as BulletsForever seem to do a far better job at reporting on the team, and keeping fans abreast of things like player injury status, player progression, etc. than the Washington Post does.

I’ll go as far as to say that I learn more about the happenings within the Wizards organization from the Washington Post comment section — there are some exceptionally well-informed commenters there — than from the Post’s Michael Lee, who actually covers the Wizards for the paper.  So what better way for the editorial staff to address those Wizards’ fans concerns than to expand the paper’s coverage by hiring some of these well-informed, seemingly well-connected commenters to expand the Post’s Wizards coverage — without pay!

Well, consider this, the US Department of Labor, in addition to providing the list of six guidelines outlined above, goes even further into detail to clarify when someone qualifies as a paid employee:

If an employer uses interns as substitutes for regular workers or to augment its existing workforce during specific time periods, these interns should be paid at least the minimum wage and overtime compensation for hours worked over forty in a workweek. If the employer would have hired additional employees or required existing staff to work additional hours had the interns not performed the work, then the interns will be viewed as employees and entitled compensation under the FLSA.

And once again, looking back at the Washington Post’s description for these ‘positions for hire’ they state: “We are doing this to supplement our current coverage”.  And the formal definition of “supplement”:

sup·ple·ment (spl-mnt):  Something added to complete a thing, make up for a deficiency, or extend or strengthen the whole.

Clearly the Washington Post is augmenting its existing workforce with free labor to produce content on pages to sell advertising — did I mention their online advertising revenues were up 14% this quarter?

The USDL further states:

Under these circumstances the intern does not perform the routine work of the business on a regular and recurring basis, and the business is not dependent upon the work of the intern. On the other hand, if the interns are engaged in the operations of the employer or are performing productive work (for example, filing, performing other clerical work, or assisting customers), then the fact that they may be receiving some benefits in the form of a new skill or improved work habits will not exclude them from the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime requirements because the employer benefits from the interns’ work.

And yet, Jon Denunzio, Sports Editor for the Washington Post, in answering one of the commenters questions (in the comment section) on that same “Fan Blog” FAQ page stated  (Posted by: Jon DeNunzio | August 22, 2010 11:02 AM):

Q: “Is this going to be individual fanblogs for the major sports teams, or a ‘mash-up’ of all sports into a single fanblog?” (from BinM)

A: The latter. Because we plan some moderation of the posts (not too heavy-handed, we promise), we had to limit the scope of this blog. We’ll try to make it easy for you to find all the posts about a single team by categorizing each post, and we’re discussing having some set scheduling (a Caps post every Tuesday afternoon, etc). And as we said in a previous post, nothing is set in stone — we’ll see how it goes.

Did you get that?  The Post’s Sports Editor states they are discussing scheduling writing assignments from these hired ‘non-employees’ — which would clearly be in violation of US Labor Laws.  And seriously, just because they have strategically given this unpaid position the name “fan blogger” it in no way deflects from what the position actually is — an unpaid employee, whom they hope to generate revenue from.

To see a huge, corporate behemoth like the Washington Post Co. — just after announcing huge profits — actually trying to circumvent the labor laws by hiring ‘non-employees’ to create their content, upon which they will sell advertising, is simply disgraceful!

If this kind of practice — ‘for-profit’ private companies hiring ‘non employee writers’ – were to catch on amongst other media giants, well … there’s going to be even less opportunities for aspiring writers out there who are struggling to make a living.

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The most enthusiastic Reaganites today are radical, nationalist, racist and xenophobic; just like the fascists of old. And because Democrats lack the courage and conviction to stop them, they drag our politics rightward, regardless of who sits in the White House or which party controls Congress.

These circumstances have forced the left or what remains of it into a defensive mode — struggling, often in vain, to retain as much as possible of the social, political and economic progress gained before the Reagan era began. Not in the Tea Party sense, but according to the real meaning of the word, it has made conservatives of those who would otherwise be struggling to make a qualitatively better world.

For many, Obama, the Rorschach candidate, conjured up hopes of putting an end to this sad state of affairs, putting progress back on the agenda. But, as Reagan’s screenwriters might have had him say, “boy, were they wrong!” Under Obama as much as under Clinton or either Bush, Reagan rules.

You can read the article in its entirety over at Huffington Post.

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Well, Ted Olson proceeds to articulately dismantles every single one of Wallace’s assertions so thoroughly and so coherently that Chris Wallace could do nothing, but compliment Olson at the end of the interview.   Enjoy!

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If you want a preview of President Obama’s health-care “reform,” take a look at Massachusetts. In 2006, it enacted a “reform” that became a model for Obama. What’s happened since isn’t encouraging. The state did the easy part: expanding state-subsidized insurance coverage. It evaded the hard part: controlling costs and ensuring that spending improves people’s health. Unfortunately, Obama has done the same.

Massachusetts, like Obama, was as timid in confronting the runaway profits of Big Pharma, health insurance companies, and medical professionals as it was committed to actually solving the escalating health care crisis.  The result: Massachusetts health care costs continue to soar:

Aside from squeezing take-home pay (employers provide almost 70 percent of insurance), higher costs have automatically shifted government priorities toward health care and away from everything else — schools, police, roads, prisons, lower taxes. In 1990, health spending represented about 16 percent of the state budget, says the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. By 2000, health’s share was 22 percent. In 2010, it’s 35 percent. About 90 percent of the health spending is Medicaid.

State leaders have proved powerless to control these costs.  [...]

Attacking unpopular insurance companies is easy — and ultimately ineffectual. The trouble is that they’re mostly middlemen. They collect premiums and pay providers: doctors, hospitals, clinics. Limiting premiums without controlling the costs of providers will ultimately cause insurer bankruptcies, which would then threaten providers because they won’t be fully reimbursed. The state might regulate hospitals’ and doctors’ fees directly; but in the past, providers have often offset lower rates by performing more tests and procedures.  [...]

The lesson from Massachusetts is that genuine cost control is avoided because it’s so politically difficult. It means curbing the incomes of doctors, hospitals and other providers. They object. To encourage “accountable care organizations” would limit consumer choice of doctors and hospitals. That’s unpopular. Spending restrictions, whether imposed by regulation or “global payments,” raise the specter of essential care denied. Also unpopular. [...]

What’s occurring in Massachusetts is the plausible future: Unchecked health spending shapes government priorities and inflates budget deficits and taxes, with small health gains. And they call this “reform”?

Though I agree with much of what Samuelson writes on medical cost containment, I disagree with his assertion that insurance companies are merely ‘middlemen’, therefore contributing little to runaway medical costs.   There is a long documented history of health insurance companies price gauging companies and patients with exorbitant premium hikes based on little more than ‘exaggerated justification’:

Aetna has become the second health insurance company in California since April to scrap planned rate hikes, following revelations last week that “math errors” in the company’s application exaggerated justification for the proposed rate increase.

The company had sought a 19 percent rate increase affecting 65,000 policyholders in California. [...]

Anthem Blue Cross withdrew a much larger, 39 percent rate increase request in April that would have affected 800,000 policyholders in California, following detection by state workers of similar calculation errors.  [...]

Filings for rate increases by Blue Shield of California and Health Net Inc. are also under review by state regulators.  [...]

An expert hired by the New Mexico Attorney General’s office similarly concluded that Blue Cross Blue Shield New Mexico had inflated its losses to justify a controversial 21.3 percent rate hike, but the AG’s office nevertheless signed off on the rate hike. [...]

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently responded to these unjustified premium increases:

“I applaud California for its decision to shine more light on skyrocketing insurance rates and demand more accountability after uncovering that a second insurer used faulty math to try to justify exorbitant health insurance premium increases.”

Unfortunately, Obama’s decision to sidestep the central issue in this country’s health care crisis — runaway costs — will likely come back to haunt the Left. The forthcoming spiraling costs will most certainly be used by the opposition to undermine any future efforts for REAL reform.

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Gregory: What does distinguish the Republican Party of today from the Republican Party under President Bush’s rule with regards to spending — which is where it got out of control under Republican rule, that now Conservatives are so upset about?

Cornyn: Well let’s look at a few facts — and I thank you for the opportunity — because I want to respond to what Chris said, the last year that President Bush was in office, 2008, the deficit was 3.2% of the gross domestic product.  Today it’s 10%.  We just hit the 13 trillion debt on national debt.

Gregory: Well, let me just stop you Senator.  Where did some of that debt come from?  The President of the United States was George Bush when they passed a huge TARP just to bail out the banks.  I mean that’s what ran up a lot of debt as well.  Are you saying a Republican was somehow different?

Cornyn: Well, you’re ignoring the stimulus that was, ah, failed according to the President’s own standards.  He said he was supposed to keep unemployment to 8%.  A 2.6 trillion dollar health care bill that — I agree with Pete — will bankrupt not only the private sector, but the states and the federal government creating a new entitlement program.  My point is that unemployment was roughly 6.9% when President Obama was elected, now it’s 9.5%.  The deficit was 3.2% the last year President Bush was in office, now it’s 10%.  The debt was 2.3 trillion dollars lower in 2008 than it is now, because of runaway spending and debt so …

Gregory: So my question is still: What is the distinction of the Republican Party of today versus the Bush record that you’re defending.

Cornyn: Well, I think what people are looking for, David, are checks and balances.  They’ve had single party government, and it’s scaring the living daylights out of them, and it’s keeping ‘job creators’ on the sidelines rather than investing and creating jobs.  That’s why the private sector isn’t creating jobs.

Gregory: Well, are you concerned people will see that as a strategy of saying ‘no’ rather than saying ‘yes’ to something?

Cornyn: Well, my constituents in Texas — I have to tell ya — to all the bad ideas they hear coming out of Washington these days, ah — ‘no’ is a good start, and then they want us to replace it with common sense policies that actually make sense.  But the problem is our friends on the Democratic side, including the President have passed one unpopular policy measure after another and told the American people “we don’t care what you think.  We know what’s better than you do what’s good for you,” and I think the birds are coming home to roost.

In other words, they intend to resume Bush’s policies of increasing the national debt to pay for deeper tax cuts for the rich, to bail out Wall Street fat cats, and to wage more endless and unnecessary wars.  Sounds like a winning strategy, John …

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‘Different Class’ is one of those timeless albums befitting any serious record collection.  It is that good.

Here, Pulp perform the exceptional “I Spy” on the Jools Holland Show in 1995 — at the peak of their popularity.

Enjoy!

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The song, “I Spy”, or its full-length album, ‘Different Class’ can be downloaded here:  

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International Monetary Fund Photograph/Stephen Jaffe

The former Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, is now rebuking the popular GOP Supply-Side talking point (as trumpeted recently by Mitch McConnell) that tax cuts increase revenues, and therefore help reduce deficits:

“They should follow the law and let [Bush's tax cuts] lapse,” Greenspan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff,” citing a need for the tax revenue to reduce the federal budget deficit. [...]

Greenspan, in a telephone conversation after his Bloomberg TV interview was taped, said his position is that all the expiring Bush tax cuts should end, for middle-class and high- income families alike.

Ending the cuts “probably will” slow growth, Greenspan, 84, said in the TV interview. The risk posed by inaction on the deficit is greater, he said.

“Unless we start to come to grips with this long-term outlook, we are going to have major problems,” said Greenspan, who led the U.S. central bank from 1987 to 2006. “I think we misunderstand the momentum of this deficit going forward.”

Here, he more or less lays responsibility for the huge deficit problems we now face at the doorsteps of the Bush Administration:

Greenspan said reducing the deficit is “going to be far more difficult than anybody imagines” after “a decade of major increases in federal spending and major tax cuts.”

Ironic, this coming from the guy who foolhardily endorsed Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, thereby helping to lay the ground work for the massive deficit expansion.

Regardless, this will hopefully take some of the wind out of the GOP/Tea Party sails — these self-proclaimed ‘fiscal warriors’.  After all, they have championed two grotesquely incompatible positions:  debt reduction AND tax cuts.

Tax cuts have long been the cornerstone of the Republican platform due to their obvious political popularity.  But the GOP has recently made debt reduction their ‘call to action’.  After they bequeathed a tumultuous economic disaster to an incoming President Obama, the GOP knew he would be forced — as was called for by every credible economist in the world — to increase federal spending to keep the country from spiraling into a full blown depression.  It gave the GOP a quick recipe for attack: “Obama is just another big spending ‘socialist’ Democrat, intent on creating runaway deficits”.  They hoped to shift at least some of the blame for the staggering deficits they created onto him.  Disingenuous?–obviously, but they knew their low-information (propaganda devouring) base would swallow it, hook, line and sinker, and they did.

But a week ago their credibility as self-proclaimed ‘deficit hawks’ was called into question by none other than Chris Wallace (their own mascot) on The Fox News Channel (their home field).  And the ensuing fallout continues to reverberate across the main stream media and blogosphere.

The Washington Post recently posed the following question to the GOP:

The issue is whether the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans should be extended, adding another $678 billion to the deficit over the next decade. The tax cuts, it’s worth remembering, passed originally in 2001 with the argument that the surplus was so large that rates could be cut with budgetary room to spare. Now that the fiscal picture has deteriorated so badly, the questions remains: How are you going to pay the $678 billion? And if you don’t, how are you going to justify the added damage to an already grim fiscal outlook?

If the GOP hopes to have any chance at recasting themselves as ‘deficit hawks’ to anyone left of their wing-nut base, they will have to address this glaring contradiction.  They cannot continue to defend tax cuts for the rich, and still claim they intend to be fiscally prudent next time around.

UPDATE:

According to the CBO (as reported by Financial Times):

The Joint Committee on Taxation confirms that extending George W. Bush’s tax cuts “would increase the federal budget deficit by cumulative $2.567 trillion between 2011 and 2020.”  It adds:

But that would also deepen a growing structural deficit caused by the cost of providing healthcare and social security to an ageing population.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that the national debt will balloon to 87 per cent of gross domestic product by 2020 and 185 per cent by 2035 if the tax cuts are extended and discretionary spending grows in line with the economy.

The Republicans want to extend all the cuts, while most Democrats support proposals by Barack Obama, president, to extend them only for households with incomes below $250,000, lowering the cost to $2.154 Trillion.

Democrats have accused the Republicans of hypocrisy when they block spending on economic stimulus in the name of cutting the deficit.

It’s obviously time to roll back ALL of Bush’s tax cuts.  President Obama, show some leadership on this!

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… the revenue track under Reagan looks a lot like the track under Bush: a drop in revenues, then a resumption of growth, but no return to the previous trend:

Matt Yglesias contends that “the conservative movement in America doesn’t [actually] care about the budget deficit,” and the proof is in the policies for which they advocate:

1) There have been two presidents who were members of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and they both presided over massive increases in both present and projected deficits.

2) The major deficit reduction packages of the modern era, in 1990 and 1993, were both uniformly opposed by the conservative movement.

3) When the deficit was temporarily eliminated in the late-1990s, the mainstream conservative view was that this showed that the deficit was too low and needed to be increased via large tax cuts.

4) Senator Mitch McConnell says it’s a uniform view in his caucus that tax cuts needn’t be offset by other changes in spending.

5) The deficit reduction commission is having trouble because they think conservative politicians won’t vote for any form of tax increase.

In sum, there are zero historical examples of conservatives mobilizing to make the deficit smaller.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell recently made the following assertion about George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy:

“There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”

Here Ezra Klein of the Washington Post resoundingly slams McConnell’s fictitious allegations:

There’s an ontological question here about what, exactly, McConnell considers to be “evidence.” But how about the Congressional Budget Office’s estimations? “The new CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In the absence of such legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for almost half — 48 percent — of this $539 billion in increased costs.” How about the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget? Their budget calculator shows that the tax cuts will cost $3.28 trillion between 2011 and 2018. How about George W. Bush’s CEA chair, Greg Mankiw, who used the term “charlatans and cranks” for people who believed that “broad-based income tax cuts would have such large supply-side effects that the tax cuts would raise tax revenue.” He continued: “I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don’t.”

Of course, the Right rarely if ever lets factual evidence get in the way of their deep-seated, largely debunked, ideologies.

Still, it is good to see the Left finally doing a better job of educating the public about the real track record between the differing economic policies — something necessary if we are serious about promoting positive change in this country.

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For all the differences between ‘Naderism’ and Ron Paul’s brand of conservatism — which Napolitano subscribes to — they are clearly on the same page when it comes to government accountability.  In this exchange, Nader and Napolitano discuss Bush and Cheney’s violations of Habeas Corpus:

Napolitano: … What President Bush did with the suspension of habeas corpus, with the whole concept of Guantanamo Bay, with the whole idea he could avoid and evade federal laws, treaties, federal judges, and the constitution was blatantly unconstitutional, and in some cases criminal.

Nader: What’s the sanction for President Bush and Vice President Cheney?

Napolitano: There has been no sanction except for what history will say about them.

Nader: What should be the sanction?

Napolitano: They should have been indicted.  They absolutely should have been indicted.  For torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrant.  I’d like to say they should be indicted for lying, but believe it or not, unless you’re under oath, lying is not a crime — at least an indictable crime.  It’s a moral crime.

Nader: So you think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should — even though they’ve left office — they haven’t escaped the criminal laws. They should be indicted and prosecuted.

Napolitano: [...]  the evidence … is overwhelming, when you compare it to the level of evidence required for a normal indictment, that George W. Bush, as President, and Dick Cheney, as Vice President, participated in criminal conspiracies to violate the federal law, the guaranteed civil liberties of hundreds, maybe thousands, of human beings.

It’s rather encouraging to hear this coming from a guy who often fills in for wing-nut Glenn Beck, when the host is away.

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