Obama Administration Department of Labor issues new overtime rules guaranteeing time-and-a-half pay for any worker making less than $47,476 annually, up from $23,660. That's rather less than we asked for and a bit less than the Obama Administration originally proposed, but it's still more than double what it used to be, so congratulate yourself for fighting for economic justice -- and job creation, since the whole purpose of making corporations pay people time-and-a-half for overtime is to prompt them to hire more people they can then pay in straight time.
Hood River County (OR) voters, in a landslide, ban all commercial water extraction from the area. Nestlé (of course!) had petitioned to draw over 100 million gallons of water annually from the area, so they could then sell it at a massive markup as bottled water, but the good citizens of Hood County said no by a nearly 7-3 margin. Good for them -- more localities need to stand up to corporations, and refuse to be held hostage to the promise of money.
PR Watch finds the notorious Koch brothers funding a "Grassroots Leadership Academy" dedicated to establishing a better right-wing ground game. And also "to fight for freedom and against the progressive policies and false narratives of the left." They can't quite bring themselves to say the "fight for freedom" is against "progressive policies," which I count as a fault. And I'm pretty sure the course entitled "Making the Case for Economic Freedom" has nothing to do with the consumer's right to be free from corporate manipulation.
Public Citizen finds that, for at least four coal corporations, going bankrupt doesn't mean the money stops flowing. The CEOs who run these corporations into the ground still pay themselves millions of dollars in bonuses, and bankruptcy lawyers and advisers seems to make out even better, if that's possible. It is quite unfortunately that eight years of George W. Bush occupying the Oval Office didn't permanently stigmatize the whole idea of getting rich through failure." And this "war on coal" is a war on working families, who never enjoy the benefits of executives stripping their corporations clean.
Finally, internal NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden show the NSA working with other agencies in conducting investigations on Guantánamo Bay detainees. This was early in Tha Bush Mobb years, and the tone of some of these documents -- "(w)ater sports are outstanding" at Gitmo, one says -- is rather chilling. After all, what good is stoking fear and rage in the populace if you can't go snorkeling? File this one under "never forget."
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