Governor declares state of emergency for NYC transit system

By The Associated Press                                                  
June 29,2017

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday that he has declared a state of emergency over New York City's troubled public transit system and has asked its new leader to complete a series of urgent reviews of the agency's management and aging infrastructure.

The Democratic governor said the state of emergency declaration will help cut red tape and speed up improvements.

The city's subways and commuter trains have been plagued by rising delays and unreliable service. Dozens of people were injured when a subway derailed Tuesday.

Cuomo, speaking at a conference for the MTA Genius Transit Challenge, which is seeking innovative solutions for the city's transit woes, said he's asked Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joe Lhota to come up with a reorganization plan in 30 days and an equipment review in 60 days. He also wants a 90-day review of transit power failures.

The state of the subway system "is wholly unacceptable," said Cuomo, citing decades of underinvestment, deferred maintenance and surging ridership.

"I think of it as a heart attack — it happens all of a sudden and the temptation is to say, 'Well, something must have just caused it,'" Cuomo said. "No, a lifetime caused it. Bad habits caused it."

The problems abound: In a fleet of 6,400 subway cars, more than 700 have passed their 40-year expiration date. The oldest are 52: "They literally should be in a museum," Cuomo said.

It takes the MTA five years to get a new car.

"That is just ridiculous. I could build a car in five years," Cuomo said. "If the MTA's current vendors can't provide them in the timeframe we need, then the MTA should find new vendors. It's that simple."

Much of the signal system was installed before 1937. The MTA's current replacement timetable is seven to 10 years per line — 40 to 50 years systemwide.

"You have countries that are building entire subway systems in a matter of years," Cuomo said.

The ongoing subway problems are coupled with two months of Amtrakrepair work that will cause widespread delays at Penn Station, where the subways converge with New York and New Jersey commuter lines and Amtrak trains.

Cuomo repeated his warning that rail riders could face "a summer of hell" but said alternatives like ferries, express buses and creative train scheduling should provide some relief.

Conference participants included representatives of transit systems in Paris, London, Istanbul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore, Toronto, Zurich and Copenhagen.

Why Pope Francis just called labor unions “prophets”

Here in America, at a celebration for a Christian evangelical group, Mike Pence praised “the free market” and “personal responsibility” — in short, capitalism -- as the basis for an ideal health care system. But early Wednesday across the Atlantic, Pope Francis delivered quite a contrary message.

In an audience at the Vatican with the Confederation of Trade Unions in Italy, the pope presented a more holistic — and some may say compassionate — alternative to Pence’s vision of the free market. Calling work a form of “civil love,” the pope described his vision of harmonious cooperation, in which the individual participates in meaningful work as part of a shared whole. 

"If we think of the person without work, we are saying something partial, incomplete, because the person is fully realized when he or she becomes a worker: Because the individual becomes a person when he or she opens up to others, to social life, when he or she thrives in work,” he said. He spoke of a "new, human social pact, a new social pact for labor,” that would allow older workers to retire even as it allowed the young to find a trade (youth unemployment is a particular issue in Italy). 

Francis praised unions on spiritual grounds, calling them “prophetic" institutions that give "a voice to those who have none, denounces those who would [as in the Biblical Book of Amos] ‘sell the needy for a pair of sandals’ … unmasks the powerful who trample the rights of the most vulnerable workers, defends the cause of the foreigner, the least, the discarded. … But in our advanced capitalist societies, the union risks losing its prophetic nature, and becoming too similar to the institutions and powers that it should instead criticize.” 

He also criticized the idea of a purely “market economy,” praising instead a “social market economy” balancing the goals of business with care for those “outside the walls” of industry, meaning those denied work by physical infirmity or condition, or those who, as immigrants, do not have the right to work.

"The capitalism of our time does not understand the value of the trade union,” Francis added, “because it has forgotten the social nature of the economy, of the business.” 

The pope has never been afraid to take a stand on economic issues

Francis’s speech reflects a wider trend in his public remarks, as he positions his role as pontiff as a persistent gadfly to capitalism: checking its worst excesses. In April, Francis gave a TED talk in which he repeatedly highlighted the importance of social justice: "How wonderful would it be if solidarity, this beautiful and, at times, inconvenient word, were not simply reduced to social work, and became, instead, the default attitude in political, economic and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples, and countries.” 

In both cases, Francis’s words seem straightforward, even saccharine. But for many careful Vatican-watchers, Francis’s words tie into a much broader church tension — not just over the role of social justice in the Catholic Church, but also over the decree to which Catholic theology and economic perspective should be intertwined. 
Francis’s open critiques of capitalism have caused their fair share of controversy within church circles, even before the election of capitalist in chief Donald Trump, previously known mostly as a real estate developer and deal-making businessman. Back in 2012, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan contributed a pointed op-ed to the Wall Street Journal, walking back any suggestion that the then-newly elected Francis might be a threat to capitalism. 

“The answer to problems with the free market is not to reject economic liberty in favor of government control,” he wrote. “The church has consistently rejected coercive systems of socialism and collectivism, because they violate inherent human rights to economic freedom and private property.” Don’t worry, Dolan seemed to be telling Catholics wary of the new pope’s political leanings. He’s not as bad as he sounds.

Critics (and some supporters) of Francis’s approach to economic systems have often called him a “liberation theologian” — a loaded term. Liberation theology is a Marxist-influenced approach to Christian theology with its roots in Latin America that sees the overturning of oppressive power structures on this earth as well as the hereafter as central to the message of Christianity. This approach is certainly part of the pope’s cultural background. As the young Argentine bishop Jorge Bergoglio, working in Buenos Aires in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Francis would have been hard-pressed to escape it. 

The liberation movement has many detractors, particularly among right-wing Catholics who see it as unnecessarily politicizing a religion whose concerns should transcend individual political issues.
But is Francis a liberation theologian? Tracing the liberation connections of the young Bergoglio is a tricky business for political as well as ideological reasons. Talking about liberation theology in Latin America in the ‘60s and ‘70s also means talking about tricky politics. During the Cold War both the US and Russia used politics and theology alike as ways of exerting ideological control in the region (a popular theory among more right-leaning Catholics is that the proliferation of liberation theology in South America was a KGB-backed propaganda outlet). In junta-era Argentina, supporting (or not supporting) liberation theology was a very political act. 

So while young Bergoglio seems to have been vocally opposed to the movement — for reasons that may be as political as they were religious — he’s grown much more openly sympathetic to its theology in recent decades. In 2012, just six months after becoming pope, he invited one of the liberation theology movement’s major proponents, Gustavo Gutiérrez, to the Vatican and declared another, Oscar Romero, a “martyr.”

In recent interviews, he has described the movement as a “positive thing” for the religion. His 2015 encyclical, Laudato Sì (“Praise Be to You”), a condemnation of global social inequality, was likewise deeply indebted to the themes, if not the precise language, of the movement: closing with the charged statement: “This economy kills.” 

Whether or not we frame Francis’s theology within the formal category of “liberation” theology, his stance, in this morning’s speech and elsewhere, is undeniably political. His understanding of Christianity is inextricable from social justice not just on the individual level — be a good person — but on the structural one: Some institutions and modes of governing (and commerce) are inherently more sinful than others. And, while Francis has not said so directly — his points tend to be subtly made — his vision of a Christian society stands in stark opposition to that of Pence.

It’s worth pointing out here that, despite Francis’s critics, it’s difficult to find a religious attitude that doesn’t have structural political implications; as Elizabeth Bruenig notes in the New Republic, the rise of the Protestant religious right in America was closely linked to a pro-capitalist ethos of freedom as a Christian value; so too, the “prosperity gospel” that links wealth and divine favor.


Feminists and other activists like to say that the personal is political. But, for better or for worse, the theological is political, too.

Pope: Society needs labor unions and needs them to be inclusive

By Junno Arocho Esteves

June 29, 2017

ROME - Labor unions that protect and defend the dignity of work and the rights of workers continue to have an essential role in society, especially in promoting inclusion, Pope Francis said.

“There is no good society without a good union, and there is no good union that isn’t reborn every day in the peripheries, that doesn’t transform the rejected stones of the economy into corner stones,” the pope said June 28 during an audience with Italian union leaders.

“There is no justice together if it isn’t together with today’s excluded ones,” he told members of the Italian Confederation of Union Workers.

Unions, he said, risk losing their “prophetic nature” when they mimic the very institutions they are called to challenge, he said. “Unions over time have ended up resembling politicians too much, or rather political parties, their language, their style.”

Labor unions must guard and protect workers, but also defend the rights of those “outside the walls,” particularly those who are retired and the excluded who are “also excluded from rights and democracy.”

Francis denounced situations in which children are forced to work rather than being allowed to study, which is the “only good ‘job’ for children.”

Turning to one of his frequently voiced concerns, the pope told the union leaders that a society that leaves young men and women without jobs is “foolish and shortsighted.”

“When young people are outside the world of work, businesses lack energy, enthusiasm, innovation and the joy of living which are precious common goods that make a better economic life and public happiness,” he said.

The pope’s speech kicked off the union’s national conference on the theme: “For the person, for work.”

Reflecting on the conference theme, the pope said that work without respect for the person “becomes something inhuman,” while a person without work is incomplete.

People truly flourish when they have a job, “the most common form of cooperation that humanity has generated in its history,” the pope said.

“Work is a form of civil love: It is not a romantic love nor always intentional but rather a true, authentic love, that makes us live and bring the world forward,” he said.

Men and women, he continued, are not created solely for work but also must enjoy a “healthy culture of leisure,” which “isn’t laziness but a human need.”

Pope Francis said he asks working parents if they play with their children and is often told that some mothers and fathers leave for work when their children are still sleeping or arrive home when they are already in bed.

“This is inhumane,” he said. “For this reason, this other culture (of leisure) must go together with work; a person is not made just for work, because we don’t always work and we shouldn’t always work.”

Springtime for Union Busting?

By Ian Millhiser

June 28, 2017

Late June has become a time of terror for anyone on the left. These early days of summer are traditionally the last of the Supreme Court’s term, and at a time when the Court is dominated by Republican appointees, Democrats, liberals, and leftists alike often spend the last week of June dreading what the Court is about to do to health care, workers, and the rights of women or racial minorities.

This June, however, was different. With the Court down a justice for most of the last year, its members avoided most politically charged cases that were likely to produce a 4-4 split. Compared to past terms, the last year at the Supreme Court was relatively boring. The term’s biggest decisions—an erosion of the separation of church and state and a lamentable decision to temporarily reinstate parts of Trump’s Muslim ban—both were decided after Republicans placed someone in the Court’s final seat.

Remember how good this boredom feels, because it won’t last. With Neil Gorsuch now occupying the seat that Republicans held open more than a year until Donald Trump could fill it, the next term will not be boring at all. And the Court’s Republican majority has a familiar target in its sights: the American worker

Last year, many of America’s unions had a near-death experience.

In January of 2016, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case that sought to starve public sector unions of the money they need to operate. The arguments before the justices seemed to herald an impending disaster for the unions, with Anthony Kennedy—the closest thing to a swing vote—appearing visibly angered by some of the pro-union arguments presented to the Court. After the arguments phase, there was little doubt that organized labor would lose in a 5-4 decision that threatened many unions’ ability to operate.

Then Antonin Scalia died.

Without Scalia to cast the fifth vote against labor, the justices split 4-4 in Friedrichs and the threat to unions seemed to have passed.

Now, however, Gorsuch occupies Scalia’s old seat. And Gorsuch is, if anything, well to Scalia’s right. The Supreme Court’s war on unions, in other words, will now resume. And there’s already a case in the works that will allow the Court’s Republican majority to pick up where it left off in early 2016.

Earlier this month, lawyers led by the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation asked the Court to hear Janus v. AFSCME, a case that is nearly identical to Friedrichs. Both challenge what are sometimes called “agency fees” or “fair share fees.” And Janus, like Friedrichs, is an existential threat to many public sector unions.

By law, unions must bargain on behalf of every worker within a bargaining unit, regardless of whether each individual worker joins the union. That creates a free-rider problem, because each individual worker gets to keep the higher wages and increased benefits that normally accompany unionization without having to pay membership dues.

Collective bargaining, moreover, is an expensive process that can require a team of lawyers and financial experts. Hiring good negotiators costs money. If too many workers refuse to pay union dues, unions can find themselves without enough funds to operate.

To solve this free-rider problem, union contracts often contain a provision requiring non-union members to reimburse the unions for their fair share of the costs of collective bargaining. These are called “agency fees.” That means that just as everyone gets to share the benefits of unionization, everyone also pays their share of the costs.

Many state legislatures, in an effort to weaken unions, ban these agency fees—that’s what so-called “right-to-work” laws do. As the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould and Will Kimball explain, such a law is “associated with $1,558 lower annual wages for a typical full-time, full-year worker.”

Janus asks the Supreme Court to impose a right-to-work regime on all public sector unions. And with Gorsuch now occupying a seat on the Court, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Court will side with the anti-union attorneys behind Janus.

Should these lawyers prevail, the effects will be threefold.

First, wages and salaries will decline. According to Gould and Kimball, wages in right-to-work states “are 3.1 percent lower than those in non-RTW states.” State and federal workers who currently aren’t bound by a right-to-work law can expect to see similar downward pressure on their own earnings.

Second, Republicans will gain ground on Democrats. Unions provide much of the Democratic Party’s political infrastructure, including thousands of volunteers. Though agency fees cannot lawfully be spent on political activity, Janus is likely to starve many unions for cash and could cause some unions to fail entirely. That places the party of Neil Gorsuch in a much stronger position each election year.

Finally, even when Democrats do perform well at the polls, the Democrats elected in a post-Janus world are likely to act much more like Republicans. Because organized labor plays such a crucial role in the Democratic coalition, Democratic politicians take anti-labor positions at their own peril. As labor’s role diminishes, those politicians will have less to fear from labor—and more to fear from the big donors unleashed by decisions like Citizens United.

By lashing out at unions, in other words, the Supreme Court can help ensure that its future members look more like Gorsuch and less like the blocked Barack Obama nominee, Merrick Garland.

A majority of the Court, moreover, is likely to rule against public sector unions in Janus, despite the fact that the plaintiff’s arguments in this case are weak.

In essence, the lawyers behind Janus argue that agency fees violate the First Amendment because they compel non-members of a union “to subsidize the speech of a third party…that they may not wish to support.” When unions bargain, they must engage in speech to do so. And a non-union member might disagree with that speech. So that, according to the lawyers behind Janus, is unconstitutional forced speech.

It is true that, as a general matter, the government cannot compel someone to speak. But different rules apply to government workers, and for good reason. If the state hires me to teach algebra, the First Amendment doesn’t let me keep my job if I decide instead to teach my students about Japanese art, or to teach them nothing at all. As Justice Kennedy explained in Garcetti v. Ceballos, “government employers, like private employers, need a significant degree of control over their employees’ words and actions; without it, there would be little chance for the efficient provision of public services.”

Moreover, if the Supreme Court holds that bargaining between an employer and its employees is a First Amendment–protected activity, that could have absurd results. Consider a hypothetical that Justice Scalia offered in an earlier case involving agency fees.

Suppose you have a policeman who is dissatisfied with his wages. So he makes an appointment with the police commissioner, and he goes in and grouses about his wages. He does this, you know, 10 or 11 times. And the commissioner finally is fed up and tells his secretary, I don’t want to see this man again. Has he violated the Constitution?

It would be difficult, to say the least, to run a workplace if managers cannot discipline a government employee who harasses their supervisors with frivolous requests. The First Amendment has never been understood to impede workplace management in this way.

Janus, in other words, asks the Supreme Court to embrace a novel and dubious reading of the First Amendment. And it does so in service of a cause that will harm workers and greatly benefit the GOP. And there is little doubt as to how the five Republicans on the Supreme Court will vote.