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In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt. In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largess in the next election. It’s the perfect cozy setup.

To redress these perverse incentives that benefit both negotiating parties at the expense of the taxpayer, Walker’s bill would restrict future government-union negotiations to wages only. Excluded from negotiations would be benefits, the more easily hidden sweeteners that come due long after the politicians who negotiated them are gone. The bill would also require that unions be recertified every year and that dues be voluntary.

Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic Party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. The Democrats’ strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion.

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…let’s try to put aside the hyperventilation. Everybody now seems to agree that Governor Walker was right to ask state workers to pay more for their benefits. Even if he gets everything he asks for, Wisconsin state workers would still be contributing less to their benefits than the average state worker nationwide and would be contributing far, far less than private sector workers.

The more difficult question is whether Walker was right to try to water down Wisconsin’s collective bargaining agreements. Even if you acknowledge the importance of unions in representing middle-class interests, there are strong arguments on Walker’s side. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, state-union relations are structurally out of whack.

That’s because public sector unions and private sector unions are very different creatures. Private sector unions push against the interests of shareholders and management; public sector unions push against the interests of taxpayers. Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.

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KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Yeah, you’ve really seen, I think, in the last couple weeks a revival of this message from religious groups that we haven’t heard in a long time, this sort of solidarity with workers and with union rights. You know, with all the talk in recent years about abortion and gay marriage and health care even, we haven’t heard much about unions from many churches, especially the Catholic Church, which has been a longtime supporter of organized labor.

[BOB] ABERNETHY: Long tradition of support of labor.

ECKSTROM: Right, and that’s really come back this week.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And I think that’s surprised a lot of people, because the church, the Catholic Church, had been perceived as really focusing more on issues like abortion, and so to see them come out and take a stand to say, yeah, we understand there are tough budget decisions, but workers’ rights and human dignity and the common good of all, including workers, is important, and the ability to organize is also a moral value, and that’s what the bishops were saying.

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Leaders from four Christian denominations are calling on Mississippi lawmakers to reject an Arizona-style immigration bill that would let officers check during traffic stops to see if a person is in the country illegally.

Bishops from the Catholic, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran and United Methodist churches in Mississippi said Friday residents must be willing to forgive immigrants who enter the United States without permission.

In an open letter to legislators and Gov. Haley Barbour, the bishops said the U.S. immigration system is “broken and outdated,” but should be reformed by the federal government, not by states.

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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared his Catholic religious practices a “private” matter yesterday and parried questions about whether he will continue to take Holy Communion after a Vatican consultant called it “sacrilegious” for him to be living with his girlfriend.

“It’s not something that I discuss in the political arena,” Cuomo said at St. Joseph’s College in Patchogue.

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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is a reentry program for inmates about ready to be released back to their communities. It’s funded by the state of Hawaii and the social ministry of the Catholic Archdiocese of Honolulu. Angela Anderson is one of the fortunate participants. She’s been serving time for drug abuse.

ANGELA ANDERSON: When I had got out of jail before, you know, I went directly back to drugs, because that’s really all there was. But here I got structure. I made great friends. You have classes that you have to attend to. You have to live to a schedule.

SEVERSON: What it does is lessen the odds that she’ll go back to prison. In 2009, the latest statistics available, there were 2.3 million Americans serving time behind bars, the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. Since the early 1970s, the prison and jail population has increased by 700 percent. Now, faced with the staggering costs of incarceration, about $55 billion a year, politicians are asking community and faith-based volunteers to help the reentry process for the hundreds of thousands of ex-cons who are coming home. The state of Hawaii is no exception….

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A first-of-its-kind federal survey of online access found that Americans in lower-income and rural areas often have slower Internet connections than users in wealthier communities.

he data, released Thursday by the Commerce Department, also found that 5 to 10 percent of the nation does not have access to connections that are fast enough to download Web pages, photos and videos.

Compiled in an online map that is searchable by consumers – assuming they have a fast enough broadband connection – the survey seems to confirm that there is a digital divide, something experts had suspected but lacked the data to prove.

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California’s controller said on Wednesday he has received more than four dozen tips about suspect financial practices by local governments and will ask the state legislature for power to open up cities’ books.

A group of California lawmakers has unveiled a package of bills to help State Controller John Chiang uncover financial abuses by local governments, seizing upon a scandal involving a city official pulling in nearly $800,000 a year in pay, and he is calling for its prompt review.

“This will allow me to go in and check to see if the books are as they state,” Chiang told Reuters in a phone interview.

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States that have borrowed billions of dollars from the federal government to cover the soaring cost of unemployment benefits would get immediate relief from the Obama administration under a plan to suspend interest payments for the next two years.

The proposal, which will be included in the budget request President Obama will send to Congress next week, would allow states to avoid raising taxes on employers to cover the payments – which are projected to total $3.6 billion through 2012, according to independent estimates.

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Gov. Nikki Haley managed to eliminate one of the three agency budget deficits she inherited, in part, by slashing 20 percent out of welfare-to-work checks provided to South Carolina’s neediest families.

Haley announced Monday that her team was able to wipe out a projected $29 million deficit at the Department of Social Services. But as the Republican governor finishes her first month on the job, two of her Cabinet agencies still are predicting that they’ll run out of money before the budget year ends June 30.

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Ohio public school teachers would pay a larger share of their retirement costs, work until they’re older and see pension benefits cut under changes approved Thursday that aim to keep their primary pension fund solvent by saving $10.9 billion.

The State Teachers Retirement System board approved a host of changes to the benefit program that serves the bulk of the pension fund’s 470,000 members. The changes must be approved by lawmakers and the governor.

Spokeswoman Laura Ecklar said the package marks the end of a two-year effort to find a way to keep the pension fund afloat for the long haul.

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[KATHY] LOHR: During the State of the State address, the governor said he would eliminate some 14,000 vacant jobs. He’s also calling for state agencies to reduce budgets by an average of 7 percent. That means cuts to higher education, Medicaid and services for the elderly. But Deal says there’s no other way.

Mr. [NATHAN] DEAL: Our state’s fortunes do not rise or fall on the size of state government.

LOHR: Georgia has been cutting its budget for years. Since 2009, the size of the budget has shrunk by 15 percent.

Alan Essig with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute says that’s caused a kind of budget fatigue here.

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Parents of the profoundly disabled are profoundly troubled.

Beginning April 1, Medicaid will cover a total of 75 occupational, physical and speech therapy sessions annually. The health insurance program for the poor and disabled now covers a combined 225 of those therapies a year.

The reductions will be retroactive to July 2010, meaning some families already will have reached their yearly maximum before the cuts officially take effect.

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Policy makers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers.

Unlike cities, the states are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court. Any effort to change that status would have to clear high constitutional hurdles because the states are considered sovereign.

But proponents say some states are so burdened that the only feasible way out may be bankruptcy, giving Illinois, for example, the opportunity to do what General Motors did with the federal government’s aid.

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Gov. Nikki Haley said the state is looking at an opportunity, not a problem, as it faces the need to slash the budget by another $1 billion this year.

Haley delivered her first State of the State address Wednesday night from the House chamber, warning that the cuts to the $5 billion budget might seem unfair, even callous, and they are going to hurt.

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Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.

But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

The factory closing in Devens, Mass., which Evergreen announced earlier this week, has set off political recriminations and finger-pointing in Massachusetts. And it comes just as President Hu Jintao of China is scheduled for a state visit next week to Washington, where the agenda is likely to include tensions between the United States and China over trade and energy policy.

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Police agencies around the USA soon could have a new tool in their crime-fighting arsenal: unmanned aerial vehicles inspired by the success of such drones on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Local governments have been pressing the Federal Aviation Administration for wider use of unmanned aircraft ”” a demand driven largely by returning veterans who observed the crafts’ effectiveness in war, according to experts at New Mexico State University and Auburn University. Police could use the smaller planes to find lost children, hunt illegal marijuana crops and ease traffic jams in evacuations of cities before hurricanes or other natural disasters.

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As our economic conditions continue to deteriorate, mentally disturbed people like Jared Loughner are the first to breakdown and lose it, but there will inevitably be many to follow. This tragedy is not an isolated incident. In just the past few days there have been two more incidents. A lobbyist, who was the wife of a White House adviser, was found dead in a burning car. A man upset over his Social Security benefits threatened to set fire to Senator Michael Bennet’s office and shoot his staff. There have been dozens of similar incidents over the past two years. From John Bedell, the man who opened fire on the Pentagon, to Joe Stack, the man who had a tax dispute and flew his plan into the Austin, Texas IRS building, an increasing number of Americans are beginning to resort to violence as a last desperate act of vengeance.

We can dismiss and write off all of this as just crazy people doing crazy things and go back to living with our heads in the sand, business as usual, or we can begin the urgent task of fixing a society that is severely out of balance.

The choice is ours.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

With only hours left before new state lawmakers were to take over, Illinois’s State Legislature narrowly approved early on Wednesday an increase of about 66 percent in the state’s income tax rate.

The vast size of the increase, the rarity of such increases here ”” the last one came two decades ago ”” and the hour of the vote (in the wee hours of Wednesday) all reflected the urgency and depth of this state’s fiscal crisis.

Even grudging supporters of the tax increase, which won no Republican support in a state capital controlled by Democrats, voiced a desperate sense of regret over the circumstances in which Illinois finds itself. State Representative Elaine Nekritz, a Democrat who voted for the increase, described her decision as an alternative “between bad and worse.” Another Democrat cautioned his colleagues: “We don’t have a better choice today.”

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Tucson Bishop Gerald Kicanas was thousands of miles away from the shooting rampage that rocked his Arizona diocese on Saturday (Jan. 8), but the emotional shock hit him hard.

“It broke me up,” said Kicanas, who was in Jerusalem attending a meeting of Catholic bishops on peace in the Holy Land. “I could not sleep. I just wanted to return home as soon as possible,” the bishop wrote to his spokesman.

The victims of Saturday’s shooting include a federal judge and devout Roman Catholic who attended Mass daily, and a 9-year-old girl who had received her First Communion at St. Odilia Parish in Tucson last year. Four other victims died and 14 were wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who police believe was the target of accused gunman Jared Lee Loughner.

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What made this rampage worse than others was the pall it cast over the freedom and ability to perform elected public service — the necessity for political officials to interact openly with their constituents, the need for the public to approach freely the people they send to office. Whatever his intent, Jared Lee Loughner and the rounds he fired took aim on this American form of democratic discourse and, in so doing, put a treasured right of all citizens in jeopardy.

When investigators executed a search warrant at Mr. Loughner’s home, they found an envelope with messages saying, “I planned ahead,” “My assassination” and the name “Giffords.” His YouTube videos contained rambling and incoherent passages, some of them about his becoming the treasurer of a new currency, his belief that he had powers of mind control and the need to fix “English grammar structure” in a congressional district he believed was mostly illiterate.

Newly installed Speaker of the House John Boehner, a Republican, was right Saturday when he said “an attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.”

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“Industrial relations” are back at the heart of politics””not as an old-fashioned clash between capital and labour, fought out so brutally in the Thatcherite 1980s, but as one between taxpayers and what William Cobbett, one of the great British liberals, used to refer to as “tax eaters”. People in the private sector are only just beginning to understand how much of a banquet public-sector unions have been having at everybody else’s expense…. In many rich countries wages are on average higher in the state sector, pensions hugely better and jobs far more secure. Even if many individual state workers do magnificent jobs, their unions have blocked reform at every turn. In both America and Europe it is almost as hard to reward an outstanding teacher as it is to sack a useless one.

While union membership has collapsed in the private sector over the past 30 years (from 44% of the workforce to 15% in Britain and from 33% to 15% in America), it has remained buoyant in the public sector. In Britain over half the workers are unionised. In America the figure is now 36% (compared with just 11% in 1960). In much of continental Europe most civil servants belong to unions, albeit ones that straddle the private sector as well. And in public services union power is magnified not just by strikers’ ability to shut down monopolies that everyone needs without seeing their employer go bust, but also by their political clout over those employers.

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Advocates for diabetes patients are voicing concerns that Medicaid cuts taking effect in February will reverse gains South Carolina has made over the past decade in managing diabetics’ health.

Doctors have treated diabetes aggressively in recent years, but cuts in the number of drugs Medicaid covers — reductions state health officials called difficult but necessary — might compromise that focus, they said.

The number of diagnosed cases of adult-onset diabetes has risen dramatically, but the rate of lower- extremity amputations has decreased, according to preliminary findings from the annual report of the Diabetes Initiative of South Carolina.

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An Ohio pension fund has sued Wells Fargo & Co to recover losses suffered when a bank that it bought put the fund’s money into a risky investment vehicle that failed.

The School Employees Retirement System of Ohio, represented by state Attorney General Richard Cordray, said it lost $29.6 million because a unit of Wachovia Corp mismanaged a securities lending program marketed as a “low-risk” way to boost returns.

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A study by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management calculates the combined underfunding of pensions in all municipalities at $574 billion. States have an estimated $3.3 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.

Nunes says 10 states will exhaust their pension money by 2020, and all but eight states will by 2030.

States’ troubles are becoming bigger. Hitherto, local governments have acquired infusions of funds from federal budget earmarks, which are now forbidden. Furthermore, states are suffering “ARRA hangover” – withdrawal from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the 2009 stimulus.

There are legal provisions for municipalities to declare bankruptcy. Some have done so. As many as 200 are expected to default on debt next year. There are, however, no bankruptcy provisions for states.

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South Carolina’s budget problems call for decisive action. And Gov.-elect Nikki Haley is working on a restructuring plan for state agencies that will produce badly needed savings. The Legislature should be preparing to join that effort when the session begins next month.

So far, Gov.-elect Haley has mainly recommended consolidation of Cabinet agencies to reduce overhead and limit administrative duplication. She also is looking at other state agencies largely controlled by legislatively appointed boards and commissions.

With a budget shortfall of $800 million looming, state leaders should do what they can to make cost reductions where possible, while preserving essential state services.

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In California, where foreclosures are more abundant than in any other state, homeowners trying to win a loan modification have always had a tough time.

Now they face yet another obstacle: hiring a lawyer.

Sharon Bell, a retiree who lives in Laguna Niguel, southeast of Los Angeles, needs a modification to keep her home. She says she is scared of her bank and its plentiful resources, so much so that she cannot even open its certified letters inquiring where her mortgage payments may be. Yet the half-dozen lawyers she has called have refused to represent her.

“They said they couldn’t help,” said Ms. Bell, 63. “But I’ve got to find help, because I’m dying every day.”

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What is more interesting about Ark Encounter is what it tells us about the paradoxes of American evangelicalism, a non-worldly belief system with a restlessly entrepreneurial and commercial spirit. The term “fundamentalism” generally denotes a comprehensively anti-modern movement. But this is only partly true. Far from being a counter to modernity, American fundamentalism often embraces it with far greater enthusiasm and finesse than its mainline competition.

Look at the effectiveness with which conservative evangelicalism has made use of television, radio and the Internet. Or consider the eagerness of “creationism” to claim the mantle of science, which is quite a different matter from rejecting modernity altogether. In commercial enterprises like the Christian music industry, or Ark Encounter, the packaging of products is the same as it is in the most successful secular businesses; only the content is different. Evangelicals assume that all such modern techniques can be redeemed through certain proper uses. The medium, in this view, is not the message.

Perhaps so. But it is also possible that there is no way for Ark Encounter to bring the Bible to life without demeaning or cheapening the very things it is intending to exalt. In that sense, the theme park may challenge not the proper separation of church and state as much as the proper separation of faith and commerce. Still, America’s robust commitment to religious liberty means allowing the widest possible latitude to such undertakings””and allowing criticism of them to flourish as well. Let the deluge begin.

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