Paranoia: Walmart Desperate to Keep Further Documents Revealing Employee Surveillance Tactics From Being Made Public

(Gawker) - Last month, Bloomberg Businessweek published a big story on how Walmart tracks its employees to most effectively anticipate dissent and undermine potential organizers. The piece draws largely on documents produced in the course of discovery for a case before the National Labor Relations Board. (Walmart is accused of illegally firing labor activists.) Now, Walmart alleges, labor group OUR Walmart “intentionally disclosed documents marked and designated confidential.” The documents, according to Walmart, were protected by judicial order.

In its initial story, Bloomberg reported that OUR Walmart had provided the documents, which included “more than 1,000 pages of e-mails, reports, playbooks, charts, and graphs, as well as testimony from its head of labor relations at the time,” only “after the judge concluded the case in mid-October.”

Walmart filed a motion against OUR Walmart and the United Food and Commercial Workers union, with which OUR Walmart was until recently affiliated, on December 9th asking the NLRB not only to enter a “cease-and-decist” order but also, “absent some exculpatory explanation,” order the labor group to return the documents. According to Bloomberg, Walmart is also asking that the NLRB prevent OUR Walmart from “using, referencing, or relying on” the documents in future cases.

“We couldn’t imagine that Walmart would be happy about light being shined on these kind of tactics they’re using against their employees,” said OUR Walmart co-director Dan Schlademan. Whatever documents were marked confidential were marked so for the managers to whom they were originally addressed, he added.

“Walmart is trying to bully its way to bar any future documents” from being disclosed, Schlademan said. (Full Story)

Trump's doctor: Trump 'will be healthiest individual ever elected' president

- Washington (CNN) Donald Trump on Monday released a letter from his physician stating that the 69-year-old Republican presidential candidate's latest medical examination "showed only positive results."

Trump's physician of 25 years, Dr. Harold Bornstein, said Trump "has had no significant medical problems" and called the candidate's blood pressure and lab results "astonishingly excellent" in a signed statement Trump released publicly on Monday.

"If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency," Bornstein, an internal medicine and gastroenterology specialist who works at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, wrote in the letter dated December 4. (Full Story)

Russia is bracing for $30 oil in 2016

(cnnmoney) - Russia is planning for oil prices to drop to $30 per barrel in 2016.

The country's top finance official, Anton Siluanov, said the government must be prepared for prices to fall further in 2016 as the global glut grows and new supply -- for example from Iran -- enters the market.

"Everything indicates that low oil prices are likely to dominate next year. And it is possible that at some periods [the oil price] will be $30 per barrel," Siluanov was quoted as saying by Russian state-run news agencies.

That would spell more pain for Russia. Oil and gas exports make up almost half of government revenue.

Oil futures were trading at their lowest level in nearly seven years on Monday, sliding below $35 per barrel. (Full Story)

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Related: Copper, aluminum and steel collapse to crisis levels

Gas prices drop in time for holiday travel season

Money For Nothing: Finland Considers Monthly Payments For All As Social Welfare Alternative

(Forbes.com) - What if, instead of a series of complicated bureaucracies issuing welfare checks, food stamps, and tax credits, social benefits were distributed to everyone without regard to income or employment status?

That’s exactly what the government of Finland is contemplating. The Finnish government is investigating whether it might make good financial sense to make a tax-free monthly payment of about 800 euros ($871.86 US) to all adults in the country, regardless of income, employment status or qualification for other kinds of benefits. Those other benefits would largely be eliminated.

It’s far from being a done deal: at this point, it’s only a preliminary study. The study is being conducted by Kela, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, which operates under the supervision of Finland’s Parliament.

The study began in October at the request of the Finnish government. It’s a collaborative effort between the Research Department at Kela; University of Helsinki; University of Tampere; University of Eastern Finland; University of Turku; Sitra Innovation Fund Tänk (a Finnish think tank); and VATT Institute for Economic Research. The project is headed by Professor Olli Kangas, director of research at Kela.

The purpose of the study is to find new ways to improve the current system, including making it more efficient. The study, which has been referred to as “a universal basic income experiment,” has as a primary goal, incentivizing going back to work; some in the present government believe that the current system serves as a disincentive to look for work. Finland’s unemployment rate is awhopping 9.5%, about twice the rate in the United States (which currently sits around 5.0%). (Full Text)

​Walmart's China syndrome: The loss of U.S. jobs

(CBSNews) - One of the economic themes of the last few decades has been the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector. But how has that happened, and how is the world's largest retailer playing a part?

A new study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute takes a look at what it calls "the Walmart effect," by which it means the giant retailer's growing trade deficit with China. With Walmart (WMT) importing more cheap goods from China than it exports to that country, the retailer's actions may be implicated in an estimated loss of at least 400,000 U.S. jobs from 2001 to 2013, the study finds.

The issue isn't on Walmart's shoulders alone, of course, given that the total U.S. goods trade deficit with China amounted to $324.2 billion in 2013, of which Walmart represents a fraction of the imbalance. But with Walmart pledging to ramp up purchasing of U.S.-made goods in an effort to boost American manufacturing employment, the report raises questions about how far that pledge can go to offset a much bigger trade issue, and whether it's possible for American companies to bring back some of those lost jobs.

"Walmart has been making increasingly extensive claims it will support 'Made in America' efforts," said Robert E. Scott, the director of trade and manufacturing policy research at EPI. "Frankly the numbers are just tiny compared with reasonable estimates of the jobs displaced by Walmart's China trade."

Walmart, for its part, said in a statement that the EPI study is a "flawed economic analysis that assumes that imports equal job losses and does not take into consideration that countless jobs are added through the global supply chain, distribution and logistics, among other areas of the business."

Its pledge to buy American-made products will create 250,000 direct manufacturing jobs in the U.S., the retailer said, citing data from Boston Consulting Group.

Manufacturing jobs are the secret sauce to creating a strong middle class, especially among workers who lack college degrees. Employers paid workers in manufacturing jobs an average of almost $34 an hour in wages and benefits at the end of 2013, or a premium of almost 9 percent compared with all other jobs, according to the Manufacturing Institute, an affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers.

But American manufacturing jobs have been gutted during the past four decades, falling from a high point in 1977 when the sector represented 22 percent of nonfarm payroll jobs to about 9 percent today, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Importing cheap goods from China is legal, of course, and Walmart shareholders could argue that the company is acting in the best interests of investors and its own employees: if it failed to take advantage of changes in global trade, then it could find itself displaced in a competitive retailing market. And many of those Chinese-made goods are produced by U.S. corporations with factories there.

Behind Walmart and other retailers' imports of Chinese goods is another, perhaps bigger, issue: the trade policies of both the U.S. and China. (Full Text)

Majority of U.S. renters are older than 40, according to study

(denverpost) WASHINGTON — The majority of U.S. renters are now older than 40, a fundamental shift over the past decade that reflects the lasting damage of the housing crash and an aging population.

This finding in a report released Wednesday by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies overturns the assumption that the rental boom is only the result of twenty-somethings flocking to hip urban centers.

Single-family houses are a growing share of rentals. And affordability problems are mounting as rents rise faster than wages, while apartment construction increasingly targets tenants with six-figure incomes.

Nearly 51 percent of renters have celebrated their 40th birthday, according to the report's analysis of Census Bureau data. That amounts to 22.4 million households.

A decade ago when the housing bubble peaked in 2005, 47 percent of renters — or 16.4 million households — were older than 40. Their share was 43 percent in 1995.

The increase in older renters corresponds with a surge in foreclosures after the housing bubble popped. Since the 2008 financial triggered by the housing bust, there have been roughly 6 million completed foreclosures, according to CoreLogic, a property data firm.

Many of these are former owners who have transitioned to renting.

"Middle-aged households in particular bore a big brunt of the housing crash," said Christopher Herbert, managing director of Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Herbert also noted sharp increases in the number of renters between the ages of 55 and 69 during the past 10 years.

During that same period, the United States has added a total of 9 million renters — including younger millennials recent out of college.

But demand has outpaced supply and caused prices to rise. Rents increased 7 percent between 2001 and 2014 after adjusting for inflation, while incomes fell 9 percent, the report said.

The result is that a larger number of Americans must devote more than 30 percent of their income to rent, a level that the government considers to be financially burdensome. Over the past decade, that number has jumped from 14.8 million to 21.3 million, or 49 percent of all renters.

Even people with decent incomes between $30,000 and $44,999 can't keep up with the rent in the wealthiest markets. More than 70 percent of renters at this income level are classified as financially burdened in Washington, DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City and Miami.

"We've gotten ourselves into a deep hole — and it's not going to be easy to get out of it," Herbert said. "We expect the affordability problem will persist." (Full Text)

Ohio Man Charged With Using Internet to Threaten Lives of US Military

(voiceofamerica) The Justice Department indicted an Ohio man Tuesday on charges of using social media to solicit the murders of U.S. military members.

Terrence McNeil was arrested last month and faces as many as 75 years in prison if he is convicted.

"We owe it to our servicemen and women to protect their safety at home after they fought abroad to protect our freedom," U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach said Tuesday. "The defendant is charged with urging harm to our men and women in uniform and will now answer for those threats."

McNeil is accused of using three different popular social media sites - Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr - to boast of his support for Islamic State. He also used Tumblr to publish the names, photographs, and addresses of 100 purported U.S. military personnel, including one who he says killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

McNeil allegedly encouraged other extremists to behead the Americans in their own homes and stab them to death in the streets, claiming the United States is at war with Islam.

The Justice Department says while it aggressively defends the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right of free speech, McNeil went "far beyond free speech." (Full Text)