How Union Contracts Get Covered In The Media

From the ever municipal union-friendly NY Post:

A day after the MTA offered its workers a new contract with retroactive pay, Mayor de Blasio insisted the deal doesn’t set a precedent for the city’s ongoing negotiations with its unions.

“We have a very different reality here — we have our fiscal circumstances. We have a separate history in terms of labor relations than that which state and MTA has,” the mayor said Friday at a press conference in Brooklyn.

“So we’re going to do things our own way with our partners in municipal labor.”

Chuck Brecher, research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, agreed that the proposed MTA deal — an 8 percent raise spread over five years — doesn’t directly impact the mayor’s options.

“He doesn’t have to be bound by any other model, and to the extent there’s been pattern bargaining, the pattern is usually what’s happened to other city unions rather than state,” Brecher said.

He estimated that if the city were to follow in the MTA’s footsteps the tab this year would run about $3.5 billion — and that doesn’t even include teachers-union demands for retroactive pay dating back to 2009.

The mayor has said previously there’s no way the city could afford to pay full retroactive pay to all 152 unions that have been working under expired contracts.

Ah, but when the state pattern was the old CSEA contract of 4% over 5 years, with three years of zeroes and health care concessions, that's when the editorial boards thought de Blasio should follow the state pattern (even though, as this Post article points out, pattern bargaining is relegated to what happens in city contracts, not state contracts.)

Funny how that is.

Even funnier is how the the MTA/TWU 100 deal is being talked about as if it's some grand giveaway, even though, as NYC Educator points out here, the MTA contract actually leaves TWU 100 workers a little bit behind inflation, so it's not that swell a deal at all.

Sure, the TWU contract is better than the CSEA contract pattern that came before, but it's still not replete with a "bunch of new goodies" as the Post's resident Ayn Randian specialist Nicole Gelinas says it is.

Somehow we've gotten to this point in American culture where any contract that pays union workers just below the rate of inflation, doesn't shove too many onerous work rules on them, and only nails them with a half percent in health care concessions is "full of goodies."

Meanwhile on Wall Street, the criminals at Bank of America and Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase continue to lose money hand over fist due to bad bets and/or criminal penalties lodged by the feds for fraudulent activity and yet, they still keep paying themselves more money.

Funny how that it is too.
 
Can't wait to see the Nicole Gelinas piece criticizing that.

Oh, right - that's the "free market".

You know, the one with the Too Big To Fail banks who took all those government bailouts after nearly taking the world economy to total collapse.

Citigroup's Pandit Belongs In Jail

Another day, another allegation of wrongdoing by one of the Masters of the Universe:

Outspoken bank analyst Michael Mayo turned up the heat on a long-simmering dustup between himself and Citigroup's top brass.

In a one-page research note yesterday, Mayo accused Citi CEO Vikram Pandit of breaking Wall Street securities law only months after taking the helm of the bank in early 2008.

Mayo's accusations center on recently unearthed records that show that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency sent a letter to Citi on Feb. 14, 2008, informing the bank that the regulator harbored serious concerns about its internal risk controls.

Despite the letter, Pandit signed documents vouching for the integrity of the firm's internal controls and its public filings just days later.

According to Sarbanes-Oxley rules, both Pandit and Citi's chief financial officer at the time, Gary Crittenden, are required to sign off on Citi's publicly released financial records.

Merely eight months later, Citi accepted a $20 billion lifeline from Uncle Sam, which included a government agreement to guarantee $300 billion in dicey mortgage securities.

"The failure to highlight any disagreements or concerns on valuations and controls by Citi's primary regulator seems to us like a breach of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements to formally vouch for the company's financials," Mayo wrote.

In a statement Citi said its actions were "appropriate" at the time.

"Citi maintains rigorous disclosure controls and procedures to support its CEO and CFO certifications," said Citi spokeswoman Shannon Bell.

"These controls and procedures were followed in connection with the filing of the 10K in February 2008, and Citi's certifications were entirely appropriate," the spokeswoman added.

The three-year-old OCC report has come to light after the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission recently released a 545-page report and reams of documents obtained as a part of its year-long investigation into the roots of the financial crisis.

Mayo told The Post that the new revelation raises questions about Citi's current risk management practices.

"We've got ongoing concerns about Citi's risk management," he said.

Is Pandit in jail?

Nope - he's getting a raise:

Four of Citigroup’s top executives will receive a total of nearly $12m in cash if the bank’s core operations earn a total of $12bn over the next two years, in a profit-sharing scheme that has raised eyebrows among some corporate governance experts.

John Havens, Citi’s second-in-command below the chief executive Vikram Pandit, stands to earn at least $5.2m, if Citi hits the profit target, while Manuel Medina-Mora, the head of the bank’s consumer unit and of its Latin America operations, could earn $2.7m. Alberto Verme, chief executive of Citi’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is in line for a $2.3m pay-out while John Gerspach, the finance chief, could get $1.7m.

The payments will be tied to the performance of Citicorp, the group’s core operations, and exclude the earnings or losses recorded by Citi Holdings, the unit that houses non-core assets and businesses to be divested.

The awards are part of US banks’ drive to tie more of their executives’ compensation to long-term performance as regulators push Wall Street to reform its pay structures. The Citi executives will receive two-thirds of their awards in January 2013, with the rest payable a year later.

Silly, RBE, expecting accountability for a Master of the Universe.

Maybe if Pandit were a teacher...

If Obama Were A NYC School, He'd Be On The Closure List

President Accountability appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to award himself a B+ for his first year in office.

Sorry, but I beg to differ.

First, let's note that Accountability's signature domestic policy, health care reform, is heading for ignominious defeat. Most people hate the reform proposals (tonight's NBC News/WSJ poll has 32% favoring Obama's reform measures and 47% opposing them) and liberals and progressives in particular think the wishy-washy president caved to moderates and conservatives to create a health care reform proposal that is simply awful. It forces those without health insurance to buy insurance, but doesn't provide any mechanism like a public option or Medicare buy-in to help keep costs down for them. So essentially health care reform garners 33 billion more customers for the health insurance industry, but does little to hold down costs. Maybe the worst thing that could happen for Dems is if this thing does pass. The only thing worse than doing nothing is passing a bad bill that people hate.

Next, let's look at the economy Obama thinks he's turned around. Unemployment remains at 10%, long term unemployment is even worse, the national debt has skyrocketed, and Obama's stimulus package has done too little to add the necessary number of jobs per month to turn things around. Foreclosures continue to rise and are not expected to peak until 2011 and again, Obama's foreclosure plan has been a dismal failure. On the financial front, it's true the punch bowl is back for the boys on Wall Street and the financial markets are doing quite well. But Wall Street is taking Main Street to the cleaners and Obama is helping them to do it. Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture describes the latest Wall Street/Obama administration outrage:

The ongoing transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1% continues unabated.

The Treasury Department, via the IRS, has made a terrible deal with Citigroup for TARP repayment: They repay $20 billion in TARP money, and in exchange we give them $38 billion in tax abatements.

...

The looting of the Treasury, begun in panic under George W. Bush, continues in ignorance under Barack W. Obama.

As Matt Tiabbi wrote in the latest Rolling Stone, Obama has done everything in his power to make sure the boys on Wall Street have been able to enrich themselves at the public trough while failing to get any meaningful reform passed. He didn't campaign on these Wall Street-friendly policies, but he certainly has governed this way:

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Now maybe Obama thinks he deserves a B+ for 10% unemployment, a record debt, trillion dollar bailouts to Wall Street without any meaningful reform in exchange, and a health care reform measure that only a health care industry executive could love, but I have to tell you, if he were a school under Arne Duncan's command, he'd be slated for "turnaround" via closure, not the merit pay President Accountability seems to think he deserves.