Harold Meyerson

Big business is beginning to move its money around again. In just the past couple of weeks, Comcast has bought the remaining stake in NBC Universal from General Electric. With all that newfound cash, GE is buying back stock and upping its dividends to shareholders. Warren Buffett has bought the world’s largest ketchup stash; US Airways and American Airlines have agreed to merge. Meanwhile, Apple, so far an exception to this rule, is sitting on $137 billion but has been sued by a hedge-fund operator who wants more and better dividends.

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Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the status of the undocumented produced a united front of Republican support for legalizing those immigrants, but not allowing them to become citizens. Well, an almost united front.

As Kitty Felde of Los Angeles public radio staton KPCC reported, one GOP Committee member dissented from his peers’ halfway-house stance. Darrell Issa, the sole Republican committee member from California, told Felde that he believes the undocumented should be allowed to become citizens. “I believe that that’s the inherently American thing to do,” he said.

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House Republicans convened their first hearing on immigration reform on Tuesday and made clear that they were scared to death of immigrants actually getting the vote. Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia set the tone when he made clear he was looking for a mid-range position somewhere between deporting and granting citizenship to the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. A nice, safe legal “resident” status, he suggested, never to be upgraded to that of citizen and voter.

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The walking, talking, governing refutation of the notion that there are no second acts in American lives is on a roll in California. “I’ve never been more excited,” Gov. Jerry Brown says, “and this is my 11th year on the job.”

Brown, 74, has ample reason for excitement. After a calamitous recession (inland California was the epicenter of the subprime quake) and nearly a decade of record deficits and legislative gridlock, Brown has come up with a budget that will put the Golden State into surplus territory without requiring further cuts.

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Is China moving ahead of the United States on worker rights? According to a report on Monday’s Financial Times, it may be doing just that.

The FT reports that Foxconn, which employs 1.2 million Chinese workers who make the bulk of Apple’s products, along with those of Nokia, Dell, and other tech companies, has decided to allow its workers to hold elections to select their union leaders. This is a radical departure from past practice in China, where unions are run by the government—that is, the Communist Party—which customarily selects the union leaders. Often, the leaders selected under this system are actually the plant managers.

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Atop the list of landmark laws that conservatives have never particularly warmed to are two that established fundamental rights for workers and consumers: the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which provided employees a legal path to form unions, and the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, which established a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to rein in banks’ abusive treatment of depositors and mortgage holders. Conservatives have never had the votes or the gumption to repeal these statutes. But now they can essentially neuter these laws.

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