Wells Fargo, Boeing, Others Reward Employees After Tax Bill Passage
Big businesses Wednesday announced plans to increase employee and benefits plans after a sweeping GOP tax plan that slashes the corporate tax rate made it through Congress. Wells Fargo, Fifth Third Bancorp, Boeing, Comcast, and AT&T all reportedly unveiled the good news.
AT&T announced it would give more than 200,000 workers a special $1,000 bonus to celebrate the signing of the tax-cut bill. The company also announced plans to invest an additional $1 billion in the United States in 2018
Fifth-Third Bancorp will raise the minimum wage of its workforce to $15 per hour — a move that'll increase the payout to 3,000 of its workers who make less than that. Axios reported the company made $1.5 billion in profit last year.
Wells Fargo will up its minimum wage to $15 an hour, and also will allocate $400 million in donations to community and nonprofit organizations in 2018.
Boeing Company said it's "still studying all of the provisions of the new legislation," but has committed $300 million for charitable giving, employee development programs and "workplace of the future" facilities and infrastructure enhancement.
Comcast NBCUniversal said the company will award $1,000 in bonuses to more than 100,000 eligible frontline and non-executive employees, Axios reported. It'll also spend $50 billion over the next five years to improve and extend its broadband plant and capacity
Press Reaction to GOP Tax Bill Passage
CNN and other left-wing media outlets have been attacking President Trump over the tax bill, but if the economy ends up booming, it’s going to be hard to keep that anti- Trump rhetoric going.
The War on Christmas Continues: Court OKs Ban On Religious Christmas Ads
A federal appeals court has denied the Archdiocese of Washington’s bid to force the city’s public transportation agency to display its Christmas ads.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an order Wednesday suggesting the agency could lawfully refuse to run the archdiocese’s explicitly religious holiday advertisement. The Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA), the agency which administers bus and subway service in the D.C. metro area, does not run ads that promote religious observance. The archdiocese claims the policy is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
The proposed ad promotes a Catholic holiday campaign called “Find the Perfect Gift,” which encourages participation in various forms of Christmas observance.
The order, issued by a three-judge panel, explains that the archdiocese failed to show WMATA’s policy favors secular holiday views over religious ones. Though WMATA excludes religious groups promoting Christian Christmas practice, the agency has not run ads expressing secular views about the holiday, meaning no viewpoint discrimination has taken place.
“[The archdiocese] has not come forward with a single example of a retail, commercial, or other non-religious advertisement on a WMATA bus that expresses the view that the holiday season should be celebrated in a secular or non-religious manner,” the order reads.
Supreme Court precedent allows the government to impose reasonable limitations on speech and expression in certain public spaces like transportation hubs.
According to the archdiocese complaint, the Perfect Gift campaign aims to “share a simple message of hope, welcoming all to Christmas Mass or in joining in public service to help the most vulnerable in our community during the liturgical season of Advent.” To accomplish that, the website provides Mass times and venues for giving to those in need.
The WMATA says that they will not run the ad because they say it does not fit their guidelines. “Advertisements that promote or oppose any religion, religious practice or belief are prohibited.”
However, in the past, the WMATA ran controversial ads before Christmas in 2008 asking “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake.”
After student hangs Kate Steinle posters, university’s bias response office launches probe
A student at the University of California San Diego, Gregory Lu, has been contacted to report to its Office for the Prevention of Harassment & Discrimination after hanging pro-Kate Steinle posters across the campus.
On the evening of Dec. 7, Gregory Lu hung 150 posters of Steinle’s smiling face with the words “She had dreams too” in highly traversed areas across the UCSD campus that other students typically hang items on, such as bulletin boards and the free speech area.
The day after Lu hung the posters, all of them had been taken down.
Four days after Lu hung the posters, an investigator with the Office for the Prevention of Harassment & Discrimination emailed Lu asking to meet with him.
“Our office received an online incident report and I would like to schedule a time to speak with you about it. Are you free this week by phone or in person,” the investigator asked in his email, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.
Lu said he replied seeking more information about the meeting, which has yet to take place, and has been in contact with an attorney.
Lu added he feels certain the bias complaint stems from the Steinle posters, noting that as he put them up a couple students followed him around and watched his every move.
The same day Lu was contacted by the Office for the Prevention of Harassment & Discrimination, the UC San Diego College Democrats had also called the posters “racist propaganda” targeting the “undocumented community” in a statement posted on their Facebook page. It went on to describe the posters as “displays of hate.”
Over 90% of America’s Top Colleges Regulate Campus Free Speech
Over 90 percent (90.9%) of the America’s top colleges maintain policies regulating campus free speech, with one third employing severely restrictive policies, according to a study released Tuesday.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reported in its annual end-of-year analysis on campus speech and harassment policies—what FIRE terms “speech codes”—found that over half of the 461 schools included in FIRE’s study continue to use methods that have some “chilling effect” on expression.
One in nine campuses continue to preserve “free speech zones,” or limited strips of campus to which administrators at public institutions restrict demonstrations, pamphleting, and other public expressions of views, according to the report. These zones can make up less than 1 percent of a campus, according to FIRE.
Samantha Harris, vice president of policy research at FIRE, said such policy is “blatantly unconstitutional.”
The U.S. Justice Department has publicly supported students who have filed suits against their colleges zoning guidelines, and the state legislatures of Colorado, Missouri, Arizona, Virginia, Kentucky, and Utah have all approved bills this year banning zones at public universities. Yet, there has been no tidal wave in eradicating the zones policies.
"Schools, understandably, need to maintain order, and prior restraint policies are attractive and effective," said Harris. "It's the path of least resistance."
Students should be on alert for language in student handbooks banning "offensive speech," a rule banning all spontaneous protest activity, or requirement that students receive prior approval for all club activity. "The more broad, the more restrictive," Harris offered as a rule of thumb.
U.S. life expectancy falls for second straight year — as drug overdoses soar
Life expectancy in the United States fell for the second year in a row in 2016 — and it’s clear the epidemic of drug overdoses is at least in part to blame, government researchers said Thursday.
Overall life expectancy for a baby born in 2016 fell to 78.6 years, a small decline of 0.1 percent, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) team found.
At the same time, mortality from drug overdoses rose by 21 percent. “This was the first time life expectancy in the U.S. has declined two years in a row since declines in 1962 and 1963,” the NCHS, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement.
Life expectancy is affected by mortality rates, but life expectancy calculations are forward-looking projections, while mortality rates are based on current factors.
The number of people who died — not the rate — went up in 2016.More than 2.7 million people died in the U.S. in 2016, with a total of 31,618 more deaths than in 2015.
The NCHS found that 63,600 people died of drug overdoses in 2016.
The death rate from drug overdoses rose 18 percent a year from 2014 to 2016, the team reported. In 1999, 6.1 per 100,000 people died from drug overdoses. That rate rose to 19.8 per 100,000 in 2016.
The Male life expectancy fell from 76.3 years in 2015 to 76.1 in 2016, while female life expectancy stayed steady at 81.1, the NCHS said.
Word of the Day: Jejune |
