Attendants who escort disabled passengers at O’Hare International Airport often earn less than minimum wage based on mangement’s extremely dubious assumption that the passengers will make up the difference in tips, Dave Jamieson reports for the Huffington Post:

CHICAGO, Ill. – Every day she goes to work at O’Hare International Airport, Elda Burke faces the same dilemma.

Burke, 30, works as a passenger attendant at the airport, escorting the elderly and disabled to and from their gates by wheelchair. Even though the airlines describe this as a free service, Burke’s employer has her working partly for tips, which is why her base pay is a low $6.50 an hour, somewhat like a restaurant server’s, rather than the typical Illinois minimum wage of $8.25.

But unlike diners at a restaurant, many of the passengers Burke will be escorting on their holiday travels this week won’t realize she’s working for tips – and by federal law, she won’t be allowed to tell them.

“We cannot say anything,” Burke says. “If we do that, they can fire us.”

Did you know that tipping airport attendants is customary? I didn’t. Maybe we don’t know because the attendants are forbidden to tell anyone that they work for tips. Talk about a Catch-22.

[Photo credit: Dan Shouse, Creative Commons.]

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has a modest proposal: Put poor children to work cleaning their own schools and fire the unionized janitors who currently clean them.

“This is something that no liberal wants to deal with,” Gingrich said. “Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.

“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model,” he said. “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.” [POLITICO]

On Friday, Gingrich described child labor laws as “truly stupid,” which seems to imply that he wants to change them. Yet he later told Amy Gardner of the Washington Post that he doesn’t want to repeal child labor laws, he just wants to put poor kids to work as cut-rate janitors for 20 hours a week. There’s no indication that Gardner challenged Gingrich on this apparent reversal.

Newt also wants to abolish food stamps and public housing. His solution for changing the “culture of poverty” is to enlist poor kids as scullery maids while their more prosperous classmates enjoy free time. Newt predicts that enforced servitude will make the poor kids proud of themselves and their schools.

Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post describes Gingrich’s idea to replace janitors with poor kids as “unconventional,” which is an awfully generous way of putting it. She notes that, while other Republicans have flirted with relaxing wage and hour laws for teenagers, “Gingrich’s suggestion that children start working as early as age nine goes far beyond what most other Republicans are proposing.” Indeed.

Newt Gingrich is not a serious candidate. He is a buffoon and a meanspirited crank. He currently commands a bare plurality of support in the crowded race for the GOP nomination. He’s not the first fringe candidate to hog the spotlight while the Republicans work through their issues and crown Mitt Romney.

If Newt’s medieval policy proposals weren’t enough to discredit him, his checkered ethics record should count him out. His entire campaign staff already quit once. He’s just clawing his way back into the public eye to capitalize briefly on Hermain Cain’s slide in the polls.

As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow famously explained, Gingrich has been flirting with running for president for decades. His “presidential ambitions” are just a marketing ploy to keep him relevant in the eyes of his lobbying clients and direct mail donors. After all, Newt can’t dine out on being the disgraced former Speaker of the House forever.

Why do the media insist on treating Gingrich’s campaign more seriously than he does?

[Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons.]

• A terrorism expert, an ex-CIA agent, a Republican operative, and a Kansas City lawyer tried to land a >$10 million consulting gig with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi during the waning days of his rule, according to documents discovered after Qaddafi’s fall and published online, Scott Shane and Penn Bullock report in the New York Times.
• Peter Aldhous of the New Scientist compares the twitter networks of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
• 99 Portraits for the 99%, photos by Steven Greaves in GOOD.
• Senators grilling the FTC commissioner on proposed childhood obesity prevention guidelines took big bucks from the Big Food, writes Nancy Watzman of the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

The NYPD cleared Zuccotti Park in a surprise raid early Tuesday morning on the orders of Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Subway stations near the occupation site were closed prior to the raid in an apparent attempt to prevent protesters from mobilizing their allies to defend the occupation, as they did last month.

The authorities did their best to ensure that the raid took place in a news blackout. The city even closed the air space over Lower Manhattan to keep news helicopters away. Journalists from AP and the Daily News were arrested as they tried to cover the eviction.

James Downie of the Washington Post writes:

Bloomberg’s brazenness has only increased during the morning. At 6:30 a.m., Judge Lucy Billings issued an injunction “requiring the protesters to be readmitted to Zuccotti Park with their tents,” but Bloomberg has ignored the court order and kept the park closed. Protesters have marched to Zucotti Park, but are being barred from entrance despite displaying that court order to the police on site. At this time, the mayor’s office has not explained why it is ignoring the court order.

Most disturbingly, the NYPD sought to block any and all press from covering this eviction. On the ground, reporters were stopped at the barricades and refused entrance. Numerous journalists reported that cops refused to let them in, even pushing reporters away; reporters even Tweeted about getting arrested. In the air, NYPD helicopters refused to allow CBS News helicopters to film the eviction from above. As for the camera already in the park-OWS’s livestream-the police simply blocked it with a pile of torn-up tents.

Later in his post, Downie zeros in on the seemingly contradictory rationales for this morning’s action. Did Bloomberg decide to clear the park because the owner, Brookfield Properties, asked him to? Or was it because the occupation was a health hazard? Or, because some protesters were breaking the law? The mayor’s scattershot statement touched on all of these themes without making a convincing case for any of them.

Zuccotti Park is open to the public 24 hours a day, but Brookfield rules forbid camping or sleeping there.

As Downie notes, the occupiers have been cleaning the park throughout their stay. The mayor cited no evidence of any health or safety hazard posed by the tents themselves. Note that Zuccotti Park is a concrete plaza, so the fire hazard seems minimal.

Bloomberg did not explain why the press were kept away from Zuccotti Park this time. Nor did he attempt to justify the NYPD’s decision to discard Zuccotti Park’s >5500-volume People’s Library.

Update: At least some of the books are safe in City custody on 57th Street.

[Photo credit: Amanda Farrah, Creative Commons.]