On Labor Day, tens of thousands of people will be gathering for the coal-powered “Friends of America Rally” in Holden, WV. The point of the gathering is to rail against the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation. It will feature right-wing guests such as Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent (who once ranted about killing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), and is being pushed by mountaintop-removal mining company Massey Energy. Last week, Massey CEO Don Blankenship even recorded a video inviting people to attend the rally, saying they would learn about how “environmental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your jobs.” Watch it:

The sponsors for the rally are mostly regional oil, gas, and coal companies. However, the list also includes the Science and Public Policy Institute — a fringe climate-denial organization — and Verizon Wireless. CREDO Action recently launched a campaign calling on Verizon to drop its sponsorship. CREDO Political Director Becky Bond contacted Verizon’s Vice President of Corporate Communications Jim Gerace to inform him that that CREDO would be launching a campaign against Verizon. Gerace responded by disparaging Bond:

This is how our response is going over with the activists. Becky once lived in a tree for a while. At least now I know where the emails are coming from.

For the record, Bond never lived in a tree. Verizon’s vice president of federal government relations also sits on the board of the global-warming denier National Association of Manufacturers.

Blankenship recently gained attention because the Supreme Court rebuked him for buying West Virginia judges. He has called opponents of his coal “communists,” “atheists,” and “greeniacs” and labeled a cap and trade system a “Ponzi scheme.”

Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Laura Merritt told the Charleston Gazette that Verizon’s decision to sponsor the rally was made “at the local level to support the community.” “It wasn’t an effort to take a position on any particular issue,” she added. However, the pro-coal policies that Verizon is now sponsoring actually hurt communities in West Virginia. As the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has written:

The coal-dominated economy of West Virginia is a troubling example of the cruelty of coalocracy. Despite $118 million in coal-mining annual income, West Virginia has the nation’s lowest median household income, worst educational services, worst social assistance, the highest population with disabilities, and nearly a quarter of West Virginia children in poverty.

Interestingly, Verizon brags that “environmental stewardship is ingrained in Verizon’s heritage, and the company prides itself on having a positive influence on the environment in which it operates.” It has a whole page devoted to its “green initiatives.” Take action here and tell Verizon that if it really wants to be green, it needs to stop sponsoring global warming denial rallies.

According to a new report — “the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade” — labor protections in America “are failing significant numbers of workers.” 68 percent of the low wage workers who were interviewed for the report said they were subjected to pay violations in their previous work week alone. This included 26 percent who were paid less than the minimum wage and 76 percent who didn’t receive legally required overtime pay.

The researchers discovered that “the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay“:

“The conventional wisdom has been that to the extent there were violations, it was confined to a few rogue employers or to especially disadvantaged workers, like undocumented immigrants,” said Nik Theodore, an author of the study and a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “What our study shows is that this is a widespread phenomenon across the low-wage labor market in the United States.”

As Kevin Drum put it, “How many reports of mistreatment do we have to get before we finally figure out that labor violations are rampant in this country?” And the problem has only gotten worse during the recession. “[Wage theft is] definitely on the rise nationally because of the economic crisis,” says Ted Smukler, public policy director of Interfaith Worker Justice. “Employers are desperate to shave corners when their profits are going down, and some are just greedy.”

There are a few things that need to happen to begin to address this problem. First, the Labor Department’s effort to hire 250 more wage and hour investigators should be complemented by the Senate confirming the Labor Department nominees who are still stuck in no-man’s land. This will help put in place people willing to enforce the wage laws that are on the books, but were neglected under former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

Furthermore, as David Madland and Karla Walter pointed out, the administration should work with Congress “to increase maximum allowable fines” for labor violations, as “the civil and criminal penalties are simply too low to deter or even adequately punish lawbreakers.”

As Annette Bernhardt, an author of the study and policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project said, “these practices are not just morally reprehensible, but they’re bad for the economy.” And they’re also preventable, if the Labor Department actually makes a commitment to enforcing the law.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), should he stay on as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is reportedly considering “a regulatory reform bill that would create a single federal regulator for financial institutions, stripping supervisory powers away from existing agencies.” Consolidation of this sort would go beyond what the Obama administration is proposing, and is gaining support from both Democrats and Republicans on the Banking Committee.

However, the proposal is running into opposition from FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, who wrote in the New York Times yesterday that creating a single bank regulator “would endanger a thriving, 150-year-old banking system that has separate charters for federal and state banks.” “We can’t put all our eggs in one basket,” she added. And Bair has been joined in her opposition by Wells Fargo chief executive John Stumpf, who told Bloomberg News today that the idea is “a mistake”:

I think that’s a mistake…The dual banking system has served this country exceedingly well for 150 years or more…You have all different flavors and sizes of financial institutions. To have one place domiciled with all that, I think you’ve missed differing points of view.

Bair is protecting her agency’s turf and is rightly concerned with the big banks’ ability to capture a large regulator, to the detriment of smaller institutions. But Wells Fargo’s concern for smaller banks is more suspect, considering that it is the fourth largest bank in the country. Instead, Wells seems to be trying to preserve the current patchwork of regulatory agencies, which allows financial institutions to essentially “shop” for their regulator. As Felix Salmon put it:

The most corrosive aspect of the US regulatory infrastructure to date has been the ability of financial institutions to go regulator-shopping: that must be stopped. And the only way to stop it, in a world where AIG can end up being regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, is to have just the one regulator.

As Angie Litwin pointed out at Credit Slips, given that bank regulators “derive large portions of their budgets from fees assessed on the institutions they supervise, it’s no surprise” that they failed to step in and prevent the subprime boom. Indeed, regulators now have to entice banks to come under their supervision (in order to collect these fees), giving the regulators a perverse incentive to provide the best “deal” in terms of regulation — and institutions can always find a way to move to a new agency, taking their fee payments with them.

This is exactly what Countrywide Financial did in 2007, and under the lax oversight of the Office of Thrift Supervision it blew itself up with subprime mortgages. As the Washington Post reported, Countrywide saw ample reason to switch regulators:

[T]he Office of Thrift Supervision, promised more flexible oversight of issues related to the bank’s mortgage lending. For OTS, which depends on fees paid by banks it regulates and competes with other regulators to land the largest financial firms, Countrywide was a lucrative catch.

This is not how regulation should operate, and having one regulator would prevent it from happening. Bair may have her heart in the right place, but her position is aligning her with the big banks looking to mitigate the effect of the regulatory reform effort.