The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is revisiting a previous decision that denied graduate students who work as research assistants at private universities the right to organize and collectively bargain, drawing protests from prestigious private universities and their allies. In 2004, the NLRB prohibited the unionization of graduate-student assistants at private universities when it ruled that they were students, not employees of the university.

A NLRB regional director ruled last year, however, that some graduate assistants at New York University have “a dual relationship” that is “both academic and economic,” a decision the would make them employees and gave the NLRB an opening to revisit its decision. Private universities opposed that decision and, in briefs reviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, said giving labor rights to student workers would undermine the private graduate system:

“It is no exaggeration to state that the future of American private graduate education is at stake in these cases,” argued a brief submitted by Brown University, which faces the prospect of the board reversing a 2004 decision that prohibited the unionization of its graduate-student assistants.

The American Council on Education joined several other higher-education associations in arguing, “Students enroll in graduate school to complete their higher education, not to work for wages. Their relationship with the university is fundamentally one of a student and teacher, not master-servant.”

Brown’s claim that the system “is at stake” if the NLRB decides in favor of the student workers does seem to be an exaggeration, given that graduate student workers at public universities have had the right to organize and collectively bargain for decades, and those schools continue to grow and prosper. (Public graduate students are governed by state labor laws, not the NLRB.)

The ACE’s claim, meanwhile, that students shouldn’t have rights because they are students ignores that these students do, indeed, work for wages, a fact that would seem to grant them an economic relationship covered by labor law. The NLRB has also previously decided that other workers in graduate schools — such as apprentices — are subject to the National Labor Relations Act. Medical residents are also subject to labor law, though the ACE argues that their precedent does not apply because they have already graduated.

“Nobody who looks at the reality of the current university today can argue that graduate students are not employees,” Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research at Cornell University, told the Cornell Daily Sun in 2010. “Graduate students are used as workers in the University — they are hired to fill in wherever there are openings. The faculty doesn’t spend time teaching graduate students how to teach — they use them as employees to do the teaching for them.”

The tax cut extension package that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) brought up for a vote today did not include an Obama administration proposal to reset the estate tax to the 2009 level. Senate Republicans, along with a handful of Senate Democrats — including Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AR), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), and Kay Hagan (D-NC) — balked at including the measure.

The Obama administration’s estate tax parameters already kept all but the nation’s very wealthiest estates from owing any tax at all. In fact, by refusing the increase, the Senate will spend $119 billion, to preserve tax breaks for just 3,200 estates:

This year, the per-person exemption is $5.12 million and the top rate is 35 percent. Obama agreed to those parameters as part of a December 2010 deal with Senate Republicans that also extended expiring tax cuts and created a payroll tax cut.

Under those numbers, which Republicans want to extend, 3,600 estates would pay taxes, or fewer than 0.2 percent of estates, according the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.

Obama proposed a $3.5 million per-person exemption and a 45 percent top rate, returning to parameters that were in effect in 2009. That would require 7,200 estates, or about 0.3 percent, to pay taxes.

Even under the Obama administration’s proposal, just 0.3 percent of estates would be subject to the estate tax, all of them with estates larger than $3.5 million. Those estates that do owe tax will receive a $1.1 million tax break if the administration’s proposal is not adopted and the estate tax stays at its current level.

Meanwhile, the tax plan released by Senate Republicans would raise taxes on 20 million working families.

A survey of forty economists from across the ideological and partisan spectrum has concluded that on some of its most cherished issues, the Republican Party has simply taken leave of economic reality. For instance, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers noted that one of the results from the survey — run by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, which is hardly known for a left-wing slant — is an overwhelming agreement that the 2009 Recovery Act (i.e. the stimulus) brought down unemployment. But GOP leaders have spent years roundly denouncing the stimulus as a failure:

And while there was a bit more disagreement as to whether the benefits of the stimulus bill outweighed its costs, the bulk of the economists surveyed came down in the “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” camps. Other points from the survey’s respondents worth noting:

The nation needs new revenues. Contrary to nearly every Republican, the economists overwhelmingly agreed that the federal budget deficit cannot and should not be closed without increased tax revenue.

No gold standard. They roundly rejected the belief that a return to the gold standard would stabilize prices or lower unemployment. Enthusiasm for the gold standard made a significant comeback in Republican circles during the presidential primaries.

The “Laffer Curve” won’t help. Virtually all of them rejected the notion that cutting income tax rates would actually increase total tax revenue in future years.

Rethink the drug war. The respondents were also generally in favor of softer approaches to the nation’s drug problem.

While there were a few survey results that could be interpreted as hard on progressive causes as well, none struck at their heart in the same way as the positions taken on core Republican beliefs.

Struggling homeowners were supposed to receive $46 billion of federal aid under the 2009 Troubled Asset Relief Program, but a new auditor’s report shows that only 10 percent of funds from various federal housing programs under TARP have actually found their way to borrowers.

Federal dollars seem to reach big banks just fine, but spending on the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — the lynchpin of the Obama administration’s foreclosure prevention efforts — has been slow. Just $3 billion of the $22.7 billion obligated at the end of June has been spent, according to the report.

HAMP has been a remarkably lackluster program since its inception, with more borrowers getting booted out of it than receiving mortgage modification. Three years after its creation, fewer than one million homeowners have received a permanent loan modification. What’s more, many homeowners who enter the HAMP program end up owing back fees and late penalties to the bank if they fail to obtain a permanent modification.

According to Bloomberg News, HAMP is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to federal aid failing to reach homeowners:

One program, which allocates $2.7 billion in TARP funds to encourage lenders to write down or eliminate second liens when refinancing properties insured by the Federal Housing Administration, has not resulted in any removals of second liens, the report said.

The Treasury Department has allocated $8.1 billion for a program to allow borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth to refinance into loans insured by the FHA. Of that, $6.6 million has gone for administrative expenses, and 1,437 borrowers have benefited, the report said.

The U.S. auditor’s report also criticized the Treasury Department’s bungling of an aid program meant to assist families in states with the largest home-price drops. Of the $7.6 billion allotted for the program, only $351 million had been spent by the end of June.

– Steven Perlberg

Sandy Weill

While the financial supermarkets were “right for their time,” Weill said, times have changed and it is time to break up the banks to protect taxpayers and financial institutions:

WEILL: What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail. If they want to hedge what they’re doing with their investments, let them do it in a way that’s going to be market-to-market so they’re never going to be hit.

Watch it:

Later, Weill went even farther, explicitly saying the banks needed to be broken up. “I’m suggesting that they be broken up so that the taxpayer will never be at risk, the depositors won’t be at risk, the leverage of the banks will be something reasonable, and the investment banks can do trading, they’re not subject to a Volcker Rule, they can make some mistakes, but they’ll have everything that clears with each other every single night so they can be market-to-market,” Weill said.

Weill isn’t alone in his endorsement of separating commercial banking from riskier investment banking. A former Goldman Sachs trader made the case for it in his resignation letter and another former Citigroup CEO, John Reed, wrote a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission calling for breaking up the biggest banks.