Lanny is a partner in Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and was a registered lobbyist for Whole Foods in the first quarter of 2009 for the low low price of $40,000. Orrick filed a “termination report” on March 1 (PDF), but somehow Lanny was still trying to put together an anti-Employee Free Choice effort on behalf of Whole Foods and Starbucks in late March. Lanny wanted to see if he could bring everyone together and get them to agree to EFCA just without card check or binding arbitration or anything included in the original bill, which lasted about 48 hours until the Chamber landed on his head and Lanny bailed.

Workers returned Tuesday to the job at Stella D’Oro Biscuit Co. in the Bronx after a judge ordered the company reinstate the 136 employees who had remained strong throughout a brutal 11-month strike. But before they could even walk through the doors, they were greeted with the anti-union response by the company’s private equity firm owners, the 21st century’s mutation of the robber barons: Brynwood Partners announced it would shut down operations in October.

Roman Catholic members of Congress in both parties may want to check out the new papal encyclical. Republicans in particular may be surprised to learn that there’s more to charity than giving out scraps — it’s about ruling with justice. Minority Leader Boehner might want to take notes.

Don’t get me wrong. The “who will screw us on EFCA” merit badge will probably get passed around the Senate a few times before settling on someone (or more likely “someones”) who are politically safe from union retribution, and Diane Feinstein is top of the likely contender list. But I’m not sure this means what they think it means:BREAKING NEWS:

We hear it again and again, big corporations like WalMart paying lobbyists a forture to run campaigns about union thuggery on behalf of their fat corporate clients in an effort to defeat Employee Free Choice (EFCA). Because they care so very much about their workers.

If they’re worried about thuggery, maybe they ought to be looking in the mirror:

Stage, television, and screen actors have been famously unionized for decades, and the Screen Actors Guild just resolved a messy contract dispute with producers. So, it makes perfect sense that a new online campaign features forty-seven award-winning actors in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

QOTD:

“Dick Cheney is as much of an expert at helping America’s workers as he is on not shooting people in the face,” said AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale. “If Cheney wants to emerge and be the lead spokesman against the Employee Free Choice Act, I’ll help book his interviews.”

Labor will no doubt be disappointed by these sacrifices to the bill, but if it means getting something passed, they will probably be happy to make these concessions which satisfy the demands of critics like Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Jim Webb, Michael Bennet, Mark Udall and Ben Nelson.

Penny Pritzger, the finance chair of the Obama campaign who is now a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, has a somewhat different opinion of the Employee Free Choice Act than he does. She is joining together with other billionaires to fight bill, which would “make it easier for unions to organize hotels they own.” She has “told the president she is opposed to the measure

JoAnn Wypijewski, Robert Johnson, and Mark Brenner on EFCA, healthcare reform, the auto industry and the media coverage of the past week.