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Cognitive dissonance in the Republican Party is evident in the way they appear to believe that benefits or actions they would deny to other people are perfectly all right when only Republicans receive them.  An excellent example will be found HERE.  Two Republicans, Mark Sanford and Andre Bauer currently serve as Governor and Lt. Governor of South Carolina.  We are all well aware of Mark Sanford’s notorious shenanigans, but Andre Bauer has been eclipsed by the Governor, as is often the case with lieutenant governors. (Quickly:  do you know who is the lieutenant governor of your state?)
 
So Andre Bauer, who was himself a recipient of free lunches, would deny them to other people’s children.  He blamed his speech on his grandmother who he claimed taught him that selfishness was a virtue.  Isn’t that a little like, “the devil made me do it?”  And he was reportedly twice stopped for speeding, once for driving over 100 mph in a 70 mph zone.  He said he didn’t realize how fast he was going!  That is reckless and irresponsible behavior.  It is a driver’s duty to know how fast the car is going.  Mindless control of one’s car is akin to mindless control of one’s mouth and mindless performance of duties in political office. 
 
Once again we are reminded of Colin Powell’s expressed regret that we lack a sense of shame.  Regardless of which political party we belong to, we need to resolve that the candidates we nominate to run and the leaders we elect will exemplify the highest virtues in their personal and public conduct; that is what leadership should be.  How can we expect our children to grow up respecting the law when they see that disrespect for the law and for the rights of others and for personal discipline apparently leads to some measure of “success?”  And let us never forget that we are known by the company we keep.  That is why I left the Republican Party, because I didn’t wish to be identified with the likes of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other lawbreakers.
 
In all honesty, I supported Richard Nixon in his first run for the presidency, believing him to be an exponent of Quaker values.  But I have long admitted that was my error, and I have since learned to be more selective.  I just wish that everyone else would be as diligent in their appraisal of political candidates. 

Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, Pa.

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 Note bolded quotations dealing directly with labor issues:

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author

 While I’m loathe to write a top-ten list, if only for fear of falling short of Dave Letterman’s legendary bit, I’m making an exception in this first week of 2010 — a moment when we get to not only make New Year’s resolutions, but resolutions for the new decade. As we make those prospective pledges, let’s take a moment to look back at the Top Ten Quotations from the last ten years — the ones telling us some painful truths about our country, society and worldview; the ones that might inform us of what we need to do as we move forward:

10. “They frankly own the place.” — Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. in 2009 admitting the taboo about banks’ influence in Congress.

9. “Haven’t we already given money to rich people … Shouldn’t we be giving money to the middle?” — President George W. Bush in November 2002, acknowledging to advisers that he knew his tax cuts were giveaways to the super-wealthy.

8. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” — Anti-health care protester at an August 2009 congressional town hall meeting in South Carolina — the single most succinct sign that our country has become an Idiocracy. 

7. “We did this for the show.” — Falcon Heene on Oct. 15, 2009, telling CNN that the Balloon Boy chase was a hoax. The declaration demonstrated that the media‘s 24-7 knee-jerk sensationalism is irresponsible and proved that America‘s culture of celebrity aspiration is completely out of control.

6. “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know they’re some things we do not know. But there’re also unknown unknowns; the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Feb. 12, 2002, effectively telling us that the government had no idea what it was doing by invading Iraq.

5. “Bring ‘em on.” — President George Bush on July 2, 2003, daring al-Qaida to attack U.S. troops — yet more proof that the elite defines “toughness” as politicians flippantly sacrificing young American lives for Washington’s hubristic ideologies.

4. “The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.” — Daniel Fass, chairman of Obama’s financial-industry fundraising party on Oct. 19, 2009, insisting that despite wrecking the economy and then being handed trillions of bailout dollars, Wall Street is a victim.

3. “$500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus.” — Wall Street compensation consultant James Reda on Feb. 3, 2009, giving the New York Times a good example of just how totally out of touch the super-rich really are.

2. “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” – President Obama on December 22, 2009, expecting the public to forget that his presidential campaign platform explicitly promised to pass health care legislation giving all Americans “the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.”

1. “It doesn’t matter.” — Vice President Dick Cheney on Nov. 5, 2006, referring to polls repeatedly showing the majority of Americans oppose the Iraq War — a sign the ruling class truly does not care about the demands of the public. 

These epigrams expose a nation that has internalized and accepted the forces of avarice, corruption, dishonesty, incompetence and insensitivity. Some of them are darkly funny, some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad — but all of them are warnings. Whether we listen to them or not will be the difference between repeating the last decade’s folly or learning from it. 

Here’s to resolutions for the new decade that finally choose the latter.

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David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

By David Sirota
Author of “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt”

Last week, I appeared on Fox News to discuss Barack Obama’s tax proposals. You can watch the clip here – and make sure to watch the end where Fox News tries to drown me out with music.

Not surprisingly, the “debate” centered around the false premise that Obama’s tax cuts are actually welfare. I say that’s false because – as I pointed out on the show – everyone pays some form of taxes, whether it’s income, property, sales or payroll taxes. When you take all those taxes together, most working- and middle-class Americans pay a higher effective tax rate than the Warren Buffetts of the world (as Warren Buffett, by the way, readily acknowledges). So Obama’s plan to pass refundable income tax credits is only a handout if you look exclusively at one slice of taxes – in this case, income taxes. But in the overall tax scheme, those tax credits are aimed at better equalizing the tax structure so as to diminish the gap between Warren Buffett’s very low effective tax rate and Joe Sixpack’s high effective tax rate. Only in the asylums of Fox News and Republican Party politics is reducing that effective tax rate gap billed as theft from the rich to finance “welfare.”

This concept of effective tax rates (ie. the tax rate actually paid and enforced) is key to understanding the most telling part of this Fox News discussion – the part at the end where former Bush-Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck parrots McCain campaign talking points about America supposedly having a very high corporate tax rate in relation to the rest of the world. This, says Dyck and fellow Republicans, is driving businesses to move offshore.

It sounds like a credible storyline, especially considering that officially, our corporate tax rate is somewhere between 35 and 39 percent. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

To know how high – or low – the effective tax rate is, you have to go beneath the top-line rate and account for all the loopholes, subsidies and write-offs – and the way to do that is by looking at corporate tax revenues as a percentage of a country’s GDP. That way, you know how much corporations are actually paying as a share of your overall economy – in other words, you know the real corporate tax rate, not the fake one advertised by top-line numbers. And when you look at America’s tax structure through this lens, you see that even the Bush Treasury Department admits we have the second lowest effective corporate tax rate in the industrialized world (see page 42 of this report).

Indeed, this explains the dissonance between Republican claims of “highest corporate income tax rate in the world” and the recent Government Accountability report showing that most corporations pay no corporate income taxes at all. The latter is the truth – most corporations don’t pay any taxes because of loopholes, writeoffs and subsidies that allow them to effectively reduce that 35 percent corporate tax rate to zero. In fact, many profitable corporations actually collect tax rebates. But as I told Fox News, we don’t hear criticism of that kind of “corporate welfare” from the Republican mouthpieces deriding Obama’s middle-class tax cuts as welfare.

As you can see from the video clip, when the GOP parrot I’m debating throws out the standard “high corporate tax” canard, I revert to the actual facts over and over and over again, to the point where Fox News feels the need to drown me out with music at the end. And I was, of course, rewarded with the usual river of hate email from Fox News viewers, most of which reaffirmed the dittohead nature of the modern conservative audience in that almost every email included exactly two links purportedly “proving” the GOP talking point – one a link to U.S. News and World Report’s right-wing business columnist, the other to the fringe Tax Foundation, a group funded by Scaife, Koch and the usual constellation of Wingnuttia’s trust-fund babies. You’ll notice that both of these sources focus only on the official tax rate, not the effective tax rate – deliberately misleading their readers about the facts.

The good news is that polling shows most Americans do not think the big problem facing our country is that wealthy corporations are oppressed by high taxes. That is, most Americans live in the “reality-based” world and understand that if anyone is winning big from the Bush-McCain tax policies, it is Corporate America and the super-rich. So if the GOP wants to attack Obama for trying to cut 95 percent of America’s taxes – if they want to lash their electoral hopes to a promise to give Big Business another tax handout – then I say that’s great. They are helping progressives build a landslide and an election mandate.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

When presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his intended vice presidential running mate, those of us in the lower 48 learned that her husband, Todd Palin, not only was a champion snowmobiler and commercial fisherman but also a steelworker.
At the press conference, Palin trotted him out, stressing his steelworker credentials. Here’s a good union man, she emphasized.
But his United Steelworker card doesn’t include an automatic auxiliary membership for her. Or her running mate at the top of the Republican ticket, McCain, whose record on labor issues would require some serious penance before he could ever earn a union card.
John McCain opposes the Employee Free Choice Act, which would enable workers to collectively bargain and secure contracts with corporations more easily, like the employment contracts CEOs demand to have with corporations. McCain has jeopardized retirement by championing Bush’s privatization scheme for social security. McCain has voted for every American-job-killing free trade deal, without regard to human rights or environmental standards. And he has proposed, instead of providing health insurance for all Americans, a plan to tax the insurance of those lucky enough to still have employer-provided coveraage.

Soul mate
McCain has characterized Palin, 44, as his political soul mate. How he determined that is unclear since he met her only twice before selecting her, and her resume for VP is paltry, at best. She served two terms on Wasilla City Council and two terms as Wasilla Mayor. At that time, Wasilla had about 5,000 residents. She also served as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a job she quit in less than a year. She ran for lieutenant governor and lost. While seeking the governor’s post, she said she supported the bridge-to-nowhere, a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska to an island of approximately 50 residents across the Tongass Narrows.
Then, after Congress squelched the bridge, she said, as she put it, “No thanks,” to the “earmark.”  Despite all that, when Congress offered Alaska about half the money from that “earmark” that John McCain claims to have so opposed, Palin took it and spent it on other road projects.
While mayor, she lowered property taxes, before she raised sales taxes. She hired a Washington lobbyist to secure some of those McCain-dreaded “earmarks” for little Wasilla, a task it succeeded in doing. She left the town with millions in debt and a dispute that ultimately cost it $1.3 million to settle over ownership of land on which she wanted its $15 million sports complex built.

Plucking Palin
Even the New York Times in an editorial Wednesday questioned McCain’s judgment in plucking Palin from a state with a population (670,053) roughly the same as the twin cities’ where the Republicans are meeting: “If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov Sarah Palin of Alaska.”
The workers of America cannot afford bad judgment after eight years of economy-crushing, debt-creating, Bush-Cheney. Unemployment, the national debt, inflation, home foreclosures and gas prices are all rising at demoralizing rates, while Bush and McCain continue to proclaim the economy is basically strong and any recession is all in workers’ heads, just some sort of psychological problem. Maybe that’s true — if you’re a multimillionaire like Bush and McCain. Or if you’ve got seven homes in which to hide from the reality of everyday American life like McCain.
Ms. Palin needs to stop trotting out her husband as an exhibit until she explains her positions on workers’ issues. Just exactly where does she stand on the Employee Free Choice Act?
Her family has benefitted from her husband’s ability to be part of a labor union. Workers in labor organizations earn higher wages and are more likely to have pensions and health insurance. Because he works for BP and is a member of the USW, which collectively bargained a good contract for workers at BP, Todd Palin earns a good wage and has good health insurance. The Employee Free Choice Act would make it easier for other Americans to join unions and earn better money and obtain health insurance. Polling shows that 70 percent of Americans support for the Employee Free Choice Act.
Inquiring minds want to know, Ms. Palin. Where do you stand on Employee Free Choice? Where do you stand on privatization of social security? Where do you stand on job-killing free trade?
Are you with McCain – and against workers – on these issues? If so, you need to stop using your husband’s membership in the USW as a prop, because then his union card cannot possibly cover up your or John McCain’s worker-savaging positions.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Presidential race
While some want to paint this year’s presidential race in black and white, for middle class America, it’s all about the green.
Greenbacks.
Team colors are clearly visible: The Republicans’ – green and gold. That’s obvious when their nominee, John McCain, is one of the richest men in the Senate. He’s so wealthy that when recently asked by a reporter how many homes he owned, he just couldn’t recall.
Seven, Senator, seven.
When schlepping around Arizona on the campaign trail got tough, his wife surprised him with the gift of a private jet to ease the sojourn. When asked to define wealthy, he said, for him, a guy whose worth has been estimated at $100 million, rich is $5 million.
Team colors for the chosen Democratic candidates, by contrast, are basic red, white and blue. Presumptive nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s boyhood family struggled on food stamps for a time. His chosen vice president, Sen. Joe Biden, grew up in hard scrapple Scranton and his family shared quarters with in-laws during tough times. Biden has long been ranked as one of the least wealthy members of the senate.

Kitchen tables

Biden, long a personal friend of McCain’s, noted the economic difference in his speech in Illinois Saturday after Obama introduced him as his selection for vice president. While many Americans sit down at their kitchen tables to worry over bills, Biden said, John McCain, by contrast, would just have to worry over which of his seven kitchen tables to sit down at – not over an actual bill.
Ah, the frets of the rich. And for them — and himself — John McCain wants to preserve Bush’s tax cuts.
Those tax cuts are a considerable part of the budget deficit, and the budget deficit – along with the trade deficit — is a considerable part of the declining confidence in Wall Street.
The Republicans, George Bush, VP Dick Cheney, and McCain, the self-styled “maverick” who voted with Bush-Cheny 95 percent of the time last year and 100 percent this year, took the budget surplus that Democrat Bill Clinton bequeathed them and converted it into a behemoth debt.

$4 gasoline

They took rising employment and sent it down and a burgeoning housing market sent it to bankruptcy. They took a low consumer price index and bought us the highest rate of wholesale inflation in nearly 30 years – 9.8 percent. Think $4-a-gallon gasoline.
Then, just to smack middle class America in the face, they gave the rich tax breaks. ‘Cause multi-millionaires like John and Cindy McCain, with their seven homes and private plane, need a break today.
Greenbacks. Republicans Bush and Cheney put us here, with McCain agreeing all the way. Electing McSame would result in four more years of greenbacks draining out of our wallets.
Obama and Biden didn’t come from the world of wealth that Bush, Cheney and McCain luxuriate in. They have lived the life and felt the feelings of middle class Americans. They know what it is to pay off college and car loans.

Riding the train

Biden rode a train back and forth from Washington to his district home in Delaware, chatting with conductors, never buying a second home and living in pricey D.C. He crawls on the floor to play with his grandkids.
Obama declined top dollar job offers when he graduated Harvard Law School to return to Chicago to become a civil rights lawyer and organize voter registration drives. When he was campaigning in Pennsylvania earlier this year, he wanted pictures of himself feeding a bottle to a calf at a Penn State University dairy so he would have something interesting to tell his little daughters about in their evening telephone call.
Greenbacks. Obama and Biden will help the middle class keep them in their pockets. Because they understand from firsthand experience how difficult it is to get a few there in the first place.