By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Senior Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future
This is not your father’s (or mother’s) GOP. During a time of national crisis, the President has submitted an urgently-needed jobs bill that is well within the mainstream for Republicans as well as Democrats. But today’s Republicans are a new breed, dedicated not to their country or even an ideology.
Who could best express the absurd lengths these politicians will go to destroy anything that’s stands in their way? Nobody I can think of – except Groucho Marx. But before Groucho has his say, let’s have ours.
Their refusal to pass the strongest provisions in this reasonable bill, if that’s what they choose to do, will be conclusive proof that their only allegiances are to their own re-elections and the massive corporations that they serve. This bill is far from perfect, but it’s a start.
Rejecting this bill wouldn’t just be a vote against jobs, although it would certainly be that. It wouldn’t just be a vote against children, although it would condemn them to oversized classrooms in crumbling buildings. It wouldn’t just be a vote against bridges and highways and a safer, more prosperous country. (more…)
By Carl Davidson
Author and Writer for Beaver County Blue
“Newt Gingrich: Obama’s ‘Bureaucratic Socialism’ Kills Jobs” is one of many similar headlines appearing on dozens of web-based news portals in this 2012 election season. This one keeps popping up, and I’m getting sick of seeing it.
The reason? It manages to pack several major lies, each of which you could write a book about, into just five words—and hardly an editor anywhere takes a blue pencil to it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no problem with ‘socialism.’ My shoot-from-the hip response when someone spits the ‘S’ word out in a political argument is, “Socialism? I’ve been a socialist all my life, and proud of it. We should be so lucky as to have some socialism around here. Unfortunately, we’re not even close.”
First of all, Barack Obama is not a socialist. Even back in his more youthful years in Illinois, at best on a good day, he was simply a neo-Keynesian liberal with a few high tech green ideas. Keynesians believe, among other things, that when markets fail, government has the task of being the consumer of last resort, even hiring people directly to build infrastructure and put people to work. (more…)
There is so much awful and ridiculous about the House Republican budget that it can be difficult to explain the severity of its impact without getting lost in a blizzard of numbers and jargon. To its authors, that is a feature, not a bug.
But why worry about picking out the specific areas of our federal government it would abolish, when you can cut to the chase? It would get rid of nearly all of our federal government.
According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — but including defense — to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run. (more…)
Five years ago, a 47-year-old Missouri woman began a duplicitous on-line courtship through MySpace with a 13-year-old neighbor who once had been friends with the woman’s daughter.
The adult, Lori Drew, flirted with the 13-year-old, Megan Meier, through the guise of a fictitious, 16-year-old character named Josh Evans. Suddenly, “Josh” broke up with Miss Meier, writing to her, “the world would be a better place without you.” Just hours later, Miss Meier hung herself in her bedroom.
Words have consequences.
Drew wasn’t charged with the child’s death. In fact, a judge reversed her conviction on computer fraud charges, saying the law was intended to deal with hacking, not murder. But for most Americans, there is something deeply disturbing, something morally, if not criminally, wrong with deliberate torment, with predatory viciousness. Drew eluded accountability the same way conservatives are seeking to evade culpability after their irresponsible speech has provoked the delusional to violence.
It’s hard to draw a line directly from Drew’s cruel words to the noose around Miss Meier’s neck. Similarly, it’s difficult to directly link violent political rhetoric like Sarah Palin’s illustration showing gun sight cross hairs on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ Arizona district to the shattering of Giffords’ office door after her vote for health insurance reform last March or Jared L. Loughner’s shooting spree last weekend that left six dead and Giffords and 13 others wounded.
What is clear, however, is that vile and threatening communication that becomes so repetitive that it’s routine has the effect of sanctioning an atmosphere of violence.
Conservatives are yammering that they’re not the only ones who engage in brutal rhetoric. That’s true. But in a contest for production of violent words and images, Republicans would, to use their words, “kill” the Democrats.
The Department of Homeland Security concluded in an April 2009 internal report that right-wing extremism, with a growing potential for violence, was on the rise. That was followed last spring by Capitol security officials reporting a tripling of threats against members of Congress – almost all from opponents of health care reform – in other words, from Republicans, right-wingers or people influenced by GOP TV and radio front men like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, who personally profit from the hostile climate they generate.
They didn’t stop though they had fair warning about the consequences. Consider the case of Byron Williams. He launched a 12-minute shoot out with California Highway Patrol officers last July after they stopped him for erratic driving. A police affidavit filed the following day said Williams intended to “start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at The Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”
The Right has for decades slammed the ACLU, whose sole purpose is to protect constitutional rights, but Glenn Beck had made the Tides Foundation, once an obscure progressive organization, famous by attacking it repeatedly – at least 29 times between January and the July shoot out last year, including two tirades the week before Williams began his assassination mission.
Williams, who was armed during the shootout with a handgun, shotgun, rifle and body armor, said he watched FOX News to see Beck, who blew his mind, and who he viewed as a “schoolteacher.”
Still Beck, expressed no remorse and tried to squirm out of any responsibility for inciting Williams, saying on his show:
“I am the only one that has mentioned the Tides Foundation. . . So that’s what they’re using. This guy couldn’t have found this out on his own; it had to come from me. . .America, if you don’t think that they will use anything, they will. They absolutely will.”
Words do have consequences, Mr. Beck, no matter how many times you cravenly shout denials.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives insisted on reading the U.S. Constitution on the opening day of the new Congressional session. It was, however, nothing but political theatre because conservatives disassociate the rights it grants from the incumbent responsibilities. Right-wing leaders like Beck disavow responsibility altogether.
When it was Arizona Rep. Giffords’s turn to read, the chamber had come upon the First Amendment, which guarantees, among other things, the right to free speech. It even guarantees Republican Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl the right to go on television the day after the shootings and contend that Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Dupnik didn’t have the right to speak about the complicity in the crime of vile, hateful and threatening political speech.
The courts have established the “crowded theater” test to determine when free speech ends and responsibility begins. Americans are responsible to refrain from yelling “fire” in a crowded theater when, in fact, there are no flames. The freedom to yell ends at the point when it endangers others.
Republicans are recklessly yelling. During the fall campaign, Arizona Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle suggested her supporters consider their Second Amendment rights if Sen. Harry Reid were re-elected. Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman said at a Tea Party rally on July 4, “If ballots don’t work, bullets will,” and then was hired by new GOP Congressman Allen West to serve as chief of staff. Tea Party contender Jesse Kelly held a fund raiser in June asking his supporters to “get on target to . . . remove Gabrielle Giffords from office” by shooting a “fully automatic M16” with him.
Republicans bear responsibility for the consequences of this kind of brutal discourse – a political atmosphere charged with violence. Just like Glenn Beck, though, Republicans guard their rights, but shirk the concomitant responsibilities.
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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.
Robin Hood, the guy who robbed the rich and gave to the poor, wore a short frock and tights. From the get-go, the guy serving the disadvantaged while sporting gay attire would fail the entrance exam required to become a card-carrying Republican.
The GOP is, after all, the anti-gay marriage, anti-repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell crew. More than that, Republicans are anti-working class. Their recent policies and activities show them clobbering the middle class while kissing the wealthy’s, well, you know.
Consider health insurance reform and tax cuts for the rich.
The GOP spent the entire fall election cycle yammering about the federal deficit. The world as we know it was coming to an end because of the deficit, they contended loudly and repeatedly.
To secure that bonus for millionaires, Republicans held hostage extension of unemployment compensation, which during this grave recession, sustains the nation’s workers who are out of jobs and, all too often, also out of foreclosed-on homes. The deal comes down to this: The average millionaire will be $100,000 richer as a result in 2011. The average worker will get $15,236 in unemployment benefits if jobless the entire year of 2011.
Republicans insisted on giving the rich $84,764 a year more than the poor.
Repealing health insurance reform, as the GOP has said it hopes to do before month’s end, would have the same result – increasing that supposedly-cataclysmic federal deficit while slamming the poor and middle class.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that the Affordable Care Act will decrease the federal deficit by $140 billion over 10 years. That’s what the GOP wants to repeal – a deficit reduction measure. Republicans want to add $140 billion to the debt.
Most injured by repeal would be the nation’s poor and middle class. That’s because rescinding the law would once again allow insurers to deny health care to children with pre-existing conditions. It would mean the elderly would once again pay more for preventative care and prescriptions. It would permit insurers to once again withdraw coverage from people when they get sick. It would mean insurers could kick out young adults who are now covered under their parents’ plans until age 26. It would permit insurers to re-impose “lifetime maximums,” so that they could cancel the coverage of people with costly illnesses. It would permit insurers to once again pocket for profit and “administrative expenses” an unlimited percentage of premiums paid by workers and employers. It would mean small businesses would lose tax breaks that will help them pay for health insurance for workers.
The GOP intends to deny tens of millions of uninsured Americans the hope that soon they’ll be able to afford coverage.
Republicans want to, as they put it, “undo” the health insurance benefits that the Affordable Care Act provides to Americans. And they’re offering nothing in return, nothing to help the uninsured, nothing to help the untold millions cheated by insurance corporations, nothing to require premiums to be spent on health care.
That’s the way Republican-hood rolls, protecting the wealthy, pummeling the poor. The rich, in the case of health insurance, are CEOs earning millions while increasing rates in double digits during a recession. The Los Angeles Times reported in August, for example, that the top executives of the nation’s five largest for-profit health insurers pulled down $200 million in compensation in 2009. The poor, in this case, are policy holders who the insurers charged rate increases as high as 39 percent.
House Republicans would exempt their cancelling of health insurance reform from their own rule that new legislation be paid for. So they wouldn’t have to find an additional $14 billion when they attempt to fulfill their campaign pledge to slash $100 billion from domestic programs – that would be from the programs most needed by the nation’s workers – those that help pay for education and transportation, for example. Because these domestic programs are such a small part of the budget, securing $100 billion from them would cost each department approximately 20 percent of its funds this year. That means painful reductions to areas like law enforcement and medical research. This is accompanied by Republican demands for cuts to many workers’ only retirement plan – Social Security.
In the meantime, the main concern of most Americans, as it was in the grueling days of Robin Hood, is jobs. Not the deficit. The GOP offers no plan to increase jobs for formerly working people, to end the suffering of tens of millions of Americans. Republican-hood is, instead, focused on pampering those who don’t need it.
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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.
When voting Tuesday, consider this, House Minority Leader John Boehner said he sees no reason for organized labor. That means he sees no reason for a middle class — just an impoverished servant class and an elite class — populated by Boehner and his Republican, corporate-funded, country-club chums.
Politifact went all the way back to the Truman administration to see which presidents, Republican or Democrat, were better at
creating jobs. Besides the fact that under the Obama administration job growth has been 300 times that of the Bush administration, jobs
have increased substanially more under Democrat administrations than under Republican ones.
Read and remember. Then vote for job growth in November.
Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA
Leo Toribio
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