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In yet another move to put power in the hands of the 1 percent, House Republicans have introduced legislation to hand over the nation’s publicly-administered job training and workforce development system to the corporate sector.

Their bill, the “Workforce Investment Improvement Act of 2012” (H.R. 4297), would impose a new requirement that two-thirds of the state and local boards, which govern the job training system, be selected from private-sector businesses and corporations. The legislation would overturn legal mandates that the boards include at least two worker representatives nominated by unions and labor federations. The bill also eliminates the requirement that labor organizations have the opportunity to comment on the state and local plans that outline the services.

The details of this drive for a corporate takeover of the system will be spotlighted today when the House Education and the Workforce Committee holds a hearing on the Republican bill.

The move comes as Congress takes up reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA), the federal law that authorizes funding for a national network of some 2,800 One-Stop Career Centers in local areas. These centers served 9.8 million dislocated workers, disadvantaged persons and unemployed workers between Oct. 1, 2010 and Sept. 30, 2011. The Republicans’ bill would consolidate 27 job training programs and allow governors to cut programs that serve dislocated workers, seniors, farmworkers, Native Americans, young persons in the Jobs Corps and unemployed workers who receive career counseling through the Employment Services. It also would reduce the amount of job training services delivered to low-income individuals. (more…)

There is a new study out by a pair of political scientists saying that the current Republican caucuses in Congress are the most conservative in a hundred years. I think they are underestimating.

The 1911-12 congressional Republicans, after all, at least had some Teddy Roosevelt Republicans still in the Congress, so while a distinct minority, the party had some reformers and moderates in their caucuses. No, I think you would have to go back into the 1800s, into the Republican Congress swept into power with William McKinley’s 1896 election, to find a party as thoroughly reactionary as this one. This is somehow appropriate, because these Republicans clearly do want to repeal the 20th century. Starting with the early Progressive movement reforms Teddy Roosevelt got accomplished, the tea party GOP is trying to roll back all the progress our country has seen over the last century plus.

Let’s go back to those late 1890s Republicans — who they were, what they believed, how they operated. This was the heart of the era dominated by Social Darwinists and Robber Baron industrialists, and the McKinley presidency was the peak of those forces’ power. The Robber Barons were hiring the Pinkertons to (literally) murder union leaders, and were (literally) buying off elected officials to get whatever they wanted out of the government: money for bribery was openly allocated in yearly corporate budgets. These huge corporate trusts were working hand in hand with their worshipful friends in the Social Darwinist world, the 1800s version of Ayn Rand, who taught that if you were rich, it was because that was the way nature meant things to be — and if you were poor, you deserved to be. Any exploitation, any greed, any concentration of wealth was justified by a survival of the strongest ethic. It was an era where Lincoln’s and the Radical Republicans of the 1860s’ progressive idea of giving land away free to poor people who wanted to work hard to be independent farmers through the Homestead Act was being overturned by big bank and railroad trusts ruthlessly driving millions of family farmers out of business. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was being completely ignored by McKinley. And of course, none of the advances of the 20th century were yet in place: child labor laws, consumer safety, the national parks or later environmental laws, consumer safety, popular election of Senators, women’s suffrage, a progressive tax system, decent labor laws, a minimum wage, Social Security, Glass-Steagall, the GI Bill, civil rights laws, Medicare, Medicaid, Legal Services, Head Start. None of it existed.

Flash forward to today. With the exception of women’s suffrage (and given the gender gap, I have no doubt that secretly Republicans would be happy to get rid of that), various high-level Republicans from this session of Congress have argued for the repeal or severe curtailment of all of those advances. This is not just Conservative with a capital C, but Reactionary with a capital R. (more…)

While anti-worker bills in state capitols across the country still threaten middle-class families, Republican state legislatures are beginning to second guess whether to continue pursuing their extreme agenda attacking working families.

Yesterday morning, the Republican-controlled New Hampshire Senate tabled HB 1677, the so-called “right to work” bill. This bill is the pet of Speaker Bill O’Brien, dubbed by a recent Concord Monitor editorial as a “self-drawn caricature of vindictiveness and power run [amok].” “Right to work” failed last year, and so far this year it has failed to muster a veto-proof majority.

Although the bill is still alive, this is a symbolic victory that makes it clear that Senate Republicans are tired of Speaker O’Brien’s antics and his extreme agenda. New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie said of the vote:

The Senate took a step in the right direction today in voting to indefinitely table HB 1677….Their vote confirms what we hear each and every day: People are tired of right to work for less dominating the discussion in Concord.

And last night in Maine, the public employee “right to work” bill, LD 309, was tabled on the floor of the House, after working families–from both the public and private sectors–urged a bipartisan coalition of senators to preserve safe communities and working conditions. (more…)

As of Wednesday afternoon, House Republicans were at an impasse within their own caucus on how to move forward on a surface transportation funding bill. There is a real possibility that, because of this impasse, federal funding for transportation projects would abruptly stop at the end of this week, with Congress out of Washington on a two-week recess.

Meanwhile, a “work crew” from LiUNA—the Laborers’ International Union of North America—was dispatched Wednesday to the Key Bridge, which connects the western edge of Washington to the northern Virginia suburbs. On their truck was a giant roll of duct tape, used to symbolically patch the 89-year-old bridge.

LiUNA chose Key Bridge because it is on the list of the nation’s more than 70,000 structurally deficient bridges around the country. That’s almost 12 percent of all of the nation’s bridges. The Department of Transportation ranks a bridge as “structurally deficient” if it needs “significant maintenance and repair” in order to remain a safe bridge to use. Often, a structurally deficient bridge must carry less capacity than it was designed to hold—for example, heavy trucks might be banned—in order to keep it from having to be closed altogether.

Key Bridge may not be in imminent danger of collapsing, but it is slowly crumbling, as House Republicans refuse to move forward on a sensible transportation reauthorization bill.

The Senate has passed a two-year, $109 billion bill that, while imperfect, buys Congress time to tackle the long-term issues that need to be faced about what our future transportation policy should look like and how we should pay for it.

House Republicans have proven themselves so far incapable of uniting around a way forward on these key questions, caught as they are between an ideological bloc that wants to use the transportation bill to push the fossil fuel lobby’s agenda for oil drilling and coal burning, and small-government ideologues who want to offload national transportation responsibilities onto the states and the private sector. (more…)

Attention ladies: Big news on the state legislative front. Republican lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin want to help you improve your lives. Or else.

In Wisconsin, Senator Glenn Grothman wants to give single moms an incentive to get married. Actually, it’s a rather negative incentive, for his bill declares that being an unmarried mother constitutes “child abuse and neglect.” Interestingly, Glenn has never been married, nor raised any children. But he says his bill is necessary to counter those diabolical liberals who “want children born out of wedlock because they are far more likely to be dependent on the government.” Thanks for that insight, Glenn.

Now, on to Arizona, where the GOP-controlled legislature intends to help any and all employers protect the moral purity of their female workers – married or not. How? By letting them deny insurance coverage for birth control pills if the women intend to use the pills for… well, birth control. Ladies will not get the cost of their contraceptives covered, unless they submit proof from their doctors that the pills are necessary to treat a medical condition – NOT just for having non-procreative sex. And, to add some puritanical oomph to the law, it also eases the way for the state’s employers to fire any woman who uses contraceptives to – yes – avoid conception.

If that’s not perverse enough for you, try this: Rep. Debbie Lesko – the sponsor of Arizona’s assault on a woman’s freedom, privacy, and dignity – says that the law is necessary to protect “our First Amendment rights and freedom of religion.” She means the right and freedom of a boss to violate the rights and freedom of women workers over something as purely personal as their sex lives.

Someone’s been munching too much loco weed in Arizona. To keep up with the insanity, go to www.now.org.

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National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

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This piece was first published on Jim Hightower’s website.

On March 26, the U.S. Supreme court will begin to decide whether it’s constitutional to require everyone to have medical insurance or pay a fine.

With 50 million people in our country not having any medical insurance, it will be a real shame if the court would rule the Affordable Care Act (AFA) unconstitutional because without the mandate requiring everyone to help fund the AFA, I’m afraid the whole thing will fall apart.

The Republicans who called it unconstitutional during the time that President Obama was trying to get the law passed are the same people who at one time wanted the mandate. Go figure.

The court will probably hand down their ruling in June and the mandate would go into effect in March of 2014.

On top of this, the U.S. House of Representatives has just offered their budget in the form of the Ryan plan that would, if enacted, harm our retirees on Medicare by giving them a voucher and make them purchase medical insurance on their own. Can you imagine how many seniors would be taken advantage of by unscrupulous insurance companies?

Fortunately, the Democrats in the Senate will not allow this to happen.

I heard it said once that Republicans will vote for anything that causes human pain, misery, suffering or death. I believe it.

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The Santorum Strategy is not just about Santorum. It is about pounding the most radical conservative ideas into the public mind by constant repetition during the Republican presidential campaign, whether by Santorum himself, by Gingrich or Ron Paul, by an intimidated Romney, or by the Republican House majority. The Republican presidential campaign is about a lot more than the campaign for the presidency. It is about guaranteeing a radical conservative future for America.

I am old enough to remember how liberals (me included) made fun of Ronald Reagan as a not-too-bright mediocre actor who could not possibly be elected president. I remember liberals making fun of George W.Bush as so ignorant and ill-spoken that Americans couldn’t possibly take him seriously. Both turned out to be clever politicians who changed America much for the worse. And among the things they and their fellow conservatives managed to do was change public discourse, and with it, change how a great many Americans thought.

The Republican presidential campaign has to be seen in this light.

Liberals tend to underestimate the importance of public discourse and its effect on the brains of our citizens. All thought is physical. You think with your brain. You have no alternative. Brain circuitry strengthens with repeated activation. And language, far from being neutral, activates complex brain circuitry that is rooted in conservative and liberal moral systems. Conservative language, even when argued against, activates and strengthens conservative brain circuitry. This is extremely important for so-called “independents,” who actually have both conservative and liberal moral systems in their brains and can shift back and forth. The more they hear conservative language over the next eight months, the more their conservative brain circuitry will be strengthened.

This point is being missed by Democrats and by the media, and yet it is the most vital issue for our future in what is now being discussed. No matter who gets the Republican nomination for president, the Santorum Strategy will have succeeded unless Democrats dramatically change their communication strategy as soon as possible. Even if President Obama is re-elected, he will have very little power if the Republicans keep the House, and a great deal less if they take the Senate. And if they keep and take more state houses and local offices around the country, there will be less and less possibility of a liberal future. (more…)

And so, the proverbial ‘heads of the five families’ of the right wing are still fully engaged in all-out war of right-on-right character assassination. Last week, politico-playboy Newt Gingrich called in a hit. And you know he didn’t use American muscle for the job! He outsourced (in true Republican fashion) and flew in a Sicilian for the job.

His ‘Luca Brasi’ of choice was calling Rick Santorum a “big labor Republican.” Newt is just sick over the fact that Santorum (or Ricky “The Saint,” as he’s known within the right wing Cosa Nostra) supposedly sided with the unions. Newt was alluding to a 1996 shoot-out in the U.S. Senate where Santorum was supposedly in favor of Fed-Ex drivers remaining protected by the Railway Labor Act, a piece of legislation that,, among other things, gives workers the right to organize in their units. Unknowingly, however, Newt’s guy bungled the hit. His Luca Brasi was really more of a Fredo Corleone.  

The real story is that in the early stages of this act, Santorum only voted in favor of continuing the debate, probably knowing full well that often bills don’t even get voted on if enough members of the caporegime insist on continuing to debate over them. This Santorum must have some consigliere! Either that or he’s ripping pages right out of Machiavelli.

Later, Santorum voted in favor of the ruling chair, stealthily against Fed-Ex worker interests, under the argument that the provisions in Sect. 1223 of the act were beyond the authority of that committee. Buying more time on the taxpayers’ dime, he once again voted  nay and lost.

He did vote in favor of the bill when it finally came up with the Fed-Ex provisions untouched, but don’t let that fool you. He played that one beautifully in true Hyman Roth fashion.

Don’t forget the fact that six years ago, the Teamsters ‘went to the mattresses’ (went to war) with this guy and won! Santorum is crazy… like a fox, avoiding setting off traps. Having that ‘yes’ vote in his track record could confuse a lot of working class people, particularly those who are sitting on the fence. It could trick them into thinking that he is sympathetic to their plight.

In reality, if he takes the big seat, if he gets crowned the capo di tutti capi, workers’ right to organize and possibly even the very existence of a labor movement will “probably swim with the fishes.” If he is as crafty as he appears to be, he knows that siding with labor will displease his neo-con henchmen to no end. That could potentially be the spark to set off some serious unrest on the right side of the aisle (or even a coup d’etat, in the most extreme scenario), and as sly, old Hyman Roth said, “No one wants another war,” more specifically, one that will put a strain on Santorum’s political alliances because any seasoned mafiosi will tell you, “When guys are on the mattresses, they’re not out earning.” When there is too much back and forth in the Senate, it diverts attention from the more important issues as they find new ways to make a buck at the expense of the working class and taxpayers as a whole. (more…)

A pattern has emerged in the Republican primaries, Romney wins among Republican voters with six-figure incomes and loses among Republican voters with five-figure incomes.

We have a class war, and it’s inside the Republican Party.

What has happened? What is it about Romney that has split Republicans along class lines? Does it mean Romney will struggle with working-class voters in November?

We can only conclude so much from exit polls and a few person-on-the-street quotes. Let’s not forget that many pundits thought Barack Obama couldn’t compete for working-class votes after his poor bowling outing preceded his drubbing in the 2008 Pennsylvania primary. Yet Obama won the Rust Belt in 2008, including Pennsylvania.

But there are two clear reasons why Romney is struggling now, and if those problems persisted, they not only portend trouble for Romney’s candidacy, but for the future of conservatism.

1. Romney comes across like an out-of-touch Richie Rich.

You wouldn’t think that being enormously wealthy, paying little in taxes and constantly saying insensitive things about his fortune and others’ misfortune would be a problem in a Republican primary. But we are being reminded that not everyone Republican voter is in Romney’s class.

Many conservatives recoiled when Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC hammered Romney’s track record running Bain Capital during the South Carolina primary. But those voters live 750 miles from Wall Street, and they voted for Newt.

There is mistrust of Wall Street-style finance that cuts across ideology, and Romney hasn’t done anything to overcome it.

Obviously, working class people support wealthy politicians all the time. But usually there is an attempt not just to sound sympathetic to the struggles of others, but have at least a wisp of a policy agenda that speaks to those struggles. (more…)

Bill Maher: “If you can look at a crime where everything points to one answer and not see it, you are a dumbass. If you can look at the deficit and not see that the problem is that the rich stopped paying taxes, you are a Republican. And before you accuse me of equating thee Casey Anthony verdict with Republican thinking, save your breath I am. . .I am saying, if you are a working class American who still votes Republican, you don’t get to bitch about that verdict.”