Moderate Citizens Unite!
The GOP War on Women – MUST WATCH VIDEO
By siteadmin | March 21, 2012
Topics: Womens Rights | No Comments »
The Affordable Care Act Protects Women’s Health
By siteadmin | March 20, 2012
Almost two years ago, the president signed the Affordable Care Act. Today the new law is giving millions of families the security that comes with knowing their health care will be there for them when they need it. And the law is helping women address many of the challenges they have faced getting the care they need.
Some of these benefits will take effect over the next few years, but many of them are already helping women lead healthier lives. Senior citizens like Norma Byrne of Vineland, N.J., have already seen that the new Affordable Care Act makes prescription drugs more affordable. Norma used to have to dip into her food budget to help pay for her medications because of the so-called donut hole. In 2010, just like other senior citizens with high drug spending, she received a $250 rebate check, which helped defray those costs. In 2011, thanks to the new law, she was one of nearly 2 million women who received a 50 percent discount on their brand-name prescription drugs.
Topics: Healthcare, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Tennessee Abortion Bill Would Make Abortion Providers’ Names Public
By siteadmin | March 20, 2012
Note: Republicans continue their war on women’s rights…
A new bill moving through the Tennessee House of Representatives would require the state to publish the names of each doctor who performs an abortion and detailed statistics about the woman having the procedure, which opponents worry will spur anti-abortion violence in the state.
The Life Defense Act of 2012, sponsored by state Rep. Matthew Hill (R-Jonesboro), mandates that the Tennessee Department of Health make detailed demographic information about every woman who has an abortion available to the public, including her age, race, county, marital status, education level, number of children, the location of the procedure and how many times she has been pregnant. Each report would also have to include the name of the doctor who performed the procedure.
Topics: Womens Rights | No Comments »
Divided on the Right
By siteadmin | March 15, 2012
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed implausible that the Republican nomination fight would not be resolved by the August convention. But Rick Santorum’s primary victories in Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday make that a real, if still distant, possibility. If the convention becomes as disorderly as the primaries, it will reflect a party consumed by anger and frustration, led around by its most extreme base, and lacking any sense of forward direction.
Topics: Class Warfare | No Comments »
The Ruling Class
By siteadmin | February 21, 2012
10% of the 1% makes more money in a year than 97 million Americans do. The same people due to differed dividends, off shore tax haven banking, stock options in lieu of cash, loopholes, tax rebates on capitol investment and depreciation write offs, clever accounting and tax lawyers pay between 1 and 15% in taxes.
If their tax rates go up, they aren’t going to move anywhere else and as for moving their production overseas, they’ve been doing that a pace for years, to avoid even contributing decent salaries to Americans and the corporation headquarters are now nothing more than a brass plate in a tax haven and a post box.
You couldn’t find more unAmericans than these people. I go so far as to say they are anti American and only love us for the opportunities for business expansion through the lives and blood of our military service people and the protection it affords them in imperial looting with no pay back.
60% of the 1% wants taxes to rise, which throws into perspective how few people the Republicans work for. Considering even registered republicans are far in the majority when it comes to raising the taxes on the very rich and there is still a majority, as low as the $250.000 per annum threshold.
The choices are, teachers, firemen, police, roads that aren’t falling apart, bridges that aren’t on the verge of collapse, people in houses with jobs and a decent salary, clean air and water, affordable healthcare and a guaranteed pension or everything floods up to those that have most of everything any way.
Every vote for a Republican is a vote for corporate greed and totalitarianism and their partners in crime are corporate democrats, they’re easy to spot as they always vote for the corporations on every issue and against anything for the people.
These are the candidate’s policies and constituents they represent.
Religion is only a door opener to enter closed minds, twisted by fear and the great unknowable that will dispel their ignorance. It has always been a tool for those that seek to control people.
Evolution is only a reality for people who can evolve and the dark ages are no place you’d want to visit, let alone base a government in America on.
You’re in the losing class trying to convince yourself you don’t know it because of the propaganda that has taken control of your thought processes.
Deeply inside even their hearts the Republican base knows these things to be true.
Outlandish poster from HuffPo
Topics: Class Warfare | No Comments »
GOP says Keeping Teacher Pay Low ‘A Biblical Principle’
By siteadmin | February 1, 2012
Someone alert the unions: raising teacher pay will actually make for worse teachers–according to one GOP lawmaker.
Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill said that increasing teacher pay is against “a biblical principle” because it might attract people who otherwise wouldn’t do the job.
“Teachers need to make the money that they need to make,” McGill said, according to the Times-Journal. “If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach … and these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em.”
McGill’s comments came at a prayer breakfast this week in Fort Payne, Ala. State legislators are currently weighing raising teacher pay. One GOP leader proposed raising salaries of newer teachers by 2.5 percent, but critics argue that it isn’t fair to longer-serving educators, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.
A recent report might justify critics’ worries, showing that Alabama is actually leading the nation in starting teacher salaries, while lagging behind in average teacher pay, the Dothan Eagle reports.
The national average starting salary for a teacher is $39,000. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof has argued that paying teachers more would help attract better people to the profession, and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly vocalized his assertion that teachers should have salaries starting at $60,000 and the opportunity to make up to $150,000 based on performance.
Topics: Class Warfare, Union Busting | No Comments »
U.S. Jobless Claims Fall Sharply
By siteadmin | January 20, 2012
The number of people seeking unemployment benefits for the first time plummeted last week to 352,000, the fewest since April 2008, the Labor Department said Thursday. The decline added to evidence that the job market is strengthening.
Topics: Economy | No Comments »
American privilege rots an empire from within Well-paid professionals are contributing to U.S. economy’s demise
By siteadmin | December 13, 2011
A rising empire rewards people who contribute to its growth and invest in its future. The empire’s decline begins when certain members of society are over-rewarded by means of privileges, and the empire’s money is wasted on outdated endeavors.
Against this backdrop, the United States is experiencing a full-blown economic crisis. The nation’s real unemployment rate, which includes idled workers who’ve given up looking for jobs, is 18%. One-tenth of the nation’s properties have been foreclosed since 2007, and another tenth have negative equity. The poverty rate is more than 15%, and another 20% of the population is struggling on incomes near the poverty line. Looming over these grim statistics is the federal government’s budget deficit, which is equal to about 10% of the nation’s GDP.
Topics: Class Warfare | No Comments »
The 1% nearly triple their income, CBO says
By siteadmin | October 27, 2011
October 25, 2011, 4:09 PM, MarketWatch.com
More fuel for the Occupy Wall Street protests: “The distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979,” the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday in a special report. Read the CBO’s analysis of income inequality.
The top 1% of households more than doubled their share of national income in the years between 1979 and 2007, as their real (inflation-adjusted) incomes increased by an astonishing 275%, the CBO reported.
More…
Topics: Class Warfare | Comments Off
The study that shows why Occupy Wall Street struck a nerve
By siteadmin | October 27, 2011
By Eugene Robinson, Thursday, October 27, 6:53 PM
The hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party claim to despise the redistribution of wealth, but secretly they love it — as long as the process involves depriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other way around.
That is precisely what has been happening, as a jaw-dropping new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office demonstrates. Three decades of trickle-down economic theory, see-no-evil deregulation and tax-cutting fervor have led to massive redistribution. Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.
The gist of the CBO study, titled “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” is that while we’ve become wealthier overall, these new riches have largely bypassed many Americans and instead flowed mostly to the affluent. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t remember voting to turn the United States into a nation starkly divided between haves and have-nots. Yet that’s where we’ve been led.
Overall, in inflation-adjusted dollars, average after-tax household income grew by 62 percent during the period under study, according to the CBO. This sounds great — but only until you look a little closer.
For those at the bottom — the one-fifth of households with the lowest incomes — the increase was just 18 percent. For the middle three-fifths, the average increase was 40 percent. Spread over nearly 30 years, these gains are modest, not meteoric.
By contrast, look at the top 1 percent of earners. Their after-tax household income increased by an astonishing 275 percent. For those keeping track, this means it nearly quadrupled. Nice work, if you can get it.
This is not what Republicans want you to think of when you hear the word redistribution. You’re supposed to imagine the evil masterminds as Bolsheviks, not bankers. You’re supposed to envision the lazy free-riders who benefit from redistribution as the “poor,” and the industrious job-creators who get robbed as the “wealthy” — not the other way around.
If Americans were to realize they’ve been the victims of Republican-style redistribution — stealing from the poor to give to the rich — the whole political atmosphere might change. I believe that’s one reason why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve. The far-right and its media mouthpieces have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to disregard, dismiss or discredit the demonstrations. Thus far, fortunately, all this effort has been to no avail.
The right maintains that inequality is the wrong measure. To argue about how the income pie should be sliced is “class warfare,” and what we should do instead is give the private sector the right incentives to make the pie bigger. This way, according to conservative doctrine, everyone’s slice gets bigger — even if some slices grow faster than others.
Indeed, the CBO report says that even the poorest households saw at least a little income growth. Why is it any of their business that the high-earners in the top 1 percent saw astronomical income growth? Isn’t this just sour grapes?
No, for two reasons. First, the system is rigged. Wealthy individuals and corporations have disproportionate influence over public policy because of the often decisive role that money plays in elections. If the rich and powerful act in their self-interest, as conservative ideologues believe we all should do, then the rich and powerful’s share of income will continue to soar.
Second, and more broadly, the real issue is what kind of nation we want to be. Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal” is properly understood as calling for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. But the more we become a nation of rich and poor, the less we can pretend to be offering the same opportunities to every American. As polarization increases, mobility declines. The whole point of the American Dream is that it is available to everyone, not just those who awaken from their slumbers on down-filled pillows and 800-thread-count sheets.
So it does matter that as the pie grows, the various slices do not grow in proportion. We’re not characters in one of those lumbering, interminable, nonsensical Ayn Rand novels. We believe in individual initiative and the free market, but we also believe that nationhood necessarily involves a commitment to our fellow citizens, an acknowledgment that we’re engaged in a common enterprise. We believe that opportunity should be more than just an empty word.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
Topics: Class Warfare, OWS | Comments Off