Workn2gether's Weblog

Bailed-Out Bailing Out

workn2gether — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:13:01 +0000

“…most of the campaign donations from bailed-out companies are going to Republicans, some of whom ardently opposed the Troubled Assets Relief Program…”

“Rick Moran writes at the American Thinker: “Once the GOP takes control, it will be up to them to continue to bail out GM once the inevitable crunch comes. What do you think the chances are that the GOP would cave and throw more good taxpayer money after the bad?”

“The voters blame (the Democrats) for the bailout (most Americans don’t know TARP was conceived and signed by the Bush administration), and the bailed-out companies are funding the other guys.”

http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/why-are-bailed-out-firms-abandoning-democrats/19687964

Excerpts from “Why Are Bailed Out Firms Abandoning Democrats?” by John Hudson, The Atlantic Wire.

Despite the party of No

workn2gether — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 14:53:02 +0000

Democratic Accomplishments

Signed Into Law…

Health Insurance Reform, to recognize health care as a right, not a privilege and put a stop to the worst abuses by insurance companies including discrimination against people with pre-existing medical conditions. [OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

The Economic Recovery Act, to save and create millions of jobs and cut taxes for 98 percent of Americans. [OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, to make the largest investment in college aid in American history. [OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

Wall Street Reform, to rein in reckless practices on Wall Street, end taxpayer-funded bail-outs and “too big to fail” institutions, and protect and empower consumers. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

Extension of Unemployment Benefits, to extend benefits to millions of Americans who have lost their jobs in the Bush recession and to stimulate economic activity.

Cash for Clunkers, to jumpstart America’s auto industry and spur the sale of 700,000 new vehicles. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights, to ban the worst practices by credit card companies and provide tough new consumer protections. [OPPOSED BY HOUSE REPUBLICAN LEADERS]

Hate Crimes Prevention, to extend federal protection to people who are victims of violent crime because of their gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

The Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act, to save or create the jobs of 161,000teachers, and thousands of police officers, and firefighters while closing tax loopholes that encourage big corporations to ship American jobs overseas.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, to restore the rights of women and other workers to challenge unfair pay and help close the wage gap where women earn 78 cents for every $1 that a man earns in America. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

The HIRE Act, to provide tax incentives for businesses to hire more Americans (4.5 million Americans have already been hired) and unleashing billions of dollars to rebuild highways and other infrastructure, and to crack down on offshore tax havens for the wealthy.

The Worker, Homeownership, and Business Assistance Act, to boost the American economy and create jobs, expand the 1^st time homebuyers’ tax credit, and enhance tax relief for small businesses.

The U.S. Manufacturing Enhancement Act, to help American manufacturers compete by temporarily suspending or reducing duties on materials and products which are not made domestically.

Children’s Health Insurance legislation, to provide affordable health care coverage to 11 million children, who would otherwise go without coverage.

Tobacco Regulation, to have the FDA regulate the manufacture and marketing of tobacco, especially to children.

Budget Blueprint, to create jobs through investments in health care, clean energy, and education, reduce taxes for most Americans, and cut the Bush-deficit in half by the year 2013.

Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO), to bring back the Clinton-era rule that requires all new policies that reduce revenues or expand entitlement spending be offset over five and ten years and therefore not increase the deficit. This spending rule led to the record surpluses during the Clinton Administration.

Stem Cell Research, to end former President Bush’s ban on federal funding for lifesaving embryonic stem cell research. [ENACTED BY EXECUTIVE ORDER]

Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services, to provide help for those who provide care to disabled, sick, or injured veterans and improve health care services to women veterans.

Passed by the House…

Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ to end this outdated policy, contingent on the certification that military review was completed and that repeal would not impact readiness.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act, to create millions of clean energy jobs, bring about historic reductions in pollution that causes climate change, and reduce America’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

The DISCLOSE Act, to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United that threatens corporate takeover of our elections. The measure requires CEOs to stand by the political advertising funded through their corporate treasuries, expands disclosure requirements, and prohibits foreign countries from exercising influence in the funding of U.S. elections.

The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act, to close tax loopholes that reward corporations for shipping American jobs overseas. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

Jobs for Main Street Act, to create and save jobs through investments to hire more teachers, police officers, fire fighters, rebuild highways and mass transit systems, and boost small businesses. [OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

Small Business Jobs and Credit Act, to establish a $30 billion lending fund to help community banks provide loans to small businesses. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

The America COMPETES Act, to reauthorize this legislation that aims to create millions of American jobs in science and innovation while reasserting America’s economic and technological leadership throughout the world. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

Response to the BP Oil Spill, to eliminate the $75 million cap on oil company liability, restore the Gulf Coast, increase safety requirements and oversight on offshore drilling, and protect local residents.

Home Star Jobs legislation, to incentivize consumers to make their homes more energy efficient, create 168,000 jobs, reduce energy bills for 3 million families, and reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil.

http://dccc.org/page/content/accomplishments

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Feingold: No outside big money allowed

workn2gether — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 13:51:06 +0000

This is not the first time Feingold has risked his (Senate) seat to hang onto his convictions about the proper way to finance political campaigns. In 1998, in a race he ultimately won by a whisker, he told outside groups not to come into Wisconsin with unregulated “soft money” ads on his behalf. “No career, including mine, is as important as breaking the hold of this system of legalized bribery,” he told R.W. Apple of The Times.

Elections: Oshkosh Shrugged

By GAIL COLLINS

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/opinion/23collins.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Before you burn down your house…

workn2gether — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 21:42:50 +0000

What strikes me in this mid-term political climate is that some people want to turn out incumbents regardless of their competence, effectiveness or whatever and w/o regard to who — or what — will replace him/her, and what the consequences might be. After Christine “Where is separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution?” O’Donnell won Deleware’s senatorial GOP primary, some people said they didn’t care who she was or how unqualified she might be, they would vote for her because they wanted a change. To me that’s like burning your house down because someone says they’ve got a nicer place for you to live — and even show you a picture of it — only to find that the “nicer place” is nothing but a cardboard cutout.

Don’t bother us with facts; we’re too angry for that

by PAUL FANLUND | The Capital Times | October 20, 2010

Russ Feingold sat in my office for an endorsement interview the other day and held forth knowledgeably for almost an hour on many issues, but I was most struck by his remarks on health care. Feingold’s willingness to be the nation’s only U.S. Senate candidate daring to campaign on his support for President Obama’s health care reform law has made national headlines.

The Wall Street Journal pegged an entire article to how the three-term Democrat was going it alone in that regard.

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/madison_360/article_ebef6a58-dbcc-11df-b317-001cc4c03286.html

Out of the GOP/Rove/FOX playbook?

workn2gether — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:58:23 +0000

This sure sounds like it:

“The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision…..The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc….. since its function … consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated …. its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions ….All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to….. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these … until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”

This is indeed right-wing thinking, but this is not from the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove braintrust. It’s from Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, Volume One – A Reckoning, Chapter VI: War Propaganda (1.1.5, 1925)

Workers can thank GOP and U.S. Chamber of Commerce for joblessness

workn2gether — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 21:07:45 +0000

So here’s the deal. U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Tom Donahue praises outsourcing — you know, U.S. companies sending American jobs overseas, which is a major cause of unemployment in the U.S. He thinks that’s good — or as he says, “outsourcing jobs, outsourcing work, has legitimate value.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporation-front groups like political-operative Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the mega-rich Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (notice the nice “patriotic” names these groups have) are pouring big bucks — can you say $300 million? – into GOP big-business/corporation-friendly Congressional candidates.

Some of that money might even be from foreign entities (and, if so, is illegal). But voters don’t and might never know because GOP senators successfully filibustered and killed the Disclose Act, which would have outlawed secret donations like those the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its U.S. job-killing confederates are funnelling into GOP campaign coffers and using — or freeing up money from non-foreign sources — to fund attack ads against Democratic Congressional candidates.

So the more GOP senators and representatives in Congress, the more Congressional support for continuing the drain of jobs from the U.S. and to other countries.

And what’s in it for the GOP? Why do they support bleeding the U.S. dry of jobs? Because doing so keeps GOPers in office — as long as they can keep Americans from realising that the GOP and its funding sources are the real high-unemployment culprits.

The bulk of corporate and pro-corporate groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Rove’s and the Kochs’ campaign donations go to GOP candidates. The return on their investment is GOP support for outsourcing jobs and opposition to donor secrecy and bills like the one Democrats tried to pass last month that would have provided incentives to companies for creating jobs in the U.S. and disincentives for outsourcing jobs to other countries.

The reason behind all of that is, outsourcing U.S. jobs to other countries enhances corporate profits.

Money from other countries that benefit from outsourcing — you know, the “thank you for sending us your jobs” countries — to influence or outright fund Congressional representatives that improves employment in their countries (to the detriment of ours) means Americans who vote for Republicans for Congressional offices are, in fact, voting themselves and/or other Americans right out of their own jobs.

http://kaaltv.com/article/stories/S1794107.shtml?cat=10151

Where the jobs are

workn2gether — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:09:52 +0000

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show asked House Minority Whip Eric Cantor about who Cantor was referring to when he talked “the people” and what “the people” want.

Jon Stewart: Who are “the people” because the people aren’t monolithic…so how do you know what the people want?

Eric Cantor: Right now everybody wants jobs.

What Cantor didn’t say is where those jobs are and where people have to go to find them. India, China, Mexico, Bangladesh.

If Cantor really wanted to help Americans get jobs in the United States, he would have ‘whipped’ his fellow House Republicans and gotten GOP senators to pass a recent bill they all voted against that would have provided incentives to corporations/companies/businesses to create and keep jobs in the U.S., and penalize/tax those that ship jobs out of our country. These GOPers and their corporate enablers wrap themselves in Old Glory, yet behave in the most unpatriotic ways.

Self-ID’ed Christians Constantly Prove They’re Not

workn2gether — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:55:49 +0000

News report: Critics of athiest Christopher Hitchens upon learning that he has cancer says he got what he deserved.

And Jesus would have said???

And that means that an uncle who was a lifelong Nazarene minister who died of cancer got what he deserved, too?

That isn’t being a Christian. That’s being a Pat Robertsonian

From KKK to Tea Party to Rovian Crossroads

workn2gether — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 21:27:19 +0000

The GOP cabal of anonymous donors and its “House surge strategy” is nothing more that a modern-day version of the Ku Klux Klan’s intimidate-and-control strategy. The difference between Karl Rove’s brainchild and the KKK of the 1860s and its forerunner and its lame early 1900s resurgence is that it uses money instead of jack-boot tactics, cross-burning and lynching to brainwash and dominate the populace. Otherwise Rove’s Crossroads donors is just another bunch of white bullies who are so afraid of democracy that they cower behind anonymity to lauch their attacks and attempts to take over the country.

It Takes a Village to be Rich

workn2gether — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:49:49 +0000

Becoming rich and staying that way can’t happen without a hand–or many hands–from the government. The rich need to pay their fair share for that aid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/opinion/l22krugman.html?ref=opinion