The People's View

A statement of American values

2012-02-14T15:40:00.000-08:00

“Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.”
― Joe Biden

Yesterday, President Obama sent his budget to Congress. There is a party in our country that likes to invoke the word "values" at election time. That party - the Republican party - has a funny formulation of their "values": they claim to value the family but vehemently oppose family planning; they claim to value children but show it by cutting funds from our public schools; they claim to value community and show that by reducing funding for police and firefighters; and they claim to value faith but deny the central tenet of every faith: helping the least among us.

Capital Hill Republicans and the US Chamber of Commerce (my apologies for the redundancy) are in a tizzy over the it, but the President's budget is not just a statement of his values. It is a statement of American values.

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How is Keystone XL Conservative?

2012-02-14T12:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was listening to a Conservative coworker of mine cheerfully preach about how President Obama was standing in the way of oil jobs. After a bit of thought I couldn't help but respond

So the American Conservative position is that President Obama should hurry up and bypass state desires to allow a foreign company to build another pipeline across the nation to ship oil from Socialist Canada to Communist China?

I was surprised that a person fluent in right-wing radio bubblespeak could take this position. After all this is a demand for the President (or one of his czars!?) to intervene in the private market and pick winners and losers!! They say it's about jobs, using the government to create jobs? The government doesn't create any jobs is what all those Senators and Congressman and lobbyists and political commentators told us before! When I broke it down from my point of view while using the appropriate anti-government constructs my friend's smugness deteriorated. This should be an easy one for Democrats to win the messaging war on. In fact generally this should be an area were we can attack Republicans. Gas was $1.30/gallon when Bush became president and more than $3.50 after his ideas of economic anarchy took hold. All serious economists knew that would happen. When you take away the rules and refs a football game becomes a street fight. A drag race becomes destruction derby (although even that has rules). We've let the oil and gas industry and financial speculators have free reign in the past with clear devastating results. It's time on this Keystone Pipeline to say no, or at least, "let's leave that up to the states." ;)

Scorched earth and last stands

2012-02-14T08:47:00.000-08:00

Ian Kershaw is one of the most eminent historians of the Second World War. His most recent book, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945, is a powerful examination of the last year of the war, from the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944 to Germany's final capitulation in May 1945. Specifically, Kershaw attempts to answer a very important question: Why did Germany continue fighting when it was obvious to anyone with an understanding of the military and political situation that the war was lost? Here is Kershaw's conclusion:

Of the reasons why Germany was willing and able to fight on to the end, these structures of rule and underlying mentalities behind them are the most fundamental. All other factors... were ultimately subordinate to the way the charismatic... regime was structured, and how it functioned, in its dying phase... The dominant elites possessed neither the collective will nor the mechanisms of power to prevent Hitler from taking Germany to total destruction.

It wasn't so much that the Nazi leaders were bound up with Hitler's fate; by this time Hitler had lost most of his charisma. But they were all bound together to a common ideology, and had committed common crimes. Hitler knew that the only way out for him was victory or death; his closest acolytes, even though some tried to make deals with the West in the war's dying days, knew this as well. The ones who drove the German war machine into its destruction knew they had nothing to lose, and that nothing awaited them on the other side of a defeat. It was the desperation of the desperate.
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GOP folds like a cheap wallet on payroll tax cut

2012-02-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

Last December, inexplicably, Republicans handed President Obama a most beautiful political gift. They extended the president's payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance for only two months rather than the whole year. Why? So they could protect their millionaire friends from a 3% surtax on income over $1 million.

So of course, with amazing political malpractice, John Boehner and the Republicans handed to the president and he Democrats a golden goose - the chance to re-argue the case for extending these benefits to help working Americans and Americans looking for work in just two short months, a debate the president and the Democrats have already decidedly won.

And so here it comes. The two months are almost up, the Republicans are refusing to agree on any revenue raisers and arguing for cutting critical support from programs for the elderly, poor and job-seekers, and Democrats are putting the squeeze on. The result? The Republicans folded like a cheap wallet on the payroll tax cut; offering to extend it without any pay-fors.

“Because the president and Senate Democratic leaders have not allowed their conferees to support a responsible bipartisan agreement, today House Republicans will introduce a backup plan that would simply extend the payroll tax holiday for the remainder of the year while the conference negotiations continue,” Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric I. Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a joint statement.

Did President Obama just launch his own "Operation Chaos?"

2012-02-13T11:57:00.000-08:00

You all remember Operation Chaos - Rush Limbaugh's failed attempt in 2008 to get Republicans to vote in the Democratic primaries so as to keep it going longer and weaken the eventual nominee - don't you? Well, what if I told you that President Obama has launched his own "Operation Chaos" in the Republican primaries this year?

Thus far, on the politics of the contraception nontroversy, I have discussed how the President is advantaged by both standing up for women's health and women rights as well as by exposing the extremist, anti-women agenda of the GOP. What had escaped me though is that the exact way it played out - first announcing a rule that religious employers, like other employers, would be required to cover contraception in the insurance of non-Church employees and then shifting the mandate to insurance companies masterfully to take out any even supposed reasonable religious liberty concerns - could well have been engineered to do one other thing: throw the Republican primary process into chaos.

It certainly happened that way.

All American Politics Of Envy

2012-02-13T09:02:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone, I'm Curtis Abbey. Thanks so much to Deaniac for inviting me to post here. I wrote for years on the Progressive Electorate (now inactive) and on the Daily Kos as CornSyrupAwareness. I've got a degree in economics and do local work electing Democrats as well as national fundraising for Congressional candidates. I often write about the idiocy that is supply side economics, which is built on the belief that the economy does best when companies are allowed to do whatever they want. This cartoon is original, I came up with the concept and a good friend of mine did the artwork. It's based off of Mitt Romney's comments that anyone who questions his work for Bain Capital is just jealous.

“President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” Romney said in his prepared speech, which he delivered on a stage filled with family and supporters. “In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision.”

A vision where near billionaires should be applauded for raping and pillaging companies!? Bain's favorite trick was having the newly acquired company borrow epic sums of money and then pay out bonuses to the Bain execs. This leaves the victim company to sell off assets, slash pensions and/or just fold up shop, while Bain walks away free and eager to repeat the process.

Another study that looked at the eight-year period following 77 deals during the same time found that in 17 cases the company went bankrupt or out of business, and in 6 cases Bain Capital lost all its investment. But 10 deals were very successful and represented 70 percent of the total profits. wiki

It's not jealousy I feel, it's disgust. And pity for those whose lives were destroyed.

Nontroversy resolved. Another stroke of genius by Obama.

2012-02-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

Today, the President announced the final form that regulations to protect women's access to contraception will take under the Affordable Care Act.

The jest of the rule is this: women will have full access to no-copay contraception, regardless of their employer. Religious employers will not have to pay for contraception coverage, but insurance companies offering plans to the employees of even those employers must provide contraception coverage directly to the employees free of charge nevertheless. This is cost neutral because the cost of coverage with contraception is actually lower than the cost of coverage without, since unintended pregnancy is more costly than contraceptive care. Therefore, any insurance plan that would cover unintended pregnancies has no extra cost (but a potential saving) in covering contraceptive care.

Basically, it shifts the mandate of coverage from the employer to the insurance companies. And it exposes the fact that there is in fact no additional cost to covering contraceptives under insurance, mutilating the idiotic argument that Catholic employers would be required to "pay for" contraceptive coverage.
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On women's issues, the spectacular failure of a media culture stuck in the old white male bubble

2012-02-10T12:36:00.000-08:00

Whoever said that abortion would be a sacrament if men could get pregnant got it exactly right. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen an extraordinary attack on American women, particularly on their access to birth control. It is an attack on women's health as much as one on the religious freedom of women who work for religiously-affiliated civil institutions to be free from the religious dictates of their employers. Women's advocates in the Senate were right to stand up and defend that freedom strongly:

But the media, by and large, is framing the issue in the most preposterous way possible. I watched a segment on Hardball on MSNBC yesterday, and Matthews himself was bloviating about a manufactured "right" of religious employers to trample on the personal moral and religious beliefs of their employees.
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A few thoughts from a lapsed Catholic

2012-02-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: Hello everyone, please welcome Liberal Librarian - whom many of you know from across the blogosphere, as another excellent addition to TPV's team of contributors. I am proud to have him publish on The People's View, and as I see below (sorry I cheated and read it before you all had a chance to!) he starts with a bang! - Deaniac83.

When Deaniac invited me to contribute to The People's View, my intention was to start with a post I had written for The Obama Diary. I'll still post that one, but the events of the past week have turned my attention elsewhere.

I am, in common parlance, a lapsed Catholic. In other common parlance, I'm an agnostic; if I'm not an atheist it's because I'm not certain enough in my disbelief to completely rule out the existence of some sort of divinity. Call it a mind willing to be open to all possibilities; however, I consider the chances of the Creator's existence to be quite slim.

Whether or not God exists, human beings seem to be inexorably drawn to explaining the ultimate meaning of the universe in spiritual, supernatural terms. It's part of our cultural DNA, evolved in a pre-scientific age, when explanations for both good and evil had to be sought to give life sense and meaning. I still at times make the sign of the Cross when I have a particularly close call while driving, or when I escape a potentially embarrassing situation by the skin of my teeth. It's wired into most of us.
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CI: A Call for Every California Prisoner ~ 150,000 and More

2012-02-10T08:28:00.000-08:00

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

A Call for Every California Prisoner ~ 150,000 and More
by Nancy A. Heitzeg

"We must win this struggle not simply because it is morally correct, upholds international standards of humanity, opposes governmental collusion in corporate exploitation of underclass people, and serves the interests – social, political and economic – of society as a whole, but also because it’s necessarily our survival. We are men in earnest; consequences have little meaning in the face of such conditions.

Some of you reading these words are no doubt grappling with the reality behind them, attempting to find some point of relatability, some common experience from which to draw a correlation. Unless you’ve experienced this firsthand, such an attempt is an effort in futility. But for the sake of this discussion, I challenge you to run an experiment: Go to your bathroom and close the door. Imagine that you will never leave that room. Your tub and shower, that’s your bed. Yes, your toilet is only a step or two away from where you lay your head. Your food will be brought to you here twice a day.

Stay there as long as you can. How long do you last? Twenty minutes? An hour? Six hours? Imagine you sit in that bathroom for a year, 10 years, 24 years, 40 years. You will never leave that bathroom unless you are released from prison, agree to be an agent for the same people who stuck you in that bathroom, or you die of old age and infirmity. How long would you last? How strong is your will?" ~ Heshima Denham, January 8 2012 from the NCTT Corcoran SHU

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Learning About Slavery From A Freed Slave. It's An American History That Must Be Told With Care.

2012-02-10T05:10:00.000-08:00

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

Excerpt of a letter by Jourdan Anderson offering a smart response to P.H. Anderson’s request that his former slave, Jourdan, come back and work for his former master in Tennessee:

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.

Continue reading the full excerpt below the fold...
Slavery is the ugliest chapter of American History and to this day it makes many white people very uncomfortable to talk about it. In fact, I would go a little further to make the claim that a lot of today's Ron Paul supporting types of youth don't have a clue about slavery because if they did, I am sure they would not support bigotry and racism displayed by Ron Paul but again there are some who do support the view that Blacks, Indians, Asians, Hispanics or Gays should not be served at restaurants if the owner of a restaurant chooses to not serve them in the name of free speech. Who knows, some may believe in the view that the South was right in the Civil War and that the "North should have paid to buy slaves from southern slave owners to avoid the war" in the process denying Blacks equal opportunity. Well, for those with limitation, if you don't learn, you will never know the monstrous crime that was committed and the ideology some are pushing today in our politics makes you criminal to say the least.
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Professional Left hates struggling homeowners

2012-02-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

One would think the homeowner relief settlements with five major banks just announced by the Justice Department would be welcome news for people who spend their days pretending that they care about the 99%. But oh no. The settlement just announced may have $17 billion in principal reductions for a million distressed borrowers and $3 billion in refinancing for underwater-but-current-on-payment mortgages, but apparently, you can't sell branded products on those and stuff your own coffers. The settlement may have $2,000 checks waiting for 750,000 responsible homeowners who were foreclosed on between 2008 and 2011, and it may include $5 billion in cash payments to states to fund consumer protection and foreclosure prevention efforts, but it doesn't require all bankers to immediately drown themselves in the Mississippi.

Yes, the settlement requires banks to look at loan modifications and other options and makes foreclosure a last resort, bans robo-signing, stops banks from moving forward on foreclosures while a loan modification process is pending, gives borrowers a right to appeal modification denials and creates a single point of contact for borrowers. Yes, though the initial figure is $25 billion, the way the settlement and the payouts are structured, benefits from the 5 biggest lenders to homeowners could reach $40 billion. And yes, the settlement figure can reach $45 billion if all major servicers decide to join, but hey, why would you want $45 billion in relief for homeowners and a mandated loan modification program when you can instead bitch and moan about perpwalks that the settlement leaves the door wide open to?
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Barack Obama's brilliant play on birth control

2012-02-08T15:43:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama is a transformative president who has far-reaching policy triumphs and who has never been afraid to take the political risk to do the right thing. But he is also the man whose political acumen has Republicans scared. Even post the GOP electoral gains of 2010, President Obama wrapped the Republicans in their own petard, so to speak, and won policy as well as political victories over the GOP on the debt ceiling fight, on instituting and extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, and even on some parts of his jobs agenda.

Here comes another one: birth control. The beltway media thinks that it's a public relations disaster for the Administration for applying the law as it has been over more than a decade (only difference being under the Affordable Care Act, it is now free - h/t blackinthebuilding in the comments) and trying to protect the religious freedom of employees of religion-affiliated civil institutions from the religious dicta of their employers. Catholic bishops (who are at odds with the majority of American Catholics) are demanding for their Church-run (but non-church) public civil institutions the ability to shirk laws every other employer has to abide by. But as Rachel Maddow said last night, there is another way to look at this:

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The Grand Old Party Spitting On Mitt Romney and Coddling With A Racist & Homophobic Rick Santorum

2012-02-08T10:54:00.000-08:00

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog
No kind of endorsement or money can boost Mitt Romney's chances of securing the Republican nomination if the three States primary contest results from yesterday are any indication. In fact, there is no secret about how much the GOP base hates Mitt Romney representing them as their Republican Presidential candidate if you look at what happened in yesterdays' primary.

Rick Santorum probably pulled off one of the most unexpected victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado but still may not have what it takes to be the nominee of the GOP. Mitt Romney is a very bruised candidate around the country and the perception on his character flaws are sinking in with voters. Once the darling of these three primary States with strong backings during the 2008 primary, Mitt Romney is no longer liked by many as his supporters have now evaporated. The result from yesterday's primary pretty much tells the picture:

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Dear Russ Feingold, let me tell you about dancing with the devil

2012-02-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

Hey, did you hear? The Senator who lost his seat to a wingnut is now pretending that he's qualified to call the shots on 'strategy' for the president who not only is the first black president of the United States, but has shown strategic brilliance in defeating the Republican legislative agenda time and again. That's right. Russ Feingold is calling President Obama's decision to support Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC, "dumb strategy", and "dancing with the devil."

"This is dancing with the devil. I know a lot of Democrats in D.C. don’t agree, and I understand the desire to do everything possible to win," Feingold said in a statement. "But this decision will push Democrats to become corporate-lite, and will send us head-on into a battle we know we will lose, because Republicans like Mitt Romney and his friends have and will spend more money."

Dancing with the devil? So because Mitt Romney and his pals "have and will spend more money," our side should just pretend that the rules of the game has not been changed by the Supreme Court and try to compete? And should President Obama's re-election team lend the support to competition, they are "dancing with the devil?"

Since we're talking about dancing with the devil, let me give you a scenario, Mr. Feingold, that gives us a window into what dancing with the devil really looks like. Imagine:
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Equality Gets One Step Closer

2012-02-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The above is section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. No state can pick and choose a group of people that the protection of the laws apply to while leaving out any other. Even if the state's voters want to. It is on that basis that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled California's Proposition 8 unconstitutional, just as Judge Vaughn Walker had done in a lower court.

“Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different people differently,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the decision. “There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.”

“All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same sex-couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation ‘marriage,” the judge wrote, adding: “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gay men and lesbians in California."

It's a little overcast in Silicon Valley as I sit and write this today, but today is a bright day in the history of LGBT civil rights. And it's a bright day for America.

Contraception, Newt Gingrich, The Catholic Church, and The Boundaries of Religious Freedom

2012-02-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich, a newly minted Catholic (guess he decided that he can do without the publicly cheating on his wives and divorcing one to marry the next for at least a while now), has an attack line against the Obama administration: that it is "secular government" eroding the freedoms of religious institutions. Why? Because the Obama Administration, under the Affordable Care Act, issued regulation that requires employer-sponsored health plans to include FDA-approved contraceptives. Churches and other houses of worship are exempted from it, but other religion-affiliated institutions, like religion-affiliated hospitals, schools and colleges are covered in cases where a majority of their employees are not of the given religion. This is not to force "Catholic" hospitals to offer contraceptives, mind you, but to simply cover it in their insurance policy so that if one of their employees needed and wanted to, they could go get it somewhere else.

The American Roman Catholic Church is pretty miffed by it, but one might remind the pontiff pontificating about "intrinsic evil" that to this day, there continue to be priests who go unpunished for abusing children.

Be that as it may, since Gingrich and the Catholic Church are waxing poetic about this regulation being an encroachment of religious liberty, let's look at it for what it really is: it is a check on religion-affiliated civil institutions' ability to force their beliefs on everyone who works for them, regardless of whether that employee subscribes to the given religion or not. According to the beliefs of the Church leadership and of Newt Gingrich, religious freedom is the freedom of churches to encroach on any civil institutions without having to abide by the same laws that apply to everyone one else.
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The Susan G. Komen Foundation Thinks You're Stupid

2012-02-06T10:12:00.000-08:00

It's an unpleasant truth, I know. But based on the recent statements coming from their leaders and affiliates, there is no other conclusion to be had. Nothing illustrates the organization's deep-seated hubris better than this snarkalicious Facebook comment from one Cheryl Roberts:

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that resulted in completely unexpected scrutiny of our CEO's unconscionably high salary, obscenely high overhead to actual good ratio, longstanding links to Republican politicians, huge budget for taking oppressive legal actions against other charities that dare use the word 'cure,' vast marketing and lobbying budgets, and long-standing history of secretly lobbying against federal assistance to women with breast cancer. Based upon the last ten years, we truly had no idea that we couldn't do whatever the hell we wanted with gullible contributors' money. We thought that the corpse of our CEO's sister was an impenetrable shield that protected all of our actions from scrutiny or accountability. We appreciate your support while we try to figure out WTF has changed.

However, although the sudden spike in scrutiny and precipitous drop in fundraising and sponsorships scared the crap out of us, we want to assure all of you that, even as we desparately attempt to salvage something out of the conflagration burning our brand to the ground, we will continue to flat-out lie to your face and generally assume you are all still such credulous imbeciles that we can shamelessly stick to obvious falsehoods or change our story from minute to minute as whim or panic dictate.

Now please stop looking into our finances, lobbying and legal activities and strong political connections with right wing politicians. Stop it right now or Susan will be angry, very angry with you. Thank you.

I think that captures it all quite nicely. They really do think the people following this fracas are dumb as posts. Let's examine the evidence. Read more »

Mitt Romney: “I Won’t Bribe Voters With A Handout”. President Obama’s Comprehensive List of Accomplishments in Helping the Poor.

2012-02-05T09:59:00.000-08:00

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

Somebody, please tell Mitt Romney that caring for the poor is not bribing for votes. I don't know about you but I still have a problem with the "I am not concerned about the very poor" statement made by Mitt Romney. I think it is despicable and un-Americana. I know when the going got tough for Romney, he said he misspoke but I really do believe that Romney was speaking from the heart all along.

Well, it is tough to know which side of the issue Mitt Romney is but Rachel Maddow had done a great job unmasking Romney's fake behaviors and beliefs on her show (click the link for a must watch video from a couple of days ago). She, just as I believe, feels that his behavior "was not so much a misplaced set of words as it was a real statement of beliefs" and he demonstrated what he really feels about the poor during the Nevada caucus victory speech Saturday night when he pretty much called the President an "entitlement" President just like Newt called the President a "food stamp" President not so long ago.

Here is the deal, if you care for the poor, you wouldn't use their needs to score political point by belittling or demonizing them as if helping the poor is a crime or un-American. This is what Mitt Romney said in his victory speech in Nevada:

I will not attempt to bribe the voters with promises of new programs, new subsidies, and ever-increasing checks from government. If this election is a bidding war for who can promise the most benefits, then I’m not your President. You have that President today.

I think it is clear that Mitt Romney has a "state of believe" that perceives poor people as problems and painting President Obama as an "entitlement President" is a give away as to what he believes deep in his heart.

Capitalism - GOP Style - with bonuses that are not bonuses

2012-02-04T16:37:00.000-08:00

American Airlines has been losing money and market for years so the company top executives have had to scrape by on $300 million or so. Last year, the CEO got $5 million and his President, who is now CEO, made about $3million.

The bonuses, then as now, are given to executives at a time when American’s unionized mechanics, ground workers, pilots and flight attendants are working under 30 percent wage and benefit cuts agreed to in 2003 to keep the airline out of bankruptcy.
“They’re not bonuses,” [then CEO] Arpey told his questioner. “It’s stock-based compensation.”

All right then - not bonuses. But all that money buys a lot of talent, and that talent has come up with a brilliant scheme for restoring the company to profitability. No, please don't be silly, they don't plan to improve quality of service, gain customers, and reduce operating costs through smart policies. Instead they plan to abuse the bankruptcy laws to break contracts with their employees, rip-off their pensioners, and stick the government with $9,000,000,000 (9 billion) or so in bad debts. The company contracted with employees to fund pensions - that was in the contract- but they preferred to use the money for higher purposes like themselves. Now the pensions are underfunded, so management wants to take a razor to them and hand what's left to the taxpayers. And they have already paid $14 million to bankruptcy and reorganization advisers from Wall Street- including $500,000/month to Mitt Romney's friends at Bain Consulting for advice on how to screw over workers at American Eagle.

The company PAC has been able to hand out money left and right - mostly right though - to both national and Texas state politicians. Conservatives like Boren and Inhofe and Rick Perry have all bellied up to the till. No wonder Texas GOP Senator Kay Baily Hutchinson slipped a special provision in the Iraq War bill of 2007 that permitted American to divert another billion dollars from employee pensions - that's one billion of the 9billion that the taxpayer is supposed to take over under management's plan. Who is standing in the way?Only the Obama administration which wants to save workers pensions (ones they are owed under contract) and save taxpayer dollars instead of supporting these "job creators" who apparently deserve low tax rates and high salaries because they are so damn great at running an airline. Funny how all those conservatives who think contracts are so important and who hate government handouts seem to have fallen silent. As Lawrence O'Donnell points out - another reason to vote.

Did 1.2 Million People Fall Out of the Labor Force in a Month? Umm, NO!

2012-02-04T13:11:00.000-08:00

You may have seen this article from "financial blog" Zerohedge, and the rants of CNBC's Rick Santelli making the rounds among whackos of all political stripes, claiming that in one month, from December 2011 to January 2012, more than a million people dropped off the labor force.

What are they basing this on? Population estimate adjustments. See, every year, the Census Bureau makes new adjustments to our population, which changes the estimates on the exact number of people in the population, in the labor force, etc. So in short, the population was adjusted thusly: according to the BLS report for this month (increase from 2011 to 2012): non-institutional, over-16 population increased by about 1.5 million, and persons not in labor force by 1.2 million. Ergo, zomg, 1.2 million people fell out of the labor force in one month!!!!!

Actually, although the data shows up like that in this month's report, it actually has nothing to do with that month. It has to do with population data being readjusted. It means there are 1.2 million more people not in the labor force than previously estimated in last year's numbers. Oh, and the adjustments apply to December:

To gauge the impact on the labor force data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses special tabulations of December data that incorporate the new population controls. When applied to December 2011, the updated controls increased the estimated size of the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years and over by 1,510,000, the civilian labor force by 258,000, employment by 216,000, unemployment by 42,000, and persons not in the labor force by 1,252,000. The total unemployment rate was not affected. The labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio were each reduced by 0.3 percentage point.

The Komen Kerfuffle is Far from Over

2012-02-04T06:05:00.000-08:00

Despite all the headlines declaring Komen to have "backed down," "reversed its decision," etc., you can bet your bippies the recent impasse is but a prelude of what's to come. I, for one, am more than happy to let the media leave the impression that Komen has re-embraced Planned Parenthood, though. It's making wingnut heads explode across the land; the commentary from some of the conservative websites is just the most delicious schadenfreude. Especially comments like this:

This is an incredible mistake. The fact that a wide majority of people had no idea they were funneling cash to Planned Parenthood actually provided a backstop to the fallout from cutting it off. How many of those will cut off donations to SGK, now that they caved to the fascists?

That's right; until Komen cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, a huge swath of their support base had no idea they even gave them one penny. Now that people do know, they want nothing to do with Komen anymore. No matter what Komen does from here on out, they have lost faith with too many people to survive this. Planned Parenthood is almost an after-thought at this point; the ensuing scrutiny into Komen's doings has dampened enthusiasm on both sides of the support base.

The really bad news for Komen is that both sides even agree on some of the issues that have come to light. For instance, I don't think anybody is happy that the former CEO (Brinker does not take a salary) was paid over $400,000 a year. Komen spends more on overhead than they do donating to research. Nobody on either side of the political divide trusts them anymore and with good reason: all indications seem to be that what goes on at Komen is not exactly above the board and really has very little to do with breast cancer research. Read more »

President Obama Serves Up Big Plate of Crow to GOP As Unemployment Dips to 3-Year Low

2012-02-03T12:16:00.000-08:00

The President is making things worse! His economic policies haven't worked! We must stop giving consumers power!

These are the cries of the modern day GOP. Over the past months, though, as the economy has shown better signs of life, including in the job market, their chants have been harder to sustain, their disregard for facts not withstanding. Today's jobs report - with 257,000 private sector jobs created in January and the unemployment rate falling to a three-year low of 8.3%, numbers significantly better than most predictions - serves them up with another well-deserved, nice, big plate of crow.
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CI: We Demand the Right to Vote: The Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People's Movement Counters Voter Suppression

2012-02-03T05:48:00.000-08:00

† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

We Demand the Right to Vote: The Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People's Movement Counters Voter Suppression
by Victoria Law

On Sunday, March 7, 1964, 600 civil rights activists attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the police murder of fellow demonstrator 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson and to demand their rights. As the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were brutally attacked by white state troopers, many of whom had been deputized that very morning. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized; the day became known as "Bloody Sunday." After a federal district court issued a restraining order preventing a second march across the bridge, a third march was successfully organized and carried out. The bridge became a symbol of the Civil Rights struggle.

Nearly fifty years later, the dreams of the Civil Rights movement remain unfulfilled. Mass incarceration has replaced Jim Crow as a means of racial and social control: In the fall of 1965, in a special message to Congress, Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Crime: “I hope that 1965 will be regarded as the year when this country began in earnest a thorough and effective war against crime.” In his 1973 State of the Union message, Richard Nixon vowed to continue and expand that war, linking the growing civil unrest to violent street crime. Reagan further intensified the amount of policing and prisons with his 1982 “War on Drugs” launched three years before the 1985 emergence of crack cocaine. These "wars" came at a time when economic conditions were deteriorating, particularly in communities of color; both served to lock poor people, particularly poor people of color, away before they could organize and challenge social conditions and the social order.

On February 28, 2011, more than fifty formerly incarcerated people from around the country convened in Alabama. All had worked on issues affecting incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in their respective states. Over the course of the weekend, attendees asked themselves and each other, "How do we bring people together and align people with the work that they're doing individually from a collective perspective?"

The Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People's Movement emerged from this inaugural meeting. Its goal is to organize a national movement to restore formerly incarcerated people's civil rights, halt prison expansion, demand an end to mass incarceration, eliminate prison abuses, and protect the dignity of family members and their communities. The organizers drew connections between the Civil Rights movement and their own movement for civil and human rights, illustrating the connection by walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

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Bradley Manning Defense Basically Admits His Guilt, Crickets From His Pretend-Left Defenders

2012-02-02T14:39:00.000-08:00

You remember the Bradley Manning case, don't you? The soldier who is charged with leaking classified information to WikiLeaks - that the entire Professional Left was in a tizzy over? And when the President said that Manning broke the law, you couldn't rest a second without hearing a earful from the same nuts about how the president is declaring someone guilty before trial.

Well, guess what? In news that fell through the crack (and was conveniently ignored by the Pretend Left) a couple of weeks ago, we now know that Manning's own defense team is essentially admitting to his guilt. Their defense is going to be based on a few things:

The idea that the information released wasn't really all that sensitive and didn't hurt US interests, albeit they were classified.
Even though the released material was classified, it really shouldn't have been.
The chain of command failed to stop Manning from releasing that information.

What's absent? Even Manning's defense won't argue that Manning in fact didn't release the classified information he's accused of releasing. Hell, they won't even argue that the government is failing to meet its burden of proof that he did so. Instead, the defense is simply, "Yeah, well, it's not that bad. And hey, it's not his fault that the others didn't stop him!"
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