All posts by carldavidson

Community, Right Wing

Take the Rag Away From Your Face Dept: Triggers Today Are Being Pulled by the Right

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Right-Wing Terrorism:

Murders Grow on the Far Right

Four Decades After

Martin Luther King Jr.

By Stephan Salisbury
Progressive America Rising via Tomdispatch.com

Jan. 16, 2011

The landscape of America is littered with bodies.

They’ve been gunned down in Tucson, shot to death at the Pentagon, and blown away at the Holocaust Museum, as well as in Wichita, Knoxville, Pittsburgh, Brockton, and Okaloosa County, Florida.

Total body count for these incidents: 19 dead, 26 wounded.

Not much, you might say, when taken in the context of about 30,000 gun-related deaths annually nationwide. As it happens, though, these murders over the past couple of years have some common threads. All involved white gunmen with ties to racist or right-wing groups or who harbored deep suspicions of “the government.” Many involved the killing of police officers.

In Pittsburgh, three police officers were shot and killed, while two were wounded in an April 2009 gun battle with Richard Poplawski, a white supremacist fearful that President Obama planned to curtail his gun rights. In Okaloosa County, Florida, two officers were slain in April 2009 in an altercation with Joshua Cartwright, whose abused wife told the police that her husband “believed that the U.S. Government was conspiring against him” and that he was “severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.”

Continue reading Take the Rag Away From Your Face Dept: Triggers Today Are Being Pulled by the Right →

Economy, labor, unemployment

Getting Behind HR 5204, the Conyers ‘Jobs for All’ Bill

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Legislation for Our Time:

The 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act

Join PDA’s Economic and Social Justice Issue Organizing Team (IOT) to Campaign for It; Learn More Here.

By Bill Barclay
Beaver County Blue via ChicagoDSA.org.
Jan. 15, 2011

In May 2010, Rep John Conyers introduced a bill entitled "The 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act." The bill was little noticed at the time but, today, after another 7 months of dismal jobs reports—we have actually lost ground during 2010, creating fewer jobs than the growth of the labor force—there is renewed interest in this legislation by a range of progressive groups.

The DSA NPC has made mobilization around the Act a national priority; Progressive Democrats of America is developing a similar effort, as are both the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and the National Jobs for All Coalition . What follows is a summary of the major elements of the Act and why it is one that anyone concerned about the economy should support. 

The 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act includes (i) funding for jobs; (ii) allocation of monies raised by the funding mechanism; (iii) job creation targets (who and what types of jobs); (iv) mechanisms for implementing the Act; and (v) a definition of the economic situations under which the Act would come into effect. I will take these topics one at a time. I will also briefly suggest what a political mobilization effort around the Act could look like.

Continue reading Getting Behind HR 5204, the Conyers ‘Jobs for All’ Bill →

Right Wing

Violence in Politics: Right Wing Tries to Hide from Its Own Demagogy

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Rights Come with Responsibilities:

The Right Shirks Theirs

Leo W. Gerard
International President, United Steelworkers
Beaver County Blue via Huffington Post

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 may have 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.

Continue reading Violence in Politics: Right Wing Tries to Hide from Its Own Demagogy →

Community, Environment

Slide Show on How ‘Fracking’ Pollutes the Beaver River, Endangering Our Water

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Foam on the Beaver River indicating pollutants. To start slide show, click HERE

Economy, social security, unemployment

Put This Neoliberal Warning Label on Blue Dogs, the GOP and Other Wavering Centrists

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10 Ways Right-Wingers Will Try

to Wreck Any Economic Recovery

By Isaiah J. Poole
Beaver County Blue via Blog for Our Future

Dec. 27, 2010 – Conservatives have a legislative agenda for 2011 that will hurt your ability to get or keep a job, your neighborhood’s ability to recover from the recession and this country’s ability to regain its footing in the global economy.

To keep conservatives from enacting policies that will kill a nascent economic recovery, progressives will have to organize against these top 10 economy killers.

1. Repeal of Health-Care Reform

Republicans have placed "repealing Obamacare" at the top of their legislative agenda for 2011. If they succeed, the economy is going to come down with multiple serious illnesses—at least 24, according to a report released this month by Rep. Peter Stark of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Among them: a $143 billion increase in the deficit by losing the savings the reforms created, an increase the number of uninsured by 30 million people, an end to free preventative care services and the loss of the requirement that insurance companies devote the bulk of premium payments to health care costs rather than expensive advertising and executive perks. While a Virginia judge is a conservative hero for blocking health-care reform’s requirement that people buy private insurance, conservatives are silent on the fact that if that requirement goes, the reform’s mandate that insurance companies cover preexisting conditions is unsustainable.

We’ll be back to uncontrolled cost increases in private insurance. But, as the state of our health compared to other leading nations continues to decline, conservatives will at least be able to say that they maintained the United States’ global leadership as the nation that spends the most on health care and gets the least.

2. Diminish the Federal Government’s Ability to Support Job-Creation

Conservatives are poised to execute a strikingly broad assault against federal spending, particularly programs that help jump-start and steer the nation’s job-creation engine. It includes the expected targets—such proven programs as Community Development Block Grants—as well as some new ones, such as the Small Business Administration (there goes all that Republican fealty to "small business") and even the requirement that the Federal Reserve take employment impact into account when it sets monetary policy.

Continue reading Put This Neoliberal Warning Label on Blue Dogs, the GOP and Other Wavering Centrists →

Economy, Infrastructure, unemployment

Exposing the Banksters: One Picture, One Thousand Words Dept:

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Why a Financial Transaction Tax to Fund Green Energy Jobs Makes Sense

Economy, unemployment

Male Workers in Trouble: When Clinging to an Old Sanctuary Becomes a Trap

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Mancession: Gender, Occupational Segregation,

and the Structural Transformation of Capitalism

Nancy Folbre Interviewed by Paul Jay

Paul Jay: Nancy Folbre, in her blog on the New York Times, wrote the following: "The Great Recession has sometimes been dubbed the Mancession because it drove unemployment among men higher than unemployment among women."  So how is this affecting families?  How is this affecting the future outlook for the population as a whole when it comes to unemployment?  What might be the social consequences of men being more reliant on women for family support? . . .

Nancy Folbre: Male unemployment is significantly higher than female unemployment now.  That’s not terribly surprising — typical in recessions for men to be more affected, because they’re employed in more cyclical industries like manufacturing that go up and down more than other industries.  But –.

Paul Jay: As opposed to service sector, like nurses.

Nancy Folbre: Right.  But the more disturbing trend is a longer-term decline in manufacturing employment.  If you look at the last ten years, even counting the boom years, employment in that sector has declined.  And that’s one of the factors that are driving higher unemployment among men.

Continue reading Male Workers in Trouble: When Clinging to an Old Sanctuary Becomes a Trap →

Civil Liberties, Media

Michael Moore Posts Bail for Wikileaks Head Julian Assange

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Why I’m Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange

(A statement from Michael Moore)

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Friends,

Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

Continue reading Michael Moore Posts Bail for Wikileaks Head Julian Assange →

Community, Economy, unemployment

Beaver County Solidarity in Hard Times

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Hot soup in Aliquippa

Growing Demand in Western PA’s

Food Pantries and Soup Kitchens

By Patti Conley
Beaver County Times

Dec. 11, 2010 – Seven days a week, anyone who is hungry can sit down at a soup kitchen somewhere in Beaver County. No questions asked.

A community schedule of meals, available online at http://www.bccan.org., lists the times when the 15 meals are available in churches from Beaver Falls to Aliquippa.

Such soup kitchens became a staple in the region 25 years ago when the steel industry stopped nourishing the area’s economy. Since then, soup kitchens and food pantries have filled food gaps for the chronically poor who are without jobs, benefits and money, and for those whose Social Security, disability and welfare benefits don’t stretch through the end of each month.

That was until recent months, when soup kitchen and food pantry staff said they began to see new faces at their tables and new names on food pantry applications, which are governed by income guidelines.

The nation’s rocky economy has delivered a direct blow to some middle-class Joes and Janes here in the Beaver Valley. An increase in local food pantry recipients brings home that point.

Continue reading Beaver County Solidarity in Hard Times →