Category Archives: elections
Division on the Right: Why GOP Collapse on the Payroll Tax Could be a Turning Point Moment
By Robert Creamer
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost
Dec 23, 2011 – In recent American politics, every major shift in political momentum has resulted from an iconic battle.
In 1995 the tide of the 1994 "Republican Revolution" was reversed when Speaker Newt Gingrich and his new Republican House majority shut down the government in a battle over their attempts to cut Medicare to give tax breaks to the rich (sound familiar). The shutdown ended with – what pundits universally scored — as a victory for President Clinton. That legislative victory began Clinton’s march to overwhelming re-election victory in 1996.
In 2010, Democrats passed President Obama’s landmark health care reform. But they lost the battle for public opinion – and base motivation. That turned the political tide that had propelled President Obama to victory in 2008 and ultimately led to the drubbing Democrats took in the 2010 mid terms.
The Republican leadership’s collapse in the battle over extending the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits could also be a turning point moment that shifts the political momentum just as we enter the pivotal 2012 election year.
Here’s why:
1). Since the President launched his campaign for the American Jobs Act, he has driven Congressional Republicans into a political box canyon with very few avenues of escape. The jobs campaign has made it clearer and clearer to the voters that the "do nothing Republican Congress" bears responsibility for preventing the President from taking steps that would create jobs.
IBEW Convention Endorses “Universal Single Payer Health Care”
IBEW International Convention Endorses Single Payer
The 38th convention of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
(IBEW) has endorsed single payer health as a solution to the nation’s
health care crisis.
The 3,000 delegates who attended the IBEW convention called upon “…our
international officers (to) do everything in their power and authority to
work with other groups and elected officials to build support and action
for universal single payer health insurance….”
The IBEW represents over 725,000 members in the United States and Canada
and is one of the largest building trades unions affiliated with the
AFL-CIO. The September 2011 convention was held in Vancouver, Canada.
Continue reading IBEW Convention Endorses “Universal Single Payer Health Care”
Interview with Bill Black: S&L Fraud Prosecutor
Occupy Wall Street: Our One Demand
Altmire Votes to Hold Emergency Aid Hostage
by Randy Shannon
PA 4th C.D. Congressman Jason Altmire voted with the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives to hold hostage emergency aid to flood victims in PA and other states.
Altmire supported the austerity agenda of the far right which says that emergency aid cannot be funded without cutting the funds of programs already in place.
Neighboring Democratic Congressmen Mark Critz and Mike Doyle voted against the bill that ultimately failed due to overwhelming Democratic opposition and the opposition of a handful of Republicans.
UAW Contract Analysis
UAW Makes Significant Gains in New Contract |
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| By: David Dayen Sunday September 18, 2011 3:42 pm | |
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The successful auto industry rescue is definitely a feather in the cap for the Administration, protecting up to a million direct and indirect auto industry jobs, and putting GM and Chrysler in a position to succeed. Now there’s a new contract with the United Auto Workers to share the success with labor.
Plan to Protect Social Security Offered
DEFAZIO AND SANDERS OFFER PLAN TO PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY |
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Urge Deficit Commission to Reject Privatization or Raising Retirement Age; Make Wealthy Pay Same Rate as Working Men and Women
WASHINGTON, September 30 – Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today sent a letter to the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the so-called Deficit Commission, outlining a plan to protect Social Security for the more than 50 million American seniors collecting benefits. The bi-partisan Deficit Commission is charged with making recommendations to rein in federal spending in order to reduce the federal budget deficit.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and others have recently suggested that Congress may need to privatize Social Security or raise the retirement age to help save the Social Security program from insolvency. However, we do not need to raise the retirement age or cut benefits to ensure the future solvency of the program. According to the Social Security Trust Fund Board of Trustees annual report which was released last week, without any changes in the program, the Social Security Trust Fund will continue to pay current benefits up until 2037 – 27 years from now. And without any changes in the program, after 2037 the Social Security Trust Fund would continue to pay up to 75% of current benefits until 2075.
Republican Legislators Plan to Restrict Ballot Access
The GOP War on Voting
In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year
by: Ari Berman
A voter casts his ballot during the primary elections in Virginia
Matt McClain/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.
Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP’s effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.
All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.
Continue reading Republican Legislators Plan to Restrict Ballot Access
“We’re not Slaves anymore.”
Community Stands Strong to Block an Eviction
By Natasha Lennard
New York Times
August 19, 2011
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/community-stands-strong-to-block-a-foreclosure/?hp
From inside Mary Lee Ward’s small and sparsely
furnished living room in Bedford-Stuyvesant, it sounded
Friday as if a block party was in full swing in the
street below. Cars and trucks honked their horns
melodically as they passed and almost 200 voices could
be heard cheering and chanting.
But this was no street party; it was not yet 9 a.m. and
the crowd outside was there as a line of defense.
Ms. Ward – a tiny, soft-spoken 82-year-old – faced
forcible eviction by a marshal on Friday morning
because of a subprime mortgage she bought in 1995. And
so neighbors, friends, housing advocates and supporters
had formed a thick human wall outside Ms. Ward’s small
gray house on Tompkins Avenue in Brooklyn.
Shortly after 9:30, the local state assemblywoman,
Annette Robinson, emerged from the house with news.
“The marshal will not be taking action today,” Ms.
Robinson said over a bullhorn as Ms. Ward stood by her
side. Ms. Robinson vowed to negotiate with the deed
holder to keep Ms. Ward in her home.
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 