Category Archives: Right Wing

2012 Election, Environment, Green Energy, Green Jobs, Right Wing, unemployment

Romney’s Green Energy Job Destruction Plan: Hurting GOP Governors to Hurt Obama

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Wind Subsidies Raise a Storm in Heartland States

By Jim Malewitz
SolidarityEconomy.net via PEW’s Stateline

Across the plains of Iowa, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and South Dakota, tall turbines with sleek blades dot once-clear horizons, churning out carbon-free energy to add to the nation’s power grid. The blades seem to wave a greeting, on windy days at least, to whoever drives across those open spaces.

The wind industry’s rapid growth has been cause for excitement among both Republican and Democratic policymakers in the heartland states. They welcome the jobs that come with it. In South Dakota, which has the capacity to generate almost a quarter of its energy from the turbines, “wind is not a partisan issue,” says Hunter Roberts, the state’s energy director.

But it is a controversial issue in Washington these days, threatening to stop the turbine boom before it progresses much further. Fiscal hawks in Congress — those who don’t represent wind states — question whether Congress can still afford to dole out the generous tax credit that has helped fuel the industry’s rise. Wind energy credits are just one of several renewable energy incentives set to expire at year’s end.

Wind-state governors, most of them Republicans, have loudly called for the credit’s renewal, writing letters to Congress and speaking through the media. But with the expiration deadline looming, the governors have grown curiously quiet on the issue. That’s since Mitt Romney voiced his opposition to the subsidy, shortly before releasing an energy plan that is heavy on oil and natural gas investments and light on wind and other renewables.

Continue reading Romney’s Green Energy Job Destruction Plan: Hurting GOP Governors to Hurt Obama →

2012 Election, GOP, Right Wing, Voting Rights

If We Can Shoot It Down in Texas, Why Not in Pennsylvania?

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Texas Loses Latest Voter ID Battle after Judges Strike Down ‘Retrogressive’ Law

Judges find that law requiring voters to present photo ID at the ballot box placed ‘unforgiving burdens on the poor’

By Chris McGreal
Beaver County Blue via The Guardian, UK

August 30, 2012 – The court said that the law was ‘likely to have a retrogressive effect’ by limiting access to the ballot box. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty

A federal court has struck down a Texas law requiring voters to present photo identification at the ballot box in the second ruling this week to effectively accuse the state of racial discrimination and attempting to manipulate elections.

In an escalating legal battle between mostly Republican-controlled states and the Obama administration over voter ID and other election laws, a panel of three judges in Washington DC found that the Texas legislation imposed "strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor" because of the cost and process involved in obtaining identification.

The US justice department told the court that voters would have to pay for birth certificates and travel up to 250 miles to obtain ID cards. The court said this imposed a "heavy burden" on any voter and would be "especially daunting for the working poor" who are more likely to be racial minorities.

The court concluded that if the law was implemented it "will likely have a retrogressive effect" by limiting access to the ballot box. It said that evidence submitted by Texas in support of its claim that the law was not discriminatory – and was necessary to combat voter fraud – was "unpersuasive, invalid, or both".

Continue reading If We Can Shoot It Down in Texas, Why Not in Pennsylvania? →

2012 Election, GOP, Right Wing, Voting Rights

Dollarocracy Over Democracy, 2012

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One Percenters Buying Themselves an Aristocracy

By Leo Gerard
USW President, via Huffington Post

August 30, 2012 – The U.S. Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. What this nation needs now is separation of wealth and state.

Without such a protection, Americans stand to lose their democracy. They’ll be ruled instead by an aristocracy of 1 percenters.

That’s the 1 percenters’ plan. To them, it was no more than a perk when the U.S. Supreme Court enabled politicians to open their wallets for unlimited, anonymous campaign contributions. That’s because way before the 2010 Citizens United ruling, 1 percenters were working on a takeover. If the 99 percent don’t stop them soon, don’t establish some sort of separation of wealth and state, then the nation will lose its founding precepts — that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Aristocracies can ignore the governed.

Already the 1 percenters have been extraordinarily successful. The rich really do enjoy advantages. They’ve succeeded in stuffing Congress with their peers. In America, fewer than 1 percent of all people are millionaires. In Congress, 47 percent are. The median net worth of a U.S. senator in 2010 was $2.56 million.

Those guys haven’t experienced what it’s like to try to pay a mortgage, fix the car and keep food on the table for the average household with a median income of less than $52,000. They’re completely out of touch with the 50 million Americans who don’t have health insurance.

Continue reading Dollarocracy Over Democracy, 2012 →

2012 Election, GOP, Racism, Right Wing, Voting Rights

The Long Struggle for Voting Rights

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By Al Hart
UE News Managing Editor via Beaver County Blue

August 20, 2012, Pittsburgh, PA – Since the founding of the United States, working people have had to fight to win, and to keep, the right to vote. And through American history, rich and powerful people, often calling themselves "conservatives", have tried to maintain their privileges by depriving other Americans of the right to vote.

The story of the long struggle for voting rights in America is thoroughly and brilliantly told in ‘The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,’ by Alexander Keyssar, who teaches history and social policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. This highly- readable account was first published in 2000, and the 2009 revised edition brings the story up to nearly the present, when voter suppression has again become a national issue.

Before and immediately after the American Revolution, the right to vote in most of the 13 original states was limited mainly to white men, and in most states, only those who owned a certain amount of property. Free blacks who owned property had voting rights in some Northern states and, for a while, North Carolina. The most common property qualification was a freehold of 50 acres (among others, this disqualified tenant farmers who leased land.) In some states the requirement was property of a certain monetary value, such as 50 pounds, or a taxpaying requirement. When Vermont gained statehood in 1791, it was immediately the most democratic state, with no property or tax requirements for voting.

Continue reading The Long Struggle for Voting Rights →

2012 Election, GOP, Racism, Right Wing, Seniors, Voting Rights, Youth and students

Even Papers as Far Away as New Zealand Are Shocked at PA’s GOP Voter Suppression Efforts

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Dorothy Cooper, Tn, denied vote by the same GOP efforts back by Santorum here.

Eligibility rules bar millions of voters in US

By Peter Huck
New Zealand Herald

Aug 18, 2012 – When Dorothy Cooper applied for a free voter identity card in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she supplied a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her birth certificate and her voter registration card to prove who she was.

Voter ID is mandatory to prevent fraud under a new state law passed by Republicans, despite scant evidence fraud exists.

But the 96-year-old, who was on the voting roll, left her marriage certificate behind. Cooper was denied the ID.

Wilola Lee in Pennsylvania has a similar story to tell. The 60-year-old has voted in most national elections since the 1970s, worked at her local Philadelphia polling station and is retired from the city’s education department. She has a social security card and a state identity card.

But a new law, passed by a Republican-controlled legislature, says voters must use an ID card issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

To get one you need a birth certificate. Lee’s was destroyed by fire. Efforts to get one from Georgia, her birthplace, have been frustrated for the past decade.

Continue reading Even Papers as Far Away as New Zealand Are Shocked at PA’s GOP Voter Suppression Efforts →

Economy, Right Wing, unemployment

What Romney Economics Means: Working Class Men’s Wages Have Plummeted Over the Past 40 Years

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By Kevin Drum
Beaver County Blue via Mother Jones

July 31, 2012 – Dylan Matthews says a bit more today about something I mentioned briefly a couple of weeks ago: among men, wages haven’t just stagnated over the past few decades. They’ve plummeted: [1]

    As you can see on the black line in the above graph, median earnings for men in 2009 were lower than they were in the early 1970s. And it gets worse. The decline shown above is actually too mild, because it doesn’t take into account the massive exodus from the workforce of men since that period. Between 1960 and 2009, the share of men working fulltime fell from 83 percent to 66 percent, and the share not making formal wages tripled from 6 percent to 18 percent. When you take all men, not just those working fulltime, into account, the slight decline in the second graph becomes a plummet of 28 percent in median real wages from 1969 to 2009. ‘

    ….High school dropouts’ earnings have fallen 66 percent since 1969, and people with some college – the median level of education in the US – have seen earnings fall by a third. Reasonable people can disagree about what caused this massive decline and what should be done to fix it. But it’s a major crisis….

This decline in both male employment and male wages has been going on for 40 years now, and as Dylan mentions, it’s far worse at the bottom of the ladder than at the top. Male high school grads working full time earn 25% less than they used to, and if you account for those not working or working only part time, aggregate wages are down by nearly half.

Half! And that’s for high school grads, not dropouts. (And the picture changes only modestly if you add health benefits to the wage picture.) These are men who basically played by the rules, got their diploma, and then went into the workforce. Or tried to, anyway. But they’re finding it far harder to find steady, full-time work than their fathers did, and when they do they earn dramatically less than their fathers did. So I’ll repeat what I said the last time I wrote about this: if you want to understand why marriage has declined among the working and lower middle classes, you have to understand what’s happened to male wages. It’s not the whole answer, but there’s simply no way that it’s not a big factor.

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/working-class-mens-wages-have-plummeted-over-past-40-years

Links:
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/31/wages-arent-stagnating-theyre-plummeting/

Economy, GOP, Infrastructure, Right Wing, safety net, social security, unemployment

A Sensible "Deal for All" Challenges the Dreaded "Simpson-Bowles" Cutbacks

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Photo: Cardboard image of Jamie Dimond, JP Morgan’s ‘Simpson Bowles’ Advocate.

By Carl Bloice
Beaver County Blue via Black Commentator

‘The real losers would be seniors, sick poor people, the unemployed, and people with disabilities.’

July 26, 2012 – A highly placed journalist spoke up boldly over the weekend on behalf of the country’s serious people, "those of us who crave a little common sense," who are feeling a bit of "despair," right now because the nation’s capital has become "a sludge pit of dysfunction." This state of affairs, wrote New York Times former executive editor. Bill Keller, could be attributed to "Republican cynicism, Democratic fecklessness or presidential disengagement."

"Talk to any credible economist, wire any serious politician to a polygraph, and you will hear at least 80 percent agreement on what is to be done: investment to goose the lackluster recovery and rebuild our infrastructure, entitlement reforms and spending discipline to lower the debt, and a tax code that lets the government pay its way without stifling business, punishing the middle class or rewarding sleight of hand," wrote Keller in the Times July 21. The problem, he asserted, is the failure of the responsible people to come up with a "grand bargain," the outline of which is pretty much summed up in (a little drum roll here) our old friend, the magic elixir; "Simpson-Bowles."

It just won’t go away. Its promoters continue to use a nonexistent "Simpson-Bowles" report from the failed Presidential deficit reduction commission as the code for what a powerful group among the nation’s political and economic elite want to enact by hook or by crook, whether we the people want it or not.

Continue reading A Sensible "Deal for All" Challenges the Dreaded "Simpson-Bowles" Cutbacks →

2012 Election, elections, PDA, Right Wing, Voting Rights

Defend Our Voting Rights!

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BUSES FROM BEAVER TO HARRISBURG on July 24

By Tina Shannon

At time when we need to increase the number of people voting, our State legislature has passed a law that will turn voters away from the polls.

Although there are no cases of voter fraud in PA, the Republican controlled legislature is requiring a picture ID to vote. This is part of a nation-wide Republican strategy to reduce the vote in order to defeat Obama.

John Jordan from the Pennsylvania NAACP will be in Beaver County on July 11th to explain the Voter Suppression Law, along with details of the rally and petition for injunction. Please join us for this important public meeting.

Public Meeting
John Jordan

PA NAACP Director of Civic Engagement

July 11th at 7:00 PM

USW Local 8183

1445 Market St, Bridgewater

Sponsored by a coalition of labor, civil rights, and community organizations

In a recently speech Republican Representative Mike Turzai said: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer: “More than 758,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania do not have photo identification cards from the state Transportation Department, putting their voting rights at risk in the November election, according to data released Tuesday by state election officials.”

The NAACP, ACLU & League of Women Voters have petitioned the Commonwealth Court for an injunction to stop implementation of the Voter ID Law. This will give their lawsuit time to make it to court to see if this law is constitutional. It would be a travesty to allow this law to decide the Presidential election only to later have it ruled invalid. 

A rally will be held at 1:00 PM on the steps of the Capitol in Harrisburg on July 24th, the day before the Court holds the hearing on the petition.

Continue reading Defend Our Voting Rights! →

2012 Election, African-Americans, Right Wing, Voting Rights

Update on Challenging Voter ID

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Yet Another Reason to Defeat All GOP Candidates—If You Needed One

 

Viviette Applewhite is 93-year-old and has voted in nearly every election for the last 60 years. She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Georgia. She has tried for years to obtain photo ID to no avail. Under Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law, Ms. Applewhite’s vote will not be counted. She is a plaintiff in our lawsuit to stop voter ID.

Learn more about ACLU-PA’s challenge to Pennsylvania’s unconstitutional voter ID law at: http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/applewhiteetalvcommonwealt/index

2012 Election, Civil Liberties, GOP, labor, Racism, Right Wing

April 4 Vigil Vows to Fight GOP Efforts to Deny Voting Rights

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HB 934 Exposed as ‘Modern-Day Poll Tax

By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue

Some 80 labor and civil rights activists, together with a few elected officials, gathered at dusk at the Beaver County Courthouse April 4 for a candlelight vigil. The somber but militant event commemorated the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and protested the current efforts of rightwing PA Republicans to block citizens from voting in 2012.

mlkrally 008 “They’re declaring war on us,” said Lynwood Alford, a member of the Beaver-Lawrence Central Labor Council and leader of the Minority Coalition. ‘Taking away our voting rights is taking away the little power we have in the fight for survival.”

Alford repeated the refrain several times as he introduced new speakers. The vigil was sponsored by the Beaver-Lawrence Central Labor Council, SEIU Local 668, the USW, and the Beaver County NAACP. The 12 CD Progressive Democrats of America also endorsed the vigil, and turned out a good-sized contingent.

The target of everyone’s anger was the passage into law of HB 934 last month, the so-called ‘Voter ID Law’.

Continue reading April 4 Vigil Vows to Fight GOP Efforts to Deny Voting Rights →