Category Archives: safety net

African-Americans, Poverty, Racism, Right Wing, safety net, Voting Rights

Meet the Preacher Behind Moral Mondays

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Coming to Beaver County in June, The Reverend William Barber is charting a new path for protesting Republican overreach in the South—and maybe beyond.

By Lisa Rab

Beaver County Blue via Mother Jones

April 14, 2014 – The Reverend William Barber is charting a new path for protesting conservative overreach in the North Carolina—and beyond.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, the Reverend William Barber II [1] reclined uncomfortably in a chair in his office, sipping bottled water as he recovered from two hours of strenuous preaching. When he was in his early 20s, Barber was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a painful arthritic condition affecting the spine. Still wearing his long black robes, the 50-year-old minister recounted how, as he’d proclaimed in a rolling baritone from the pulpit that morning, "a crippled preacher has found his legs."

It began a few days before Easter 2013, recalled Barber, pastor at the Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and president of the state chapter [2] of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). "On Maundy Thursday, they chose to crucify voting rights," he said.

"They" are North Carolina Republicans, who in November 2012 took control of the state Legislature and the governor’s mansion for the first time in more than a century. Among their top priorities—along with blocking Medicaid expansion and cutting unemployment benefits and higher-education spending—was pushing through a raft of changes to election laws, including reducing the number of early voting days, ending same-day voter registration, and requiring ID at the polls. "That’s when a group of us said, ‘Wait a minute, this has just gone too far,’" Barber said.

Barber "believed we needed to kind of burst this bubble of ‘There’s nothing we can do for two years until the next election.’"

On the last Monday of April 2013, Barber led a modest group of clergy and activists into the state legislative building in Raleigh. They sang "We Shall Overcome," quoted the Bible, and blocked the doors to the Senate chambers. Barber leaned on his cane as capitol police led him away in handcuffs.

That might have been the end of just another symbolic protest, but then something happened: The following Monday, more than 100 protesters showed up at the capitol. Over the next few months, the weekly crowds at the "Moral Mondays" protests grew to include hundreds, and then thousands, not just in Raleigh but also in towns around the state. The largest gathering, in February, drew tens of thousands of people [3]. More than 900 protesters have been arrested for civil disobedience over the past year. Copycat movements have started in Florida [4], Georgia [5], South Carolina [6], and Alabama [7] in response to GOP legislation regarding Medicaid and gun control.

Continue reading Meet the Preacher Behind Moral Mondays →

GOP, health care, safety net, Seniors

The Main Target: Obamacare Is Right-Wing Proxy For Social Security and Medicare

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By Karoli

Progressive America Rising via Crooks and Liars

Oct 7, 2013 – Despite all the sound and fury about Obamacare, here’s the truth: It’s not the prime target of the right. The real targets are Medicare and Social Security, as Rep. Barton admits in the video above when he says he wants "real reforms in entitlements".

Over the past couple of weeks, it’s become apparent to me and many others that this entire showdown is not over Obamacare. The ACA is a convenient patsy because it is new, untested, and they’ve managed to poison public opinion around it over the past three years.

The real target is Social Security and Medicare. From a political standpoint, waging a war using those programs as hostage would be so wildly unpopular no sane or insane politician would dare choose that route. And so Obamacare has become the convenient stand-in, a cardboard stand-in for their real goals.

Continue reading The Main Target: Obamacare Is Right-Wing Proxy For Social Security and Medicare →

health care, safety net, trade unions

Solidarity with Our Nurses, Tues, June 25, 4pm

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SEIU Rally at the Courthouse

HVBRallyflyer

Economy, GOP, Poverty, safety net

GOP Worships the ‘Hand,’ Disrespects Those Who Work With Them

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By Leo Gerard
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost

March 4, 2013 – The invisible hand of the market, which the GOP worships as an infallible god, is curled into a fist and is pounding America’s lowest-paid workers.

Those workers have complained about the grinding poverty level of minimum wage. Wal-Mart warehouse workers and New York fast food workers recently demonstrated. They’re fed up. Well, they would be if they could afford enough to eat. President Obama responded, asking Congress to raise the minimum wage, which was last increased to $7.25 an hour in 2009.

Republicans, the party of NO, replied to Obama’s request with a surly, "No way!" Respect the hand, they said, referring to their beloved spectral regulator of the market. Government, Republicans said, must not tell business what to do, must not "burden" business by requiring it to pay a little more. Republicans never mention the burden under which 18 million minimum wage workers struggle, working full-time for $15,080 a year, barely enough to feed, clothe and house themselves. That’s because Republicans revere non-humans — corporations and invisible hands — while denigrating and disrespecting humans who work with their hands to serve food, care for the elderly and stock shelves.

The disrespect could be heard in Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s voice as he derided 47 percent of all Americans as "takers." That huge number Romney despises includes minimum wage workers – 84 percent of whom are 20 or older — whose children receive immunizations and antibiotics through Medicaid because employers paying minimum wage virtually never provide health insurance.

Continue reading GOP Worships the ‘Hand,’ Disrespects Those Who Work With Them →

labor, Obama, Poverty, safety net

The Minimum Wage Would Be $21.72 An Hour If It Rose With Productivity Since 1968

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From boldprogressives.org

Activists are mobilizing around President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage to $9.00, and polling shows that Americans across the political spectrum agree with such a policy.

But here’s an interesting fact about what the minimum wage could be instead. The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s John Dewitt looked at what the minimum wage would be if it simply rose with productivity — that is, if workers were actually paid for the increasing amount of output — since 1968, and found that it would be almost 3 times what it is now:

Since 1968, however, productivity growth has far outpaced the minimum wage. If the minimum wage had continued to move with average productivity after1968, it would have reached $21.72 per hour in 2012 – a rate well above the average production worker wage. If minimum-wage workers received only half of the productivity gains over the period, the federal minimum would be $15.34.

Even Obama’s modest plan to raise the minimum wage is expected to face intense opposition from Big Business and its lobbyists.

Economy, health care, Poverty, safety net, Seniors, social security, unemployment

US Capitalism Redistributing Wealth ‘Upward’

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Nine Economic Facts That Will Make Your Head Spin

By Lynn Stuart Parramore
Beaver County Blue via Alternet.org

Feb 18, 2013  |  How much will you need for medical expenses in retirement? What does it cost to keep 2.5 million Americans behind bars? Here are a few facts and figures that might surprise you.

1. Recovery for the rich, recession for the rest.

Economic recovery is in rather limited supply, it seems. Research by economist Emmanuel Saez shows that the top 1 percent has enjoyed income growth of over 11 percent [3] since the official end of the recession. The other 99 percent hasn’t fared so well, seeing a 0.4 percent decline in income.

The top 10 percent of earners hauled in 46.5 percent of all income in 2011, the highest proportion since 1917 – and that doesn’t even include money earned from investments. The wealthy have benefitted from favorable tax status and the rise in stock prices, while the rest have been hit with a continuing unemployment crisis that has kept wages down. Saez believes this trend will continue in 2013.

2. Half of us are poor or barely scraping by.

The latest Census Bureau data shows that one in two Americans currently falls into either the “low income” category or is living in poverty. Low-income is defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level. Adjusted for inflation, the earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have dropped from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000. Earnings for the next 20 percent have been stuck at $37,000.

States in the South and West had the highest proportion of low-income families, including Arizona, New Mexico and South Carolina, where politicians are eagerly shredding the social safety net.

Continue reading US Capitalism Redistributing Wealth ‘Upward’ →

budget crisis, Democrats, GOP, safety net, unemployment

An Ugly Deal: 4 Reasons the ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Deal Is Worse Than It Looks

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By Robert Borosage
Beaver County Blue via OurFuture.org

Jan 1, 2013 – Early this morning, the Senate passed the fiscal cliff deal by 89-8, a margin virtually guaranteeing that it will survive in the House.  The deal has some good parts.  It lets the Bush tax cuts expire on the wealthy, raises the estate tax marginally and increases taxes on capital gains and dividends a bit.  Unemployment benefits are extended for a year.  Tax boosts for the low paid workers – the child tax credit, expanded earned income credit, refundable tuition tax credits – are extended, if only for five years.  Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are not touched.

But no one should be fooled.  This is an ugly deal, with foul implications for the coming months.

1.  Setting Up the Next Extortion

The most ominous part of the deal is what was left out.  The deal makes no provision for lifting the debt ceiling.  It postpones the sequester (automatic cuts in domestic and military spending) for only two months.  It is a smaller deficit reduction package than that originally sought by the president.  It therefore sets up the right-wing House zealots to hold the economy hostage once more, while demanding deep cuts in public services (known as cuts in domestic spending), backed by a media frenzy about deficits.  And while Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid escaped unscathed in this deal, they will be the prime targets in the coming debate.

Continue reading An Ugly Deal: 4 Reasons the ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Deal Is Worse Than It Looks →

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 →

Community, Economy, Poverty, safety net, unemployment

Jobs Campaign: Why Workers Need Solidarity Across All Income Levels

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North Hills Food Pantry

Wider Poverty Has Taken Root in Pittsburgh Area Suburbs

By Rachel Weaver and Jill King Greenwood
Beaver County Blue via PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW

Nov 27, 2011 – Five years ago, Deidra and David Vaughn were proud, new owners of a $119,000 two-story, five-bedroom Shaler home, complete with a swimming pool.

He made about $30,000 as a social worker for nonprofits, and she collected Social Security medical disability benefits. They weren’t rich, but with three children at home, they got by — until he lost his job not long after they became homeowners.

As David Vaughn, 38, tried for years to find work in his field, the family struggled to save their home from foreclosure. They finally found a buyer for it in September. Now, they rent from her sister.

"We’re looking to see how we can get things back to normal," Deidra Vaughn, 31, said last week as she stocked up on groceries at the North Hills Community Outreach food pantry. "I’d like to see my husband back in his field, hopefully, when the economy gets better. Every day is a struggle."

Poverty — which federal guidelines define as having income of $26,170 or less annually for a family of five — once was widely associated with inner-city communities, but during the nation’s economic downturn, it infiltrated more middle-class neighborhoods. A Brookings Institution analysis of census data showed that from 2000 to 2010, the number of poor individuals in suburbs grew 53 percent, compared with 23 percent in cities.

In Western Pennsylvania, Beaver, Lawrence and Fayette counties experienced the highest increases in poverty rates, census data show.

Continue reading Jobs Campaign: Why Workers Need Solidarity Across All Income Levels →

Community, Culture, Organizing, safety net, trade unions

‘My City of Ruins’ from Bruce Springsteen, Telling It Like It Is…Pass it on!

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It’s time for a Main Street Contract for the American People. National Nurses United has embarked on a campaign to reverse national priorities and policies that have placed the interests of Wall Street over the crisis facing American families today. The goal is to chart a new contract for the American people — for a better life today and a more secure future for our children and future generations. www.mainstreetcontract.org