elections

Income Growth Rates vs. Political Party

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This chart shows that people in lower income brackets experienced much higher income growth under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents. People in all income brackets experienced higher income growth under Democrats than under Republicans.

Conversely, under Republicans, people in high income brackets experienced much higher growth of income than people in low income brackets. However, under Republican presidents, people in all income brackets experienced lower growth than under Democratic presidents.

The conclusion is that under Republican presidents, corporate and especially financial corporate income increased while personal income at all levels decreased relative to Democratic presidents.

elections

Oct 2 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice – Why We Should Participate

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Why we should participate in the Oct 2 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice

by Peter Deutsch, Secretary

PA 4th CD Chapter, Progressive Democrats of America

September 8, 2010

As you may already know the NAACP has called a national march for jobs and justice on Oct 2, 2010. The AFL-CIO, La Raza, SEIU, and the United Auto Workers have now joined in support with One Nation United serving as an umbrella organization.  The Progressive Democrats of America and over 190 other organizations are involved with other organizations joining in.

Why should we who focus on peace join a labor and justice march on Washington this fall? Don’t issues of peace and justice connect intimately through economics?

Peace is necessary in order to have an effective impact on the issues of jobs and justice being taken up by those organizing the October 2nd march. Competition for resources from the war machine needs to be exposed. To date the U.S. has spent cumulatively over $1 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq1. Total annual U.S. defense spending is around $1 trillion dollars2 ,. Little is left over in the annual federal funds either on or off budget to recover economic rights or safety net structures of the past, let alone to address new social needs.

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elections

60,000 March in Pittsburgh Labor Day Parade

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Labor Day parade draws small but enthusiastic crowd
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
By Sean D. Hamill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Bob Donaldson/Post-Gazette
Tony Lerrew of Munhall watches the Labor Day parade along Grant Street with daughter Brianna, 2.

When it was first proposed more than 130 years ago, Labor Day was envisioned as a day to celebrate “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.”

That is still the thrust of the day for many, as evidenced by the estimated 60,000 participants who paraded through the streets of Pittsburgh in Monday’s Labor Day parade — even if the marchers outnumbered the parade-watchers, who had their choice of curbside viewing along the length of the mile-long route.

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elections

National Jobs Emergency Day of Action Sept. 15 – Noon at Cong. Altmire’s Aliquippa Office demand jobs and hands off social security

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Sept. 15 Day of Action: We’re in a Jobs Emergency!

by James Parks, Sep 3, 2010

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With their six-figure salaries and government-paid health care, members of Congress may not feel the pinch of a 9.6 percent unemployment rate. But millions of Americans are in pain, and on Sept. 15, they will shout loud and clear that we are in an emergency and Congress must act immediately to create good jobs.

Sept. 15 is the day workers, students and community and religious groups in dozens of cities across the country will revive one of the key demands of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” by calling for full and fair employment and demanding the government declare a national “jobs emergency.”

“It’s time for corporate apologists in the Senate, who are blocking a recovery for the rest of us, to recognize what workers already know: we are in a jobs emergency that requires a bold, emergency response,” says Sarita Gupta, executive director of Jobs with Justice, the main organizer of the protests.

Continue reading National Jobs Emergency Day of Action Sept. 15 – Noon at Cong. Altmire’s Aliquippa Office demand jobs and hands off social security →

Economy, Environment

The Truth Is Coming Out On the Need to Regulate Gas Drilling

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‘Gasland’ Film Sweeping Pennsylvania

‘A force to be reckoned with’

 

Sunday, September 05, 2010

News from Cumberland, Harrisburg, York

The movie “Gasland” — about the environmental hazards of drilling and “fracking” shale for natural gas — has become a national sensation.

The documentary has aired repeatedly on HBO in recent months. Critics, including some Pennsylvania government officials, say it’s a piece of propaganda riddled with inaccuracies. Fans say it opened their eyes to what really happens when drillers come to town.

Either way, it has become a force to be reckoned with in the ongoing political debate over Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania. The film will be shown outdoors Tuesday in Reservoir Park.

Director Josh Fox is a native of Wayne County, and much of the film focuses on Pennsylvania problems and policies. In an interview last week, Fox spoke about the film’s impact.

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antiwar, Economy

We Need Jobs, Not War – For Real

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Obama on Iraq’s ‘Ending’:

A Speech for Endless War

September 6, 2010

By Norman Solomon

Beaver County Peace Links via Z-Net 

On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war.

Hours later, the New York Times front page offered a credulous gloss for the end of “the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq.” The first sentence of the coverage described the speech as saying “that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home.” The story went on to assert that Obama “used the moment to emphasize that he sees his primary job as addressing the weak economy and other domestic issues — and to make clear that he intends to begin disengaging from the war in Afghanistan next summer.”

But the speech gave no real indication of a shift in priorities from making war to creating jobs. And the oratory “made clear” only the repetition of vague vows to “begin” disengaging from the Afghanistan war next summer. In fact, top administration officials have been signaling that only token military withdrawals are apt to occur in mid-2011, and Obama said nothing to the contrary.

While now trumpeting the nobility of an Iraq war effort that he’d initially disparaged as “dumb,” Barack Obama is polishing a halo over the Afghanistan war, which he touts as very smart. In the process, the Oval Office speech declared that every U.S. war — no matter how mendacious or horrific — is worthy of veneration.

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Banks, Right Wing

Tea Party: Pawns in the Bankster Game

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[Note from Editor: With the caveat that people vote BOTH on facts and emotions, this is a fairly good analysis on the topic]

5 Ways the Tea Party Agenda

Screws Tea Party Supporters

By Adele M. Stan
AlterNet,September 4, 2010
If people could be counted on to vote in their own best interests, there would be no Tea Party movement, for if the economic agenda embraced by Tea Partiers — a vastly pro-corporation, government-killing plan — Tea Partiers would find themselves among the people most hurt by it.

To hear Tea Party activists tell it, they seek to save future generations from the crushing demands of big government. Yet the agenda they advocate, dictated by the big-money players behind the muscular interest groups that keep the movement growing, will likely render the Tea Partiers themselves the economically squeezed subjects of a corporate state, one in which the elderly will be left to scrounge for crumbs, small businesses will be crushed by lack of capital, and their own ground-level online organizing supplanted by the networks built by giant, corporate-funded astroturf groups.

As George Lakoff and Drew Westen remind us, people don’t vote on the facts: they vote on emotion, according to Westen, and their notion of morality, according to Lakoff. The resentment of Tea Partiers toward liberals, East Coast elites, the poor and people who don’t look like them has been effectively marshaled in service of a “free market” ideology cleverly packaged as “freedom.” Never mind that free markets are anything but free for ordinary people. The packaging strikes the necessary emotional and moral chords: Free markets = freedom = liberty = endowed by the Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence by the founders. It’s the perfect exploitation of the worldview of conservative middle-class white people — all in the service of enriching the super-rich at the expense of their unwitting, patriotic ground troops.

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elections

Vets Call On Obama To Fire Alan Simpson

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Plan to Slash Social Security, Medicare, Veterans Benefits after Election

by Ryan Grim

ryan@huffingtonpost.com

A major veterans organization called on President Obama to remove Alan Simpson from the deficit commission for questioning why veterans are not “helping us to save the country” by foregoing health care benefits promised in return for their military service.

On Tuesday, Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming and currently the co-chair of a deficit commission looking into spending cuts, decried “the irony that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess.”

Simpson wants to cut the national debt by slashing benefits for veterans. VoteVets.org, which represents 50,000 veterans and family members, has had enough. The group’s chairman, Jon Soltz, said that veterans had been concerned by comments Simpson made disparaging Social Security, calling it “a milk cow with 310 million tits!” and suggesting that military pay be frozen.

The “final straw,” writes Soltz, was Simpson calling for veterans’ benefits to be cut.

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