elections

MEDIA RELAUNCHES CAMPAIGN AGAINST SOCIAL SECURITY

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MEDIA RELAUNCHES CAMPAIGN AGAINST SOCIAL SECURITY

by Harry Targ
The Lafayette, Indiana Journal and Courier, a Gannett Newspaper, printed an Associated Press story, Monday, August 13, on the front page above the fold, entitled“Little Security for Program’s Payouts.” It warned that Social Security would be in financial crisis by 2033.

The $2.7 trillion surplus in the fund, the story suggested “is starting to look small.” The story did admit that for thirty years the social security fund received more in taxes than it paid out to eligible recipients. But it raised the fear that the balance sheet would undoubtedly change in the future. In addition, the story indirectly blamed Social Security for federal deficits by suggesting that“surpluses also helped mask the size of the budget deficit being generated by the rest of the federal government.”

elections

Banksters Turn against Obama

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by Randy Shannon

When the banksters wrecked the economy in 2007, they jumped on the Obama campaign bandwagon in hopes of saving their positions of power in the economy and the government.

They were able to achieve a lot of their objectives under Obama, but not all of them. The Consumer Protection Act and Obama’s attempt to liquidate Citibank rubbed the banksters the wrong way.

Now, the banksters want more than Obama can deliver. As the story below reveals, they have executed an about-face and are throwing their money at Romney.

If Obama is re-elected the banksters chance for a double down on their economy-wrecking program may be at risk. If Obama is elected there will be a real struggle to save Medicare and Social Security from the cuts the banksters have planned.

It will take an aware and energetic voter turnout to beat the banksters in a presidential election. The big money is on Romney but the people will decide.

Goldman Sachs Leads Split With Obama, as GE Jilts Him Too

By Jonathan D. Salant – Aug 9, 2012 10:10 AM ET

Bloomberg News

Goldman Sachs Group (GS) employees have changed to red from blue.

Four years ago, employees of New York-based Goldman gave three-fourths of their campaign donations to Democratic candidates and committees, including presidential nominee Barack Obama. This time, they’re showering 70 percent of their contributions on Republicans.

That’s the biggest switch among the 25 companies whose employees have given the most to candidates and parties since 1989, according to data through June 30 compiled by Bloomberg from the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group that tracks campaign donations. Goldman isn’t alone; 13 of the companies’ employees are now giving more to Republicans after backing Democrats four years ago.

Continue reading Banksters Turn against Obama →

Environment, Green Energy, Marcellus Shale

Shayna Metz and Beaver County’s Marcellus Awareness Committee Defending Our Water!

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Shayna Metz, Center, at Protest

Industry Woman Cycles Against Fracking Current

By Bill Utterback
Beaver County Times

August 4, 2012 – On a cross-country cycling trip created to promote clean water as a priority over Marcellus shale drilling, Shayna Metz of Industry waded into the Youghiogheny River. She was moved to poetry.

“I push against the current … I wade deeper and stand and fight,” she wrote in an online blog.

Metz, a Geneva College graduate, pushed against the surging current of natural gas drilling by serving as project coordinator for the Tour de Frack, a bicycle trip that began July 14 in Butler County and ended July 28-29 on the lawn of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The cyclists, and a bus full of supporters from western Pennsylvania who joined them, participated in the "Stop the Frack Attack" rally, labeled the first national anti-fracking event.

Continue reading Shayna Metz and Beaver County’s Marcellus Awareness Committee Defending Our Water! →

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 →

GOP, Racism, Voting Rights

‘We’re Fired Up!’ – Protestors in Harrisburg Vow to Defeat GOP Voter Suppression Law

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Photos by Bill Allen

By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue

Nearly 500 people gathered on the steps of Pennsylvania’s State Capitol in Harrisburg on the hot afternoon of July 24 to deliver a warning to the GOP-dominated legislature-all their efforts to suppress the right to vote will be met with stiff resistance.

The rally was organized by the NAACP, trade union, women’s and church groups. Its tarrget was the GOP’s so-called ‘VoterID’ law, which may forbid nearly nine percent of the electorate, from voting in November.

"Do you want to know where the voter fraud has occurred? I’ll tell you right now where the vote fraud has occurred?" declared Rep. Ron Waters (D-Philadelphia). "It occurred when the people who wanted to disenfranchise the many 758,000 who are already registered to vote but do not possess a PennDOT-issued Photo IDs. They want to make sure that this is a way to get the candidate of their choice elected."

Continue reading ‘We’re Fired Up!’ – Protestors in Harrisburg Vow to Defeat GOP Voter Suppression Law →

elections

PA Commonwealth Court Rules against State Zoning for Marcellus Shale drilling

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Court throws out state zoning for Marcellus Shale drilling

July 26, 2012 10:47 am
By Laura Olson / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

HARRISBURG — A Commonwealth Court panel this morning threw out Pennsylvania’s attempt to establish statewide zoning for Marcellus Shale drilling, setting up a likely appeal to the state’s top court.

The appellate court ruled that the state cannot require local municipalities to allow gas drilling in areas that would conflict with their zoning rules, as several towns argued was the outcome of the Legislature passing and the governor signing Act 13 in February.

That law enacted a sweeping set of changes for how the oil and gas drilling industry operates within Pennsylvania, including creating an impact fee and, most controversially, dictating what municipalities can and cannot do regarding standards for gas drilling. Any municipality that did not follow those state-issued zoning guidelines stood to lose its share of the impact fee revenues and was liable to legal challenges.

Continue reading PA Commonwealth Court Rules against State Zoning for Marcellus Shale drilling →

elections

Second judge rejects Wisconsin voter ID law

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A second judge on Tuesday declared Wisconsin’s voter identification law unconstitutional, further guaranteeing that the ID requirement won’t be in place for this fall’s elections.

Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan ruled that the state’s requirement that all voters show photo ID at the polls creates a “substantial impairment of the right to vote” guaranteed by the state Constitution.

In March, Flanagan issued an injunction temporarily blocking the law, finding that the groups challenging the ID requirement — the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP and the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera — were likely to succeed in their arguments. He made that injunction permanent in Tuesday’s 20-page decision.

Another Dane County judge, Richard Niess, permanently blocked the voter ID law in March in a separate case brought by the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. Voter ID proponents would need to get both orders lifted to get the law reinstated.

Continue reading Second judge rejects Wisconsin voter ID law →

elections

Pennsylvania’s strict voter ID law faces ACLU lawsuit

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Below is today’s coverage by the Los Angeles Times of the ACLU lawsuit against the voter restriction law passed by PA Republicans.

A state-wide coalition of voting rights and civil rights activists is holding a rally at the state Capitol on Tuesday July 24th to express the public’s support for the lawsuit against voter restriction.

Buses leave the IBEW Hall in Vanport, PA at 6:00am on Tuesday the 24th and will return at 3:00pm after the rally. There is no charge. Please call Progressive Democrats of America chairperson Tina Shannon at 724-683-1925 to reserve a seat.

Buses leave Philadelphia from 1619 Cecil B. Moore Ave. at 9:00am and return at 3:30pm.  To reserve a seat from Philadelphia call John Jordan, Director of Civic Engagement for the PA NAACP at 215-978-7500.

Pennsylvania’s strict voter ID law faces ACLU lawsuit

The law could stop hundreds of thousands of voters, many of them minorities, from casting ballots despite their efforts to obtain an ID. The outcome may affect the presidential election.

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau
Los Angeles Times

July 18, 2012, 5:00 a.m.

PHILADELPHIA — At age 93, Viviette Applewhite proudly lives on her own in a high-rise apartment just a few blocks from where she was born. A widow, she has never driven a car, but she has had many jobs, including work as a welder during World War II. She marched withMartin Luther King Jr. in Georgia.

She cast her first vote for PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt. On election day four years ago, Applewhite went across the street to vote. “I was waiting there when they opened the door,” she said. “I didn’t vote for [Barack] Obamabecause he was black. I voted for him because he was a Democrat.”

But her record of faithfully voting for Democrats will be more difficult to maintain, thanks to a strict voter identification law adopted this year by Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Legislature. Now she is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the new law.

Applewhite is among more than 186,000 registered voters who lack a valid driver’s license in this heavily Democratic city. Many of them are minorities. And to vote in Pennsylvania in November, they will need to produce a government-issued ID or driver’s license.

Continue reading Pennsylvania’s strict voter ID law faces ACLU lawsuit →