tagged w/ Matthew Rothschild
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott plans to force public workers and welfare recipients to undergo random drug testing every three weeks. Why? Because he doesn’t like either group, Cenk Uygur argues on the Young Turks. “It’s an attempt to stigmatize, demonize, and punish those people,” Uygur says:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fhSYsb2Gtg[/youtube]
Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones explains why Scott’s plan is almost certainly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has ruled that public employees cannot be forced to take drug tests unless public safety is at stake. The government can impose random drug testing for bus drivers, but not clerks at the DMV. Scott wants to spend millions of dollars testing all state employees. The only beneficiary of Scott’s plan will be the drug-testing industry.
From vitamins to purity balls
Martha Kempner of RH Reality Check profiles Leslee Unruh, the eccentric vitamin saleswoman-turned-crisis pregnancy center maven and abstinence crusader who is spearheading the drive for increasingly draconian abortion restrictions in South Dakota.
Unruh founded a crisis pregnancy center in 1997. Gradually, she became convinced that cajoling unhappily pregnant women to give birth was backwards. What she needed to do was save women from sex in the first place:
As Amanda Robb explains in her 2008 expose on Unruh published in MORE Magazine: “after working with hundreds of women who got pregnant unintentionally, she says she began to realize that this kind of counseling put the cart before the horse in women’s lives. To truly empower women, she became convinced, you have to ‘save them from sexual activity.’”
Unruh’s Abstinence Clearinghouse is famous for sponsoring “purity balls” at which fathers promise to guard their daughters’ sexual purity until marriage.
My uterus is a closed shop
Last weekend the Wisconsin AFL-CIO held a rally with Planned Parenthood in Madison, Wisconsin, Mike Elk reports for Working In These Times. Elk writes:
The labor movement, at its core, is about class struggle – the working class overcoming the power of the owning class in order to take control over their own lives. For women, class struggle historically has centered on overcoming the oppression of men who want to have control over their lives.
It makes sense that organized labor and the reproductive rights movement are being drawn closer together. Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker has declared war on unions and reproductive health care. Walker’s notorious anti-collective bargaining bill also declared war on the state’s highly successful, money-saving family planning program.
The Walker administration declared the union-busting bill to be law last Friday, in defiance of a court ruling, Matthew Rothschild reports in The Progressive. A court had ruled that the legality of the bill was in question because it seems to have been passed in defiance of the state’s strong open meetings laws.
De-funding family planning
Some Minnesota Republicans are taking a page from Scott Walker’s playbook, Andy Birkey reports in the Minnesota Independent. A group of Republican state senators are working to de-fund the state’s family planning programs by cutting off state funding and refusing federal dollars to fund these initiatives. An estimated 40,000 people receive reproductive health care each year through programs that the GOP is trying to eliminate. Their position is surely not motivated by concerns about the deficit. Joint state-federal family planning programs have been shown to save money for the state and the federal government.
HIV/AIDS at 30
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. At Colorlines.com, LaShieka Purvis Hunter profiles a distinguished community leader in the struggle against HIV, Rev. Edwin Sanders of the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Sanders and his congregation have been engaged in the struggle for 26 years, ever since one of the founding members of this predominantly black church died of the virus.
Saunders says that, as far as he knows, his is the only African American congregation operating an HIV/AIDS primary care clinic:
“There are other congregations with primary care clinics that do other things, but ours is exclusively focused on HIV/AIDS,” he explains. “We were really fortunate to get a planning grant from the URSA Institute about 10 years ago, and have a fully operating clinic four years after that. Now we are able to serve a population in our community that represents those who are truly disenfranchised.”
The URSA Institute is a non-profit social interest consulting firm which supports HIV/AIDS-related research and prevention programs.
Dig for victory
Spring is here. Ellen LaConte of AlterNet explains why gardening is good for your health and your pocketbook. Produce prices are rising, thanks to increasing oil prices, dwindling soil reserves, monoculture, and other factors. LaConte predicts that gardening and small-scale collective farming will become an increasingly important source of fresh fruits and vegetables for average Americans in the years to come.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Florida Republican Governor Rick... more
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
On Monday afternoon, the Capitol Police in Madison, Wisconsin refused to enforce an order to clear the Capitol building of hundreds of peaceful protesters who have been occupying the site to protest Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of public employees.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews State Rep. Kelda Helen Roys (D), who spent Sunday night in the Capitol building with other protesters. Roys describes what happened at four o’clock on Monday afternoon when the government gave the order to clear the protesters from the building:
And after several hours of the same sorts of scenes that we’ve been seeing all week—singing, chanting, drumming, speechifying—the Capitol police captain, Chief Tubbs, made an announcement, and he said that the protesters that had remained in the building, they were being orderly and responsible and peaceful and there was no reason to eject them from the Capitol.
Police attempted to clear the building of protesters on Sunday night, but they relented when the protesters refused to leave and allowed them to stay another night. On Monday, the police decided not to eject protesters already inside, but no additional activists would be allowed in. The governor plans to deliver his budget address on Tuesday afternoon. Walker is expected to call for spending cuts that could exceed $1 billion dollars.
Gov. Walker has threatened mass public sector layoffs if the Democratic senators do not return from Illinois by March 1. However, the Uptake.com reports that one of the absent legislators, State Sen. Jon Erpenbach, claims Walker is not telling the truth. Erpenbach says the unions have already agreed to come up with the money the governor needs to balance the budget, and therefore, he has no need to lay anyone off to bridge the gap.
Wisconsin 101
Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive describes the epic scale of the Wisconsin protests:
This is the largest sustained rally for the rights of public sector workers that this country has seen in decades — perhaps ever.
The crowds at the state Capitol have swelled from 10,000-65,000 during the first week all the way up to 100,000 on Feb. 26. Hundreds of people occupied the Capitol building with a sit-in and sleep-in for days on end, and total strangers from around the world ordered pizzas for them.
In case you’re still wondering what all of this means, Andy Kroll, Nick Baumann, and Siddhartha Mahanta of Mother Jones have joined forces to bring you this “Wisconsin 101″ primer.
The Republicans in the Wisconsin House passed a bill that would take away collective bargaining rights for public sector unions, restrict their ability to collect dues, and force them to undergo yearly recertification votes. But the bill cannot become law until the state Senate also passes it. Currently, 14 Democratic state senators are hiding out in Illinois to deprive the Republican majority of the quorum they need to vote on the bill. However, as Kroll notes, if only one Democrat breaks faith and returns to Madison, the Republicans will be able to pass the bill.
Nationwide solidarity
Jamilah King of Colorlines.com brings us a photo essay on the solidarity rallies held around the country over the weekend in support of the Wisconsin protesters. From San Francisco to Salt Lake City to Atlanta to New York, people took to the streets in support of the right of workers to organize. Also at Colorlines.com, historian Michael Honey draws parallels between the situation in Wisconsin and Dr. Martin Luther King’s last crusade. Shortly before his assassination, King stood with the sanitation workers of Memphis to demand collective bargaining rights and the power to collect union dues.
George Warner of Campus Progress profiles some young activists who took to the streets of Washington, D.C. to express their solidarity with the Wisconsin protesters. About 1,500 people came out to a rally in support of the protesters on Saturday.
Anonymous strikes again
In a bizarre twist, a loosely organized coalition of anarchic hackers known as “Anonymous” attacked websites linked to Koch Industries on Sunday, Jessica Pieklo reports for Care2.com. The Koch brothers are among Gov. Walker’s most generous benefactors. The hackers launched a distributed denial of service attack on the website of the Koch-funded conservative group Americans for Prosperity.
In addition to generous campaign contributions, the Koch brothers gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn paid for millions of dollars worth of ads against Walker’s opponent in 2010. Walker is evidently very grateful to Koch. Last week, a writer for a Buffalo-based website got Walker on the phone by pretending to be David Koch.
Don’t look now, but…
Meanwhile, in Indiana, the state assembly reconvened on Monday to find most of the 40 Democratic members had decamped for Illinois. The legislators are apparently taking a page from the Wisconsin playbook. Indiana’s Republican governor is trying to pass legislation that would make permanent a ban on collective bargaining by public sector workers and the Democratic legislators are seeking to deny him the 2/3rds quorum required to vote on the bill.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
On Monday afternoon, the Capitol... more
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Tens of thousands of people continue their peaceful occupation of the Wisconsin state capital to protest a bill that would abolish most collective bargaining rights for public employees. As the protests entered their eighth day, GRITtv with Laura Flanders was broadcasting from Madison, Wisconsin in collaboration with The Uptake.
Flanders interviewed Nation journalist and seventh-generation Wisconsinite John Nichols. Nichols and fellow guest Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive noted that the bill isn’t just an attack on collective bargaining rights. The bill would force public sector unions to hold recertification votes every year, which would put their very existence on the line annually. “The unions realize that this is a threat to their very existence,” Rothschild explained.
A game of chicken
The Wisconsin state Assembly begins debate on the bill on Tuesday, but 14 Democratic senators remain in hiding in Illinois, depriving the Senate of the quorum it needs to vote on the bill. According to an obscure procedural rule, the state Senate can still pass bills on non-fiscal matters.
The result is that a game of chicken is about to begin, in which the Republicans will attempt to pass as many non-fiscal bills hated by Democratic senators as possible, such as legislation mandating photo ID for voters, in an attempt to provoke their colleagues into coming back home to vote on the fate of public sector unions.
The Democrats don’t control the state Senate at the best of times, so it’s not clear why they would be more eager to come home to lose on voter ID and public sector unions. As of Tuesday, the legislators in exile showed no signs of wavering, telling CBS that they were waiting to hear from the governor.
“I think if this [bill] gets pushed through, we’re going to have a recall effort and take this governor out,” Rothschild predicted.
Solidarity
An estimated 80,000 protesters gathered in Madison, Wisconsin to protest a Republican-backed budget bill that would abolish collective bargaining rights for most public employees, Democracy Now! reports.
The bill would spare the bargaining rights of unionized police officers and firefighters. However, Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Wisconsin Professional Firefighters Association, tells host Amy Goodman that Wisconsin’s firefighters and police officers stand with other public sector workers. “An assault on one is an assault on all,” Mitchell said.
Union busting, not budget fixing
Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive argues Gov. Walker’s real agenda is union busting, not budget repair. Walker claims that he is forced to abolish collective bargaining rights because the state can no longer afford them. But this is a matter of priorities, not a true fiscal emergency. Walker is asking working people to pick up the tab for his economic agenda. During his brief tenure in office, Walker refused $800 million in federal funds for high speed rail, which would have created jobs and stimulated the economy. He has also pushed through $117 million in tax breaks.
The captain of the Superbowl-winning Green Bay Packers, the NFL’s only non-profit team, has come out in solidarity with the protesters in Wisconsin, Dave Zirin reports in The Nation. Captain Charles Woodson said in a statement:
Last week I was proud when many of my current and former teammates announced their support for the working families fighting for their rights in Wisconsin. Today I am honored to join with them. Thousands of dedicated Wisconsin public workers provide vital services for Wisconsin citizens. They are the teachers, nurses and child care workers who take care of us and our families. These hard working people are under an unprecedented attack to take away their basic rights to have a voice and collectively bargain at work.
“Budget crisis” theater
Forrest Wilder in the Texas Observer notes that the Lone Star State is facing a $27 million shortfall of its own. He argues that Republicans are construing this relative small shortfall as a “budget crisis” in order to imbue their crusade against public services with a false sense of urgency. The budget gap could be bridged with a small and relatively painless tax increase, Wilder notes, but Republicans only want to talk about cuts.
Raise our taxes
Fifteen thousand Illinoisans massed in the state capital with an unusual demand for their state legislators: Raise our taxes! The Save Our State rally was one of the largest citizen assemblies in the history of the state legislature, David Moberg reports for In These Times. The event was organized by the Responsible Budget Coalition (RBC), an alliance of more than 300 organizations including social service agencies, public employee unions, and religious and civic groups. The RBC is calling on legislators to fix flaws in the Illinois tax structure that threaten essential services and the long-term financial health of the state.
No help for 99ers
Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-CA) bid to attach a 14-week unemployment insurance extension for Americans whose benefits have run out (known as 99ers because they have already been unemployed for at least 99 weeks) to the continuing resolution to fund the government proved unsuccessful last week. Ed Brayton of the Michigan Messenger reports that the provision foundered late last Wednesday due to a procedural objection.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Tens of thousands of people... more
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Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren’t stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We’ll return to our normal schedule next week.
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
According to official statistics, nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed. Between 2 and 4 million of them are expected to exhaust their state unemployment insurance benefits between now and May. Historically, during times of high unemployment, Congress provides extra cash to extend the benefits. Congress has never failed to do so when unemployment is above 7.2%. Today’s unemployment rate is above 9% and the lame duck session of Congress has so far failed to extend the benefits.
Congress has until November 30 to renew two federal programs to extend unemployment benefits, as David Moberg reports for Working In These Times. Last week, a bill to extend benefits for an additional three months failed to garner the two-thirds majority it needed to pass in the House. The House will probably take up the issue again this session, possibly for a one-year extension, but as Moberg notes, it’s unclear how the bill will fare in the Senate. The implications are dire, as Moberg notes:
The result? Not just huge personal and familial hardships that scars the lives of young and old both economically and psychologically for years to come. But failure to renew extended benefits would also slow the recovery, raise unemployment, and deepen the fiscal crises of state and federal governments.
But wait! There’s more:
* The Paycheck Fairness Act died in the Senate last week, as Denise DiStephan reports in The Nation. The bill would have updated the 1963 Equal Pay Act to close loopholes and protect employees against employer retaliation for discussing wages. All Republican senators and Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson voted not to bring the bill to the floor, killing the legislation for this session of Congress. The House already passed its version of the bill in 2009 and President Barack Obama had pledged to sign it.
* Economist Dean Baker talks with Laura Flanders of GritTV about quantitative easing (a.k.a. the Fed printing more money) and the draft proposal from the co-chairs of the deficit commission. Baker argues that we’re facing an unemployment crisis, not a deficit crisis.
* Charles Ferguson’s documentary “Inside Job” is a must-see, according to Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive. An examination of how Wall Street devastated the U.S. economy, the film details the reckless speculation in housing derivatives, enabled by crooked credit rating schemes, that brought the entire financial system to the brink of collapse. The film is narrated by Brad Pitt and features appearances by former Governor and anti-Wall Street corruption crusader Eliot Spitzer, financier George Soros, and Prof. Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who predicted the collapse of the housing bubble.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we... more
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by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Last night, Senate Republicans proved beyond any doubt that when it comes to the economy, they stand with Wall Street and against everybody else. Joined by lone Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Republicans successfully filibustered the procedural technicality of opening debate on Wall Street reform. It’s an unmistakable ploy to kill the bill and collect campaign cash from bigwig bankers. The coming weeks won’t be pretty.
Republicans are going to be battered by this filibuster. Financial reform is popular, and nobody on Capitol Hill wants to be seen as the agents of Wall Street in Washington come November. Republicans are hoping to rhetorically counter Obama’s proposals, negotiate a fatally weakened reform package, and then vote with Democrats for reform-in-name-only before the elections. But the U.S. financial system is broken and voters know it needs strong medicine.
In a speech last week before Cooper Union Hall in New York City, Obama laid out what’s at stake in the reform fight. Our biggest banks don’t fear failure because they know the government will bail them out in a crisis. As a result, they take massive risks that endanger the economy. Our current regulators ignored predatory lending in order to protect Wall Street profits. To top it off, the risky, multi-trillion-dollar market for derivatives—the financial weapons of mass destruction that brought down AIG—remains beyond the scope of regulatory authority altogether.
Without major changes, the U.S. economy is doomed to repeat the destruction of the past two years. Epic bailouts, consumer predation and heavy job losses will become the new national norm, not just the conditions of a single, terrible crisis. Last night’s Republican-plus-Nelson filibuster was an effort to preserve an unacceptable status quo.
Phony populism
As Matthew Rothschild emphasizes in a podcast for The Progressive, Wall Street Republicans have been spreading all kinds of crazy lies about Obama’s reform legislation. While the legislation that cleared the Senate Banking Committee in March isn’t perfect, it isn’t a massive bailout for Wall Street, either. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been making the rounds calling it just that, in a dishonest effort to kill the bill. This is phony populism. McConnell says he’s against bailouts, but his goal is to prevent reform from overturning the current system, which, as we saw in 2008, has bailouts baked in.
While Obama did a good job identifying what’s wrong on Wall Street, the solutions he proposed are either too weak to end abuses, or simply not included in the Wall Street reform bill in its current form. Obama’s initial proposal for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency was great, but Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) watered down in the Senate Banking Committee to appease Republicans. The same thing happened to Obama’s proposal to fix the wild market for derivatives, the financial weapons of mass destruction that brought down AIG.
How to make reform a reality
As Sarah Ludwig of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Program (NEDAP) emphasizes in an interview with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders, most of the reforms currently under consideration are a “good first step.” That is to say they are useful and productive—but not enough to fundamentally change the way Wall Street does business.
Fortunately, there are several amendments that can fix these shortcomings, most notably the SAFE Banking Act, introduced by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Ted Kaufman (D-DE). As Peter Rothberg emphasizes for The Nation, the amendment would force our largest banks to split up into institutions that could fail without jeopardizing the broader economy. It would also place a hard cap on the total amount that banks could bet in the financial markets.
Those amendments, of course, can only be added to the bill if Republicans allow debate on financial reform to begin. Progressives should be fighting hard to make sure that the break-up-the-banks measure is included in the bill that the Senate eventually votes on. And as Rothberg notes, there will be plenty of opportunities to do so this week. Protests calling for Major Wall Street reform have been organized all over the country. On Tuesday, protesters will speak out against predatory banking behemoth Wells Fargo in San Francisco. On Wednesday, they will target too-big-to-fail titan Bank of America in Charlotte, N.C. On Thursday, reformers will march straight into the lion’s den on Wall Street itself to demand change. It’s called the Showdown in America, and you can find out more here.
It’s only just begun—but how did we get here in the first place?
But whatever happens with this bill, the fight to rein in Wall Street is just beginning. As Robert Kuttner emphasizes for AlterNet, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no shortage of verve for Wall Street reform, but it still took him seven years to enact all of the New Deal banking laws. And as Simon Johnson and James Kwak detail for The American Prospect, reining in Wall Street means overturning the ideology that has dominated the halls of power in Washington, D.C. for three decades.
Since the Reagan era, politicians from both political parties have sincerely believed that what is good for Wall Street is good for America. The subprime mortgage monstrosity and Great Crash of 2008 put cracks in the foundation of that ideology. But the process of demolishing it may very well take longer than the legislative cycle that will end with the November elections.
Even if we do get a strong bill—one that breaks up the biggest banks, bans them from placing risky bets in the derivatives and securities markets and establishes a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency—other important aspects of the financial sector will need to be addressed in other legislation. Hedge funds, whose pivotal role in the crisis is only now being identified, will need to be reined in. Rating agencies, who actively fueled the subprime bubble, and whose business models are founded on conflicts of interest, must be restructured. The future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must be decided. Families across the country still need foreclosure relief.
We need a strong Wall Street reform bill. There is no excuse for any politician from either party to be standing with bigwig bankers against the rest of the country. And with two-thirds of the nation supporting reform, any political party that throws in its lot with Wall Street will pay a major price come November. No amount of Wall Street campaign cash can counter the voter outrage over bank bailouts and bonuses. There’s no way to know when Republicans will come to their senses, but whatever happens this week, there will still be much work to do this year and the next.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Last night, Senate Republicans proved... more
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