As the article points out many of the states hit hardest by this summer’s heat have drastically cut or eliminated programs that help the poor pay to adequately cool their homes. The cruel paradox of this already deadly scenario is that many of the leaders of these same states have vehemently denied “global warming”; opposed investing in green technology; and repeatedly & loudly decried “big government” until of course, a natural disaster strikes.
Now in the face of high unemployment and requests for assistance, an economy drained by over a decade of war spending, Wall Street manipulation, and a lack of tax revenues has left even the most well intentioned state governments have been forced to make deep cuts in aid to the poor, the elderly and the most vulnerable. Recent extreme weather will compound problems by not only posing serious health risks but also by impacting the costs of everything from food to clothing. Due to prolonged drought and scorching heat, crop losses will result in higher prices for everything from beef to corn to cotton.
So what have our political leaders been quibbling about for the past few months: raising the debt ceiling; making cuts to social safety nets like Medicaid & Social Security; and making sure that the rich do not pay a dime more in taxes.
Rep Dennis Cardoza asks the question: “For the life of me, I can’t figure out why a community organizer who says he cares about families, who says he cares about communities, has just turned his back on one of the biggest problems in America,”
The answer is simple. Foreclosure and/or bankruptcy still carry a stigma in our society. There is a mythology that people facing foreclosure are in that position because they: were greedy and tried to buy more house than they could afford; are poor money managers or; were speculators who were just flipping houses for profit. Sadly, this mythology is prevalent in both Democrat Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
As Professor Ravitch notes, “It is really important to vote.” Only 51.7% of eligible voters in Wisconsin cast a ballot last November, and they ended up with a governor and a legislature who are wreaking havoc on state government and decimating vital public services.
This prompted me to look at the voter turnout results for a few other states and the numbers truly drive the point home. The following numbers reflect the percentage of the voting eligible population: Florida 42.2%: Indiana 37.3%; Michigan 44.3%; New Jersey 36.5%; Ohio 44.6%; Pennsylvania 41.7%; Idaho 43.0%; and Tennessee 34.4%. No wonder the Governors believe that they can do away with democracy and turn government over to the corporations.
Looking at this numbers, Wisconsin residents should be proud that at least more than 50% of their voters bothered to vote in 2010. Hopefully, we will all be inspired to do better in 2012 Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Let’s be perfectly clear so there is no misunderstanding the GOP agenda.
They want to cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which tracks storms for disaster preparedness like earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes. They still believe that the nation should move full speed ahead with building nuclear power plants, off-shore oil drilling and the coal mining process known as fracking but not improve the rail system. They want to repeal the health care legislation. They want to reduce the federal deficit by making cuts to education, social security and government programs that aid the poor. Republican governors want to bust public unions, have the right to privatize cities and towns and dismiss elected officials. In fact, it really doesn’t matter if jobs are lost and people suffer as long as the unions can’t make campaign contributions to Democrats in 2012. AND most importantly, the GOP will defend to the death tax cuts for the wealthy.
“The project, which would have connected Tampa and Orlando with high-speed trains, was rejected by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican. He said he didn’t want to obligate the state to pay for what could be expensive operating costs for the line. However, the Florida DOT shows the line connecting Tampa to Orlando would have had an operating surplus in 2015, its first year of operation.”
So Gov. Scott does not want the expense of operating a train line that would provide the thousands of minimum wage employees as well as the tourists of Florida’s theme parks a less expensive mode of travel. Maybe he just doesn’t want Floridians to spend less on gasoline, have fewer highway accidents or breath cleaner air. Or just maybe Gov. Scott is more concerned about the 2012 Presidential election than he is about the residents of Florida. Hmm! Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
As my regular readers already know, I have been in a long blogging drought. And as I’m sure most caregivers can understand, I simply haven’t had enough hours in the day to keep up with my house much less the White House. However, after reading this morning’s news about the housing / mortgage market, I had to make time to write a little political commentary.
In an article published this morning, Associated Press, Real Estate Writer, Alex Vega reported on the current state of the housing industry. As expected, the news was not encouraging. He reports, “Lenders took back more homes in August than in any month since the start of the U.S. mortgage crisis.”
You might shrug that off as just a bad month until you read further and come to this section of the story.
Vega reports:
“More than 2.3 million homes have been repossessed by lenders since the recession began in December 2007, according to RealtyTrac. The firm estimates more than 1 million American households are likely to lose their homes to foreclosure this year.
In all, 338,836 properties received a foreclosure-related warning in August, up 4 percent from July, but down 5 percent from the same month last year, RealtyTrac said. That translates to one in 381 U.S. homes. The firm tracks notices for defaults, scheduled home auctions and home repossessions — warnings that can lead up to a home eventually being lost to foreclosure.
Among states, Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rate last month, with one in every 84 households receiving a foreclosure notice. That’s 4.5 times the national average.
Rounding out the top 10 states with the highest foreclosure rate in August were: Florida, Arizona, California, Idaho, Utah, Georgia, Michigan, Illinois and Hawaii.
Economic woes, such as unemployment or reduced income, are now the main catalysts for foreclosures.
Lenders are offering a variety of programs to help homeowners modify their loans, but their success rates vary. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners can’t qualify or fall back into default.
The Obama administration has rolled out numerous attempts to tackle the foreclosure crisis but has made only a small dent in the problem. Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.”
. The numbers are staggering and this leads to my political commentary.
“Economic conditions have always been relevant on Election Day. It is a truism recognized long before 1992, when irreverent Bill Clinton adviser James Carville summarized these concerns in a four-word slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The wrath of this adage is often felt by incumbents of either party, but it’s necessarily a bigger problem for the party in power. In 2010, Democrats control the House, the Senate, and the White House. Despite efforts to remind voters that President Obama inherited a nasty recession, this economy is now the Democrats’ burden.”
Yes, “it’s the economy, stupid” may be a great way to describe the political view of the trees, but the forest ( the bigger picture) that is being overlooked by both the Democrats and the Republicans is that it’s not JUST “the economy stupid”, it’s security.
No, I’m not just talking about keeping the world safe from terrorists and every other thing that goes bump in the night. I’m referring to personal, financial security. The security that fewer and fewer Americans feel in the run-up to the 2010 elections.
The security that comes from knowing that you will go to work tomorrow and still have a job.
The security that comes from knowing that if you, or a family gets sick, that a doctor will care for them and that their insurance will pay the bill.
The security that comes from knowing that if you borrow thousands in student loans that when you graduate there will be a job for you.
The security that comes from knowing that if you work hard all of your life and finally retire that your pension fund will not go belly up.
The security that comes from knowing that if you live long enough to grow old that your won’t lose everything just because you get sick.
And finally, the security in knowing that if you do lose your job or your health that you will still have a roof over your head.
These are the things that make most Americans, and most people for that matter, truly feel secure.
It’s not JUST “the economy stupid”, it’s security. And, after all that this nation has been through over the past decade, Americans simply do not feel secure. So, as much as I deplore some of their divisive rhetoric, I have to admit the Tea Party gets it. The Democrats and Republicans were simply clueless for too long.
When Washington was busy trying to push through a bail-out for the banks and Wall Street firms which caused so much of this nation’s pain, (which for the record was under the Bush administration ), many Americans felt that this was adding insult to injury to every person who was struggling to stave off bankruptcy and/or foreclosure. And when it was revealed that many of those same banks and Wall Street firms were using the bail-out money to pay employee bonuses ( which occurred during the Obama administration ) many Americans felt that they had been bamboozled and that Washington simply had no control.
So while it may be true that the Obama administration has made great strides in health care, banking reform and the war in Iraq, those political gains mean little to the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs, their homes and … their personal security.
On the other side of the aisle the GOP should not feel too confident about the 2010 election. Americans may well remember them as the party of NO, who ran up an astronomical budget deficit under the Bush years and who repeatedly blocked unemployment benefit extensions. For all of their attempts to discredit the Obama presidency, Republicans are viewed as no better than the Democrats by most Americans.
If a large part of the vote in 2008 was an anti-Bush vote, a large part of the 2010 vote will be cast for anyone that the public thinks has really learned the lesson.
When I initially read this headline I was certain that it was from The Onion or The Borowitz Report. After all how could GOP cheerleader and defender against socialism, Sarah Palin be calling for a government takeover over a foreign owned corporate entity. But then I thought again and realized that the story was probably true.
As Bob Cesca states in his assessment of Sarah Palins sudden conversion: “There’s no concern for consistency or hypocrisy. The platform is very simply: we believe the opposite of anything the president, the Democrats and the progressives say, regardless of whether it’s contradictory, crazy or stupid.”
And Sarah Palin is crazy like a fox in a hen house.
Sarah Palin’s sudden appreciation for government regulation has little to do with holding BP accountable or protecting the people and ecosystems impacted by the spill. In fact, I suspect that her flip-flop on this issue has less to do with opposing the President as it does with protecting the long-term interests of off-shore drilling proponents. After all, lack of regulation has never really been the problem. The problem is that the regulations already in place to protect the public from the corporations are never enforced. So why not let the government pass a few more regulations to appease the masses as long as it doesn’t stand in the way of letting Sarah and her friends “drill baby drill.” Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
I woke up on Thursday morning in a Republic based on the principles of democracy and capitalism. Tonight I go to sleep in a corporate state and wondering if my vote will ever matter again.
It’s very hard to find the words to express how I feel about the Supreme Court ruling giving corporations unlimited influence in elections. No words can describe the sense of foreboding.
In response to the Court’s ruling in the case of Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold issued the following statement:
“It is important to note that the decision does not affect McCain-Feingold’s soft money ban, which will continue to prevent corporate contributions to the political parties from corrupting the political process. But this decision was a terrible mistake.
Presented with a relatively narrow legal issue, the Supreme Court chose to roll back laws that have limited the role of corporate money in federal elections since Teddy Roosevelt was president. Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns.
Just six years ago, the Court said that the prohibition on corporations and unions dipping into their treasuries to influence campaigns was ‘firmly embedded in our law.’ Yet this Court has just upended that prohibition, and a century’s worth of campaign finance law designed to stem corruption in government.
The American people will pay dearly for this decision when, more than ever, their voices are drowned out by corporate spending in our federal elections. In the coming weeks, I will work with my colleagues to pass legislation restoring as many of the critical restraints on corporate control of our elections as possible.”
While the tea partiers and birthers were busy disrupting town hall meetings, denying the President’s citizenship, lying about “death panels” and generally trying to scare people with term Socialism, Wall Street and K Street were laughing all the way to the bank and conducting a coup.
Am I totally surprised by the Supreme Court decision?
After eight years of Bush/Cheney/Gonzales, very little surprises me. If you recall, author Naomi Wolf tried to warn us in her book “The End of America”, to be aware of the 10 steps to closing down a democracy.
Did the Supreme Court think that the world was so distracted by the crisis in Haiti that they wouldn’t notice this decision? Did they think that the conservatives would be so giddy, or liberals so dismayed, over the Senate race in Massachusetts that this decision would just fly in under the radar? Author Naomi Klein certainly tried to warn us of the many ways that governments use “shock strategies” to implement pro-corporate policies.
So no, I’m not totally surprised by this decision.
What does catch me completely off guard is the timing. i thought surely something like this could happen in 2012 or 2016 but not now. How could something like this happen in the middle of the term of a President elected with a mandate for change, in the middle of a populist up-rising. Just when President Obama is ready to stop playing nice with Wall Street and try to reign in corporate greed with regulatory measures, the conservative Supreme Court which Wall Street helped seat says, “We’ll show you just how powerful we are.”
And friends, they are powerful.
As he often does, Keith Olbermann summed up what so many of us are thinking in his special comment.
Thanks to Marcia G. Yerman for bringing Kimberly Hefling’s article, Female Veterans Struggle for Acceptance, to my attention. As Marcia noted in her comment on the post, “Military Sexual Trauma is a major issue.”
Sadly, it’s a major issue that is gravely under-reported.
“Female service members have much higher rates of divorce and are more likely to be a single parent. When they do seek help at VA medical centers, they are screening positive at a higher rate for military sexual trauma, meaning they indicated experiencing sexual harassment, assault or rape. Some studies have shown that female veterans are at greater risk for homelessness.
Former Army Sgt. Kayla Williams, an Iraq veteran who has written about her experience, said she was surprised by the response she and other women from the 101st Airborne Division received from people in Clarksville, Tenn., near Fort Campbell, Ky.
She said residents just assumed they were girlfriends or wives of military men.”
Unbelievable! It’s sounds like Sgt. Williams is encountering people who’ve watched too many episodes of MASH and taken the fiction as gospel.
But as one response to the HuffPo article indicates, even if people view today’s service women as more than the “girlfriends and wives of military men”, many are still unaware of the scope of the problems that they face. In his comment Kidorf asked, “Are you suggesting that those female soldiers are being “offed”?
Well, Kidorf, the parents of Army Pfc Lavena Johnson may well answer that question with, YES.
On July 19, 2005, Army Private First Class LaVena Johnson was found dead in Balad, Iraq. It has been reported that when her body was discovered in a tent belonging to a private military contractor her remains displayed a black eye, broken nose, burned hands, loose teeth, acid burns on her genitals and a bullet hole in the head. The military ruled her death as a suicide.
While it is yet to be confirmed by the military that Pfc Johnson was murdered, it is certainly clear that she and many other service women have been and continue to be subjected to various forms of abuse. It is also evident that their concerns (and those of their loved ones) are largely being dismissed.
The following is a video clip from a 2008 hearing held by The Oversight Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs’ on “Sexual Assault in the Military.” In this segment, you see Subcommittee Chairman Tierney and Full Committee Chairman Waxman practically threaten Michael Dominguez, Principal Deputy Undersecretary for Defense, with contempt after he reveals that he has ordered Dr. Kaye Whitley of the DOD Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office to defy a subpoena to appear before the committee.
In his opening comments to the hearing Chairman Tierney remarked:
“What’s at stake here goes to the very core of the values of the military and the nation itself. When our sons and daughters put their lives on the line to defend the rest of us, the last thing they should fear is being attacked by one of our own. We fundamentally have a duty to prevent sexual assaults in the military as much as humanly possible, and to punish attackers quickly and severely. We also must empower victims so they feel comfortable coming forward to seek justice and to receive help to get their lives back on track and to restore their dignity. Finally, we simply must ensure a climate in our military where sexual assault is in no way, either officially or unofficially, condoned, ignored, or tolerated.”
Another article which addressed this same troubling issue was “Rapists in the Ranks” by Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), a must read for anyone concerned about this issue.
In this article Rep. Harman wrote:
“The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and the downward spirals many of their lives have since taken.”
She also noted:
“At the heart of this crisis is an apparent inability or unwillingness to prosecute rapists in the ranks. According to DOD statistics, only 181 out of 2,212 subjects investigated for sexual assault in 2007, including 1,259 reports of rape, were referred to courts-martial, the equivalent of a criminal prosecution in the military. Another 218 were handled via nonpunitive administrative action or discharge, and 201 subjects were disciplined through “nonjudicial punishment,” which means they may have been confined to quarters, assigned extra duty or received a similar slap on the wrist. In nearly half of the cases investigated, the chain of command took no action; more than a third of the time, that was because of ‘insufficient evidence’.”
In the following video Massachusetts School of Law Professor Diane Sullivan interviews Kirsten Holmstedt on her book, The Girls Come Marching Home: Stories of Women Warriors Returning From The War In Iraq. In the book female veterans of the war in Iraq speak about soldiers dying on their watch, dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the difficulties of returning home.
Recently, President Barack Obama announced that an additional 30,000 troops will be deployed to Afghanistan. Of course, a percentage of that number will be women. Regardless of how you feel about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, isn’t it time to make sure that the women who courageously serve in the armed services be treated with the respect that they have earned.
As Ben Feller reported for Associated Press, “President Barack Obama evoked the cause of a just war on Thursday, accepting his Nobel Peace Prize just nine days after sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to war in Afghanistan but promising to use the prestigious prize to ‘reach for the world that ought to be.’”
In response to President Barack Obama’s “Just War” statement, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has issued the following statement:
WASHINGTON – December 11 – “Yesterday, our president mused about the inevitability of war, war’s instrumentality in the pursuit of peace and just wars.
It is important for us to reflect on his words, because once we believe in the inevitability of war, war becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once we are committed to war’s instrumentality in pursuit of peace, we begin the Orwellian journey to the semantic netherworld where War IS Peace, where the momentum of war overwhelms hopes for peace. And once we wrap doctrines perpetuating war in the arms of justice, we can easily legitimate the wholesale slaughter of innocents.
The war against Iraq was based on lies. Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are based on flawed doctrines of counter-insurgency. War is often not just; sometimes it is just war. And our ability to rethink the terms of our existence, to explore the possibility of peace without war, may well determine whether we end war, or war ends us.”
Kudos Representative Kucinich. Progressives can not afford to only be against the war when the opposing political party is in office.
In case you missed the speech, here is a video clip courtesy of TPMTV
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