Patriots Expose Another Conservative Lie, Low Wage Jobs Do Not Lead To Management Positions

Patriots Expose Another Conservative Lie, Low Wage Jobs Do Not Lead To Management Positions

Entry-level jobs in the fast food business are far more likely to be dead ends than stepping stones to higher-level work, according to new data from the National Employment Law Project. Less than 9 percent of fast food employees are supervisors, and just 2.2 percent hold managerial, professional, or technical jobs.

The remaining 89.1 percent of fast food workers – 3.6 million Americans – earn a median pay rate of $8.94 per hour.

A 40-hour work week, every single week of the year without time off would therefore earn the median front-line fast food worker $18,595 before taxes – right on the cusp of poverty for a family of three. The think tank Demos, using a more realistic accounting of days off and family expenses, has calculated that anything under $12 per hour is insufficient to support a family. That may explain why a McDonald’s website meant to help workers budget recommends they get a second job and why fast food workers in more than half a dozen major cities are striking to demand a livable wage.

NELP notes that fast food companies defend their treatment of workers by depicting cashier and fry cook jobs as the first step on the path to economic mobility. Indeed, in looking at the overall economy it makes sense to think of entry-level jobs as dues-paying stages on the way to the front office. That’s because a third of employees in the whole economy hold managerial, technical, professional, or workplace supervisory roles. The nearly nine-to-one ratio of worker bees to higher-level employees in fast food doesn’t add up:

And it isn’t just that there are hundreds of frontline workers for every franchise owner, leaving very little room for new entrants to the top level of fast food entrepreneurship. It’s that fast food chains require their franchisees to be quite wealthy before they ever purchase a store. In order to be considered for franchise ownership at Wendy’s, applicants must show a net worth of $5 million. KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King, and Jack in the Box set their minimums at $1.5 million. At the low end, Subway requires net worth of $80,000 for franchisees. That means the hypothetical front-line fast food worker from the example above, who never takes a day off, could be eligible to apply for a Subway franchise after 20 years if she somehow saved more than 20 percent of her earnings every year.

Fast food companies aren’t alone in justifying their low wages and treatment of workers by citing opportunities for advancement that almost none of their employees will ever reach. As the Columbia Journalism Review recently noted, such claims are a key piece of Walmart’s public relations strategy.

 These large coporations do not pay their employees a fair share of the revenue generated by those employees because they pay the excetives huge salaries and pay share holders - which are predominantly also wealthy- large proceeds. McDonalds, Hobby Lobby and Walmart are stealing from employees to make themselves filthy rich.

Conservative Republican America Where Workers Are Treated Like Soviet Dissidents

Welcome To Conservative Republican America Where Workers Are Treated Like Soviet Dissidents

Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their dinner. One day, your supervisor tells you that instead of being paid an hourly wage, you will now get paid for the number of containers you load or unload. This will be great for you, your supervisor says: More money!  But you open your next paycheck to find it shrunken to the point that you are no longer even making minimum wage. You complain to your supervisor, who promptly sends you home without pay for the day. If you pipe up again, you’ll be looking for another job.

Everardo Carrillo says that's just what happened to him and other low-wage employees who worked at a Southern California warehouse run by a Walmart contractor. Carrillo and his fellow workers have launched a multi-class-action lawsuit for massive wage theft (Everardo Carrillo et al. v. Schneider Logistics) in a case that’s finally bringing national attention to an invisible epidemic. (Walmart, despite its claims that it has no responsibility for what its contractors do, has been named a defendant [3].)

What happened to Carrillo happens every day in America. And it could happen to you.

How big is the problem?

Americans like to think that a fair day’s work brings a fair day’s pay. Cheating workers of their wages may seem like a problem of 19th-century sweatshops. But it’s back and taking a terrible toll. We’re talking billions of dollars in wages; millions of workers affected each year. A gigantic heist is being perpetrated against working people: they’re getting screwed on overtime, denied their tips, shortchanged on benefits, defrauded on payroll, and handed paychecks that bounce like rubber balls. A conservative estimate of unpaid overtime alone shows that it costs workers at least $19 billion per year.

The laws protecting workers are grossly inadequate [4], and wage thieves go unpunished. For giant companies like Walmart, Citigroup and UPS, getting fined is just the cost of doing business. You could even say that they're incentivized to cheat because punishment is so unlikely, and when it happens, so light. The protections we used to take for granted, like the right to receive at least the minimum wage, the right to workers’ compensation when hurt on the job, and the right to advocate for better working conditions, are nothing more than a quaint memory for many Americans. Activist Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America,calls it a "national crime wave."

The sheer scope of the problem is jaw-dropping, sweeping across key industries and inflicting massive damage on individuals and society as a whole. In 2009, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a ground-breaking study, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers,” which found that in America, an honest day’s work is frequently rewarded with theft and abuse. A survey of over 4,000 workers in Chicago, L.A. and New York found that minimum and overtime violations were rife, and any attempt to complain or organize was swiftly met with punishment. Among the revelations:

    26 percent of low-wage workers got paid less than the minimum wage.

    76 percent of workers toiling over 40 hours were denied overtime.

    Workers lose an average of $2,634 a year due to these and other workplace violations.

Who gets cheated?

Women, minorities, immigrants, and workers at the bottom of the wage scale are hardest hit, but wage theft is thriving across the employment spectrum.

The people at the top who are stealing these wages are not going broke. They are not in need of food and shelter. They have money. They just want more. They're the ones always yelling about how regulation is hurting American business. Regulation is not hurting business or capitalism. What is hurting business, American culture, American values and capitalism is greedy immoral thugs who call themselves patriotic conservatives and libertarians.

Time To Face the Reality, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook Are Evil

Time To Face the Reality, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook Are Evil

Having solved the problem of people not wasting enough time on the internet, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now tackling his first real-world political cause: immigration reform. With a slick new non-profit group funded by tech millionaires, Zuckerberg is rallying Silicon Valley's elite into a political force they hope might one day rival Wall Street. Zuckerberg's political moves are of a piece with his career as a tech mogul: hugely ambitious, painfully awkward, entirely self-interested, and surprisingly successful. And he's just getting started.

Earlier this month, Zuckerberg unveiled the vehicle of his political will: FWD.us, a bipartisan, non-profit political advocacy group that sounds like an iPhone app. FWD.us has attracted big names from both politics and technology, including former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, Romney adviser Dan Senor, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt. The group hopes to raise $50 million to fund its lobbying for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform, which is currently making its way through Congress.

Why immigration? We need those smart foreign brains: In a Washington Post op-ed announcing FWD.us, Zuckerberg wrote that "in a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country." To that end, FWD.us says on its website it aims to "establish a streamlined process for admitting future workers" and increase the number of H-1B visas that let companies hire high-skilled foreign workers to "continue to promote innovation and meet our workforce needs."

The implicit argument behind FWD.us is that the U.S. doesn't have enough high-skilled domestic workers to meet tech companies' needs. This is a myth, and Zuckerberg and FWD.us are just the latest tech players to promote it. In fact there is no shortage of domestic IT workers, as shown in a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. While there is an unusually low unemployment rate among American tech workers (3%), they haven't enjoyed the large salary increases that would signal a shortage. There is also little evidence that the foreign workers tech companies hire are any better than Americans. The real reason tech companies want to hire more high-skilled immigrants is that they can pay them less than Americans, since immigrants are in a more economically precarious position. More than 80 percent of workers hired under the H-1B program are paid less than their American counterparts, according to the EPI. This kind of outsourcing benefits tech companies while hurting domestic tech workers.

The self-serving motives behind Zuckerberg's immigration reform push can be seen clearly in Facebook's corporate lobbying efforts. As FWD.us promotes high-minded ideals of openness and opportunity, Facebook's lobbying firms have been doing the dirty work of making sure immigration reform means they can freely hire high-skilled immigrants for less money than their American counterparts. Specifically, Facebook has been trying to insert language into the Senate immigration bill to eliminate a requirement that American companies make a "good faith" effort to hire Americans before looking abroad, according to the Washington Post. And Facebook wants to axe rules that would require companies to pay these foreign workers more. Facebook isn't just a fan of outsourcing its high-skilled jobs: Last year we reported that much of Facebook's dirty and unpleasant content moderation was done by outsourced third-world workers making as little as $1 an hour.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy told the Post, "The real goal is to put Zuckerberg and Facebook front and center with the Washington elite … to better extinguish a growing call to regulate how his company does business.”

So FWD.us is just another case of a savvy businessman wielding political clout for his financial benefit. But how FWD.us and Zuckerberg have done this is worth considering as a model of tech industry political activism to come. FWD.us demonstrates a bizarre wedding of Silicon Valley idealism with the tepid realities of interest politics. The two worlds collided last week when news stories went viral revealing that the group had funded ads trashing Obama and praising oil drilling in the Arctic. One ad supporting South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham slammed Obamacare and the president's "wasteful stimulus spending." The liberal blogosphere was shocked: The same Mark Zuckerberg who once feted Obama in Silicon Valley and counts Corey Booker as a bff now sounded like a long lost Koch Brother.

While the ad was funded by Zuckerberg's group, it didn't represent a right-wing turn for the politically ambiguous mogul. It was a tactical strike in his immigration reform campaign. The ad was made by a subsidiary group of FWD.us called Americans For a Conservative Direction. Lindsay Graham is one of the few Republican supporters of the Senate immigration reform bill, and the ad is meant to bolster Graham's conservative bona fides so he can push the largely Democrat-backed immigration bill without seeming like a softy. If that means bad-mouthing Obama, so be it.

After the ad went viral, FWD.us tried to placate angry liberals by pointing out that the group had also created a left-leaning organization, the Council for American Job Growth, to support liberal immigration reform backers. A FWD.us spokesperson told ThinkProgress that "maintaining two separate entities… to support elected officials across the political spectrum—separately—means that we can more effectively communicate with targeted audience of their constituents." This is politics, Facebook-style: pandering as personalized as your Facebook Newsfeed! It's also about as craven as Washington gets. Even the Koch brothers lacked the devious ingenuity to back two competing teams, as BuzzFeed's Ben Smith pointed out on Twitter. They only disingenuously funded the Tea Party.

The ad fracas was not even the weirdest moment in FWD.us' brief history. Days before it launched, Politico obtained an enthusiastically creepy memo FWD.us president Joe Green sent to potential supporters that sounded like a dispatch from North Korea's propaganda ministry. While the bloviating of the tech elite sounds just a bit ridiculous in blog posts by venture capitalists pumping a new mobile payment service, it takes a more sinister tone when applied to politics.

Green's memo boasted that "technology executives would use their companies to 'control the avenues of distribution' for a political message in support of their efforts," according to Politico. In case the implications of that statement were unclear, the memo also listed three reasons why the tech industry can become "one of the most powerful voices" in politics:

    1: We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA.

    2: Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.

    3. We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment.

We control massive distribution channels is something that would issue from a Facebook lackey's mouth in the most conspiracy-addled daydream of an infowars.com power-user. And yet here is Green, Mark Zuckerberg's old Harvard roommate, essentially promoting technology-enabled subliminal messaging in a confidential memo to the tech elite.

Green said in a statement that his language was "poorly chosen" and gave "a misimpression of the views and aspirations of this organization and those associated with." But he made a very similar pitch Monday in a paid promotional presentation to the assembled geeks and entrepreneurs of the TechCrunch Distrupt conference in New York City:

"This is one of those urgent policy problems that demonstrates how broken Washington D.C. is," he said, "and where we can apply our patented tech community innovation skills."

This framing is important because as tech companies become bigger political players they're likely going to adopt a similar message. Last year, the tech industry spent $132.5 million on lobbying efforts, "placing them among the top lobbying sectors in the Capitol," according to the Washington Post. Many of these companies are taking the same route as Zuckerberg, creating non-profit "stealth PACS" that allow them to wield political influence in the name of some social good without disclosing their donors.

FaceBook has become no more than a captive audience of consumers to be studied by corporate marketeers - users are no more than guinea pigs.  If FaceBook is going to use and exploit their users the least they could do is start paying them.

George W Bush's $250 Million Can of Whitewash. In America, with enough time and money you can convince people you're not evil when you lose $17 trillion dollars of the nation's money and get 20,000 soldiers and marines maimed. Bush was just following the Conservative Road-map for America. He made the rich richer and the middle-class poorer.

Another proud day for the NRA ( National Right to Murder Children Association) 5-Year-Old Get .22 Caliber Birthday Rifle, Shoots and Kills 2-Year-Old Sister

The NRA or National Right to Murder Association has already blocked Boston Marathon Investigation

The NRA or National Right to Murder and Get Away With It Association has already blocked Boston Marathon Investigation

One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

The FBI said Tuesday that gunpowder, along with pieces of metal and ball bearings, were packed into at least one pressure cooker and another device to make the crude bombs that killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and wounded more than 170 more during the Boston Marathon Monday.

But a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of  Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told MSNBC.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Explosives manufacturers are required to place tracing elements known as identification taggants only in plastic explosives but not in gunpowder, thanks to lobbying efforts by the NRA and large gun manufacturing groups.

NRA officials at the group’s headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia declined to respond to calls and emails from MSNBC.com requesting comment.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute, Inc., share a cross-membership of dozens of firearms manufacturers based out of their joint offices in Newtown, Connecticut. Foundation spokesman Bill Brassard, Jr. told MSNBC.com that no one from either group was available for comment.

“They are concerned about tort liability,” Morhard added to MSNBC.com, referring to manufacturers worried about being sued over the improper use of their ammunition or explosives.

Has American noticed that the NRA - worried that gov'mint will take away their right to be part of a well "regulated" militia does done nothing to fight for the civil liberties that conservatives regularly take away from Americans in the form of the Patriot Act and other surveillance state activity. The NRA does nothing to keep the gov'mint from entangling itself with religious fanatics. The NRA does nothing to protect the right of individuals to have autonomy over their own body. I could go on, but the point is easily made, the gov'mint that they say they need their guns to protect themselves against, takes away rights that the NRA supports being taken away. I'm not anit-gun ownership, but I am anti-fanatics.

Related to chart above, Conservative Republicans want America to follow European economic austerity

Anti-American Legal Analyst Peter Johnson, Jr. Joins Fox News In Spreading Health Care Lies

Anti-American Legal Analyst Peter Johnson, Jr. Joins Fox News In Spreading Health Care Lies

During an appearance on Fox and Friends Friday morning, Fox News contributor and legal analyst Peter Johnson, Jr. claimed that Medicare beneficiaries who are losing access to critical medical services as a result of sequestration “ain’t seen nothing yet,” as Obamacare will kill off far more Americans in the next ten years.

During a segment discussing how the budget sequester’s two percent cut to Medicare is forcing cancer clinics to deny chemotherapy to thousands of beneficiaries, Johnson told host Steve Doocy that elderly Americans should expect a lot more bad news in the coming decade as a direct consequence of the health care law:

    DOOCY: This story is going to disturb you. Cancer clinics across this country are turning away thousands of Medicare patients in need of chemotherapy. You can blame the sequester. Is there more to come? Peter Johnson, Jr. has a prescription for truth. Peter, what is this about?

    JOHNSON: This is about people dying as a result of Obamacare and as a result of the sequester. What the oncology association is saying is that thousands of chemotherapy patients who should have received their treatments, their benefits under Medicare, will not based on a 2 percent reduction under the sequester. What they fail to understand — and maybe they do and they don’t want to discuss it at this point — is that over the next ten years, 2013 to 2023, under Obamacare, there will be a $716 billion reduction [to Medicare] in Obamacare. We’re talking about a $3 billion reduction in the sequester now and the $3 billion reduction in Obamacare –

    DOOCY: This is a preview of coming awful things.

    JOHNSON: You haven’t seen anything yet. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Johnson’s conflation of the sequester’s ham-fisted spending cuts with Obamacare’s Medicare savings demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the sequester, Obamacare, and how federal budgeting works. Sequestration is causing cancer clinics to turn people away because they can’t afford to keep providing expensive chemotherapy drugs to patients in the face of a two percent cut to Medicare Part B that has to come entirely out of clinics’ overhead funding — making the sequester cut more akin to a double-digit pay cut. Obamacare’s $716 billion in Medicare savings come from reducing historically excessive payments to providers that service private Medicare Advantage plans, meaning that it doesn’t affect benefits. Conservatives have consistently fear-mongered over those savings despite including them in their budgets.

Later on in the program, Johnson also revived the widely debunked claim that Obamacare has “death panels” — a claim that is so patently false that Politifact named it 2009's “Lie of the Year.”

Johnson is a wild eyed zealot for a proto-facist agenda who is willing to tell the most blatant lies to advance his anti-American agenda. he is hoping no one will look up the simple fact that conservatives voted for the sequester and held the budget and Medicare hostage because they claimed the sequester cuts are nothing. The review broads that review medical care costs are what pathological ideologue such as Johnson and Fox are calling death panels - only once again they are hoping fair minded Americans do not look up the facts - conservatives voted for such a panel. Americans should also be asking themselves why why a foaming at the mouth America hater like Steve Doocy makes millions of dollars for doing nothing but misleading the nation on crucal public policy issues. It sure looks like hating freedom and democracy pays well.

The Patriotic Truth About Middle-Class Taxes and Corporations

The Patriotic Truth About Middle-Class Taxes and Corporations

Transplanting Taxes from Corporations to the Rest of Us
American taxpayers are increasingly picking up the tab for unpaid corporate taxes.

Today, corporate profits are setting all-time records while middle class families continue to struggle financially. These trends are intertwined.

Whether you’ve clicked to send your tax forms to the IRS along the cyber-highway or dropped your return in the old-fashioned blue mailbox, you’ll be paying extra to cover the growing amount of taxes that the nation’s clever corporations are shunting onto individual taxpayers.

Officially, the U.S. corporate tax rate stands at 35 percent, but in practice it’s far lower. Corporations have lots of tricks in their box of tax-avoidance tools.

In the 1950s, corporations paid nearly a third of the federal government’s bills. Last year, thanks to the antics of Pfizer and other examples of overly creative accounting, corporate income taxes accounted for less than a tenth of Uncle Sam’s total revenue.

Consider Pfizer’s track record. The drugmaker increased its offshore profits by $10 billion in 2012, boosting its offshore stash to $73 billion — all of it untaxed by Uncle Sam. Like most pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer registers its patents in a low-tax offshore haven, and then charges a high price for the use of this “intellectual property.” Doing so, it shifts all of its U.S. profits offshore, avoiding U.S. taxes and bloating its overseas bank account.

Pfizer’s tax dodging prowess has earned it a gold medal in the sport, but it has also drawn unwanted attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC wrote to Pfizer last year asking them to explain four years of large losses in their U.S. operations despite reporting about 40 percent of their sales on American soil. Undeterred by the SEC investigation, Pfizer added a fifth year of U.S. losses to the string in 2012.

Imagine for a moment one of the physicians that prescribes Pfizer’s products taking their diploma off their office wall, carefully packing it up, and shipping it to a bank vault in the Cayman Islands. That diploma represents the doctor’s intellectual property. Without it, they would not be able to practice their profession.

After each visit, patients approaching the check-out desk would be given their bill and an envelope to mail their check to a post office box in the Cayman Islands. Faced with confused looks, the receptionist cheerfully explains, “Well, we have to pay for the use of the skills represented by the diploma, which is housed in the Caribbean.”

The corporate offshore tax dodge that shifts $90 billion of tax expenses onto individual taxpayers this Tax Day is just that crazy. Just like having a doctor’s diploma parked in the Cayman Islands does nothing to improve the quality of care, having corporate profits transferred from America to tax haven nations provides no enhanced benefits in terms of product quality or service. In other words, there is no economic value. It only serves to add more to already-overflowing corporate coffers.

In the 1950s, corporations paid nearly a third of the federal government’s bills. Last year, thanks to the antics of Pfizer and other examples of overly creative accounting, corporate income taxes accounted for less than a tenth of Uncle Sam’s total revenue. This dramatic shortfall shows up in two ways — federal budget deficit growth and the growing trend of individual taxpayers paying an increased share of the costs of government.

Only about two in every thousand American businesses are even eligible to play this game, and far fewer actually do. Most business owners are proud to pay taxes they know support schools, good infrastructure, and national security.

If tax-dodging corporations were people, they might say thanks to the responsible taxpayers who are picking up their share of unpaid taxes. But since they aren’t human, allow me to say on their behalf, “Have a Nice Tax Day.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Scott Klinger is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies

But conservatives keep claiming that taxes are too high and are preventing economic growth. Unlike the years following the new Deal and up through the 1970s, when corporations were somewhat responsible about the social contract between workers and consumers, now they let the workers have the crumbs and corporate plutocrats take must of the pie. And big institutional investors get a big share too. On the other hand workers are more productive than ever yet their wages are not keeping up with inflation. Our roads, bridges, cities and schools could use some infrastructure improvement, but that is slow in coming because conservatives, who caused the deficit and the recession, say the deficit is more important than rising revenue. 

The Republican March In North Dakota To Have Tyrannical Government Control of Women's Bodies

The Republican March In North Dakota To Have Tyrannical Government Control of Women's Bodies

On Tuesday afternoon, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R) signed into law three different abortion restrictions — HB 1305, HB 1456, and SB 2305 — that women’s health advocates say will effectively ban abortion in the state. The extreme legislation that has received the most media attention is HB 1456, an unconstitutional “fetal heartbeat” ban that would outlaw abortions after just six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even realize they’re pregnant. But when it comes to the new laws’ concrete effect on the lives of women in North Dakota, a lesser-known piece of legislation may actually pose an even bigger threat to reproductive rights.

North Dakota women will feel the immediate impact of SB 2305, which indirectly targets abortion access by over-regulating abortion providers — a popular anti-choice tactic known as the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP. Abortion opponents push TRAP laws with the ultimate goal of forcing abortion clinics to close their doors.

TRAP laws are cleverly framed in terms of ensuring women’s safety, but they’re actually incredibly effective methods of cutting off access to reproductive care at health clinics. That’s why Tammi Kromenaker, the director of North Dakota’s last remaining abortion clinic, told RH Reality Check that SB 2305 could actually represent the most serious threat to women’s abortion services in the state:

    “We definitely see the TRAP bill as the one that will end abortion in the state,” Tammi Kromenaker, the director of Red River Women’s Clinic (RRWC), told RH Reality Check. RRWC is the only abortion clinic in North Dakota. “The other bills aren’t really a threat right now, but this one could close us.” [...]

    These bills have drawn attention away from the true threat to RRWC: Under the new TRAP bill, abortion providers would be forced to obtain hospital admitting privileges. But at least one of the two local hospitals won’t offer those privileges to the clinic — because the quality of care at RRWC is so high that the clinic doesn’t need them.

    Lawmakers proposed the bill under the guise of “women’s safety,” but Kromenaker points out that her clinic’s safety record is actually better than the average clinic safety records, showing that the “need” for the bill was completely fabricated. “This bill is intended to impose an impossible to meet requirement,” she said. “There is no other goal but to shut us down.”

North Dakota’s new six-week ban will likely be tied up in court for going much too far to undermine the constitutional protections in Roe v. Wade, which guarantees the right to first-trimester abortion services. And an even more radical “personhood” amendment, which could ban all abortions altogether if voters approve it on the 2014 November ballot, will face similar legal challenges if it becomes law. On the other hand, SB 2305 could force the Red River Women’s Clinic to close its doors relatively quickly — just like similar legislation has done to health clinics in other states.

Conservatives have some very creepy ideas about rights, children and women. As long as someone is a possible person, a clump of cells, they're all for the protection of that abstraction - going so far as to have the government make personal health care choices for individuals and their families. On the other hand they actively despise women, hate the idea of helping children with health care or education. And they're happy to use government to make sure that corporations have more power then women or children. Whatever values Republicans have, they're not patriotic American values. 

Americans Want a Back-to-Work Alternative to Creepy Paul Ryan's Austerity Scheme

Americans Want a Back-to-Work Alternative to Creepy Paul Ryan's Austerity Scheme

When it comes to budgets, debts and deficits and, most importantly, the future of the US economy, there are two distinct visions competing in Washington.Members of the Congressional Black Caucus speak against proposed tax cuts, December 10, 2010. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Both cost a lot of money.

But they seek to steer the United States in radically different directions.

One vision, that of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, spends our federal largesse on tax breaks for the rich and schemes to divert Medicare funds into the accounts of private insurers. It’s classic crony capitalism. But that’s not the worst of it. Because Ryan’s plan comes wrapped in an austerity model for squeezing government spending and investment, it threatens to stall an economy that is only beginning to grow at a rate sufficient to create needed jobs.

On Thursday, the House voted 221-207 for the Ryan budget. The Republican majority was reasonably solidified in support of the proposal, although ten sincere fiscal conservatives opposed a measure that focuses far more of satisfying the demands of Wall Street donors than actual deficit reduction.

Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the Ryan budget. That can and should be read as a rejection of the ugliest face of austerity. But it is not the case that congressional Democrats are united when it comes to presenting an alternative to Ryanism. And that’s a problem because voters don’t just want Congress to reject austerity; polling data makes it clear that they want an alternative that is focused on job creation.

The best alternatives to the Ryan budget have been presented by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The two groups, which have a significant overlap in their membership, saw their proposals rejected by the House on Wednesday. Ryan’s Republican colleagues opposed both plans, as did dozens of cautious Democrats who have yet to recognize the importance of challenging the lie of austerity with a no-holds-barred growth agenda.

The political reality, of course, is that this week’s House votes settle nothing with regard to the budget priorities that will ultimately frame the nation’s future. “Once again, Republicans in the House have passed a budget that the American people do not support, and has no real chance of becoming law,” explained Congressman Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who serves on the Budget Committee. “This is a budget whose math is bogus, but whose consequences are real and serious for our middle class families in Wisconsin. From destroying jobs, to raising taxes on the middle class, to turning Medicare into a voucher system, it makes the wrong decisions and reflects the wrong priorities… But the biggest problem with the GOP budget is that it fails to tackle the greatest threat to our long-term deficit—our need to grow our economy and create jobs. With 12 million Americans still unemployed, and millions more who are underemployed, the best budget we can put forth is one that fosters job growth.”

It will be in the wrangling between the House and Senate, and the broader national debate, that the fiscal and economic priorities of the nation will finally be shaped.

And it is important to recognize that, in that broader national debate, Ryan and the House majority have already lost.

The American people have no taste for austerity.

They want a growth agenda. The new Gallup Poll finds that 72 percent of Americans support spending federal money on a program to “put people to work on urgent infrastructure repairs.” Seventy-two percent of Americans also favor “a federal jobs creation law that would spend government money for a program that would create more than one million new jobs.”

Those positions are antithetical to everything Ryan is proposing.

That’s a growth agenda that is the opposite of austerity.

It is a growth agenda that mirrors what the Congressional Progressive Caucus has proposed with its “Back to Work” budget.

The CPC budget plan balances the budget far more efficiently and effectively than does Ryan’s—as it eschews the pay-to-play giveaways to campaign donors in the insurance, pharmaceutical and financial-services industries—and stimulates job creation. That’s because the CPC proposal rejects austerity in favor of growth. The focus on growth is essential to the CPC plan, which is wholly distinct from other Democratic plans that seek to strike an often incoherent balance between smart investments and Ryan’s austerity.

Believing in conservative austerity, Ryan's austerity or Romney austerity is like believing that flesh eating trolls live under all bridges. It is all based on the fetid fantasies of the conservative bubble, not sound economics. America cannot afford austerity. Democrats have already given them austerity-lite, which is why the economy is growing, but slower than it would if we did away with austerity all-together.

If Republicans Really Love America, Hey, How About a Refund, Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives

If Republicans Really Love America, Hey, How About a Refund, Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives

A new report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that nearly 200,000 people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed in the war in Iraq President George W. Bush launched 10 years ago.

The report also found that American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.

“Nearly every government that goes to war underestimates its duration, neglects to tally all the costs, and overestimates the political objectives that will be accomplished by war’s violence,” said Boston University professor of political science and project co-director Neta C. Crawford.

Indeed, the war devastated the Iraqi health care system and allowed militants to hone their skills and export them to neighboring conflicts:

    Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.

    Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country.

The Watson Institute project — which involves “30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations, and other organizations” — comes on the heals of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction’s final report released last week finding that the U.S. spent $60 billion on reconstruction efforts in Iraq and that $10 billion of it was wasted on fraud and abuse.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”

Meanwhile, the AP reported this afternoon that “a string of explosions tore through central Baghdad within minutes of each other on Thursday, followed by what appeared to be a coordinated assault by gunmen who battled security forces in the Iraqi capital.” The AP said the attack — which reportedly killed 12 people — “bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’s Iraq arm.”

We probably will not be getting a refund because conservatives are spending it on lobbyist to get more tax cuts for millionaires, make sure that women do not make medical decisions about their own bodies and further deregulating banks so they can continue to steal from working class Americans.

Conservative and Libertarian Wacko Budget Hawks Should Be Ashamed of Their Lies and Agenda

Conservative and Libertarian Wacko Budget Hawks Should Be Ashamed of Their Lies and Agenda

Here's a pretty important fact that virtually everyone in Washington seems oblivious to: The federal deficit has never fallen as fast as it's falling now without a coincident recession.

To be specific, CBO expects the deficit to shrink from 8.7% of GDP in fiscal 2011 to 5.3% in fiscal 2013 if the sequester takes effect and to 5.5% if it doesn't. Either way, the two-year deficit reduction — equal to 3.4% of the economy if automatic budget cuts are triggered and 3.2% if not — would stand far above any other fiscal tightening since World War II.

Until the aftermath of the Great Recession, there were only three such periods in which the deficit shrank by a cumulative 2% of GDP or more. The 1960-61 and 1969-70 episodes both helped bring about a recession.

Far steeper deficit cuts during the demobilization from World War II and in 1937-38 both precipitated economic reversals.

Now the deficit is shrinking about 50% faster than it did during the booming late 1990s, when the jobless rate was falling south of 5% and tax revenues were soaring — without tax hikes.

Yet conservatives and libertarians, who have the nerve to claim they know economics and what is in the best interests of the country, claim that Democrats have been on a spending spree. Cons and weirdo Randians want the USA to follow Europe austerity path. Could it be that following such a path would be disastrous for the economy - and that know that, but want the economy to crash for one simple reason- they want to make Democrats and Obama look bad. Are conservatives and libertarians the enemy within.

Why food-stamp bans are perpetuating risky behaviors among America’s most vulnerable

Why food-stamp bans are perpetuating risky behaviors among America’s most vulnerable

Carla walked into my office with despair in her eyes. I was surprised. Carla has been doing well in her four months out of prison; she got off drugs, regained custody of her kids, and even enrolled in a local community college.

Without much prodding she admitted to me that she had retuned to prostitution: “I am putting myself at risk for HIV to get my kids a f---ing happy meal.”

Despite looking high and low for a job, Carla explained, she was still unemployed. Most entry-level jobs felt out of reach with her drug record, but what’s worse, even the state wasn’t willing to throw her a temporary life preserver.

You see, Carla is from one of the 32 states in the country that ban anyone convicted of a drug felony from collecting food stamps. With the release of the Global Burden of Disease Study last week, it bears looking at how we are perpetuating burdens among the most vulnerable Americans with our outdated laws.

If she’d committed rape or murder, Carla could have gotten assistance to feed herself and her children, but because the crime she committed was a drug felony, Carla joined the hundreds of thousands of drug felons who are not eligible. ......Women with children are especially affected. It’s estimated that 70,000 women and their children are banned from obtaining food stamps. This means mothers who are simply trying to feed themselves and their children, and who are trying to get back on their feet after serving their time, are banned from receiving the money to pay for the basics necessary to survive.  Meanwhile, 46 million others, including college graduates and PhDs with far more resources, can receive food aid.

 This is a cultural legacy of America's Puritanical and hypocritical history. White men can get away with stealing millions, beating their wives and still have a relatively comfortable life.

Few of our fellow Americans are scholars, but basic reading comprehension is not too much to ask, Radical Anti-America "news casters" at Fox New - Self-Congratulation Over Benghazi Report Undermined By Report Itself. Conservatives are so desperate and deeply immoral they have to make up scandals when there are none.
The Craziest UnAmerican Republican Legislative Proposals Of 2012. I don't know why Republicans hate America and freedom. They're certainly free to leave if they hate living in a democratic republic so much.

Michigan Republicans Prove That Democracy is Not an Age Appropriate Toy For Conservatives

Michigan Republicans Prove That Democracy is Not an Age Appropriate Toy For Conservatives

Michigan is no longer a state. It is now “Michigan,” an autocratic czardom in the hands of Emperor Rick Snyder.

Formerly the Republican governor, Snyder has been enthroned by the GOP’s lame-duck, legislative supermajority to rule with an iron fist — democracy, rule-of-law, fairness, and the people be damned.

Ironically, voters had given Snyder and his cohort of right-wing corporate ideologues a spanking for this kind of nastiness in a November referendum. The GOP cabal in Lansing had conspired last year to usurp the local authority of city governments and allow Snyder to send in unelected, unaccountable autocrats to fire elected officials and seize control, but last month, Michigan voters overthrew this absurdity.

This month, however, Snyder and gang doubled down on their dumbfounding, anti-democratic zealotry. With no warning, no hearings, no public input, no floor debate, and no time for citizens to even know what was happening, the same legislative czarists rammed a union-busting bill into law. Even though he had publicly rejected such a proposal earlier this year as being “very divisive,” Emperor Snyder gleefully signed this measure.

Who’s behind this madness? Say hello to two infamous, anti-union, billionaire plutocrats: the Koch brothers. They had funneled as much as a million dollars into Snyder’s 2010 gubernatorial election, and three Michigan front groups funded by the billionaire brothers aggressively pushed the exact same anti-worker proposal that the Republican thugs just bullied into law.

Two things not long for this world are dogs that chase cars and politicians who deceive and cheat the people. Already, Michiganders are organizing a petition drive for another referendum to overturn the law and return the Czardom of Michiganistan back to democratic rule. Stay tuned.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

Anti-American Governor Rick Snyder and his freaky conservative cronies in the Michigan legislature have been taking their political lessons from communist Joseph Stalin, not Madison and Jefferson. Their first rule of government is to make the average American worker powerless.

Hear That Giant Mumbling Sound, That is The Sound of The Republican Budget For 2013

Hear That Giant Mumbling Sound, That is The Sound of The Republican Budget For 2013 or why do conservatives keep hating America and loving tax cuts for lazy plutocrats

In the ongoing battle of the budget, President Obama has done something very cruel. Declaring that this time he won’t negotiate with himself, he has refused to lay out a proposal reflecting what he thinks Republicans want. Instead, he has demanded that Republicans themselves say, explicitly, what they want. And guess what: They can’t or won’t do it.

No, really. While there has been a lot of bluster from the G.O.P. about how we should reduce the deficit with spending cuts, not tax increases, no leading figures on the Republican side have been able or willing to specify what, exactly, they want to cut.
And there’s a reason for this reticence. The fact is that Republican posturing on the deficit has always been a con game, a play on the innumeracy of voters and reporters. Now Mr. Obama has demanded that the G.O.P. put up or shut up — and the response is an aggrieved mumble.

Here’s where we are right now: As his opening bid in negotiations, Mr. Obama has proposed raising about $1.6 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade, with the majority coming from letting the high-end Bush tax cuts expire and the rest from measures to limit tax deductions. He would also cut spending by about $400 billion, through such measures as giving Medicare the ability to bargain for lower drug prices.

The point is that when you put Republicans on the spot and demand specifics about how they’re going to make good on their posturing about spending and deficits, they come up empty. There’s no there there.

Republicans have howled in outrage. Senator Orrin Hatch, delivering the G.O.P. reply to the president’s weekly address, denounced the offer as a case of “bait and switch,” bearing no relationship to what Mr. Obama ran on in the election. In fact, however, the offer is more or less the same as Mr. Obama’s original 2013 budget proposal and also closely tracks his campaign literature.

So what are Republicans offering as an alternative? They say they want to rely mainly on spending cuts instead. Which spending cuts? Ah, that’s a mystery. In fact, until late last week, as far as I can tell, no leading Republican had been willing to say anything specific at all about how spending should be cut.

The veil lifted a bit when Senator Mitch McConnell, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, finally mentioned a few things — raising the Medicare eligibility age, increasing Medicare premiums for high-income beneficiaries and changing the inflation adjustment for Social Security. But it’s not clear whether these represent an official negotiating position — and in any case, the arithmetic just doesn’t work.

Start with raising the Medicare age. This is, as I’ve argued in the past, a terrible policy idea. But even aside from that, it’s just not a big money saver, largely because 65- and 66-year-olds have much lower health costs than the average Medicare recipient. When the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the likely fiscal effects of a rise in the eligibility age, it found that it would save only $113 billion over the next decade and have little effect on the longer-run trajectory of Medicare costs.

Increasing premiums for the affluent would yield even less; a 2010 study by the budget office put the 10-year savings at only about $20 billion.

Changing the inflation adjustment for Social Security would save a bit more — by my estimate, about $185 billion over the next decade. But put it all together, and the things Mr. McConnell was talking about would amount to only a bit over $300 billion in budget savings — a fifth of what Mr. Obama proposes in revenue gains.
The point is that when you put Republicans on the spot and demand specifics about how they’re going to make good on their posturing about spending and deficits, they come up empty. There’s no there there.

And there never was. Republicans claim to be for much smaller government, but as a political matter they have always attacked government spending in the abstract, never coming clean with voters about the reality that big cuts in government spending can happen only if we sharply curtail very popular programs. In fact, less than a month ago the Romney/Ryan campaign was attacking Mr. Obama for, yes, cutting Medicare.

Now Republicans find themselves boxed in. With taxes scheduled to rise on Jan. 1 in the absence of an agreement, they can’t play their usual game of just saying no to tax increases and pretending that they have a deficit reduction plan. And the president, by refusing to help them out by proposing G.O.P.-friendly spending cuts, has deprived them of political cover. If Republicans really want to slash popular programs, they will have to propose those cuts themselves.

So while the fiscal cliff — still a bad name for the looming austerity bomb, but I guess we’re stuck with it — is a bad thing from an economic point of view, it has had at least one salutary political effect. For it has finally laid bare the con that has always been at the core of the G.O.P.’s political strategy.

Republicans want to cut Medicare and Social Security, the two big safety net programs, but they can only hint at their desire to see grandma and grandpa living under a bridge because the American public might catch on that these really are dangerous right-wing ideologues that hate everyone, but their corporate cronies.

What liberal media? CBS Analyst Frank Luntz Praised Conservative Anti-American Radical Paul Ryan(R-WI) While His Firm Received Money From His Campaign

McCain (R-AZ) and Graham(R-SC) Look Like Anti-American Fools in Unfounded Attacks on Susan Rice Instead of the Terrorists

McCain (R-AZ) and Graham(R-SC) Look Like Anti-American Fools in Unfounded Attacks on Susan Rice Instead of the Terrorists

The Republican gang-up on Susan Rice is a puzzler. Not only does it make no policy sense to blame the U.N. ambassador for any aspect of the killings at Benghazi, Libya, it makes no political sense either.

So far five GOP senators have objected to the idea of President Obama nominating Rice to be the next secretary of state. Two of those senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—are party leaders on foreign policy and frequent visitors to TV news studios. This is what makes the campaign particularly bizarre. Their case against her is not just unusually flimsy and transparently partisan; It also shines a glaring light on their own brazen hypocrisy (something most politicians do all they can to avoid).

First, the facts. The weekend after terrorists attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, killing four officials including the ambassador to Libya, Susan Rice went on the talk shows to deliver the administration’s position. The official line at the time was that the attack began as a spontaneous protest—similar to the one that sparked violent demonstrations outside U.S. embassies in Egypt and elsewhere—to an American-made anti-Muslim movie that had gone viral on the Internet. As it turned out, and as she explained in a meeting with senators on Tuesday, Rice was only reciting an unclassified “talking points” sheet prepared by the U.S. intelligence community. Acting CIA Director Michael Morrel, who joined Rice at the meeting, affirmed that those talking points were consistent with classified intelligence reports at the time. He also noted that, to the extent that Rice’s authorized comments differed from the top-secret version (for instance, they left out the finding that a jihadist group was involved in the attack), it was for security reasons.

Was this an intelligence foul-up, worthy of a congressional hearing or two? Possibly. Was there a scandalous cover-up? Doubtful. Whatever an investigation turns up, is all this a valid excuse for denying higher office to the ambassador who went on TV and recited the intelligence community’s talking points? Of course not. More than that, the five senators must know it’s absurd, so trumped-up are their rationales for thinking otherwise.

Here’s what McCain said on Fox News, after the meeting with Rice and Morrel:

We knew in hours of all the details when we got bin Laden, they’re making a movie out of it, and [yet] here we are, ten weeks later [i.e., after the Benghazi attack] finally our ambassador to the United Nations, who appeared on every national Sunday show, is now saying that she gave false information concerning how this tragedy happened.

I don’t know if this is, as Talking Points Memo Editor Josh Marshall put it, the “stupidest thing McCain ever said,” but it’s probably one of the three or four most desperate. First, we knew everything about the raid on Bin Laden’s compound so quickly because (this should be really obvious, senator) the commandos who did it, our own Navy SEALs, were there. They streamed it live. By contrast, the details of a firefight at a remote outpost in Libya are more likely than not to be shrouded in confusion and ambiguity, for a while. Second, giving “false information,” which is legal parlance for “lying,” is an over-the-top characterization of what Rice did. Third (and this really should shut the door on the whole business), when McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election, he forever disqualified himself from commenting on any nominee for any high office—and the media should treat any such comments accordingly.

Sen. Graham has made many foolish remarks in this sorry saga as well, but the jaw-dropper is his comparison, also made after Tuesday’s meeting, between Rice and John Bolton, who was President George W. Bush’s controversial (and ultimately rejected) nominee for U.N. ambassador. As Graham summarized the Bolton fight, “Democrats dug in their heels and said, ‘We’re not going to vote, we’re not going to consider this nomination until we get basic answers to our concerns.’ ” His point, presumably, was that he plans to do the same if Obama nominates Rice for secretary of state.

There are several differences between Bolton and Rice. For instance, Bolton had made highly critical statements about the legitimacy of the United Nations—and even of international law. Many Democrats and a few Republicans thought these were inappropriate sentiments for a U.N. ambassador. The Democrats held up Bolton’s nomination, pending the release of documents concerning precisely those sentiments—not some peripheral matter over which the nominee had no say or control.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.)—who seems to be auditioning for the “third amigo” now that Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) is retiring, leaving McCain and Graham bereft of a traveling companion—says she will try to block the confirmation of any nominee for secretary of state. “My view is we should hold on this until we get sufficient information” on Benghazi, she said. Well, at least she’s honest about her motives.

McCain and Graham both lied to America about WMD and manipulated the nation into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq. They have no credibility. They have never apologized or retracted their lies. Why they have not been tared and feathered and sent to live in exile is the only real mystery. There have been attacks on U.S. embassies during the Bush 43 and Reagan administrations, many of these same conservative hypocrites did not go looking for someone to scapegoat in those Republican administrations, Conservative Republican Freak Whitewashes Bush's History To Bash Obama Over Embassy Attack

Gun Enthusiast Kills 17-Year-Old for Playing Loud Music; Lawyer Says He Acted "Very Responsibly"

Extending Unemployment Insurance Would Create 300,000 Jobs Next Year