Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

International Women’s Day: Where Does the U.S. Rank in Gender Equality for Women Workers?

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Source: AFL CIO

Author: Liz Schuler

“In the United States, a woman makes only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. The majority of minimum wage and tipped workers are women. Nearly 40 million workers don’t have a single paid sick day. And here’s just one more incredible stat about women in our country: The U.S. has paid maternity and parental benefits similar to Swaziland, Lesotho and Papua New Guinea. That is to say, zilch.

Today, as we celebrate International Women’s Day, I can’t help but think of inequality and all the work we have to do for women workers. Yes, we’ve made strides and we should celebrate those, but when it comes to basic necessities for women to make a living for themselves and their families, we are falling short. The United States ranks 23rd globally in gender equality. We’re also ranked 17th among 22 industrialized countries in terms of labor force participation for women (we were sixth in the ’90s.) And we’re supposed to be a nation that leads on fairness and opportunity.

Considering women are the sole or primary breadwinners in 40% of America’s families, this should concern everyone. Pay and access to benefits are even more unequal for women of color, who make up a disproportionate share of low-wage workers.

Despite the challenges we face, we do know there are solutions: raising wages, improving working standards and building worker power through collective action. In the United States, 6.5 million women have a voice on the job through union membership. Women in unions are more likely to have access to health care, pensions and paid sick and family leave, and our goal is for every worker to have these basic benefits.

As the labor movement, we see women’s equality as a shared struggle, and one that is core to our larger vision of social and economic justice. Simply put, the labor movement is a movement of and for women.

This is why on International Women’s Day, the AFL-CIO stands with women across the globe unto stand up, join together and say the status quo is acceptable. Under the status quo, four organizers in Bangladesh—two men and two women—were brutally beaten just last week for daring to organize unions in garment factories where women represent more than 80% of the workers; under the status quo, workers were gunned down in Cambodia for fighting for a living wage; and under the status quo, one-third of new mothers in the United States take no maternity leave because they can’t afford it. Our common problems require a framework for collective solutions across borders, whether we live in Cambodia, Bangladesh or the United States. Ensuring equal pay, safe workplaces, health care, paid sick and family leave, living wages is a struggle we share with women around the world.

Women workers know that coming together collectively improves their workplaces and communities. Here are some great examples from our partner unions around the world of organizing in their workplaces and building power for women workers.

During the United Nations 58th Commission on the Status of Women the AFL-CIO, the International Trade Union Confederation and other women’s rights and labor groups will convene to support a global agenda to address gender equality and ensure labor laws protect all kinds of workers, in the formal and informal economies. We know we must strengthen a broad array of labor rights—including the right to decent work—in sustainable development frameworks currently being negotiated by the international community. We’ll also call on the International Labor Organization to move forward on an agreement (an international convention) to ensure women are safe from workplace violence.

When we work together, we are stronger and we can make gender equality a reality for women across the globe.”

If you’re interested in women’s workplace issues and gender equality, don’t forget to check out my biweekly column at MomsRising and leave your comments. I’d love to hear from you. (Author)

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Global-Action/International-Women-s-Day-Where-Does-the-U.S.-Rank-in-Gender-Equality-for-Women-Workers

Ukraine Crisis — What You Need to Know

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Source: the New Republic

Author:

1 Crimea, Ukraine or Crimea, Russia?

Putin and Obama had what sounds like a tense and unproductive phone conversation Thursday evening. Compare the Kremlin’s and White House’s statements on the exchange.

Both houses of the Russian parliament will support the annexation of Crimea and the decision “will be legitimate,” Federation Council Chair Valentina Matviyenko said Friday. On Thursday, the Supreme Council of Crimea unanimously voted to join Russia and moved up the date of the schedule referendum on Russian annexation up to March 16. The Crimean capital city of Sevastopol announced it would also participate in the scheduled referendum. Russian lawmakers are already working on making annexation go as smoothly as possible.

Ukrainian Interim President Oleksander Turchynov issued a statement declaring the illegitimacy of the referendum vote. Turchynov said the Crimean Supreme Council is being “totally controlled by servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces” and explained that the vote violates the constitution of Ukraine. “This will be a farce, this will be falsity and this will be a crime against the state organized by servicemen of the Russian Federation,” Turchynov said.

President Obama said yesterday that the referendum vote could not take place without the “legitimate” Ukrainian government. “In 2014, we are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders,” Obama said. The E.U., Baltics, and Scandinavian countries also do not recognize the referendum.

Kiev announced its terms for negotiations with Moscow regarding Crimea on Friday. Interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk said Ukraine will negotiate with the Kremlin if Russia first removes its occupying troops, honors previous agreements with Ukraine, and stops supporting separatists, the Kyiv Post reports. “We are ready to build relations with Russia,” the prime minister said. “But Ukraine will never be a subordinate or branch of Russia,” said Yatseniuk. 

UN Secretary General Ivan Simonovic will visit Ukraine, just two days after UN peace envoy Robert Serry was forced out of Crimea.

2 On The Ground, Conflict Continues

There are now 30,000 Russian troops in Crimea according to the Ukrainian border service. RIA Novosti reports that Russia has begun large-scale air defense drills at a base 280 miles from the Ukrainian border. Dmitry Timchuk, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, explained the conditions on the ground in a Facebook post: “The situation is not getting better…From multiple sources we received information about the expected night assaults of our military units…tension is high.” He also wrote that Russian riot police had entered Crimea. In Kerch, where Russia will soon build a bridge between Russia and Crimea, Ukrainian Marines have refused to surrender.

Pro-Ukraine demonstrations in Kharkov continued with protesters holding signs reading “Kharkov loves Crimea” and “Today is the seventh day of Russian occupation.”

3 What Does This Mean for The Economy?

Gazprom says it might shut off gas pipelines through Ukraine. “Either Ukraine repays its debt and pays for current deliveries or the risk of returning to the situation at the beginning of 2009 will appear,” Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said, according to the Kyiv Post. Gazprom cut oil deliveries to Ukraine in 2006 and 2009 after Ukraine failed to repay debt to the company, and Europe. Ukraine now owes Gazprom almost $2 billion.

Danny Vinik explains what the U.S.’s sanctions will mean for Russia and why European sanctions are a much bigger threat.

The E.U. will send $15 billion in aid to Ukraine and continues to withhold sanctions. There will also be a political element to Ukraine’s agreement with the E.U., which is still being negotiated. The E.U Ambassador to Russia said it is “waiting for Moscow to start negotiations with Ukraine,” Lenta.ru reports. If that does not happen in the next few days, the E.U. will consider imposing travel bans and freezing the assets of certain individuals. In the meantime, the E.U. halted talks with Russia over visas and trade. 

On Thursday, the House approved a $1 billion loan to the interim Ukrainian government. Republicans are threatening Ukrainian financial solvency and American credibility by refusing reforms to the IMF, Vinik explains. “Republicans are tripping over themselves to propose ideas to hit Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. But at the same time, they are limiting Ukraine’s ability to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund.” That will make it much harder for Ukraine to pay back $16 billion of national debt. Think Progress explains how debt is driving the crisis.

Ukrainians are choosing to boycott Russian commercial goods.

Crimea will suffer from the crisis’s impact on its $5 billion tourism industry, the Kyiv Post reports.

4 Media Wars

Crimea has stopped broadcasting the Ukrainian TV channel “Inter” and replaced it with Russian national channel NTV, Ukrayinska Pravda reports.

Citing concerns that the “media war” over public opinion of Russia’s invasion of Crimea is threatening national security, the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council has asked for a review of the licensing rights of Russian broadcasters in Ukraine. Ukraine’s largest internet and television provider already suspended three major Russian news channels from broadcasting in the country because they are “aggressive propaganda,” Echo Moscow reports.

5 Reading The American Press

“Why does Obama believe that Putin is not willing to endure economic punishments for his military provocations?” Leon Wieseltier asks in The New Republic. “Putin is acting on the basis of a belief system.”

Forbes is tied up in a corruption scandal linked to fugitive Ukrainian politician Sergey Kurchenko. Buzzfeed’s Max Seddon has the story.

Thomas de Waal argues that one novel explains the Crimean situation in Politico Magazine.

The New York Times reports on the relative shortage of American Russia experts: “There is a belief that a dearth of talent in the field and ineffectual management from the White House have combined to create an unsophisticated and cartoonish view of a former superpower, and potential threat, that refuses to be relegated to the ash heap of history.”

6 Sochi’s Paralympic Games Begin

The XI Paralympic games in Sochi are now underway. Putin toured the Olympic Village yesterday, and the Ukrainian delegation said it was prepared to pull out if the situation escalates.

Emphasis Mine

 

Minimum wage hike would cut food stamp costs beyond Republicans’ dreams

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Minimum wage hike would cut food stamp costs beyond Republicans’ dreams

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Cashier in a store.
Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cut food stamp spending by $4.6 billion a year, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress:

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Source: DailyKos Labor

Author: Laura Clawson

“According to the finding in this report a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduces SNAP enrollment by between 2.4 percent and 3.2 percent and reduces program expenditures by an estimated 1.9 percent. Taking into account each state’s 2014 minimum wage level, we apply these results to the legislative proposal put forward by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. Our results imply that the effects of the Harkin-Miller proposal on wage increases would reduce SNAP enrollments by between 6.5 percent and 9.2 percent (3.3 million to 3.8 million persons). The total anticipated annual decrease in program expenditures is nearly $4.6 billion, or about 6 percent of current SNAP program expenditures.

Harkin-Miller proposes to index minimum wage levels in subsequent years to the consumer price index, or CPI. The minimum wage would then increase at the same rate as SNAP benefit and eligibility levels, which are also indexed to the CPI. Consequently, the savings over 10 years in 2014 dollars would be 10 times the one-year savings, for a total of approximately $46 billion.

That $46 billion over 10 years is more than the $40 billion House Republicans wanted to cut, only this reduction could be achieved by raising people’s wages, not by simply taking away the nutrition assistance they need to survive. Naturally, Republicans are more opposed to requiring businesses to pay wages that keep working people off of food stamps than they are in favor of reducing the expenditures. Because their crusade is much less about saving the government money than it is about redistributing money upward to the already rich.”

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/05/1282352/-Minimum-wage-hike-would-cut-food-stamp-costs-beyond-Republicans-dreams?detail=email

When You Hear Conservatives Talking About Religious Liberty, Watch Out

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Source: Alternet

Author: Bob Shryock

“At the dawn of the Tea Party revolution, many conservatives were optimistic. The prevailing attitude among reporters and insiders alike was that the Republican Party had shed its misguided moralism and embraced hard-nosed economic realism as its core platform. Political author Dick Morris wrote, “No longer do evangelical or social issues dominate the Republican ground troops….There is still a litmus test for admission to the Republican Party. But no longer is it dominated by abortion, guns and gays. Now, keeping the economy free of government regulation, reducing taxation, and curbing spending are the chemicals that turn the paper pink.”

New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, author of Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, agreed. “For decades, faith and family have been at the center of the conservative movement. But as the Tea Party infuses conservatism with new energy, its leaders deliberately avoid discussion of issues like gay marriage or abortion.”

Yet despite its focus on libertarianism, this new Republican bloc has spent the last three years fighting with unprecedented aggressiveness on the very social issues it was supposedly unconcerned with. Between 2011 and 2013, Republicans enacted 205 anti-abortion laws, more than they had in the prior 10 years combined (189). The Kansas house passed a bill that would give any individual, even essential government employees and hospital workers, the right to deny service to gay people. Though the bill did not pass the senate, similar bills are being introduced in at least nine other states, according to Mother Jones.

So what had changed? More than anything, it was the way that opposition to abortion and gay rights was justified: in the words of BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins, “in terms of protecting religious freedom instead of enforcing ‘family values.’” This change made Republicans appear more moderate, but actually signaled a rightward shift. Conservative ideas of religious liberty posited that the government’s eventual goal was the oppression of conservative Christians, and compromise on any religious liberty issues—which encompassed abortion, gay rights, and the Affordable Care Act—would be a violation of Christian faith. The notion of religious liberty thus gave small-government politics a cosmic imperative.

The Rhetoric of Religious Liberty

In the last few years, Republicans have become more and more focused on not “paying for abortions.” In February, Jeff Jimerson, one of the chief petitioners for a ballot measure in Oregon that would outlaw using state funds to pay for an abortion, summarized this view in the New York Times. Jimerson said, “We don’t want to make this a pro-life thing. This is a pro-taxpayer thing. There are a lot of libertarians in Oregon, people who don’t really care what you do, just don’t make me pay for it.”

Jimerson’s views happen to be in line with the official 2012 GOP platform, which opposed “using public revenues to promote or perform abortions or fund organizations which perform or advocate it” and said the party would not “fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage.”

On the surface, this position may seem a softer stance, perhaps one that could offer a place for abortion rights with a conscience exemption. This makes it all the more strange that the last three years have seen renewed anti-abortion efforts at the state level. Stranger still, the laws passed during the last three years have done very little to block the government from funding abortions: the four most popular restrictions in 2013 were laws that limited insurance coverage, banned abortion pills, instituted 20-week bans, and restricted the function of abortion providers.

How did opposing paying for abortions lead to the largest anti-abortion rights push in memory? According to New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters, “by framing the abortion debate in terms of fiscal conservatism, [Republicans] can make a connection to the issue they believe will ultimately decide who controls Congress next year — the Affordable Care Act.”

Eric C. Miller, professor of communication ctudies at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, noted in an analysis of a recent Bobby Jindal speech that, “When he takes up the claim that ‘the freedom to exercise your religion in the way you run your business’ is ‘under assault,’ for instance, you can bet that he’s talking about abortion. You can also bet that a Hobby Lobby anecdote is about to drop. Here the freedom to run a business according to conscience routinely stands in for the less marketable freedom-to-not-provide-comprehensive-health-insurance-for-female-employees.”

Besides worrying that the ACA’s contraception mandate would force religious employers to fund birth control, conservatives also expressed concerns that the ACA would create a “ financial windfall” for Planned Parenthood, and that it would “ entangle taxpayer funds in abortion coverage.”

All of these concerns can be encompassed by objections to the state funding abortion. Because of this, legislation that attempts to prevent government funding of abortion is often also anti-Obamacare legislation. As Jimerson’s petition website claims, “This initiative would prohibit public funds in Oregon from being used to pay for…government-subsidized health insurance plans created by ObamaCare.”

Still, why all the anti-abortion laws that seem to have no connection to the ACA? In fact, the fight against the ACA has simply caused conservatives to connect liberty with anti-abortion laws more generally, not just ones that directly deal with “paying for abortions.”

The evangelical Christian minister David Barton said that people who are “pro-abortion” are really “pro-socialism.” This is, “they’re pro bigger government, less individual rights and responsibilities.” In Barton’s mind, pro-choice ideas are always connected to big government liberalism, and libertarianism is thus pro-life. In this environment, fighting government, fighting the ACA, and fighting abortion have been so connected that a blow against abortion rights is a blow against the ACA, and also the (imagined) repressive state, even when the specifics of the law have everything to do with restricting individual freedom and nothing to do with the ACA at all.

Religious Liberty Justifies New Anti-Gay Movement

In 2013, a new brand of “religious liberty” stories circulated around right-wing news outlets. Townhall.com told readers about an “ Air Force Officer Forced to Remove Bible From Desk,” a Fox News article titled “Soldier Who Read Conservative Books Now Faces Charges” gained 12,000 likes, and “Investigation: Bakery Forced to Make Lesbian Wedding Cake” made headlines at WorldNetDaily. “ Judge Orders Wedding Cake Baker to Serve Gay Couples,” wrote the Drudge Report in December. According to Todd Starnes, a Fox News journalist who popularized many of these stories, “Christians are trading places with homosexuals,” that is, events like the repeal of don’t ask/don’t tell had flipped the narrative of oppression and oppressor.

Accoroding to Starnes, the government was now in the process of staging a war on Christianity. Ken Klukowski, a professor at Liberty University, at the time the director of the Family Research Council’s (FRC) Center for Religious Liberty, accused President Obama of “Chicago-style thuggery” toward Christians in an interview with the Christian Post last October. Retired Lt. General and Family Research Council vice-president William Boykin accused Obama of, in the words of a Christian Post reporter, supporting a “large and secretive Marxist movement seeking to remove all dependence on God and references to the deity from civil society.”

The FRC, an organization focused narrowly on abortion and same-sex marriage, could thus say without irony, “Our message is simple but enormously important: Everything we care about hinges on religious liberty.” Republican advocacy groups weren’t the only ones obsessed with the idea: every major Republican presidential candidate in 2012 claimed religious freedom was under attack.

The rhetorical transformation did not go unnoticed. Jay Michaelson of Political Research Associates wrote in a report titled “Redefining Religious Liberty” that “Religious conservatives have succeeded in reframing the debate, inverting the victim-oppressor dynamic, and broadening support for their agenda” and that the religious liberty argument represented a “key front in the broader culture war designed to fight the same social battles on new-sounding terms.”

It may have sounded nicer, but the practical implication of religious freedom rhetoric was a more virulent homophobic agenda. Michaelson wrote that this new discourse should not be understood “as an attempt to create not religious exemptions” but rather “ the evisceration of civil right protections themselves. If any individual or business can refuse to recognize a person’s civil rights on the pretext of religious belief, those rights are functionally meaningless.”

Religious Liberty Rhetoric Leads to Government Shutdown

On the eve of the government shutdown, Representative Michelle Bachmann told a reporter from the Washington Examiner, “This is historic, and it’s a historic shift that’s about to happen, and if we’re going to fight, we need to fight now.”

Less than a month prior, Bachmann stated, on the radio show of Olive Tree Ministries’ Jan Markell that Obama’s actions as President signaled the rapture: “Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, his day is at hand…. When we see up is down and right is called wrong…these days would be as the days of Noah.”

Bachmann wasn’t the only one to view herself as what the Daily Beast’s Joe McLean called a “ modern prophet of the apocalypse.” Four days later, Ted Cruz said at the FRC’s Values Voters Summit that America was “a couple of years” away from the “cliff of oblivion.”

Apocalyptic ideas have been part of America since its founding, and among conservative Christians, they’re experiencing something of a renaissance. According to author Chip Berlet, “Since the early 1990s, a sector of the political right in the United States has embraced a specific set of conspiracy theories revolving around government plans to impose tyranny.”

In the ’90s, this synthesis of evangelical Christianity and anti-government paranoia was restricted to the margins: militias, homeschoolers and scattered megachurch pastors. But they gained a wider audience through media: radio shows, websites and books, most notably, the apocalyptic thriller series Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye. In Left Behind, satanic forces and government forces literally mix—the antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia, ascends to power by becoming president of the United Nations, and uses that role to bring the world under his control, all with the aid of the (mostly liberal) folks who hadn’t been raptured. Left Behind sold 63 million copies. Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell said Left Behind had a greater “impact on Christianity” than “any book in modern times, outside the Bible.”

Today’s conservatives may not have quite so dramatic a vision of the apocalypse, but Tea Partiers like Bachmann and Cruz seem to have internalized the idea that, to borrow a phrase from progressive Christian blogger Fred Clark, “the abolition of all religion…is exactly what [liberals] are hoping for.” They’ve also made use of the conservative infrastructure LaHaye helped to construct: a group he founded, the Council for National Policy, called the “most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of” by ABC, designed and built the government shutdown.

According to the Nation’s Lee Fang, the CNP’s ad-hoc coalition, the Conservative Action Project, “initially floated the idea of attaching funding for Obamacare to the continuing resolution, and followed up with grassroots organizing, paid advertisements and a series of events designed to boost the message of senators like Ted Cruz.” The justification for these actions was, in the words of the Conservative Action Project, the Affordable Care Act’s “ unprecedented  attack on life and religious liberty.”

For conservatives, religious liberty was built on an anti-government, apocalyptic attitude, which posited what Eric C. Miller calls an “overarching conspiracy.” Conservative religious liberty claims rely on the idea that people in power really do desire the end of, or at least dramatic restrictions on, conservative Christianity.

Jay Michaelson wrote, “One recurring theme in the right-wing literature is the sense of a ‘coming storm’…Like the red menace, the secularist danger is imminently looming. The metaphors are appropriately biblical: soon there will be a flood of litigation, a firestorm of controversy. Indeed, these apocalyptic pronouncements resonate closely with…Christian Reconstructionism/pre-millennialism specifically. The ‘coming storm’ and the End Times are not distant from one another.”

Rob Shryock is a freelance journalist covering topics such as evangelical Christian culture, religion in the military and Islamophobia. He frequently writes for Religion Dispatches.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/when-you-hear-conservatives-talking-about-religious-liberty-watch-out?akid=11561.123424.lwfyaK&rd=1&src=newsletter965135&t=5

Dwindling Christian Right Turns Into Cornered Animal, Lashes Out at Civil Rights and Democracy

Like a cornered animal, which turns instinctively to confront pursuing predators, the Christian Right, knowing it represents the views of an ever shrinking number of Americans, is engaged in an existential fight to the death. Veto or no veto, Arizona’s anti-gay bill is just another of its many efforts to transform America’s secular democracy into a tyrannical theocracy.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: CJ Werleman

Like a cornered animal, which turns instinctively to confront pursuing predators, the Christian Right, knowing it represents the views of an ever shrinking number of Americans, is engaged in an existential fight to the death. Veto or no veto, Arizona’s anti-gay bill is just another of its many efforts to transform America’s secular democracy into a tyrannical theocracy.

The Christian Right’s dirty little secret is they are acutely aware that changing demographics are running against them. While they may believe the earth is a mere few thousand years old, they’re not complete idiots. They can read polls, and the data tells them this: millennials are abandoning religious belief. According to a recent Pew survey, one in four Americans born after 1981 hold no religious belief, which is nearly double the national rate of atheism. Other studies confirm this trend, including a recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute showing more than half of non-religious Millennials have abandoned their childhood faith.

With this in mind, the nation’s radical religious fundamentalists see an ever-shrinking window to impose their Bronze Age worldview on the gay, atheist, liberal, immigrant, heathen, and science book-reading masses. The American Taliban is as deeply troubled by the thoughts of a gay man “sneaking a peak” of a heterosexual man in an NFL locker room as much as they’re freaked out over seeing Cam and Mitchell, the gay couple on “Modern Family,” adopt an Asian child. For the intellectual infants of the American species, progressive culture is nothing more than a 24/7 infomercial for gay sex and abortion. That frightens our unfriendly theocrats because biblical fundamentalists are more concerned with the goings on in the bedrooms of others than they are within the guilt-ridden, sexless confines of their own.

Salon columnist Brian Beutler writes that measures like Arizona’s SB1062 bill have emerged in a number of states out of “a wellspring of conservative panic about the country’s abrupt legal and cultural evolution into a society that’s broadly tolerant of gay people.” He adds, “Rather than deny the shift, or stop at trying to reverse it in legislatures, the courts and at ballot boxes, conservatives are instead attempting to erect a legal architecture that will wall them off from the growing portion of American society that supports equal rights for gay people.”

These “religious freedom” bills did not arrive here overnight; they are three decades in the making. Prior to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, no serious presidential candidate ever claimed to have been “born again,” and the emphasis of faith for a politician seeking high office was as rare then as a candidate declaring his atheism is today. When Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson established the Christian Right (aka the Moral Majority) in 1979, no serious political commentator believed they could play a significant role in electoral politics. The screenwriter Norman Lear joked, “The Moral Majority is neither the moral point of view, nor the majority.”

Long story short, the Christian Right swept Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980. The Sarasota Journal wrote as much on Feb 9, 1981: “The merging of the political right with the religious right has taken the country by surprise.” It’s now 2014, and the most intellectually and morally stunted segment of American society continues to take this nation by surprise.

The Christian Right has not only moved from the fringes to become the main strain of the Republican Party; it is the Republican Party. These radicals continually surprise us for the fact casual political observers mistakenly believe they represent the far-right fringe. You cannot sugarcoat the fact that a majority of Republicans in Arizona’s House, and also a majority of Republicans in Arizona’s Senate voted for this anti-gay law. Likewise a majority of Republicans in Kansas’ House voted for a similar bill. They voted for it because they want the freedom to discriminate against individuals they claim the Bible finds abhorrent.

Worryingly, this act is a small part in a big pantomime to transform America into a theocratic nirvana—one that is absent gays, Muslims, immigrants, atheists, and science books. To achieve this, the instrument of choice is nullification. It is nullification of the federal government that weds theocrats together with libertarians and the neo-confederate movement. Since 2010, state legislatures have put forward nearly 200 bills challenging federal laws its sponsors deem unconstitutional. Typically, laws the nullifiers believe challenge “religious liberty,” the Affordable Care Act, and gun control.

In an editorial for Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall observes that since the election of Obama and the rise of the Tea Party, “there’s been more and more reaching back to the discredited ideas of nullification, interposition and even, at the truly fringe extreme, secession. They are each efforts to preserve power for disempowered minorities after they’ve lost battles in the standard majoritarian system. More simply, they’re workarounds to get out of the consequences of losing political fights. And by definition they are rearguard actions. American history and constitutional jurisprudence has consistently ruled against them.”

Marshall is right in part. But the point he misses is that elections are no longer determined by majority view, but rather by the availability of an endless pipeline of campaign cash, and on that social conservatives are no longer playing second fiddle to establishment Republicans. Thanks to Internet fundraising and changes to campaign finance laws, it’s now a case of the tail wagging the dog. According to the Federal Electoral Commission, Tea Party and social conservative groups raised nearly three times as much as GOP establishment groups in 2013, which is how you end up with a majority of Republicans in both houses of the Arizona congress voting for SB1062 in 2014.

Salon’s Beutler writes, “The bad news is that this phenomenon isn’t limited to homophobia, and doesn’t always masquerade as an exercise of religious freedom. As America grows more liberal, conservatives are retreating into a variety of interlinking, but isolated subcultures and, when necessary, making or manipulating law to insulate themselves from contact with the masses.”

The Christian Right’s ideology drives virtually all social policy debate within the Republican Party, whether it’s immigration, women’s reproductive rights, the death penalty, or same-sex marriage.

Chris Hedges says the Christian Right’s ideology calls for the “eradication of social ‘deviants,’ beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these ‘deviants’ are removed, other ‘deviants,’ including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as ‘nominal Christians’—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The ‘deviant’ government bureaucrats, the ‘deviant’ media, the ‘deviant’ schools and the ‘deviant’ churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these ‘deviants’ will be annulled. ‘Christian values’ and ‘family values’ will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.”While the Christian Right is becoming the dwindling minority, it remains an existential threat to civil rights, secularism and our democratic values. It’s a threat fueled by a seemingly unlimited supply of campaign finance, and a rabid base that believes it’s fighting for its place in a 21st-century world it can’t reconcile against an ancient book that says gays are an abomination. You know, like shellfish.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/why-christian-right-behaving-cornered-animal-lashing-out-civil-rights-and-our?akid=11552.123424.mbaeLn&rd=1&src=newsletter964051&t=8

Republicans Are Officially Out Of Obamacare Attacks

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Source: National memo

Author: @LOLGOP

It may take a few more elections for Republicans to figure this out, but health care just isn’t a good issue for them.

You can understand why they’re confused.

In 2010, their histrionic “OMG! Death panels!” Obamacare attacks were a small part of a massive landslide victory that owed more to the economy cratering than anything else. And the most successful tactic was going after Democrats for “cutting” Medicare by reducing overpayments in the Medicare Advantage program, reversing a strategy that the left employed successfully for decades.

Four years later, Republicans have two huge problems: They can’t say how they’d replace Obamacare, but they have said how they would ruin Medicare.

After taking the House in 2011, Republicans elected with a mandate to protect Medicare passed a budget from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) that would gut the program and pass massive costs on to seniors by turning the program into mostly privatized “voucher” system. In 2013, Ryan proposed similar cuts that would remake America’s health care system for seniors, along with the same reforms of Medicare Advantage that they ran against in 2010, in an effort to endorse a plan that would balance the budget in 10 years.

So what are Republicans doing in 2014, as they’re supposed to be laser-focused on what a disaster Obamacare is?

A new memo from House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) says the GOP will focus on cuts to Medicare Advantage.

The only problem?

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.nationalmemo.com/republicans-officially-obamacare-attacks/

John Elway tells Fox News Host: ‘I Don’t Believe in Safety Nets’ So I Support the GOP

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Source: Alternet

Denver Broncos executive vice president of football operations John Elway revealed on Sunday that he was a Republican because he doesn’t “believe in safety nets” — even though he admitted they were necessary.

In a interview on Fox News prior to Super Bowl XLVIII, host Chris Wallace pointed out that Elway was a “big Republican” who had contributed “a lot of money” to former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.

“Why do you support the GOP?” Wallace wondered.

“Well, it goes to what my beliefs are,” Elway explained. “I believe that we’re given the opportunity to succeed or not succeed.”

“I don’t believe in safety nets,” he continued. “Obviously, we’ve got to have some kind of safety nets. But I think my philosophy is when given the opportunity to go take advantage of that, I think that’s when you get the best out of people.”

The football Hall of Famer noted that he was “middle right” and his business experience taught him that “you got to give a little to get something.”

“So, I would like to see us to be able to free up Congress a little bit and say, okay, we need to give up a little bit to give a little bit,” Elway opined. “If we were able to do that and we acted more like businessmen in that situation, I believe we would get a lot more done.”

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/john-elway-fox-i-dont-believe-safety-nets-so-i-support-gop?akid=11471.123424.kuocwk&rd=1&src=newsletter954243&t=15

Ho-ray Ho-ray for the ACA!

The defeated Republican anti-Obamacare forces are in full retreat after ACA enrollment in healthcare plans surged past 3 million.

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Source: Politicsusa

Author: Jason Easley

The defeated Republican anti-Obamacare forces are in full retreat after ACA enrollment in healthcare plans surged past 3 million.

In a blog post, HHS reported that,

Since the beginning of open enrollment, millions of Americans are gaining access to health coverage-many for the very first time—thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The most recent data indicates that approximately 3.0 million people have now enrolled in a private health insurance plan through the Federal and State-based Marketplaces since October 1.

….

Additionally, between October and December over 6.3 million individuals were determined eligible to enroll in Medicaid or CHIP through state agencies and through state-based Marketplaces. These numbers include both Medicaid and CHIP new eligibility determinations in states that expanded coverage, determinations made on prior law, and in some states, Medicaid renewals and groups not affected by the health care law. This does not include eligibility determinations made through HealthCare.gov.

800,000 people have signed up in the few weeks between late December and January 15. This surge in enrollment means that the administration is only 300,000 behind their original target of 3.3 million enrollees. Once the full numbers for January are released, it is expected that the ACA will not only be on target, but may be ahead of schedule.

The mainstream media isn’t reporting this, but the ACA is turning into a huge victory for President Obama.

Before leaving on their current vacation, Republicans signaled their defeat by voting to fund the healthcare law for 2014. Now Republicans like John Boehner and John McCain are completely dropping the repeal and only repeal ruse, and suggesting that the GOP needs to come up with its own healthcare alternative.

It’s too late for alternative plans. The ACA is the law of the land. Millions of people have signed up. This isn’t a policy discussion anymore. Republicans can’t escape the fact that any alternative that they suggest will involve taking health insurance away from millions of people.

The time for Republicans to suggest policy alternatives was in 2009 and 2010, but they chose to demonize the ACA instead of engaging in a serious discussion about healthcare. They put all of their eggs in the ACA failure basket, and now that the program is a success, they suddenly want to talk about healthcare.

The ACA was the original Republican healthcare plan. Anything that they come up with now will be smoke and mirrors that won’t cover the uninsured.

Republicans are being proven wrong every single day on the ACA. The GOP is still going to try to sucker their base with talk of repeal during the 2014 election campaign, but they are in full retreat. There will be no repeal. It is unlikely the law will ever be replaced. The ACA is here to stay.

Republicans Are In Total Retreat As Obamacare Enrollment Skyrockets Past 3 Million was written by Jason Easley for PoliticusUSA.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.politicususa.com/2014/01/25/republicans-total-retreat-obamacare-enrollment-skyrockets-3-million.html

5 Right-Wing Myths About Raising the Minimum Wage, Debunked

chasdarwin2 Comments

Source: AlterNet

Author: Dave Johnson

“If the 1968 federal minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it would be $10.75 today. But it is only $7.25, an amount so low that many full-time workers need government assistance such as food stamps, Medicare, etc., just to get by.

There is a bill before Congress and endorsed by President Obama that will raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hours and “index” it to inflation in the future. That means the wage will increase as inflation increases so it never falls behind again. Meanwhile there are reports that President Obama is considering using executive action to raise the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors.

Corporations like Walmart and McDonalds like the current situation of really low wages at the bottom because it puts more into the pockets of those at the top. So the corporate/conservative machine is grinding out propaganda against raising the minimum wage. Here is a look at six of the most common propaganda points they’re trying to trick us with.

1. Myth: Only teenagers make the minimum wage. 

A common conservative myth, repeatedendlessly, is that only teenagers earn the minimum wage; that it’s a “starter wage” and people quickly move up to a better wage as they gain experience.

There may once have been a time when most people who earned the minimum were teenagers in starter jobs. But times and the structure of our economy have changed for the worse. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “87.9 percent of those affected nationally by increasing the federal minimum wage to $9.80 are 20 years of age and older. The share of those affected who are 20 or older varies by state, from a low of 77.1 percent in Massachusetts to a high of 92.4 percent in Florida (and 93.9 percent in the District of Columbia).” Also, “more than a third (35.8 percent) are married, and over a quarter (28.0 percent) are parents.”

Notably, 49% of people making the minimum wage are adult women.

2. Myth: A minimum wage is “government interference” that just distorts the market. If there are lots of people looking for work, then wages should fall.

The problem with this myth is that we live in a consumer economy and a consumer economy does better when more people and businesses have more money to spend. In other words, the economy rises and falls based on how much demand there is for the goods and service that our companies provide.

When the economy slows and people are laid off this increases the supply of people looking for jobs which causes wages to fall. As wages fall, demand falls because people have less to spend and the economy slows even more. So even more people get laid off, putting even more downward pressure on wages. This can become a death spiral for an economy.

This is why government action is so important. A minimum wage provides a floor to how low wages can fall. Every business watches out for itself and lowers wages when they can. But when every business is lowering wages it hurts every business. So while all businesses are engaged in the task of watching out for themselves government has to be there to watch the big picture and step in when necessary.

A second problem with this short-term market thinking is that it gives businesses a financial incentive to use their influence to push policies that keep unemployment high, thus forcing down wages. Senate Republicans filibustered the Bring Jobs Home act and the American Jobs Act as just two of more than 400 filibusters in recent years, helping to keep unemployment high. Companies that are fighting what they call “government interference” so they can continue to pay low wages are cutting their own throats because they are really causing their own customers to have less to spend.

3. Myth: Raising the minimum wage costs jobs. 

This is one place where conservative ideology is clearly refuted by looking at what actually happens. When you have states next to each other, and one raises the minimum wage while the other does not, you can compare the results.

It might seem obvious to people that raising wages will cause companies to hire fewer people. But not when you think it through. Well-run companies employ the right number of people to handle the demand for the goods or services they produce. They don’t just have extra people sitting around reading the newspaper, who they will lay off if they have to pay a couple dollars more an hour.

Picture a store with only one cashier and 20 people in line. Pretty soon people get impatient and leave. A sensible manager is going to put the right number of cashiers at the checkout lanes to handle the number of customers in the store.

In Australia the minimum wage is $16.68 and the unemployment rate is 5.8%. In the U.S. the minimum wage is $7.25 and unemployment is down to 6.7%, but is falling largely due to people leaving the labor force because they just can’t find work. This is not to say that the unemployment rates in Australia and the U.S. are different because of the difference in the minimum wage, but it does show that the high Australian minimum wage has hardly crashed Australia’s economy.

4. Myth: Raising the minimum wage hurts blacks, Latinos, fill in the blank.

Many conservatives play a propaganda trick by claiming that raising the minimum wage hurts the very people liberals want to help. Fox News’ Art Laffer called the minimum wage the “Black Teenage Unemployment Act.” At far-right Townhall, Walter E. Williams claimed that “increases in the minimum wage at both the state and federal level are partially to blame for the crisis in employment for minority young adults.”

This claim uses a core misconception as its underpinnings, that increasing the minimum wage costs jobs. Since (fill in the blank) group faces high unemployment, raising the minimum wage shows you are a hypocrite because all you are doing is costing (fill in the blank) jobs. But this is as false as saying that raising the minimum wage takes away jobs.

5. Myth: Raising the minimum wage hurts small businesses.

Conservatives like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie say that raising the minimum wage would hurt small business owners. The truth is that most minimum-wage workers do not work for small businesses. According to Think Progress: “The majority (66 percent) of low‐wage workers are not employed by small businesses, but rather by large corporations with over 100 employees.” Also “The three largest employers of minimum wage workers [are], Walmart, Yum! Brands (Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC), and McDonald’s.”

Last February, BusinessWeek debunked the “hurts small business” claim, writing, “a growing number of small business advocates support a hike.”

“That includes dozens of business groups and networks composed primarily of small business owners such as the Main Street Alliance, the National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association, and the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. ‘Our women [business owners] who pay a living wage have an advantage over their larger counterparts who don’t,’ says Margot Dorfman, chief executive officer of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, an organization with 500,000 members, three-quarters of whom are small business owners. ‘Whether Obama’s proposal is high enough or the time frame is fast enough is the question.'”

The should-be-obvious reason? “If the customer base is undermined because wages are so low, they feel it directly.”

Job Fear Drives Terrible Policies

Jobs are scarce so people are afraid. Worried people fall victim to myths like these. Robert Reich writes about this, describing the “benefit to the business class of high unemployment, economic insecurity, and a safety-net shot through with holes. Not only are employees eager to accept whatever job they can get. They are also unwilling to demand healthy and safe environments.”

Except this does not just apply to people in red states, it applies across the country.

Reich continues,

“The wages of production workers have been dropping for thirty years, adjusted for inflation, and their economic security has disappeared. Companies can and do shut down, sometimes literally overnight. A smaller share of working-age Americans hold jobs today than at any time in more than three decades.

People are so desperate for jobs they don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want rules and regulations enforced that might cost them their livelihoods. For them, a job is precious — sometimes even more precious than a safe workplace or safe drinking water.”

Raise the Minimum Wage

Here are a few points about a higher minimum wage that aren’t myths.

The minimum wage of $7.25 isn’t even the real minimum wage. Most people do not know that tipped employees work for a minimum wage of $2.13 an hour, where it has been stuck since 1991. This means that the tips you give are not really a little extra to take home, they make up the wage these workers live on.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition studied how many hours minimum-wage employees have to work per week in each state just to rent an apartment and still be able to survive. West Virginia was lowest at 63 hours. Hawaii was 175 hours. California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Washington, D.C. were all over 130 hours. (See this chart.)

Raising the minimum wage boosts employee productivity and retention, which lowers the costs associated with employee turnover. Boosting employee morale also boosts customer satisfaction. This is one more reason that raising the minimum wage helps businesses.

Raising the minimum wage increases the buying power of low-wage workers. It puts more money in the pockets of people who can then buy things at local stores, which increases demand, which drives businesses to hire more workers. This is a beneficial cycle that lifts everyone. and it’s the opposite of the death spiral described above.

Raising the minimum wage lowers government safety net costs because fewer people will need food stamps, etc. It is estimated that lifting the minimum wage to $10.10 would lift 4.6 million people out of poverty.

A lower minimum wage is actually bad for business and our economy in the long term. Cutting wages eats up the seed corn of an economy. So why do so many businesses fight raising the minimum wage? Because in the short term, cutting wages can boost quarterly profits a bit, which can increase the pay and bonuses of executives. It doesn’t necessarily matter to them if this eats away at employee morale, increases retention costs and erodes the customer base over the longer term. In the long term they’ll be rich and they’ll be gone.

Dave Johnson is a fellow at Campaign for America’s Future.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-right-wing-myths-about-raising-minimum-wage-debunked?akid=11442.123424._15TPM&rd=1&src=newsletter951270&t=5

Mike Huckabee, and why Republicans have trouble talking to and about women

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Source: Washington Post

Authors: Aaron Blake and Sean Sullivan

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) had a challenge for Democrats on Thursday.

If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it,” Huckabee said at the RNC winter meeting. “Let’s take that discussion all across America.”

As it turns out, Democrats are  quite happy to oblige.

Shortly after Huckabee’s “libido” comments, Democrats distributed them far and wide, rehashing the so-called GOP “war on women” and accusing Huckabee of insensitivity. Some enterprising campaigns even sought to tie their Republican opponents to the former presidential candidate, hoping Huckabee’s controversy would also play a bit part in their own races.

In the end, Huckabee’s comments are likely to be soon forgotten, but they do reflect a broader problem the Republican Party has when it comes to women.

Basically, the party has a very difficult time talking about these issues without opening itself up to such attacks.

Let’s explain:

Huckabee was not saying himself that women have uncontrollable libidos and need birth control; he was saying Democrats make women believe this so that they vote Democratic.

There are a few problems with his approach, though.

1) Huckabee’s 54-word sentence — which includes a 50-word dependent clause — was initially so confusing that several reporters thought Huckabee was attributing the “libido” idea to himself. (Now, we’re sure some Democrats think Huckabee wastalking about himself, but do you really think he’s that stupid?)

2) Even as the sentence reads today, it still could sound as if Huckabee thinks certain women need to “control their libido” — though that doesn’t seem to be his intention.

3) The contraception issue is, quite frankly, not the GOP’s friend.

That last statement might surprise some folks, particularly on the right, who can rightly point out that some polls show a slight majority of the American people thinks religious institutions should be exempt from covering birth control.

But while polling on a federal contraception mandate varies — and depends a lot on how you ask the question — the enthusiasm is certainly on the pro-mandate side. That, and Democrats are much better at controlling the message on this issue.

A March 2012 Washington Post-ABC poll showed Americans favored mandating contraception coverage by a margin of 61-35. Those who felt strongly in favor of the mandate outnumbered those who strongly opposed it nearly two to one, 50-27.

The numbers were much closer when it asked specifically whether religious institutions should be exempted (the crux of the current debate). In that case, 49 percent thought it should be mandated, while 46 percent thought it should not. But, again, strong supporters trumped strong opponents — by around eight or nine points.

In other words, the passion is clearly more on one side of this issue, and if Democrats can define this issue along the lines of the first polling question rather than the second — the one bringing religious institutions into the mix — they’re clearly fighting a winning battle.

As it happens, Democrats have been quite successful at doing just that, just as they did Thursday with Huckabee. In fact, if you look at Huckabee’s comments, he made no mention of religion and contraception at all.

None of this is to say that Huckabee committed a huge gaffe that will hurt Republicans significantly going forward. But, clearly, whatever point he was trying to make was lost thanks to a poor choice of words — a cautionary tale to a party that has all too often found its members doing much the same thing (think “legitimate rape”).

Huckabee is generally one of the GOP’s most gifted messengers. If even he is falling into this kind of a rathole, that doesn’t suggest great things ahead for his party.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/01/24/mike-huckabee-and-why-republicans-have-trouble-talking-to-and-about-women/?wpisrc=nl_pmpol