Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

Why Rising Gas Prices Could Backfire on the GOP in November

If Republican strategists think they can reverse their fortunes by focusing on the gas price debate, the odds are good they will be wrong.”

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From: HuffPost

By: Robert Creamer

“Eight months before the fall elections, Republican strategists are in a dour mood.

  • The economy has begun to gain traction.
  • Their leading candidate for president, Mitt Romney, is universally viewed as an uninspiring poster child for the one percent, with no core values anyone can point to except his own desire to be elected.
  • Every time Romney tries to “identify” with ordinary people he says something entirely inappropriate about his wife’s “two Cadillacs,” how much he likes to fire people who provide him services, or how he is a buddy with the people who own NASCAR teams rather than the people who watch them.
  • The polls show that the more people learn about Romney, the less they like him.
  • The Republican primary road show doesn’t appear to be coming to a close any time soon.
  • Together, Bob Kerrey’s announcement that he will get into the Senate contest in Nebraska and the news that Olympia Snowe is retiring from the Senate in Maine, massively increase Democratic odds of holding onto the control of the Senate.
  • The Congress is viewed positively by fewer voters than at any time in modern history — and two-thirds think the Republicans are completely in charge.
  • Worse yet, the polling in most presidential battleground states currently gives President Obama leads over Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.

The one thing Republican political pros are cheering right now is the rapidly increasing price of gas at the pump and the underlying cost of oil.

The conventional wisdom holds that if gas prices increase, it will inevitably chip away at support for President Obama — and there is a good case to be made. After all, increased gas prices could siphon billions out of the pockets of consumers that they would otherwise spend on the goods and services that could help continue the economic recovery — which is critical to the president’s re-election.

But Republicans shouldn’t be so quick to lick their chops at the prospect of rising gas prices.

Here’s why:

1). What you see, everybody sees. The sight of Republicans rooting against America and hoping that rising gas prices will derail the economic recovery is not pretty.

The fact is that Republicans have done everything in their power to block President Obama’s job-creating proposals in Congress, and they were dragged kicking and screaming to support the extension of the president’s payroll tax holiday that was critical to continuing economic momentum.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell actually announced that his caucus’ number one priority this term was the defeat of President Obama. The sight of Republicans salivating at the prospect of $4-plus per gallon gasoline will not sit well with ordinary voters.

2). Democrats have shown that they are more than willing to make the case about who is actually responsible for rising gas prices — and the culprits’ footprints lead right back to the GOP‘s front door.

Who is really to blame for higher gas prices?

  • The big oil companies that are doing everything they can to keep oil scarce and the price high;
  • Speculators that drive up the price in the short run;
  • Foreign conflicts, dictators and cartels — that have been important in driving up prices particularly in the last two months;
  • The Republicans who prevent the development of the clean, domestic sources of energy that are necessary to allow America to free itself from the stranglehold of foreign oil — all in order to benefit speculators and oil companies.

The fact is that the world will inevitably experience increasing oil prices over the long run because this finite, non-renewable resource is getting scarcer and scarcer at the same time that demand for energy from the emerging economies like China and India is sky rocketing.

Every voter with a modicum of experience in real-world economics gets that central economic fact.

That would make Republican opposition to the development of renewable energy sources bad enough. But over the last few months the factor chiefly responsible for short-term oil price hikes have been the Arab Spring and Israel’s growing tensions with Iran — all of which are well beyond direct American control.

But with only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, any idiot knows we can’t make ourselves materially more energy independent solely by drilling for more domestic oil. In fact, it is obvious that to have any hope of controlling the prices we pay for energy in the future, we must free ourselves from the dependence on oil in general and foreign oil in particular.

We need an emergency “all of the above” energy independence program that accesses all of the domestic sources of oil that can be developed in an environmentally safe way – plus a major investment in renewable, clean energy sources that free us from dependence on oil – and especially foreign oil.

President Obama has proposed a big first step in exactly that direction, and the Republicans have answered: “Hell no — drill baby drill.”

If they are forcefully challenged by Democrats this year — as I believe they will — that Republican position is simply laughable.

Domestic drilling has increased substantially under President Obama’s administration. And our dependence on foreign oil imports has gone down every year of his presidency. The president has put in place new mileage standards for cars that will save massive amounts of potential oil imports — standards that Republicans have opposed for decades.

But that fact remains, that for all his administration can do on its own to increase energy independence, it is impossible to free America from the stranglehold of foreign oil dependency without the kind of massive national commitment to domestic, renewable energy that must be passed by Congress. The Republicans have said “no” because their biggest energy patrons — the oil companies — oppose a crash program to create renewable energy sources for one simple reason. Every day that we fail to act, the value of their oil goes up — it’s that simple.

If you doubt that Mitt Romney and the Republicans are bought and paid for by Big Oil — just ask the infamous Koch brothers — who finance major Republican “super Pacs” — how much they stand to make personally every time the long-term price of a barrel of oil increases by another dollar.

Simply put, the Republicans have put the profits of their patrons in Big Oil well above the economic and national security interests of the United States of America.

The Republicans even continue to do everything in their power to block the elimination of the astonishing taxpayer subsidy of the oil industry, that continues notwithstanding the fact that big oil companies are more profitable today than any other companies in the history of humanity. And the Republicans do it all the while they blather on about how if we once again install them in the White House, they will bring us $2 a gallon gasoline.

Whoever is pushing those kinds of lines must be studying the techniques of the late, famous circus impresario, P.T. Barnum, who famously said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

But in fact, polling shows that American voters simply are not so gullible that they buy either of these preposterous positions.

3). Speculators. A final contributing factor that has recently amplified increases in gas and oil prices is the role of speculators.

In a purely competitive market, oil prices should settle in the long run at the marginal cost of producing the next barrel of oil — currently between $60 and $70 a barrel. Oil closed last week at about $106 per barrel and ran up to twice the marginal cost of production during the Bush era 2008 oil spike.

Currently about 80% of positions on oil commodity markets are held by “pure speculators” — who bet on changes in oil prices — rather than “end users” who actually consume oil and use the markets to hedge against price increases.

Academic studies have demonstrated that there is a big speculative premium in oil prices, above and beyond any “risk premium” that might normally develop from fear of some immediate, short-term shortage. That speculative premium could be materially dampened if steps were taken to limit the market’s domination by pure speculators.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill — which was opposed by most Republicans in Congress and all of their presidential candidates — allows the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to limit the percentage of market positions held by pure speculators as opposed to end users.

Already the CTFC has position limits on the percentage of positions that can be held by individual companies or investors to prevent one from cornering the market. Many economists have proposed imposing similar position limits on pure speculators as a class.

Ordinary voters don’t like speculators. But far from supporting limits on speculation, Mitt Romney wants to go back to the “good old days of yesteryear” where wild, unbridled speculation led to the worst economic collapse in 60 years and costs eight million Americans their jobs.

None of this is good politics for Republicans.

Voters don’t want to be held hostage by the big oil companies or foreign oil. They don’t want to have their pockets picked by oil market speculators. They understand that when world oil prices go up, it benefits oil-state dictators: it’s like allowing Iran’s Ahmadinejad to levy a tax on American consumers. And voters sure as hell don’t want to pay a taxpayer subsidy to oil companies like Exxon that made more in profits in one minute last year (about $85,000) than the average American worker earns all year long.

If Republican strategists think they can reverse their fortunes by focusing on the gas price debate, the odds are good they will be wrong.“

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partnersand a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.


Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/why-rising-gas-prices-cou_b_1323360.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications

GOP Confusion Over the First Amendment

What many Americans seem to have forgotten is that the Great Middle Class wasn’t a natural outgrowth of the nation’s economic system; it was the creation of the federal government and especially the New Deal. After the Great Depression – brought on largely by vast income inequality and rampant stock speculation – President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal, pitting the federal government against the titans of business.

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From: RSN

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

“To state what should be obvious but is apparently not, liberties – even those cited in the Bill of Rights – are not absolute and indeed many liberties that Americans hold dear are inherently in contradiction. Since the nation’s founding, it has been a key role of government to seek out acceptable balances in this competition of interests.

It also would be illegal under federal law to hack into a person’s cell phone as Rupert Murdoch’s media empire did in Great Britain. In the United States, there is a constitutional expectation of some personal privacy.

Similarly, you can make the claim that the Second Amendment gives you the right to have a gun for self-protection, but you’d be on a lot shakier ground if you insisted that your “right to bear arms” justified your possession of a surface-to-air missile or a tactical nuclear bomb. Then, the competing right of others in society to expect a reasonable level of safety would trump your weapons right.

Churches, too, were afforded broad protections under the Bill of Rights, but they still must abide by civil laws. For instance, a religion that practices pedophilia or polygamy or fundraising fraud cannot simply assert a blanket right under the First Amendment to do whatever it wants.

Yet, today we’re being told by the Right that religious liberty is boundless and that any moral or religious objection by an employer against giving an employee some specific health benefit trumps the employee’s right to get that medical service. In other words, the religious freedom of the employer should trample the rights of the employee who may have a different moral viewpoint.

A compromise from President Barack Obama on whether a religious-owned institution can deny women employees access to contraceptives in health plans (Obama shifted the costs for that coverage directly to the insurance companies) has failed to satisfy the Catholic bishops who continue to protest the plan as an infringement on their religious dogma against birth control, although many other Catholic groups have praised Obama’s compromise.

In this campaign year, Republicans have denounced Obama’s plan as an unconstitutional infringement on religious freedom. Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri proposed an amendment that would allow any employer to cite a moral objection in denying insurance coverage for any medical service. That raised the prospect that some owner who, say, considers AIDS a judgment from God against immoral behavior could exclude that expensive coverage for employees.

Appeals to the Founders

On the Senate floor on Thursday – as his proposal was facing a narrow defeat – Blunt said “this issue will not go away unless the administration decides to take it away by giving people of faith these First Amendment protections.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky claimed to be speaking for the nation’s Founders: “It was precisely because of the danger of a government intrusion into religion like this one that they left us the First Amendment in the first place, so that we could always point to it and say no government – no government – no president has that right. Religious institutions are free to decide what they believe, and the government must respect their right to do so.”

The Blunt amendment also tapped into the “hate-government” message of the Tea Party, that “guv-mint” shouldn’t be imposing regulations that impinge on “liberty,” either for individuals or the states. But these propaganda themes rely on a revisionist founding narrative of the United States, pretending that the Founders opposed a strong central government and wanted a system of states’ rights and unrestrained personal liberty.

This narrative – pushed by Tea Partiers and libertarians – always skips from the Declaration of Independence of 1776 to the U.S. Constitution of 1787, while ignoring the key government document in between, the Articles of Confederation, which was in force from 1777 to 1787. The Articles represent an inconvenient truth for the Right since they created a system of a weak central government with independent states holding almost all the cards.

Key Founders, such as Virginians George Washington and James Madison, regarded the Articles as unworkable and dangerous to the nation’s survival. They decided to reshuffle the deck. So, in 1787, operating under a mandate to propose amendments to the Articles, Washington, Madison and others engineered what amounted to a coup against the old system. In secret meetings in Philadelphia, they jettisoned the Articles and their weak central government in favor of the Constitution and a strong central government.

Madison, the Constitution’s chief architect, was also the author of the Commerce Clause, which bestowed on the central government the important power to regulate interstate commerce, which many framers recognized as necessary for building an effective economy to compete with rivals in Europe and elsewhere.

Fooling the Tea Partiers

Today’s Right leaves out or distorts this important chapter because it undercuts the message that is sent out to the Tea Partiers – that they are standing with the Founders by opposing a strong central government. This propaganda has proved to be a very effective way to deceive ill-informed Americans about what the true purpose of the Constitution was.

The Founders also spoke and wrote frequently about the necessity of trading off some liberty for a functioning society. Contrary to the Right’s founding myth, the Founders were not absolutists for liberty (beyond the obvious fact that many were slaveowners); they had read the works of political philosophers who recognized that civilization required some constraints on individual actions.

The Founders also were mostly practical men who wanted a vibrant and successful nation – recognizing that only such a country could protect the independence that had just been won at a high price in blood and treasure. To make the Founders into caricatures of religious zealotry, who would place the dogma of any religion over the decisions of individual citizens, is a further distortion of what the leading framers were thinking at the time.

Some of Madison’s key allies in the fight for the Constitution and later enactment of the Bill of Rights were Virginian Baptists who believed fiercely in the separation of church and state. Thus, the First Amendment begins by prohibiting establishment of an official religion before barring interference in religious practices. Nothing in the First Amendment says churches are exempt from civil law or that the government must help them impose their doctrines on citizens.

So, what is this coordinated attack on the federal government really all about? Clearly, the Right does not truly care about Americans having freedom of conscience on religious matters. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be seeing all these attacks on women’s access to contraception and abortion services. The Right has no compunction against intruding on the religious beliefs of those women.

Demonizing the New Deal

Which gets us to the key point about the orchestrated hostility toward any action by the U.S. government when its supports the welfare of the average American. What we are watching is a class war – as billionaire Warren Buffett has rightly noted –and that the wealthy are winning. As part of that war, the wealthy and their operatives have developed what might be called a “united front” against government, with poorer Americans drawn in by the so-called “cultural issues.”

The wealthy understand that in the absence of government intervention on behalf of common citizens, nearly all power would accrue to corporations and to the rich. The average American would become, at minimum, a second-class citizen with far fewer meaningful rights and, in some ways, a virtual slave to the powerful.

What many Americans seem to have forgotten is that the Great Middle Class wasn’t a natural outgrowth of the nation’s economic system; it was the creation of the federal government and especially the New Deal. After the Great Depression – brought on largely by vast income inequality and rampant stock speculation – President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal, pitting the federal government against the titans of business.

The New Deal’s goal was to spread the wealth of the country more equitably by legalizing unions and investing public funds in building the nation, while simultaneously reining in reckless financial practices and restraining the power of the rich. Inevitably, that meant intruding on the “liberty” of the wealthy to do whatever they wanted. It meant allowing workers to engage in collective bargaining and to strike. It meant imposing higher taxes on the rich so the national infrastructure could be expanded and modernized.

Those efforts grew in the post-World War II era with veterans benefiting from the GI Bill to go to college and buy homes. And later, with projects like the Interstate Highway system, which sped goods to markets, and the Space Program, which spurred technological advances. Even more recently, the government-created Internet introduced dramatic growth in productivity.

These innovations generated great national wealth – and combined with high marginal tax rates on the rich – created a much more equitable society, both economically and politically. But many of the rich never accepted the social contract implicit in the New Deal, that all Americans should share in the nation’s bounty and that a strong middle class was good for everyone, including fair-minded businessmen who benefited from larger markets for their products.

Instead, many rich Americans wanted to keep their money for themselves and to pass it on to their progeny, creating what would amount to an aristocracy, a class that would essentially own and govern America. Of course, they couldn’t exactly express it that way; they had to dress up their greed in different clothing. After all, even the dumbest American wasn’t likely to sign on to a program for restoring the Gilded Age under an unrestrained financial system that had led to the Great Depression.

The rich had to sell their new era of plutocratic dominance as a “populist movement,” essentially as “liberty” from government. The national government, in particular, had to be transformed from the defender of the middle class and the promoter of a broad-based prosperity into an oppressor holding back “enterprise” and restricting “freedom.”

That required building a powerful propaganda megaphone with angry voices blaring out messages that exploited the frustrations of average Americans. Instead of blaming the rich for shipping jobs overseas and for eroding middle-class incomes, the villain had to become the “guv-mint.” The answer had to be giving money and power back to corporations and their allies.

In some ways, the Blunt amendment fits into this pro-corporate philosophy (albeit with a religious twist of empowering the Catholic Church’s hierarchy as well as company bosses with moral qualms). The GOP plan would have transferred even more power to employers over their employees’ lives, down to their choices of medical services.

The Senate rejected the Blunt amendment, 51-48, but Republicans vowed to make it an issue in the presidential campaign.”

For more on related topics, see Robert Parry’s “Lost History,” “Secrecy & Privilege” and “Neck Deep,” now available in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, “Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush,” was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, “Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq” and “Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'” are also available there.

For instance, the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech, but not to cry “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The press is protected, but that does not mean that newspapers can do whatever they want. If they print malicious lies against a citizen, they can be subject to libel laws – because it is accepted that people also need some protection against losing their reputations unfairly.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/10255-gop-confusion-over-the-first-amendment

The IWW legacy

the very example of the Wobblies, their spirit of protest, their tactics, their history, and their courage continue to inspire labor and political activists worldwide.

chasdarwin1 Comment

From: Peoples World

By:Dick Meister

“Occupy Wall Street and the other anti-capitalist forces could find no greater inspiration than the Industrial Workers of the World; the IWW, one of the most influential organizations in U.S. history, that was founded in Chicago in 1905 by a band of fiercely dedicated idealists.

The Wobblies, as they were called, battled against overwhelming odds. Their only real weapon was an utter refusal to compromise in a single-minded march toward a utopia that pitted them against the combined forces of government and business.

Their weapon, their goals, the power of their opponents, the imperfect world about them made it inevitable that they would lose. But this is not to say the Wobblies failed because they didn¹t reach their goal of creating One Big Union to wage a general strike that would put all means of production in the hands of workers and transform the country into a Cooperative Commonwealth of Workers.

To say the Wobbles failed would be to misinterpret the history of the Wobbly battle that left the world, as few battles leave it, a little less imperfect.

You need not believe in the simple Marxism and direct action techniques of the Wobblies to appreciate their great contribution to democracy, to union theory and practice, to folk music and literature, to the American idiom.

The IWW was founded by a group of socialists and dissident union organizers as an alternative to the American Federation of Labor, which they saw as an elitist and racist handmaiden of the capitalist class that controlled the economy. They denounced the AFL for ignoring the racially and ethnically mixed mass of unskilled workers in favor of the far fewer skilled and semi-skilled white craftsmen who were organized into separate unions according to their crafts.

The Wobblies would bring all workers, all of them members of the working class, into the One Big Union regardless of their race, nationality, craft, or work skills.

Wobbly organizers crisscrossed the country on freight trains to spread their message. They mounted street corner soapboxes in many cities, often battling police and vigilantes who tried to silence them. They organized lumberjacks, mine workers, farm workers, factory and mill hands. They led strikes.

The speeches, the written statements, and the songs of the Wobblies were powerful, simple, direct, and moving. So were the cartoons, posters, and other material that filled the IWW’s tremendous outpouring of publications, among them a dozen foreign-language newspapers that were distributed among the many unskilled immigrants from European nations where unions had goals similar to those of the IWW.

Much of what was said and sung and written is still with us, a century later. Probably most important are the brilliant insights of the IWW¹s chief leaders, Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and the songs of famed IWW martyr Joe Hill, those simple satirical rhymes set to familiar melodies that focused workers on a common body of ideals.

You¹ve probably heard at least one of Hill’s songs. Remember?

You will eat, bye and by
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on, hey
You¹ll get pie in the sky when you die

The IWW legacy goes far beyond words and song. There’s still much of value that we can draw from its history, sadly including what the IWW¹s ultimate fate tells us about how excessively undemocratic our government can be if left unchecked.

The Wobblies’ refusal to support U.S. entry into World War I and their refusal to abandon strikes and other organizational activities during the war were used as an excuse by officials at all levels of government to side with employers. They called out troops and police to attack non-violent IWW strikers and raid IWW offices. They encouraged vigilantism and lynchings and generally raised public hysteria against ‘IWW terror’ that allegedly hampered the war effort.

After the war ended in 1918, officials seized on the IWW’s open support for the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia as an excuse to crush Wobbly strikes and organizing efforts by mass arrests and imprisonment of strikers and IWW leaders for engaging in “Bolshevik conspiracies.”

The IWW was all but destroyed. Membership shrank steeply and steadily, to the point that today the organization has only a relative handful of members, most of them employed at coffee shops, bookstores, and other small businesses, their message spread primarily via websites.

N.B.: see http://www.iww.org/

Make no mistake, though. Employers did make some concessions in response to the IWW, and the very example of the Wobblies, their spirit of protest, their tactics, their history, and their courage continue to inspire labor and political activists worldwide.

As author Joyce Kornbluh notes in her magnificent IWW anthology, Rebel Voices, the Wobblies made an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American society, laying the groundwork for later mass unionization, inspiring the formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents, prompting prison and farm labor reforms, and leaving behind a genuine heritage of industrial democracy.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://peoplesworld.org/the-iww-legacy/

Romney Tells The GOP He Is The Hero Who Will Destroy Social Security

Willard, like nearly all conservatives, also parrots the fallacy that Social Security is adding to the nation’s debt, but in accordance with the Trust’s rules, Social Security is forbidden from taking one penny from the government for administrative costs or benefit payments. It is a self-sufficient program that not only works well, but is extremely popular.

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From: Politicususa

By:

“Human beings are fortunate that one function of memory is to forget the enormous amount of data a person absorbs throughout their lifetime. Important events are often difficult to forget and they either become valuable life lessons or unhealthy obsessions that if left unresolved become a grudge that gives a vindictive person a reason to hold something against someone. Conservatives have held a grudge against Progressives and FDR over the New Deal and especially the creation of the Social Security Trust, and they are obsessed with destroying the most successful and popular program in the nation’s history.

In 2010, George W. Bush said his greatest failure was not privatizing Social Security even though doing so in 2005 would have left tens-of-millions of retired Americans without security in their old age after the stock market crashed in 2008. Bush’s regret at not destroying Social Security when he had the opportunity informs the level of contempt conservatives have for the American people and it seemed that Republicans learned their lesson, but their obsession with the New Deal prevents them from learning. Perhaps Republicans are competing with each other to be the conservative hero that gets even with Progressives for creating Social Security, and if presidential hopeful Willard “Mitt” Romney wins the nomination and presidency, he promises to be the hero that destroys Social Security.

Romney resorts to every conservative hero’s tactic of lying to promote an agenda that harms millions of Americans. At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Romney resorted to lying to promote privatizing Social Security. Willard said, “We’re going to have to recognize that Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable and we can’t afford to avoid these entitlement challenges any longer.” It is a typical Republican lie that Bush used in 2005, and the truth is that without any adjustments, Social Security will remain solvent for the next thirty years or more. Romney also lied when he said current retirees would not see a change in their benefits under his plan. During the same speech, Romney promised to  increase defense spending, give the wealthiest 1% approximately $6.7 trillion in tax cuts,  and slash “entitlement” spending that surely includes Medicare and Social Security as part of his balanced budget farce.

Then there is this recurring “Social Security is an entitlement” meme that Republicans use to portray the program as welfare. Every working American pays 6.2% of every dollar they earn into the Social Security Trust. The rate decreased by 1% as part of President Obama’s payroll tax holiday except for wealthy Americans like Romney who pays on only the first .5% of his income because his earnings exceed the current $110,100 cap. If Romney is concerned that Social Security is in jeopardy of running out of funds, his Republican pals can eliminate the cap on payroll tax contributions and keep the Trust bloated with cash forever. Every other American pays Social Security tax on 100% of their income and with the median income at $49,909, over 90% of Americans would never reach the cap limit.

Romney just wants to transfer approximately $2.7 trillion in surplus assets in the Social Security Trust Fund to Wall Street to enrich himself and other high-income investors. A typical conservative ploy to convince Americans Social Security does not work is to label it a failure and a fraud and Romney said, “To put it in a nutshell, the American people have been effectively defrauded out of their Social Security,” and that there is a “looming bankruptcy of Social Security.” Willard just doesn’t get that Social Security is popular with nearly every American (especially older tea party-supporting white voters) because it works and that is one reason why he is losing popularity by the second. Willard, like nearly all conservatives, also parrots the fallacy that Social Security is adding to the nation’s debt, but in accordance with the Trust’s rules, Social Security is forbidden from taking one penny from the government for administrative costs or benefit payments. It is a self-sufficient program that not only works well, but is extremely popular.

Republicans are so consumed with hatred for the New Deal that produced Social Security, that 76 years after its creation they are still attempting to dismantle the only retirement income for millions of Americans as well as the largest insurance program for children. The program has never failed to pay out benefits on schedule, and the surplus is invested in U.S. Treasury securities that are considered the safest investment in the world. More than anything, Social Security provides a measure of security that Wall Street can never match, but that doesn’t stop conservatives from lying about the system to garner support for eliminating it. Romney is not the first conservative to promote privatizing or eliminating Social Security and he will not be the last.

Romney is out-of-touch with America and out of touch with reality if he thinks he will ever convince Americans to allow him to take their hard-earned retirement savings and offer it up to his god Wall Street. It is a mystery why Republicans cannot recognize that despite their lies, misinformation, and scare tactics, Americans do not want Social Security privatized. It is telling that Bush laments not privatizing Social Security even though doing so would have left millions of Americans without income in their golden years, and it is a testament to the man’s vile contempt for Americans. Romney is worse than Bush. He is also stupider because his desire to be the conservative hero that dismantles the New Deal is taking the same path that began Bush’s popularity slide.

If Romney wants to raid programs to enrich Wall Street and his investor cohorts, he can return to Bain Capital and destroy struggling businesses because Americans will never allow him near the White House. As one pundit said, “There is a reason you are having serious trouble in primaries and caucuses in states where older white voters reside in disproportionately large numbers, such as Missouri, Maine (almost losing to Ron Paul?) and Minnesota.”  Romney will continue having trouble with Americans and it is a good lesson that holding a grudge is about as good of an idea as trying to be a hero for a losing cause; especially when the cause is dismantling the New Deal.””

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.politicususa.com/en/social-security-romney

Republicans and the Culture Wars: Why It Won’t Work This Year

Not long ago, Republicans could turn to issues like guns and gays when the going got tough. But Michelle Cottle says none of today’s candidates has the makings of a culture warrior.

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From: Daily Beast

By: Michelle Cottle

“You know the Republican Party is going through a rough patch when it can’t even conduct a proper culture war. Once upon a time, the GOP knew how to pick a compelling values issue, or at least demagogue one in a way that was guaranteed to make the Democrats look like a pack of sneering, godless Francophiles. Partial-birth abortion—now there was a winner. Ditto gun rights. And, man on man, did conservatives milk the gay-marriage issue for all it was worth, back when it was worth something.But of late, the party seems to be losing its touch. Oh, sure, Republicans have enjoyed watching President Obama’s tussle with the Catholic Church over insurance coverage for contraception. Indeed, many party leaders rushed to pile on, tossing about phrases like “freedom of conscience” and “war on religion.”As a broader political proposition, however, getting labeled the party that wants to limit access to contraception is less ballsy than flat-out nuts. Neither does the situation seem likely to rectify itself any time soon. The staunch conservatism of the Republican base notwithstanding, not one of the party’s remaining presidential contenders has the makings of a competent culture warrior.Newt Gingrich? Please. God may have forgiven the speaker’s sins, but, if the polls are any indication, American women are still pretty steamed. The minute Newt opened his mouth to lecture the general electorate on family values he’d likely get a kitten heel to the crotch.Ron Paul has the longest marriage and most grandfatherly manner of the bunch, but his libertarianism is poorly suited to arguing that government should be messing around in people’s private lives. (And listening to him out of the trail, it’s pretty clear that social issues aren’t what blow the good doctor’s gown around.)Romney, with his picture-perfect family and squeaky-clean lifestyle, should be a terrific values crusader. Alas, he is Mormon and so must be careful about steering the race toward matters of faith, lest someone push him to have an in-depth chat about the LDS Church’s fondness for baptizing dead Jews.Then there’s Rick Santorum, who, by all rights, should dominate the values battlefield. He’s got the loving wife, the passel of kids, the goofy-dad vibe. And, let’s face it, the man has never met a policy issue he didn’t see through the prism of family values. Tax reform? Regulatory reform? Deficit spending? As Rick tells it, the first step toward addressing any of these problems is to reinstate the ban on sodomy.On pure piety points, no one can beat Rick. We’re talking here about a guy who has said he would use the presidential bully pulpit to warn of how contraception tempts even married couples to get busy in ways contrary to God’s will. This, of course, is part of the problem. Opposing abortion is one thing. Opposing contraception even among married folks doesn’t make Rick seem like a paragon of moral virtue so much as a refugee from the 16th century.But it’s not just that the senator’s positions are out of touch with the mainstream electorate (a mere 8 percent of Americans think birth control is immoral; 84 percent of U.S. Catholics think you can use it and still be a good Catholic). It’s that the guy is simultaneously too pious and too pathetic.Take his views on gay rights. Plenty of people object to gay marriage, but Santorum has long come across as a bit of a clown on the entire subject of homosexuality. It’s some combination of his whiny manner and his slightly-too-colorful blatherings about how “sodomy” is kinda like polygamy or incest but not quite so bad as man-on-dog action. With that kind of commentary, small wonder Dan Savage decided to execute his devastating lexical takedown of the senator.Perhaps saddest of all, when things get uncomfortable, Santorum crumbles. Pressed recently about a section of his 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that laments “radical feminists” undermining the family by pushing women to work outside the home, the senator pleaded ignorance and claimed the bit had been written by his wife.To be sure, this whole Serious Candidate business is new to Santorum. Still, this is no way to run a culture war.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Michelle Cottle is a Washington reporter for The Daily Beast.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/18/republican-and-the-culture-wars-why-it-won-t-work-this-year.html

Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception!

With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation.

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From:  RSN, and Slate

By:Amanda Marcotte, Slate

“After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of “religous freedom,” Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation of religiously affiliated employers who don’t want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan, because as Matt Yglesias explained at Moneybox, contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it’s cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. Because the insurance companies have to reach out to employees directly, there’s very little danger of women not getting coverage because they are unaware they’re eligible.

That’s the nitty-gritty. The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women’s access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.) With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they’ve been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they’ll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.

My guess is that they’ll take their knocks and go home, but a lot of the damage has already been done. Romney was provoked repeatedly to go on the record saying negative things about contraception. Sure, it was in the frame of concern about religious liberty, but as this incident fades into memory, what most people will remember is that Republicans picked a fight with Obama over contraception coverage and lost. This also gave Obama a chance to highlight this benefit and take full credit for it. Obama needs young female voters to turn out at the polls in November, and hijacking two weeks of the news cycle to send the message that he’s going to get you your birth control for free is a big win for him in that department. I expect to see some ads in the fall showing Romney saying hostile things about contraception and health care reform, with the message that free birth control is going away if he’s elected. It’s all so perfect that I’m inclined to think this was Obama’s plan all along.”

Emphasis Mine

see:

Obama Didn’t Cave on Birth Control

The right has freaked out over an Obama administration rule requiring employers to offer birth control to their employees. Most companies already had to do that.

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From: Mother Jones

By: Nick Baumann

So did Barack Obama fold?

On Friday, after taking heavy criticism from Catholic groups and the political right over a regulation that would have required religiously-affiliated hospitals and universities (not churches) to offer their employees health insurance that covers birth control (with no copays), President Barack Obama went on live television to announce a shift. Now, insurance companies will have to offer employees of religious organizations the birth control coverage directly, without charging extra for it. (The details of the new birth control coverage plan are here.)

Some media outlets will no doubt call this a surrender by the president. But it’s not. Here’s why:

Emphasis Mine

see:http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/02/obama-birth-control-rule-change-why-its-not-cave

Protecting Access to Birth Control Does Not Violate Religious Freedom — And It Is a Moral Imperative

The moral thing to do is to make certain that every woman who wants it has access to birth control.

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from: Huff Post

by: Robert Creamer

In many respects it is amazing that in 2012 there is a controversy over women’s access to birth control.

Let’s be clear, the current controversy over the Obama administration’s rules that require all employers who provide health insurance to provide birth control without a co-pay to its women employees, has nothing whatsoever to do with religious freedom.

It has everything to do with an attempt to take away women’s access to easy, affordable birth control, no matter where they work.

Birth control is not controversial. Surveys show that 99 percent of women and 98 percent of Catholic women have used birth control at some time in their lives.

No one is trying to require that anyone else use birth control if it violates their religious convictions. But the convictions of some religious leaders should not be allowed to trump the rights of women employees to have access to birth control.

The rule in question exempts 355,000 churches from this requirement since they presumably hire individuals who share the religious faith of the institutions in question. But it does not exempt universities and hospitals that may be owned by religious organizations, but serve — and employ — people of all faiths to engage in decidedly secular activities. These are not “religious institutions.” They are engaged in the normal flow of commerce, even though they are owned by religious organizations.

Some religious leaders argue that they should not be required to pay for birth control coverage for their employees if they have religious objections to birth control. This argument ignores the fact that health insurance coverage is not a voluntary gift to employees. It is a part of their compensation package. If someone opposed the minimum wage on religious grounds — say because they believed it “discouraged individual initiative” — that wouldn’t excuse them from having to pay the minimum wage.

If a Christian Science institution opposed invasive medical treatment on religious grounds, it would not be allowed to provide health care plans that fund only spiritual healing.

Many Americans opposed the Iraq War — some on religious grounds. That did not excuse them from paying taxes to the government.

The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose taking away the ability for women to have easy, affordable access to birth control. A Public Policy Polling survey released yesterday found that 56 percent of voters support the decision to require health plans to cover prescription birth control with no additional out-of-pocket fees, while only 37 percent opposed. Fifty-three percent of Catholic voters favor the benefit.

Fifty-seven percent of voters think that women employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have the same rights to contraceptive coverage as other women.

No doubt these numbers would be vastly higher if the poll were limited to the employees of those hospitals and universities because eliminating the requirement of coverage would cost the average woman $600 to $1,200 per year in out-of-pocket costs.

But ironically, requiring birth control coverage generally costs nothing to the institution that provides it. That’s because by making birth control accessible, health plans cut down on the number of unwanted pregnancies that cost a great deal more. And of course they also cut down on the number of abortions.

That may help explain why many Catholic-owned universities already provide coverage for birth control. For instance, a Georgetown University spokesperson told ThinkProgress yesterday that employees “have access to health insurance plans offered and designed by national providers to a national pool. These plans include coverage for birth control.”

The University of San Francisco, the University of Scranton, DePaul University in Chicago, Boston College — all have health insurance plans that cover contraception.

And, finally, this is nothing new. Twenty-eight states already require organizations that offer prescription insurance to cover contraception.

Of course the shocking thing about this entire controversy is that there is a worldwide consensus that the use of birth control is one of society’s most important moral priorities. Far from being something that should be discouraged, or is controversial, the use of birth control is critical to the survival and success of humanity.

In 1968, the world’s population reached 3.5 billion people. On October 31, 2011, the United Nations Population Division reported that the world population had reached seven billion. It had doubled in 43 years.

It took 90,000 years of human development for the population to reach 1 billion. Over the last two centuries the population has grown by another six billion.

In fact, in the first 12 years of the 21st Century, we have already added a billion people to the planet.

It is simply not possible for this small planet to sustain that kind of exponential human population growth. If we do, the result will be poverty, war, the depletion of our natural resources and famine. Fundamentally, the Reverend Malthus was right — except that the result is not inevitable.

Population growth is not something that just happens to us. We can choose whether or not to reproduce and at what rates.

No force is required. The evidence shows that the population explosion stops where there is the availability of birth control and women have educational opportunity.

That’s why it is our moral imperative to act responsibly and encourage each other to use birth control. And it’s not a hard sell. Children are the greatest blessing you can have in life. But most people are eager to limit the number of children they have if they have access to contraception. We owe it to those children — to the next generation and the generation after that — to act responsibly and stabilize the size of the human population.

The moral thing to do is to make certain that every woman who wants it has access to birth control.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: ‘Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win‘, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.


Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/protecting-access-to-birt_b_1262530.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications

Busting Through the Media Firestorm: 6 Essential Facts About the Komen Controversy

How many of the rumors are inflated, and how many get at the real heart of why people responded to this decision with so much outrage?

chasdarwin1 Comment

From: AlterNet

N.B.: Yet another example of the value of the first clause of the First Amendment! (“Congress Shall Make No Law Respecting an Establishment of Religion, “)

By: Sarah Seltzer

“The melodramatic tale of the breakup and pseudo-makeup between the Susan G Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood — and the ensuing media firestorm — simply will not die. Last week, after Komen announced it would end its grants to Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country and promptly spent several days fending off a barrage of criticism, it at last issued an apology and a promise to restore Planned Parenthood’s eligibility for grants.

But the fury at Komen hasn’t ended: it has outlasted the Nevada caucuses, the Superbowl and even Madonna’s halftime performance. And as with any incident that blows up in such a massive way, there are rumors and inflated facts obscuring the kernels of truth, and the important lessons embedded within a narrative which is constantly being added to by embarrassing leaks by insiders and revelatory digging by outsiders.

Komen is not the true champion of women’s health many thought it was. But how many of the rumors and stories are inflated, and how many get at the heart of why women responded to this decision with so much outrage?

Here, we push aside some myths and present the essential facts.

1. Yes, Komen reversed itself, but the exact future of the grants to Planned Parenthood remain unclear.

This is the most important thing to know. It’s true that the new rule that would have excluded Planned Parenthood from Komen grants has been changed. This stipulation previously barred any organization under investigation, but has now been altered so that the investigation must be criminal, not political.

So while Planned Parenthood is now once again “eligible” for grants from Komen, the funding is not yet assured.

As the Washington Post explains, “It did not specifically state that the foundation would fund Planned Parenthood but said that the group would be eligible to apply for future grants.”

There are a few more hurdles on the way back to funding, the article notes — for instance, it might be too late to apply for those Komen grants.

Martha Edmonds, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central New Mexico, said she thought it was unlikely her group could obtain Komen funding this year because the deadline for applying to the local affiliate has already passed.

“We didn’t end up submitting a grant application for this current cycle because we thought we wouldn’t be eligible,” she said.

Furthermore, in its reversal, Komen didn’t address its second reason for denying funds to PP — the fact that it provides mammogram referrals and initial screenings, not actual mammograms.

Again, from the Washington Post:

Nonetheless, because Komen officials have not backed away from their earlier talk of refocusing funding on groups that directly provide mammograms and other breast screenings, [Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life] said she is hopeful that the ultimate result will be that the foundation ceases future funding of Planned Parenthood.

So while the PR and initial fundraising victory was decisively Planned Parenthood’s, the story of this partnership is not necessarily written in stone, and it doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending.

2. The deeper problems with Komen include a lack of checks and balances and a strong connection to Republican politics.

Komen Foundation CEO Nancy Brinker, a well-known Republican donor who traded favors with George W. Bush, is both the chair of the Komen board and its president, while her son and several close friends serve on the board. “A review of the board of directors of Komen…reveals that Brinker has the likely votes to control board decisions at any given time, and that those votes are either Republican stalwarts or individuals personally loyal to her,” Buzzflash reports. In addition, Komen is one of many nonprofit giants with fairly high executive compensation (read all about it here (PDF).

Still, those who study the nonprofit world are less concerned with the more than comfortable salaries at Komen, and more with how the organization is structured. Lori Stahl at “She the People” spoke to experts:

James Abruzzo, a management and global business instructor at Rutgers Business School, said the picture that emerges from the Komen documents does raise several concerns, however.

First, he said, Brinker’s duals roles at Komen may hobble the decision-making process. “When you have a chairman who’s also the president, you have a lack of checks and balances,’’ Abruzzo said. “The founder generally populates the board with friends and associates.’’

And that’s where the problems come in.

3. Right-wing Republicans Karen Handel and Ari Fleischer both had direct influences on this decision that was so fateful for Komen’s brand.

Karen Handel, a Tea Party type who came on board as a Senior VP recently at Komen, has been the subject of much speculation about her link with this policy, despite repeated (and continued) denials from the company, and leaks which made it clear those denials were false.

At the Huffington Post, Laura Bassett received a particularly damning leak from within the organization:

“Karen Handel was the prime instigator of this effort, and she herself personally came up with investigation criteria,” the source, who requested anonymity for professional reasons, told HuffPost. “She said, ‘If we just say it’s about investigations, we can defund Planned Parenthood and no one can blame us for being political.'”

Emails between Komen leadership on the day the Planned Parenthood decision was announced, which were reviewed by HuffPost under the condition they not be published, confirm the source’s description of Handel’s sole “authority” in crafting and implementing the Planned Parenthood policy.

Meanwhile, another influential right-winger was involved in this catastrophic moment for the company, reports AdAge: “Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who had previously been brought in by Komen to assist with an executive search for a senior VP-communications, provided informal advice. “When Nancy called me, I gave her my two cents worth,” he said via email. ”

These kinds of facts, as well as the stories of the Brinkers’ history as big Bush donors, have torn the “pink curtain” off of Komen, revealing it to be far less neutral than its bland facade would seem.

4. Komen has led lobbying efforts against common-sense healthcare bills for years–even those that would help women.

In 2009, activists trained their ire on Komen because it retained Hadassah Lieberman–just has her husband turned against the public option in the health care reform fight. They cited her own ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Komen has had a long history of lobbying for the wrong things–a shoddy Patients’ Bill of Rights, among others– and has stood in the way of research into environmental causes of cancer.

And this history is well documented. Back in 2002, AlterNet ran a story from Southern Exposure by Mary Ann Swissler that remains one of the most comprehensive exposés of the nonprofit giant’s extensive insider Beltway lobbying and corporate ties–ties that run much deeper than sponsorships by yogurt and soda corporations.

An example from the article:

It’s no accident the Komen side favors the Republicans. A July 12, 2001 agreement between the President and five companies to run a Medicare prescription discount card program for Medicare patients, included a company called Caremark Rx where Nancy Brinker was on the board of directors, according to financial records. Another vendor, Merck-Medco, is one of the many drug companies found in the Komen investment portfolio. (Nancy Brinker resigned all board seats, including Komen, when she was appointed). If approved, the discount cards would provide up to a 10 percent discount on brand-name drugs.

The entire story is loaded with these not-so-coincidental disclosures, showing the link between the Brinkers, their circles, and legislation they lobbied for–legislation that left poor women and the environment frequently in the lurch, and aided GOP Politicians and big corporations. Swissler profiles a small group of activists outmaneuvered by Komen and its huge feel-good races:

The races, they say, merely focus women on finding a medical cure for breast cancer, and away from environmental conditions causing it, the problems of the uninsured, and political influence of corporations over the average patient.

5. While the PR win of this brouhaha belongs to Planned Parenthood, the backlash has brought up some unfortunate myths — including the myth of abortion having a medical link to cancer.

There is no known link between abortion and breast cancer. The false ideas that has circulated both leading up to and in the wake of this decision by Komen, most notably by Rick Santorum (of course).

From the American Cancer Society, hardly a bastion of liberalism: “At this time, the scientific evidence does not support the notion that abortion of any kind raises the risk of breast cancer or any other type of cancer.” Every major study supports this.

In fact, before Komen took an anti-choice turn — Nancy Brinker herself called rumors of this link an “old wives tale” in her memoir, in the very same section where she mounts a vigorous defense of the exact same Planned Parenthood grants she was prepared to end last week (after an attack by the religious-run Curves fitness centers):

“The grants in question supplied breast health counseling, screening, and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of color who were underserved–if served at all–in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available. Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women.”

In the subsequent pages, Brinker dismisses the “ridiculous old wives’ tale that abortion causes breast cancer.”

So why, Jodi Jacobsen of RH reality Check asks, did Komen add Jane Abraham, of the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List (SBA) to their board? “Abraham is also closely affiliated with The Nurturing Network, a global network of crisis pregnancy centers,” Jacobsen writes, adding “Groups like Nuturing Network are the nucleus of lies about abortion and breast cancer. ”

6. The backlash against Komen was a widespread grassoots revolt, not a conspiracy by the “liberal media” (sorry, Ross Douthat):

Ross Douthat, unsurprisingly, uses his column space to bemoan what he claims is a media erasure of American “pro-life” voices — but he misses the story that many American women were furious at the decision regardless of their feelings on abortions. Viral videos and stories of women began to pop up talking about how their cancer didn’t give a crap about who was in office or who was “pro-life”–and therefore their cancer organization shouldn’t either.

Deanna Zandt, who created the Planned Parenthood Saved Me tumblr, has a post explaining who was coming to her site, which was gathering so much steam it hit the mainstream media: “You might think our crazy traffic came from those media mentions. Shockingly, no — most of the hits came before the major media. So, to repeat: telling and sharing our stories matters,” she writes.

The media saw this grassroots outrage growing on one hand — and then got crickets, or contradictory information from within Komen. And thus, a narrative was born.

Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at AlterNet and a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published at the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Jezebel and the Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter at @fellowette and find her work atsarahmseltzer.com.

Emphasis Mine

seehttp://www.alternet.org/story/154030/busting_through_the_media_firestorm%3A_6_essential_facts_about_the_komen_controversy?page=entire

Just the Facts: Churches and the Contraceptive Coverage Mandate

Misinformation on how the rules works has leaked into the media. For instance, pro-life and religious groups continue to claim the rule would force employers to pay for drugs that cause abortion, which the administration says is not the case.

chasdarwin1 Comment

From: Truthout

N.B.: Se

By:Mike Ludwig

“The Obama administration‘s recent decision to require all employers, with the exception of churches and places of worship, to cover contraceptives in health care plans continues to cause a firestorm of controversy. House Speaker John Boehner told reporters on Thursday that the rule is unconstitutional. Catholic bishops continue to call the rule an “attack” on “religious liberty” and are calling on the administration to broaden the exemption and Congress to pass a law that could overturn it. The administration, however, is standing firm on its decision.

Misinformation on how the rules works has leaked into the media. For instance, pro-life and religious groups continue to claim the rule would force employers to pay for drugs that cause abortion, which the administration says is not the case. Senior White House officials held a conference call with reporters on Thursday to clear up any misunderstandings. Here’s a rundown of the most important facts according to those who actually wrote the rule:

  • Under the Affordable Care Act, employers and private insurance providers will be required to provide reproductive preventative services, including birth control and other contraceptives, to women who choose to use them. The services are free of charge at the point of service and provided without co-pays, deductibles and cost-shares.
  • Nonprofit organizations that “primarily” exist to spread their religious values and primarily serve and employ people who share those values are exempt from the rule. This means that churches and houses of worship are exempt, but religiously affiliated schools and hospitals that serve and employ people of different faiths are not exempt.
  • Officials said that some parochial schools could qualify for the exemption if they exist to teach religion and primarily serve and employ fellow believers.
  • The rule applies only with private health insurance and does not require individual practitioners to provide contraceptive.
  • Most women use contraceptives in their lifetime, including 98 percent of Catholic women. (Meanwhile, 100 percent of Catholic bishops are men.) The average woman uses contraceptives for 30 years of her life at a cost of $30 to $50 per month.
  • The policy does not cover drugs that cause abortion, such as RU-486.
  • Twenty-eight states already require contraceptive coverage. North Carolina, New York and California have identical religious exemption standards and other states have no exemptions at all.
  • There is no list of specific institutions that are exempt but institutions must meet the above requirements. There is no application for the exemption, and an institution must use the requirements to evaluate itself and then notify its insurance provider that it is exempt.
  • Administration officials said they are working with states on enforcing the rule.
  • After taking public comments, the administration decided to give some religious nonprofits, including those that employ people of other faiths, one year to comply with the rule.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.truth-out.org/just-facts-churches-and-contraceptive-coverage-mandate/1328214331