Leaving Children Behind

OP-ED COLUMNIST
 By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
February 27, 2011

Will 2011 be the year of fiscal austerity? At the federal level, it’s still not clear: Republicans are demanding draconian spending cuts, but we don’t yet know how far they’re willing to go in a showdown with President Obama. At the state and local level, however, there’s no doubt about it: big spending cuts are coming.


And who will bear the brunt of these cuts? America’s children.

Now, politicians — and especially, in my experience, conservative politicians — always claim to be deeply concerned about the nation’s children. Back during the 2000 campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush, touting the “Texas miracle” of dramatically lower dropout rates, declared that he wanted to be the “education president.” Today, advocates of big spending cuts often claim that their greatest concern is the burden of debt our children will face.

In practice, however, when advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear.

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Maddow Show: Republicans Openly Push Higher Unemployment, Lower Wages, Slowdown in Economic Growth,

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions

By Rick Ungar
Forbes
Feb. 25, 2011

Pulitzer Prize winning tax reporter, David Cay Johnston, has written a brilliant piece for tax.com exposing the truth about who really pays for the pension and benefits for public employees in Wisconsin.

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to “contribute more” to their pension and health insurance plans. Accepting Gov. Walker’ s assertions as fact, and failing to check, creates the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not. Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin’ s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

Via tax.com

How can this be possible?

Simple. The pension plan is the direct result of deferred compensation- money that employees would have been paid as cash salary but choose, instead, to have placed in the state operated pension fund where the money can be professionally invested (at a lower cost of management) for the future.

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The Nationwide Effort To Restrict Reproductive Rights

By Jason Linkins, jason@huffingtonpost.com
& Kevin Bunkley, Kevin.Bunkley@huffingtonpost.com
Huffington Post
2-25-11 06:07 PM 

As has been noted here and elsewhere, 2011 has seen a nationwide resurgence in the effort to curtail women's reproductive rights. I know! It's almost as if an entire political faction that preaches the importance of a small and unintrusive government doesn't actually mean it, right?

Here in Washington, D.C., we've seen the House of Representatives pass an amendment that would defund Planned Parenthood and attempt to create a whole new crazy definition of rape. And state governments have been doing much the same: South Dakota lawmakers briefly floated the idea of making protecting the unborn a justifiable reason to commit homicide -- with language that didn't make it clear that abortion providers who perform legal medical procedures wouldn't be, in some way, protected from the crazy people who believe they are morally allowed to murder them. That law's been shelved in South Dakota, but it's being emulated elsewhere.

And others are going further, including a Georgia lawmaker who's crafted a law that would make miscarriages a felony. Again, there's vague wording there, that seemingly exempts miscarriages that are not brought about by "human involvement." Unfortunately, medical professionals do not know, with precision, what causes miscarriages, and the law doesn't set sufficient parameters.

But that's all beside the point: why bring miscarriages into the matter at all? No one has ever suggested that miscarriages of any sort by subject to criminal penalty, so why start now? The answer is that this is all some "moving the Overton Window" nonsense -- by pushing boundaries further past the fringe, it makes the original fringe position more palatable. I've said this once before, but it bears repeating:

Just to review, the way this game is played is that a legislator will conceive of an absolutely insane anti-woman law, stoke outrage, then make a big show of relenting on the crazy part of the law in order to get what they want -- making abortion illegal -- enacted. They will then aver that this is the result of "negotiations" in which "all sides" have been "heard out" resulting in a "compromise."

Here, for your benefit, we've collected many examples of the ways in which reproductive rights are being encroached upon. Some are more reasonable sounding than others. There's a wide gulf between a radical redefinition of rape and a law that aims to shut down abortion providers in the name of enhanced patient comfort. But one thing that all of these laws have in common is that they suggest a deep and abiding belief that women are chattel. 

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The Republican Strategy

By Robert Reich
Fmr. Secretary of Labor; Professor at Berkeley; Author, Aftershock: 'The Next Economy and America's Future'
Huffington Post
19 February 11


The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class - pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to shrink the pie even further with additional tax cuts for the rich - making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.

The strategy has three parts.

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12 News' Sunday Square Off: Jan Brewer's "Let them eat cake" moment

By Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings and Blog for Arizona
Feb. 20, 2011

Resnik - "Is it fair that businesses should get these tax breaks while universities suffer and those patients suffer?"

Brewer - "Absolutely.  Absolutely."

Earlier on Sunday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer appeared on 12 News' (KPNX) Sunday Square Off program, hosted by Brahm Resnik, to defend the hundreds of million dollars worth of corporate tax cuts she signed into law a few days ago.

Her appearance was an exercise in regurgitation -

She regurgitated the long-refuted theories of trickle-down economics (which should be referred to as "tinkle down" economics).

I regurgitated the undigested remnants of breakfast while listening to her spout (that's just a metaphor - I hadn't eaten breakfast yet :) ).

My favorite quote is above, but there were other "profound" tidbits from the program (video clip embedded below) -

3:32

Brewer -  ...I know that the free enterprise is what really stokes the fuel of the furnace, and the furnace is business in Arizona..

Resnik -  So it *is* something of a gamble?

Brewer -  Life is a gamble.

Or how about -

4:00 (talking about the impact of the corporate tax breaks on Arizona's unemployment crisis)


Resnik - People are asking "How soon will half a billion dollars in tax breaks create a job for me?"


Brewer - Because we know businesses, particularly high paying wage businesses, are the people who create those jobs and if you stymie them and you make it impossible for them to maintain here by charging them above their competitive states that we're competing with, they won't come here, they won't stay here, they will go someplace else and if we become competitive, they will bring new jobs, we will keep the jobs that we have, and that means that it's, [not] to use the phrase "the trickle down, the bottom line is that more people will have jobs, and therefore those people with the jobs are going to go out and it's going to trickle down to the lawnmower guy, to the dry cleaner, it's just the facts.

 WATCH VIDEO:





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What Conservatives Really Want

By George Lakoff
Author, The Political Mind, Moral Politics, Don't Think of an Elephant!
The Huffington Post
Posted: February 19, 2011 10:37 AM


-Dedicated to the peaceful protestors in Wisconsin, February 19, 2011.

The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.

The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women's rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting, and on and on.

Budget deficits are a ruse, as we've seen in Wisconsin, where the governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement.


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Student captures spirit of Wisconsin pro-union rallies in music video

Posted on 02.18.11
Raw Replay
Categories: Activism

Matt Wisniewski, a 22-year-old college student at the University of Wisconsin, put together this inspiring video in support of unions in Wisconsin. The video consists of three days of footage of the 30,000 protesters at the state capitol in Madison against a bill that would drastically curb the bargaining power of public employees in unions. The accompanying song is Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies).”

This video was posted to Vimeo on Feb. 18, 2011, by Matt Wisniewski.

And here is the rest of it.

Dean Baker: Budget Cuts Are the Real Job-Killers

Thursday 17 February 2011
by: Laura Flanders  |  GRITtv | Video Interview

And here is the rest of it.

Battling 'Neoliberalism' in Wisconsin

By Daniel C. Maguire
Consortium News
February 18, 2011


Editor’s Note: For a third day, protesters rallied in Wisconsin’s capital to protest a plan by the state’s new Republican governor to reduce the budget, in part, by stripping public employee unions of many collective bargaining rights.

These Wisconsin demonstrations are the first major challenge to the newly empowered Republicans and their "neoliberal" goal to slash government and to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, as Marquette Professor Daniel C. Maguire notes in this guest essay:

It has been well noted that the protest in Madison, Wisconsin, is not about the budget but about union-busting, but that is a symptom, not the root of the problem.

Gov. Scott Walker’s project is to impose the neoliberal (neoconservative) political economy on a state that pioneered many progressive traditions and reforms.

Neoliberalism (or neoconservatism) has been the operating system of the Right since the 1980s, though its roots go back further. It has these four characteristics:

---Neoliberalism has been called a philosophy of “possessive individualism.” Historian Richard Hofstadter called it “beneficent cupidity” or the notion that “greed is good,” in more modern parlance. It embodies Social Darwinism — survival of the fittest — which sees society, as C.B. MacPherson said, as a mass of competing “dissociated individuals.”

Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister in the 1980s, even asserted there is no such thing as “society,” only individuals and families. If there is no “society,” we owe society nothing – and there is no such thing as social justice.

And thus Fox News’ Glenn Beck, the clown prince of neoliberalism, can urge his faithful to walk out of church if their pastor so much a mentions social justice.




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Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier Talks About Her Abortion

By Ryan Grim
Huffington Post
First Posted: 02/18/11 09:46 AM Updated: 02/18/11 12:33 PM

WASHINGTON -- Before Rep. Jackie Speier took the House floor late on Thursday night, New Jersey Republican Chris Smith used his time to graphically describe the process of an abortion. That's when the California Democrat decided to scrap her planned remarks.

"That procedure that you just talk about was a procedure that I endured," she told a hushed chamber. "I really planned to speak about something else, but the gentleman from New Jersey just put my stomach in knots, because I'm one of those women he spoke about just now. I had a procedure at 17 weeks pregnant with a child who moved from the vagina into the cervix."

After a weighty pause, Speier went on. "I lost a baby," she said, pausing again. "But for you to stand on this floor and suggest, as you have, that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous."  

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Brewer's 'jobs bill' very irresponsible, Effort would cost burdened state $500 million

By  Robert Robb - Feb. 18, 2011 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

The "jobs bill" Gov. Jan Brewer and Republican legislators hustled through a hastily called special session this week is grossly irresponsible.

The only truly indispensible duty the Arizona Legislature has is to enact an honestly balanced budget each year. The last time the Legislature did that was 2007. Since then, the Legislature has employed constitutionally suspect borrowing and fundamentally dishonest accounting to get from year to year.

There is not any proposed or even plausible scenario in which it gets back to an honestly balanced budget at any time in the future. Not in one year, not in three years, not in five years, not in ten years.

The state currently has a structural deficit - the difference between ongoing revenues and spending - of $3 billion. Yet the "jobs bill" would cost the state more than $500 million annually when fully implemented.


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Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2011/02/17/20110217robb18.html#ixzz1EKkdRMMl