Democracy Now: Rep. Grijalva Unveils Progressive Caucus' "People's Budget" That Puts "Realistic Alternative" On the Table

Democracy Now April 14, 2011

TAX DAY 2011: Where Do Your Tax Dollars Go?

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Check out the National Priorities Project

Thom Hartmann: Secrets the Rich Don't Want You to Know

NPR: Planned Parenthood: A Thorn In Abortion Foes' Sides

by JULIE ROVNER

NPR

A lot of people were surprised when House Republicans' desire to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood very nearly caused the shutdown of the federal government last week.

But those who have watched the abortion debate over a long period of time were not surprised.

Despite the successes members of the anti-abortion movement have had over the years in restricting the procedure, "Planned Parenthood remains the thorn in their side," says Deana Rohlinger, associate professor of sociology at Florida State University.

Planned Parenthood is the nation's largest single provider of abortions, yet it gets millions of dollars in federal funding with which to provide other services. Efforts to change that have been unsuccessful not only with this last go-round, but also stretching back nearly three decades.

That makes abortion opponents see red.

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Thom Hartmann: Conservative Info Wars Training Seminars

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

By Chris Hedges
Truthdig
Posted on Apr 10, 2011

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

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War on the Weak

By Jonathan Chait, Editor of the New Republic
Newsweek
April 10, 2011

26Dems Editorial Note: This author traces the philosophical origins of the Tea Party that sprang from the cult of Ayn Rand, whose thinking turned Marxism upside down through advocacy for rewarding  wealthy  producers and punishing "parasite" workers.   This stark philosophy demands that the weak suffer, a concept that would upend American society, and abandon the role of government in preserving equality of opportunity and supplying necessities for survival of "the least of these." Rep. Paul Ryan is devoted to replacing American democracy with Ayn Randism. Read this important article that explains the frightening reality behind the uncompromising GOP budget demands that put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block this week.

How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites—and the rich as our rightful rulers.

Last week the Republican Party sounded two distinct voices. First we heard the angry demands of the Tea Party, speaking through its hardline conservative allies in the House, pushing the government to the brink of a shutdown. But then emerged the soothing tones of Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, who fashions himself the intellectual leader of the party, unveiling a budget manifesto he calls the “Path to Prosperity.”

Ryan portrays his goals in reassuringly pecuniary terms—he’s just the friendly neighborhood accountant here to help balance your checkbook. “I have a knack for numbers,” he chirps. ABC News compared him to a character in Dave, the corny 1993 movie about an average Joe who mistakenly assumes the presidency and calls in his CPA buddy—that would be Ryan—to scour the federal budget and bring it into balance. If he has any flaw, he just cares too much about rescuing the country from debt, gosh darn it! 


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Are We a Society?

By Gary Hart, Scholar in Residence at the University of Colorado
Huffington Post
April 4, 2011

When asked about the impact of her draconian policies on British society, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is reported to have said, "There is no such thing as society."

The current U.S. budget confrontation raises the same issue: Is there such a thing as an American society? The Oxford dictionary defines society as: "the sum of human conditions and activity regarded as a whole functioning interdependently" and as "the customs and organization of an ordered community."

The current confrontation between parties and ideologies is over the role of government. But even more deeply it is a foundational disagreement over whether we are a society, a community, or whether we are a collection of individuals inhabiting the same geographical space.

If we are all "in this together," then we share more than just an interest in collective security. And if we have collective interests, the instrument by which we pursue and promote those interests is the national government, not Wall Street or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As we learned in 1929 and 2008, markets can fail, usually through greed and lack of regulation. Although a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling tide lowers all boats, except for the gilded yachts.

The Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich-Tea Party revolutions all called into question whether we are a society and therefore whether we act through our national government to pursue our common interests. Though virtually all mature democracies have basically resolved this question decades ago, the people of the United States seem unable to do so. Many Americans continue to believe we can have the public services a very large majority wants without paying very much for them. Thus the "waste, fraud, and abuse" of the Reagan years. Or a recurring vocal minority continues to argue that we should do away with those services altogether and devil-take-the-hindmost.

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The Religious Right's Anti-Union Crusade

By Josh Harkinson
Mother Jones
Mon Apr. 4, 2011 3:17 AM PDT



Wisconsin's ongoing labor battle has officially become a holy war. The Family Research Council, the evangelical advocacy organization founded by James Dobson, has been dipping into its war chest to defend Republican Governor Scott Walker's efforts to curtail collective bargaining for public-sector unions. FRC president Tony Perkins interviewed backers of Walker's anti-union bill on his weekly radio program and has tweeted his support for the bill, directly linking social conservatism with an anti-union, pro-business agenda: "Pro-family voters should celebrate WI victory b/c public & private sector union bosses have marched lock-step w/liberal social agenda."

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Ryan’s Plan Neither Serious nor Courageous; Assumes 2.8% Unemployment Over Next Decade

By Joe Conason
Posted on Apr 8, 2011
Truthdig
© 2011 CREATORS.COM

What the meteoric career of Paul Ryan demonstrates is how easily impressed we are whenever a politician purports to restore solvency by punishing the poor and the elderly (while coddling the rich). The Wisconsin Republican congressman’s fiscal plan has won rave reviews from both the usual right-wing suspects and some self-styled centrists, who have praised him and his proposals as “serious,” “courageous” and even “uplifting.”

By now, however, those who have actually examined the Ryan plan with care and competence know that those acclamations are highly exaggerated, which is probably a far too polite description. 

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CBO: Seniors Would Pay Much More For Medicare Under Ryan Plan

By Julie Appleby, Mary Agnes Carey and Laurie McGinley
KHN Staff Writers
Kaiser Health News
APR 05, 2011

Seniors and the disabled would pay sharply more for their Medicare coverage under a new plan by House Republicans aimed at curbing the nation’s growing deficit, a Congressional Budget Office analysis shows.

For example, by 2030, under the plan, typical 65 year olds would be required to pay 68 percent of the total cost of their coverage, which includes premiums, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs, according to CBO.  That compares with the 25 percent they would pay under current law, CBO said.

The GOP budget proposal also would raise the eligibility age for the politically popular program – and repeal big chunks of the health care overhaul law approved by Congress last year.And here is the rest of it.

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Democracy Now: Joseph Stiglitz Addresses Class Divide "Of the 1%, by the 1% and For the 1%"

Democracy Now
April 7, 2011

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This week Republicans unveiled a budget proposal for 2012 that cuts more than $5.8 trillion in government spending over the next decade. The plan calls for sweeping changes to Medicaid and Medicare, while reducing the top corporate and individual tax rates to 25 percent. We speak to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who addresses the growing class divide taking place in the United States and inequality in a new Vanity Fair article titled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%." Stiglitz is a professor at Columbia University and author of numerous books, most recently Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

"It’s not just that the people at the top are getting richer," Stiglitz says. "Actually, they’re gaining, and everybody else is decreasing... And right now, we are worse than old Europe."