Al Jolson:
Month: July 2010
I Heart Rich Trumka
Rich Trumka, the current president of the AFL/CIO, has been fighting to protect Social Security for a very long time. (Take a look at this video from 1994, when he asks, “Where is the crisis?” and points out that Social Security is the target of “draconian” proposals while it was in surplus.)
He is one of a very few voices standing up for working people in this country, and here’s the speech he made yesterday to the Washington Press Club:
Good morning. Working people around the country know the value of Social Security, and the Labor Movement has long been one of its staunchest supporters.
The American Federation of Labor was there in 1935, advocating for passage of the Social Security Act. In the decades following, the AFL-CIO played a lead role in designing the evolving Social Security system — supporting efforts to strengthen and broaden the program, and opposing weakening of its protections. During the last Administration, we were key to defeating privatization.
In a misplaced effort to reduce the deficit, Social Security is under attack again –this time by proposals to raise the retirement age. And the right wing spin machine has convinced many Americans that Social Security won’t be there for them, anyway.
Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, goes door to door every night talking to thousands of people a week. What they hear is that working families — including young people — are deeply worried about their retirement security. They are hearing that their Social Security benefits may be cut — and they don’t see how they can possibly make up the difference.
At a time when retirement is less secure for working Americans than it has been in many generations, only Social Security remains a defined and stable retirement benefit — not to mention the important family protections it provides when a worker is injured or dies. Unions know exactly what is happening to retirement income in this country because we see it at the bargaining table. Fewer traditional pensions. More riskier 401(k) plans — not a great benefit for workers with stagnant incomes who find it difficult or impossible to save. Now is the time, to strengthen, not weaken, Social Security.
Raising the eligibility age for a full Social Security benefit would be disastrous for millions of Americans. It is a benefit cut, plain and simple. It is a cut that is unnecessary and one that Americans can ill-afford.
For those born in 1960 or later, the retirement age for a full Social Security benefit is now 67, rather than 65. These younger workers have already been hit with a 13 percent benefit cut — and some now want to impose another cut on top of that.
A 62-year old worker who would receive $800 a month if the retirement age for a full benefit were 65, will get only $700 a month when that retirement age becomes 67.
Further increasing the retirement age for a full benefit to 69 (and some are even saying 70) means another 13% cut in benefits — for a total benefit cut of more than 25% for anyone who is now 50 or younger. That probably includes many of you in this room.An age increase is a particular hardship for workers in physically demanding jobs who don’t qualify for disability — workers like my father who spent his life in the mines and couldn’t work another day by the time he qualified for Social Security — and those older workers who may no longer be able to find work due to age discrimination.
I know that America can do better than this. And that’s why the AFL-CIO, as part of a broad campaign, is mobilizing to protect Social Security. I look forward to working with our many coalition partners to create a secure retirement for our baby boomers, our children, and grandchildren.
Thank you.
Obama Signs Tribal Law & Order Act Today
This is a significant step forward for justice on the tribal reservations, especially the women who are the victims of widespread domestic violence and sexual crimes:
A measure designed to ease stubbornly high rates of violent crime, including rape and sexual assault, within Indian reservations will be signed into law by President Obama on Thursday.
Advocates of the Tribal Law and Order Act, which took three years to put together and passed the Senate last week, say it will ensure that more crimes, including murders and serious assaults, are reported and prosecuted amid worries that many cases go unpunished.
The measure gives tribal courts tougher sentencing powers and sets stricter rules to gather and collect more data on crimes. Special U.S. prosecutors will be appointed to tackle what advocates of the law describe as an epidemic of violence.
The president is due to sign the bill into law during a ceremony at the White House on Thursday afternoon.
Supporters said the current congressional session was the most active in decades in improving conditions for Indian reservations. Earlier this year, Obama signed a law that boosted health-care provisions for Indian communities.
The reservations overall have violent-crime rates of more than twice the national average, according to a congressional investigation.
Indian Country Today has more:
Also, tribes prosecuting individuals for crimes that could land them in jail for more than a year must provide defendants with the same right to a lawyer that they would have in state or federal court.
“The 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act notably did not include a right to counsel even though it is a constitutional (6th Amendment) right that also applies to the states,” said Navajo lawyer Chris Stearns. “My understanding is that this giant exception was made because back then no one thought that tribes would be able to pay for attorneys, or that there were even attorneys around at all on the reservation.”
[…] Whitney Phillips, a spokeswoman for Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, D-S.D., a major champion of the bill in the House, said tribes that don’t have the resources to provide defense counsel or house inmates for longer sentences can continue to operate under the existing one-year sentencing provisions in the Indian Civil Rights Act, which does not require that defense counsel be provided.
“Because the provision is optional, it will not place any additional costs on tribes who choose not to participate in the enhanced sentencing provision,” Phillips said.
Hannah August, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said the law will not cost tribes anything unless they choose to exercise the enhanced sentencing authority it provides.
Of course, that places the cost burden on the tribes, and not all of them can afford it. So they’ll be “allowed” to maintain a two-tiered system of justice if they can’t pay for the better version — which, come to think of it, makes them just like the rest of our country!
You Kids Get Off My Lawn
Longtime political reporter Walter Shapiro thinks it’s time for another bloggers ethics panel. Because those horrible, horrible bloggers are posting erroneous stories just to beat the news cycle! (Bad, bad bloggers!)
Choosing bluster over blushing, Breitbart told Matt Lewis in a Politics Daily interview: “I couldn’t wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out.” Later in the interview, Breitbart underscored his cavalier publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking: “It had to be done at the exact moment in time that the press would notice it.” A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details how the Sherrod charade migrated from conservative blogs taking their cues from Breitbart to Fox News and then to CNN.
Breitbart is just a symbol of a larger problem that transcends the poison-pen politics of ideological warriors (of both the right and left) and the slippery ethics of the blogosphere. We have collectively blundered into a P.T. Barnum media age when being first trumps being accurate. The economic rewards of the Internet flow to those who win the search-engine wars by being fast and furious rather than to those laggards who wait to be accurate and comprehensive. It is as if the motto of today’s journalism has become: “He who dies with the most clicks wins.”
Every second, we are mentally assaulted by hyperbolic cable TV “breaking news” alerts, data bursts and Twitter trivia. Meaning and context disappear amid the bite-sized news nuggets. In the world of politics, every new poll, TV ad and opposition-research press release is treated as a game changer on par with Newt Gingrich handing down the Contract With America from Mount Sinai. If everything is equally important, then simultaneously everything is equally unimportant.
I have to wonder: Did Walter Shapiro simply sleep through the Whitewater “scandal” that was freshly fueled every single day by the New York Times? Yeah, I get his point. I think the news cycle does drive inaccuracy. But bloggers didn’t invent this “go-go” news mentality, they only learned to take advantage of it. Even the voracious cable networks didn’t invent it – they only sped it up.
Clutching your pearls and pointing to “ideological warriors” isn’t going to solve the problem. (I mean, you’re pointing to Newt’s Contract On America as a “game changer” when it was really a bunch of meaningless blather. What made it a “game changer” was the relentless repetition by the Beltway bobbleheads. They kept talking about it as if it were meaningful, and so people began to take it seriously.)
But the biggest factor is that the corporations that own and direct news organizations care only about the bottom line. It’s to their benefit to hype news as much as possible. That gets more viewers, more viewers means higher ratings, and higher ratings mean more lucrative ad sales.
As much as I can’t stand the man, Andrew Breitbart isn’t the problem. He’s only a symptom of this very sick corporate culture. If the news business weren’t so eager to chase every ad dollar (remember, once upon a time, network news operated at a loss and was considered to be a public service), they wouldn’t be so eager to bite at every juicy fabrication tossed their way by the likes of Breitbart.
Oh, and Walter? As a rule of thumb, liberal bloggers aren’t the ones with the “slippery ethics.” If you weren’t a lazy “he said, she said” journalist who throws false equivalence into a story to appear “fair,” you’d know that liberal bloggers, much like the corporate journalists, actually do attempt to get the facts straight. (Even though most of us aren’t getting paid to do so.) We don’t manufacture stories out of whole cloth, nor do we knowingly twist and distort the facts. (*cough* Judy Miller *cough*)
If you were doing your job, you wouldn’t need me to tell you that. You’d already know. Instead, you sound like Grandpa Simpson, yelling at those damned blogger kids to get the hell off your lawn.
Black Lung
Hazel Dickens:
Testament To Youth In Verse
The New Pornographers:
Community Papers
I was thinking the same thing when I read about the outrageous salaries paid to officials in Bell, California: Where are the local papers? Because when small papers get taken over by large ones, coverage of the local communities suffers greatly — and so does democracy.
Unbelievable
You’ll have to read this to believe it. Soldiers’ death benefits (and that of retired federal employees) are kept in a private account without FDIC protection and aren’t paid out to the beneficiaries. Instead, they’re given a “checkbook” — without actual checks. And in the meantime, insurance companies are making interest off the money.
Obama Cancels Some Offshore Leases
SAN FRANCISCO— The Center for Biological Diversity praised the Obama administration’s announcement today that it is cancelling two offshore oil and gas lease sales: one in the Atlantic off the coast of Virginia and another in the Gulf of Mexico. The Atlantic lease sale was part of a controversial area that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved for expanded offshore oil development after the Bush administration lifted the moratorium on drilling in the Atlantic. The Gulf of Mexico lease sale was scheduled to take place in mid-August.
“Obama’s decision to cancel these lease sales recognizes that risky offshore drilling needs reform,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center. “Halting controversial lease sales is among the most proactive steps that Obama has taken toward the Gulf disaster.”
The Federal Register notices to be published tomorrow cancel Lease Sale 220 in the Atlantic and Lease Sale 215 in the western part of the Gulf of Mexico. The notices say cancelling these lease sales “will allow time to develop and implement measures to improve the safety of oil and gas development in Federal waters, provide greater environmental protection, and substantially reduce the risk of catastrophic events.”
“Rather than sound science and common sense, federal approval of offshore drilling has relied upon Big Oil promises, “ said Sakashita. “This commitment to revisit oil spill risks, safety and environmental protections is long overdue.” Just weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the Department of the Interior proposed expanding offshore oil development into new areas of the Atlantic, Arctic and eastern Gulf of Mexico.
Ants Marching
I want to thank those of you who recommended I use Terro to get rid of these friggin’ ants. It’s attracting ants by the hundreds, and hopefully they’ll go back to their nests and die. That’s the plan, anyway.