Category: Class War

Supporting the troops

~ susie

You need to use your card for getting the food products or cash

In the meantime, defense lobbyists and congressman eat in five-star restaurants!

More military families used food stamps to buy milk, cheese, meat and bread at military grocers last year.

Food stamp redemption at military grocers has been rising steadily since the beginning of the recession in 2008. Nearly $104 million worth of food stamps was redeemed at military commissaries in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

“I’m amazed, but there’s a very real need,” said Thomas Greer, spokesman for Operation Homefront, a nonprofit that helps soldiers on the financial brink nationwide.

Some of the growth in soldiers’ redemption of food stamps reflects the weak economic recovery, especially for spouses looking for jobs. In 2012, there was a 30% unemployment rate among spouses off active-duty military who were 18 to 24 years old, according to the Military Officers Association of America, which released the survey last week.

Spouses who have to relocate every few years have a tough time finding work in the private sector.

Not good

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Really? The administration thinks it’s wise to screw unions over their benefits? I’d like to hear the rationale behind that:

Labor leaders who have spent months lobbying unsuccessfully for special protections under the Affordable Care Act warned this week that the White House’s continued refusal to help is dampening union support for Democratic candidates in this year’s midterm elections.

Leaders of two major unions, including the first to endorse Obama in 2008, said they have been betrayed by an administration that wooed their support for the 2009 legislation with promises to later address the peculiar needs of union-negotiated insurance plans that cover millions of workers.

Their complaints reflect a broad sense of disappointment among many labor leaders, who say the Affordable Care Act has subjected union health plans to new taxes and mandates while not allowing them to share in the subsidies that have gone to private insurance companies competing on the newly created exchanges.

After dozens of frustrating meetings with White House officials over the past year, including one with Obama, a number of angry labor officials say their members are far less likely to campaign and turn out for Democratic candidates in the midterm elections.

I guess they’re supposed to be in it for the honor

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Laura Vikmanis

Not even minimum wage? Sheesh!

A cheerleader for the Cincinnati Bengals has sued the football franchise accusing the team of violating federal wage laws.

Alexa Brenneman, in a class action lawsuit filed in Cincinnati and aimed at covering all Ben-Gals, said the cheer squad members put in more than 300 hours of time attending mandatory practices and charity events and performing required volunteer work but are paid a flat rate of $90 a game for cheering at 10 games during the 2013 season.

The suit says Brenneman was paid $2.85 an hour when the Ohio minimum wage in 2013 was $7.85 an hour.

The complaint seeks a judge’s order to stop the Bengals from violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, unpaid wages for cheerleaders, attorney fees and court costs.

Billionaire to 99%: Quit whining

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Oh, how they whine. “We’re job creators,” “we already pay too many taxes,” “YOU TAXED MY YACHTMAKER.” Whine, whine, whine. This is why I have such a firm conviction that Carl Jung is a genius. I have never seen such projection in my life as when the obscenely wealthy lecture the “undeserving” poor.

Nicole Miller CEO Bud Konheim (Philips Exeter Academy ’53, Darmouth grad) was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple:

The island reminded Konheim of his family home in New England. He was born during the Depression, though his family was comfortably situated.

“We had a 23-room house on a few acres of land in the suburbs on the south shore of Long Island,” Bud explained. “But the Depression wasn’t just an economy; it was a mentality. I was born in 1935, and things really didn’t start turning around until after the War. You just didn’t flaunt your status. It was considered tasteless and offensive. There was no keeping up with the Joneses back then.”

This was brought home to him as a teen when he started becoming interested in cars.

“I went home from school one day and asked my parents why we didn’t have a Cadillac. The looks on their faces!” Konheim chuckled. “What would people think? We had three cars and a chauffer, but the cars were Plymouths. A Cadillac was too much.”

Continue reading “Billionaire to 99%: Quit whining” →

More voter suppression in Florida

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Moral March - 2/8/2014

I’m not being facetious when I say this: Don’t vacation in Florida. It’s their biggest business, and when you give them your money, you enable them to do nasty, racist crap like this:

On a party-line vote, a Florida county’s Republican majority Board of County Commissioners voted Tuesday to eliminate almost one-third of Manatee County’s voting sites. The board accepted a proposal by Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett (R) by a 6-1 vote to trim the number of precincts, despite unanimous public testimony against the move — and complaints by the lone Democratic Commissioner that it would eliminate half of the polling places in his heavily minority District 2.

Bennett, in his first term as elections supervisor, proposed reducing the number of Manatee County precincts from 99 to 69. Citing decreased Election Day turnout, as more voters switch to in-person early voting and vote-by-mail options, he told the commissioners that the move would save money and allow the county to offer more early voting sites in the future.

In the public comment section of the meeting, all ten speeches strongly opposed the move. Representatives of the local NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Council warned that the cuts would decrease voter turnout because voters would have to travel further to a polling place, especially among the elderly and people without cars, and noted that the cuts disproportionately affected minority-heavy precincts.

Bennett dismissed these concerns, noting that because District 2 had received “preferential treatment in the past,” even with the changes, his district will have the smallest number of voters per precinct. “It was overbalanced before, it’s overbalanced now.” Bennett also repeatedly noted that he had discussed the move with civil rights groups and both the Republican and “Democrat” Parties.

Bennett assured the commission that if lines are longer in 2014 as a result of these changes, he would ask them to revisit the decision in 2015, before the 2016 elections. But it is unclear whether voter accessibility is a sincere priority for him. In 2011, while serving in the Florida Senate, he endorsed making it hard to vote: “I wouldn’t have any problem making it harder. I would want them to vote as badly as I want to vote. I want the people of the state of Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who’s willing to walk 200 miles…This should not be easy.”

This is new

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Minimum Wage Rally

The New York Times points out the financial interests behind the fight against a minimum wage increase. Of course, they still do their “both sides do it” routine, but it’s a change in emphasis worth mentioning:

The campaign illustrates how groups — conservative and liberal — are again working in opaque ways to shape hot-button political debates, like the one surrounding minimum wage, through organizations with benign-sounding names that can mask the intentions of their deep-pocketed patrons.

They do it with the gloss of research, and play a critical and often underappreciated role in multilevel lobbying campaigns, backed by corporate lobbyists and labor unions, with a potential payoff that can be in the millions of dollars for the interests they represent.

“It is the way of Washington now — and that is unfortunate,” said John Weaver, a Republican political consultant who has helped run several presidential campaigns. “Because if it’s not dishonest, it’s at least disingenuous.”

In this case, the policy dispute is over whether increasing the minimum wage by nearly 40 percent to $10.10 an hour by next year would reduce poverty or further it.
Continue reading “This is new” →

Now if only someone will explain this to PA judges

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Debtors Prison

Think Progress:

To reverse an Ohio trend in which courts are sentencing individuals who can’t afford fees and court costs to probation or jail, the Ohio Supreme Court agreed this week to instruct all of its judges that they cannot jail defendants for failure to pay fees and court costs, nor for their inability to afford a criminal fine.

An April American Civil Liberties Union report documented in Ohio what has become an increasing trend around the country — therevival of so-called debtors’ prisons in which those who cannot pay fines face incarceration. The ACLU found that judges were illegally imposing jail time on the poor in two ways: First, they were threatening criminal punishment for those who don’t pay a non-criminal fee, such as court costs, a civil fine, or other fees. Second, they were failing to assess whether an individual ordered to pay a criminal fine has the ability to pay that fine before sentencing them to jail time — a violation of a 30-year-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

A new “bench card” that the Ohio Supreme Court will disseminate to all judges explains that imposing either one of these sentences is illegal. “An offender CANNOT be held in contempt of court for refusal to pay fines,” the memo states. “Accordingly, unpaid fines and/or court costs may neither be a condition of probation, nor grounds for an extension or violation of probation.”