Category: Class War

Where are the angry mobs?

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

In The Nation, Frances Fox Piven, one of Glenn Beck’s favorite targets, raises an important question: How do we mobilize the jobless to political action?

As 2011 begins, nearly 15 million people are officially unemployed in the United States and another 11.5 million have either settled for part-time work or simply given up the search for a job. To regain the 5 percent unemployment level of December 2007, about 300,000 jobs would have to be created each month for several years. There are no signs that this is likely to happen soon. And joblessness now hits people harder because it follows in the wake of decades of stagnating worker earnings, high consumer indebtedness, eviscerated retirement funds and rollbacks of the social safety net.

So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?

It is not that there are no policy solutions. Left academics may be pondering the end of the American empire and even the end of neoliberal capitalism, and—who knows—in the long run they may be right. But surely there is time before the darkness settles to try to relieve the misery created by the Great Recession with massive investments in public-service programs, and also to use the authority and resources of government to spur big new initiatives in infrastructure and green energy that might, in fact, ward off the darkness.
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You get what you pay for

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

And when Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers union, he also eviscerated the worker protections that prevent things like this from happening:

WASHINGTON – Air traffic safety is under increased scrutiny by federal authorities following an incident in which two passenger jets landed without controller assistance at Reagan National Airport because no one could be reached in the airport tower.

An aviation official said that an air traffic supervisor — the lone controller on duty around midnight on Tuesday when the incident occurred — had fallen asleep. The official, who spoke on grounds of anonymity because an investigation is ensuing, said the incident has led the Federal Aviation Administration to launch a nationwide inquiry into airport tower staffing issues.

Peter Knudson, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday that the pilots of the two planes were in contact with controllers at a regional Federal Aviation Administration facility about 40 miles away in Warrenton, Va.

He said that after pilots were unable to raise the airport tower at Reagan by radio, they asked controllers in Warrenton to call the tower. Repeated calls from the regional facility to the tower went unanswered, Knudson added.

Responding to the incident, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement that he has directed FAA to put two air traffic controllers on the midnight shift at Reagan National.

“It is not acceptable to have just one controller in the tower managing air traffic in this critical air space,” LaHood said.

Reagan National is located in Northern Virginia just across the Potomac River from Washington. LaHood also said he has directed FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt to study tower staffing at other airports around the country.

Good thing this happened in D.C., where Very Important People care about their planes landing safely. Maybe even the rest of us will benefit from this cost-cutting clusterfuck.

Shameful

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

As Duncan says, file this under “someone should probably do something”:

President Obama’s former top economic advisor sharply criticized the federal government for failing to take more aggressive action against unemployment.

“I frankly don’t understand why policy makers aren’t more worried about the suffering of real families,” former Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer, who left the Administration last fall, said during a discussion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tuesday. “I think there are tools we have tools we have that we can use, and I think it’s shameful that we’re not using them.”

Romer had been a voice inside the Obama Administration pressing for a larger ecnomic stimulus and more aggressive government action from the early days of the Administration, and she’s continued to make that case from the outside in a New York Times column.

But the sharpness of her criticism reflected deep concern among many Democratic economists about a political consensus that the federal government has to rein in expensive attempts to restart the economy even as rising oil prices again put a damper on growth.

“We need to realize that there is still a lot of devastation out there,” Romer said, calling the 8.9% unemployment rate “an absolute crisis.”

“If I have a complaint about policy these days, it’s that we’re not doing enough,” she said. “That goes all the way up to the Federal Reserve, [which] could be taking more aggressive action. It goes to the Congress and the Administration – there are fiscal policy actions they could be taking.”

“And don’t tell me you can’t [take those actions] because of the deificit because I think there are fiscally responsible ways,” she said.

Jobs, jobs, jobs!

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

There’s no sign of Speaker John Boehner’s promised “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Instead, extremist teabagger Republicans are busily trying to take care of the already-rich, kick people when they’re down, and further weaken the ability of those who do have jobs to strike against employers:

All around the country, right-wing legislators are asking middle class Americans to pay for budget deficits caused mainly by a recession caused by Wall Street; they are attacking workers’ collective bargaining rights, which has provoked a huge Main Street Movement to fight back.

Now, a group of House Republicans is launching a new stealth attack against union workers. GOP Reps. Jim Jordan (OH), Tim Scott (SC), Scott Garrett (NJ), Dan Burton (IN), and Louie Gohmert (TX) have introduced H.R. 1135, which states that it is designed to “provide information on total spending on means-tested welfare programs, to provide additional work requirements, and to provide an overall spending limit on means-tested welfare programs.”

Much of the bill is based upon verifying that those who receive food stamps benefits are meeting the federal requirements for doing so. However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer.

The bill also includes a provision that would exempt households from losing eligibility, “if the household was eligible immediately prior to such strike, however, such family unit shall not receive an increased allotment as the result of a decrease in the income of the striking member or members of the household.”

Yet removing entire families from eligibility while a single adult family member is striking would have a chilling effect on workers who are considering going on strike for better wages, benefits, or working conditions — something that is especially alarming in light of the fact that unions are one of the fundamental building blocks of the middle class that allow people to earn wages that keep them off food stamps.

But here’s the punchline: Striking workers have been ineligible for food stamps for years. (The only way a striker is eligible right now is if you met the eligibility standards before you went on strike — and if you belong to a union, odds are, you didn’t.) So not only are teabagger Republicans just plain mean and pandering to special interests, they’re stupid to boot!

The bill also rolls back back spending on government assistance programs back to 2007 levels, plus inflation, once unemployment falls below 6.5 percent. (Well, at least we know that won’t be anytime soon!)

New Jersey’s Rep. Scott Garrett, a teabagger hero, is also busy trying to slash funding for the SEC – but denies that he’s doing it. (Says the fact that its spending has gone up so much since the market crash proves the agency has plenty of funding, thank you very much!) Oh, and he’s one of the Republicans who voted against extending the budget.

He’s also the guy who’s pushing for every bill to show “constitutional authority” for why Congress has the right to pass the bill.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the other person who wants to kick voters when they’re down? Was he working on “jobs, jobs, jobs”? Nope. He’s chair of the extremist Republican Study Committee, a caucus that exists to push House Republicans Further. To. The. Right.

Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) wasn’t working on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” either. He voted against the budget extension, too. Instead, he introduced a nasty little states-right bill:

“Last week, President Obama made an unprecedented decision to declare a Federal law unconstitutional and thereby abdicate his own constitutional responsibility to uphold and defend that law. Activist judges, and now an activist President, have been trying to unilaterally define marriage for too long. This issue should instead be decided once and for all by the American people and the states.

“That is why I have introduced the “Marriage Protection Act” which simply states that no Federal Courts will have jurisdiction to hear cases regarding same-sex marriage. Instead, the definition of same-sex unions would be determined by the people through their State legislatures or via referendum.

And he also sponsored a bill that would strip President Obama “of his power to waive a law requiring him to move the embassy to Jerusalem.”

Rep. Louis Gohmert? He’s from Texas and the author of the famous “terror babies” story. A real American!

Last but not least, South Carolina’s Rep. Tim Scott. The poor guy’s really got to prove himself – first, because he voted for the continuing resolution that extended the budget for three weeks, but also because he’s a black Republican. So he’s a member of the Club for Growth, plus he just introduced the Rising Tides Act of 2011.

And what does it do, exactly? It cuts the corporate income tax rate by 10% on companies making more than $10 million annually.

Where on earth are those jobs, jobs, jobs?

Virginity test

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I wonder if men will one day accept the radical notion that women are full human beings:

The international human rights group Amnesty International claimed Wednesday that a number of female protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were rounded up by the Egyptian military and tortured recently.

Some women even said they were subjected to a “virginity test” while soldiers looked on and took pictures.

Amnesty said at least 18 different women were subjected to this treatment, first at a military prison, then inside the Cairo Museum.

The women claimed they were beaten and tortured with electric shocks, and one woman who allegedly “failed” her virginity test was reportedly singled out for the worst abuse.

“20-year-old Salwa Hosseini told Amnesty International that after she was arrested and taken to a military prison in Heikstep, she was made, with the other women, to take off all her clothes to be searched by a female prison guard, in a room with two open doors and a window,” the group explained. “During the strip search, Salwa Hosseini said male soldiers were looking into the room and taking pictures of the naked women.”

All of them were taken on March 9, as the military cleared Tahrir Square of demonstrators.

“Women and girls must be able to express their views on the future of Egypt and protest against the government without being detained, tortured, or subjected to profoundly degrading and discriminatory treatment,” Amnesty said in an advisory. “The army officers tried to further humiliate the women by allowing men to watch and photograph what was happening, with the implicit threat that the women could be at further risk of harm if the photographs were made public.”