The leadership of the AFL-CIO let the Democrats know that they were trying to burn the wrong crowd with their attempt to drop a public option from the Healthcare reform bill currently in the Senate.
One of the country’s most prominent union officials is warning that big labor may pull its support from Democrats who don’t fight for a government-run insurance plan.
In an interview with the Huffington Post on Saturday, Richard Trumka, the secretary-treasurer and likely next president of the AFL-CIO, said his federation is drawing a line in the sand when it comes to a public option in the health care bill. Lawmakers who don’t support the provision, he said, shouldn’t take anything for granted.
“We’ll look at every one of their votes,” Trumka said after his speech at the Netroots Nation convention. “If they’re against the Employee Free Choice Act, if they’re against health care for that reason, I think it’ll be tough for them to get support from working people.”
I agree completely. I worked hard to get the Democrats in office. I knocked on doors in a state that has voted red for 30 years and helped turn that state blue for the first time in a very very long time. Now the Democrats want to pretend they don’t owe us, THE PEOPLE, anything? I say the reverse is true, I don’t owe the Democrats anything. If they can’t do this with a super majority in both houses they’ll never do it. And with this super majority we can see them for the corporate whores that they all are.
I’m saying it now and unambiguously: If there is no public health option by 2010, I don’t care who did or did not vote for it, I won’t be voting for the Democrats. PERIOD. And all that energy I spent putting the Democrats into office I’ll spend trying to get a new Labor party or Green party official that I can trust into office.
Since I happen to live in Nancy Pelosi’s district, I hope she takes notice. I’m not kidding.
Over on HuffingtonPost.com today a couple of Republi-thugs were posting in the comments that “at least Bush kept us safe.”
I would like to, for the record, point out that very few Americans died on or off American soil as a result of Clinton’s actions. On the other hand, Bush’s failure to follow up on warnings from Clinton’s administration, and threats from terrorists, we ended up with 9/11. That day could have gone much differently, either completely avoided, or at least damages mitigated, had Bush and his advisor’s done their jobs.
In the case of New Orleans, Bush’s administration once again failed to “keep us safe” by cutting funding to levy repair projects. When those inadequate levies failed, he then continued to NOT “keep us safe” by failing entirely to react to the crisis. How many civilians died over the next two weeks while the Bush administration sat on it’s hands? Heck of a Good Job Bush.
Now off our soul, what about Iraq? The failure of the Bush administration to properly gather and comprehend intelligence that stated outright that the Nigerian Yellow Cake report was falsified, as well as easily disprovable assertions, resulted in the death to this day of 4,500 American soldiers. And what have they died for? What have we gained as a nation from the unseating of Saddam? We’re more hated than ever. Al Qaeda is stronger than ever due to the recruiting tool know as the “Iraq War.”
And these Republi-thugs think that “Bush kept us safe?” What world have they been living in?
The .01% that claims it cannot pay living wages to Americans while throwing $300,000 parties for their daughters 16th birthday continued to get richer last year while the rest of us hunted for scraps.
In a truly disturbing paper by a noted Berkeley professor the facts were laid out: a full 6% of all income is earned by the top .01% of people in this country.
SIX. PERCENT.
This distribution of wealth is the worst it has EVER been in the United States, even worse than it was in the Gilded Age leading to the great depression.
EQCA and HRC have decided to wait until 2012 to pursue repeal of the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment in California.
It’s been interesting to watch HRC since Prop 8 passed. They were obviously caught off guard as the gays responded angrily and energetically to Prop 8’s passage, what with having a spa night scheduled in San Francisco just days after the election (yes, I know, they scheduled that in advance, but no one seriously thought losing Prop 8 was outside the realm of possibility going into the election). They celebrated Obama’s election, then laid low for a while, issuing the occasional press release, but staying out of trouble and avoiding interviews. Belerico
I stopped being a fan of the HRC about 7 years ago when they dropped transsexuals from inclusion because they were inconvenient at the time.
EQCA bothers me quite a bit because their leader isn’t willing to fight. After Prop 8 passed in California at the protest she stood in front of the several hundred people and told us to love an enemy that would rather kill us than hug us. Stupid. And now she gets to keep her job for two additional years making big bucks as a non-profit’s head.
The Texas School Board is ordering special “dumbed down for Texans” school books because their populace is too stupid to handle actual at-grade level materials. Lauri Lebo has more information:
If any question remains about the religious and political motivations of certain members of the Texas Board of Education, one need only read the words of their social studies curriculum experts.
Rev. Peter Marshall, for example, one of their appointed academic experts, wants to restore America, according to the website of his Massachusetts-based ministry, “to its Bible-based foundations through preaching, teaching, and writing on America’s Christian heritage and on Christian discipleship and revival.” He also believes that Hurricane Katrina, Watergate and the Vietnam War are the result of divine wrath.
As part of his curriculum review for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills process, Marshall issued an assessment of a Grade 5 history section in which students are asked to “describe the accomplishments of significant colonial leaders such as Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, John Smith and Roger Williams.”
Marshall, along with his fellow reviewer David Barton, did not believe that students in the public education system should learn about Hutchinson: [ReligionDispatches]
It is really too bad that Texans are so stupid that the school board feels they need to dumb down the education they get so that those mindless idiots can understand what they’re told.
Sadly, the ramifications of this is that we since Texan is the second largest purchaser of textbooks in the country, all of us are likely to end up with dumbed down Texas editions of the new textbook.
As UHC has seen fit to insight violence against our congress, the representatives of the people, UHC is no longer fulfilling the role of public good that a corporation’s charter requires them to fulfill.
We must demand that our representatives revoke the corporate charter of UHC.
The citizens of every state, acting through their attorney general, have, and have always had, the legal authority to go to court to revoke the charters of corporations that violate the law. This means that lawbreaking corporations can be dissolved, put out of business, their assets sold to others under a judge’s order that will protect jobs, the environment and the public interest.
In our democracy, corporations have no inherent right to exist. They exist by the permission of we the people acting through the legislature, the attorney general and the courts. Since we the people attach strings to the privilege of doing business in the corporate form (such as the condition that corporations actually obey the law!), when those conditions are violated we the people are perfectly free to yank those strings and pull the charters from offending companies.
Attorneys general used the legal tool of corporate charter revocation fairly frequently in the l9th century. In our own time, it has been less common but it remains on the books in every state and is occasionally invoked. In California, in 1976 the attorney general used it to force a private water company out of business for delivering contaminated water to its customers. The attorney general of New York state used this tool in 1998 in conjunction with other tobacco litigation to put the Council for Tobacco Research, a New York corporation, out of business and order its assets donated to state education and health institutions.
Most attorneys general, however, are letting this law enforcement de vice gather dust in their desk drawers. They don’t even want you to know about it because the truth is they are soft on corporate crime and the corporate takeover of our democracy.
Attorneys general and big business want you to think that the cozy system of “government regulation” is working and nothing stronger is necessary. But the regulatory agencies that are supposed to keep corporations safe for the rest of us have been captured by the businesses they are assigned to oversee. The agencies are sucked into the quicksand of year-long efforts to protect the public one toxic spill at a time, one layoff at a time, one civil rights violation at a time. In the end, too often the corporations walk away with a light fine that they deduct from their taxes as a cost of doing business. And attorneys general get re-elected by deceptively boasting about the fines they imposed on polluters and other corporate criminals, never admitting that they could and should have put some of these incorrigible repeat offenders out of existence forever.
How many times have we watched the Republican’s bully the Democrats, the Judiciary, and election officials only to have them cave completely? How many times have the Democrats responded to threats of violence by tucking their tales between their legs and walking away rather than standing their ground?
By God we have a SUPER MAJORITY in congress. We have every right to do as the people have asked us to: restore the constitution, create a national health system, and remove the corporations’ grip on government.
Yet here we are today, the Democrats have started to waffle, lead by our number one man Obama. Ultimately the Democrats should respond to the threats of violence with their own big gun: a completely free and open public health care system and the abolition of health insurance companies entirely.
Congress has the right to charter, or remove the charter, of a corporation if it should stop doing the public good. In the case of the health insurance corporations they are outright threatening a violent coup. We most revoke their corporate charters.
Southern Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords [picture left] faced conservative operatives, shipped in by coporations to oppose the Democrats’ health care proposals, and voicing threats of violence. It was then that the unbelievable happened, the fascism loving Republican operatives dropped a gun in the middle of the town hall meeting.
The police were called by staffers.
The Republican owned media is waking their long sleeping brain washed masses. These people don’t believe in peaceful protest. They don’t believe in democracy. They believe in ruling through any means neccessary and they are willing to overturn our will using guns. We are heading into dangerous waters.
Southern Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords [picture left] faced conservative operatives, shipped in by coporations to oppose the Democrats’ health care proposals, and voicing threats of violence. It was then that the unbelievable happened, the fascism loving Republican operatives dropped a gun in the middle of the town hall meeting.