Censored Whig Letters

Leo W. Gerard
International President, United Steelworkers
September 3, 2010

On Labor Day, Work to Save the Middle Class

This Labor Day feels gloomy. It’s a celebration of work when there is not enough of it, a day off when too many desperately seek a day on.

America has commemorated two Labor Days since this brutal recession began near the end of George Bush’s presidency in December of 2007. Now the relentless high unemployment, the ever-rising foreclosures, the unremitting wage and benefit take-backs have replaced American optimism and enthusiasm with fear and anger.

Happy Labor Day.

On this holiday, we can rant with Glenn Beck, kick the dog and hate the neighbor lucky enough to retain his job. Or we can do something different. We can join with our neighbors, employed and unemployed, our foreclosed-on children, our elderly parents fearing cuts in their Social Security lifeline and our fellow workers worrying that the furlough ax will strike them next. Together we can organize and mobilize and create a grassroots groundswell that gives government no choice but to respond to our needs, the needs of working people.

We can do what workers did during the Great Depression to provoke change, to create programs like Social Security and achieve recognition of rights like collective bargaining. These changes were sought by groups to benefit groups. In a civil society, people care for one another. And America is such a society – one where people routinely donate blood to aid anonymous strangers, children set up lemonade stands to contribute to Katrina victims and working families find a few bucks for United Way.

The self-righteous Right is all about individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. That proposition – the do-it-all- by-yourself-winner-takes-all philosophy – clearly failed because so many Americans are jobless, homeless and too penniless to afford boots.

Over the past decade, the winner who took all was Wall Street. The banksters gambled on derivatives and other risky financial tomfoolery and won big time. Until they lost. And crashed the economy. After the American taxpayer bailed them out, those wealthy traders returned to making huge profits and bonuses based on perilous schemes.

Still, they believe they haven’t taken enough from working Americans. They’re lobbying to end aid for those who remain unemployed in a recession caused by Wall Street recklessness. And they’re demanding extension of their Bush-given tax breaks. This is the nation’s upper 1 percent, people who earn a million or more each year, the 1 percent that took home 56 percent of all income growth between 1989 and 2007, the year the recession began.

Since 2007, 8.2 million workers have lost jobs. Millions more are underemployed, laboring part-time when they need full-time jobs, or barely squeaking by on slashed wages and benefits. Since the recession began, the unemployment rate nearly doubled, from 5 percent to 9.6 percent, and that does not include those so discouraged that they’ve given up the search for jobs, a decision that is, frankly, understandable when there are only enough openings to re-employ 20 percent of the jobless. Five unemployed workers compete for each job created in this sluggish economy.

And American workers weren’t prepared for this downturn, having already suffered losses in the years before it began. The median income, adjusted for inflation, of working-age households declined by more than $2,000 in the seven years before the recession started.

At the same time, practices like off-shoring jobs and signing regressive international trade deals contributed to the loss of middle class, blue collar jobs. A new report, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market,” by the Center for American Progress and The Hamilton Project, says:
“The decline in middle-skill jobs has been detrimental to the earnings and labor force participation rates of workers without a four-year college education, and differentially so for males, who are increasingly concentrated in low-paying service occupations.”

The recession compounded that, the report says:
“Employment losses during the recession have been far more severe in middle-skilled white- and blue-collar jobs than in either high-skill, white-collar jobs or low-skill service occupations.”

What that means is high roller banksters are living large; lawn care workers and waitresses subsist on minimum wage, and working class machinists and steelworkers are disappearing altogether.

The researchers found the U.S. economy is increasingly polarized into high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low wage jobs. America is losing the middle jobs and with them its great middle class.

No wonder the rising anger in middle-class America.

But fury doesn’t solve the problem. This Labor Day, we must organize to save ourselves and our neighbors. We must stop America from descending into plutocracy. We must demand support for American manufacturing and middle class jobs. That means terminating tax breaks for corporate outsourcers, ending trade practices that violate agreements and international law and punishing predator countries for currency manipulation that subverts fair trade by artificially lowering the price of products shipped into the U.S. while artificially raising the price of American exports.

We must demand support for American industry, particularly manufacturers of renewable energy sources like solar cells and wind turbines that create good working class jobs, increase America’s energy independence and reduce climate change.

We must insist on policies that support the middle class, including preserving Social Security and Medicare, extending unemployment insurance while joblessness remains high, and enforcing the health care reform law so that every American worker and family can afford and is covered by insurance.

On this Labor Day, we should all have a picnic, invite neighbors, friends and family, and over hot dogs and potato salad, organize to save the American middle class.

Mobilize to end the gloom and restore American optimism.

***

For help: the Union of the Unemployed, the AFL-CIO, USW, Working America. Join the One Nation March for jobs Oct. 2 in Washington, D.C.

All:

Rich Trumka is talking this Labor Day about the need for Economic Patriotism. It’s a message/theme we think will resonate–certainly among working people and the millions of jobless workers–and one that certainly can apply in many ways: EG: Corporations acting anti-patriotic by moving jobs out of this country. (In the much-discussed New York Times artilcle yesterday on Wall Street deserting Obama, this graf buried toward the end hit me hard:

***Just last week, Paul S. Otellini, chief executive of Intel, said at a dinner at the Aspen Forum of the Technology Policy Institute that “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here.”

Mr. Otellini has overseen two big acquisitions in the last two weeks — the $7.7 billion takeover of the security software maker McAfee and the $1.4 billion deal for the wireless chip unit of InfineonTechnologies. If he is true to his word, those deals will most likelylead to job cuts in the United States, not job creation.***

Piling on to not only call out such behaviors but cast them for what they are–unpatriotic, anti-American–can help us take back the ground grabbed by reactionaries for so long, with the Tea Party just the latest manifestation of such warped usage of the red, white and blue.

Also, check out our national television ad running this Labor Day weekend during baseball, NASCAR and college football events:

www.aflcio.org

It’s downloadable from our homepage.

Tula

……………………………………….
Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor
815 16th St., N.W.
Washington, DC 20006
www.aflcio.org

Follow the AFL-CIO at
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AFL-CIO/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AFLCIO
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/AFLCIONow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 5, 2010

CONTACT:

Sue Walitsky 202-224-4524 or 202-320-0819

CARDIN LAUDS SENATE ACTION TO SAVE TEACHERS AND FIRST RESPONDERS FROM BUDGET CUTS

Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD) praised Senate passage today of emergency funding that would prevent mass layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers and first responders across the nation.

“Local communities throughout Maryland and across the nation are finally feeling relief today with the long-awaited Senate passage of $26 billion in aid to our states, $10 billion of which will help prevent 140,000 teachers and 150,000 first responders from being laid off. For Maryland, this emergency measure, which is fully paid for and adds zero dollars to our federal deficit, means an estimated $178 million for education, which translates into 2,200 jobs.

“The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act has been credited with saving 300,000 education jobs and has helped to lessen the impact of the recession. As that funding comes to an end, however, massive job cuts threatened to stall economic recovery and damage our children’s education. Thus far, almost 80% of school districts across the nation have had to lay off educators. Maryland, which is number one in the nation in education, according to Education Week for the second year in a row, has not been immune. Prince George’s County alone has seen 800 jobs cut, 355 of those were classroom positions. These job losses have an economic ripple effect. The Economic Policy Institute projects that every 100,000 education jobs lost causes an additional loss of 30,000 private sector jobs in local communities. This can take a devastating toll on families and on whole communities. The Senate had to act. As our children prepare to go back to school, I am thankful that we were able to keep teachers in the classroom, school bus drivers on their routes and school nurses and counselors in place to ensure our children’s safety.”

Is the Republican Victory Plan Another Great Depression?

It seems like the Republicans in Congress have decided that sabotaging economic recovery and employment growth is their best tactic for electoral gains in the November elections. Indications of this plan have been around since the Democratic victories in 2008. It seems that all doubt about facilitating the economic downturn as a path to political power for Republicans have been removed by recent legislative votes.

Economic recessions and depressions almost always result from insufficient “effective” consumer demand for goods and services produced domestically. In economic terms, wanting something is not “effective demand” . For a want to become a demand for goods or services, it must accompany the desire to buy with the ability to actually purchase. Money is required.

Jobs are not created by just having large pools of investment money available. There must be the opportunity to invest in a business that will have customers who can buy the goods and services before the investment money flows into job creation activities. The Republican Right economic theory that economic prosperity and employment ” trickle-down from the wealthy” has proven to be unsound by historical experience.

Tax cuts for the wealthy create huge investment money pools but not jobs. Our nation has plenty of money setting idle in corporate and personal coffers. Corporations have almost a trillion dollars setting essentially idle in corporate accounts at this time.

Republicans are seeking to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy by falsely stating that increases in taxes for the upper 2% of income earners would hurt demand and prolong the economic downturn. Experience and history prove otherwise.

Tax cuts at the highest marginal incomes brackets do concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the economic elite. The resulting political power by the economic elite pushes government policy in directions that dramatically cut the percentage of the nation’s wealth and income held by the vast majority of Americans. This reduces the ability of most Americans to buy goods and services. As a result, the economy unwinds because customers do not have enough disposable income to keep the flow of goods and services at a healthy economic level. The former middle class disposable income now controlled by the economic elite funds speculation and unsound “bubbles” in the economy instead of a healthy economy because sound businesses now lack paying customers.

Deregulation helps corporations charge excessive prices. Not enforcing anti-monopoly laws permits price gouging. Not capping interest rates concentrates wealth and reduces consumer spending. Outsourcing jobs to foreign nations reduces incomes available to buy goods and services. Union-busting keeps wages and benefits down which undermines the purchasing power of workers.

Privatizing government services costs consumers more in out of pocket expenses once provided by government. This reduces disposable income for these consumers. When employers reduce benefits and increase co-pays, it increases the cost-of-living for workers. As a result, these workers have less disposable income to spend on goods and services.

Middle class tax cuts do help the economy because they increase the disposable income of those members of society who spend the vast majority of their incomes and have little left over to save. The money changes hands over and over again instead of setting idle. This is the multiplier effect in economics.

Extending unemployment benefits has a huge multiplier effect. This is because unemployment benefits are so low that essentially all of it gets spent on goods and services immediately.

Excessive concentration of wealth and income unwinds our economy. All the Republican policies for the past 100 years have been designed to concentrate wealth and income in the hands of the very few. Every time they reach the economic concentration levels that currently exist, we have a serious depression. This is a direct result of increasingly “Republicanized” governmental policies over the previous 30 years.

Economic concentration of wealth and income are currently at levels very similar to those just before the Great Depression in 1929. The only reason our current situation has not quite deteriorated to that of the last Great Depression is that the Republicans have not been completely successful in undoing the reforms put in place as a result of the New Deal. Despite repeated attacks by Republicans our social safety net remains only damaged but not destroyed. It is not from lack of trying by Republican politicians.

Republican attempts to gut Social Security continue. Privatization keeps coming back to threaten the stability and viability of Social Security. Cutting Social Security benefits instead of increasing revenue seems to be the most effective avenue for the current attack. This approach is being pushed by most Republicans and some corporatist Democrats. A wiser economic approach would be to remove the income ceiling over which Social Security tax is not paid.

Why should almost all workers be taxed at over 13% while those making a million a year are paying closer to 1% and those making 10 million dollars a year are taxed at around 1/10th of 1% on their income? Social Security taxes are the most regressive tax system I know of in our current system. The poor and middle classes pay much, much more in percentage terms than the wealthy.

For decades, working people have been paying in far more than the current needs for each respective year of Social Security payments. These surpluses were “borrowed” by the federal government so they could fund annual deficits created by cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, cutting taxes on corporations by huge margins and nearly eliminating taxes on imports. It is only fair that corporations, wealthy Americans and foreign exporters selling in the American market pay higher taxes to fund these previous decades of “borrowing” since they reaped the benefits of that “borrowing”.

Republicans only want to look at cutting benefits instead of making Social Security taxes fairer by equalizing the Social Security tax rate for all income levels! These Republicans do not want to pay back the Social Security tax money borrowed by the federal government to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, fight two wars on credit and allow the near elimination of taxes on imports.

Sound economics says government should run surpluses in good economic times and deficits during economic downturns. Following this advice helps reduce the severity of economic cycles. Under the Republican Presidencies of Reagan and both George Bushes, we did exactly the opposite and created both the current downturn and the debt crisis. The vast majority of our total national debt developed under these three conservative Republican Presidents.

Currently, the Republicans in Congress have fought every measure to increase employment and help small businesses. They have fought all kinds of economic reforms that would curb corporate abuses of consumers, shareholders or workers. They have fought all attempts to curb excessive corporate political or economic power. They have been against any measures that would increase demand for goods and services or levels of employment.

By their actions, it is hard not to conclude that the Republicans want to worsen the economic downturn until it reaches Great Depression levels. The economic downturn was created by “Republicanizing” our economy and the Republicans want to blame the Democrats instead! With tons of corporate money behind them and a corporate dominated media helping them, it might just work.

Written by Stephen Crockett (host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com). Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702. Email: demlabor@aol.com. Phone: 443-907-2367.

Feel free to publish without prior approval.

www.americansunitedforchange.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Lauren Weiner, 202-470-5870
July 29, 2010 Jeremy Funk, 202-470-5878

Senate Republicans Offer “Alternative” to Democratic Bill to Hold BP Fully Accountable for Devastating the Gulf Coast: ‘Do the Polar Opposite’

Huffington Post: GOP’s Oil-Spill Liability Bill Would Have BP Only Paying $150 Million

Washington DC – Senate Republicans wasted no time this week unveiling a big-oil-friendly “alternative” to the Democratic Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability Act, oil-spill-victim-focused legislation that would hold BP fully financially accountable for the cost of the Gulf Coast oil disaster, lower energy costs and create over 160,000 jobs through investments in energy-efficiency, and cut down the nation’s dependence on oil.

Yesterday, Senator David Vitter (R-La.), who has taken $791,335 from the big oil and gas industry, laid out the Grand Oil Party’s plan for letting BP off the hook for their recklessness — with the American taxpayers in its stead. As reported by the Huffington Post: “Under the leading Republican plan for BP’s post-spill economic liability, those affected would receive potentially as little as $150 million due to the oil giant’s expected record loss in this latest quarter.”

Tom McMahon, Executive Director, Americans United for Change: “No surprises here – just outrage. While the well has been dry on new ideas and real solutions from Congressional Republicans for some time now, you can always count on them to offer “alternative” legislation whenever the bottom line of their big corporate donors is threatened. For all their talk about the deficit, not even the biggest oil spill disaster in U.S. history could give Senate Republicans pause before seriously proposing something that would put taxpayers on the hook for the untold billions of dollars in damages BP left in its wake.

“For all their talk about jobs, Senate Republicans will no doubt work overtime to block this legislation that will put over 160,000 Americans back to work through smart investments in energy efficiency. After creating zero net private sector jobs and turning a record surplus into a record deficit during the Bush years, Republicans in Congress are not the economic stewards they think they are. These Republicans need to stop asking themselves, ‘What would Bush do?” or “What does BP want us to do?” and start asking themselves “How can we help clean up the mess we made?”

MORE FROM HUFFINGTON POST:

[T]he GOP has rallied around a counter-proposal, authored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that would cap an oil company’s liability at an amount equal to its profits of the last four quarters. If the company had not made a profit in the past four quarters, it would be liable for $150 million (or twice the current cap).

To be sure, BP still has a chance to turn around its profit margin during the next three quarters. But in terms of net earnings, it is now operating out of a $17 billion hole. If Vitter’s version of economic liability legislation were the law of the land, there would be open concern about the damage payments that Gulf residents would end up recouping. As a Democratic operative working on the issue notes:

When Vitter introduced the bill, we pointed out that one of the co-owners of the Deepwater Horizon rig, Andarko, had not made a profit in the last year. But with this news today, if BP doesn’t overcome this quarter’s losses, next year they could be responsible for a disaster as bad as or worse than the one in the Gulf and they would only be liable for $150 million if Vitter’s bill were law.

UPDATE: An astute reader points out that another Senate candidate, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), has sponsored legislation similar to Vitter’s in the House.

The Tea Party “Catch 22”

The Tea Party movement has started to come unglued over a series of internal contradictions that amount to an identity crisis. The Tea Party is caught in a “Catch 22” position that has largely been ignored by the corporate mainstream media.

Just this morning I watched a local PBS show where a Republican operative claimed that the Tea Party movement was not “Republican, Right Wing or racist.” The comment appears to be the Republican Right Wing official spin on all things “Tea Party” in nature. Unfortunately, the claim really lacks credibility because it conflicts with the facts on the ground all over the nation.

Anyone who really watched the development of the Tea Party movement, as part of the anti-healthcare reform effort, understands that it was a creation of Fox News and corporate funded Right Wing Republican operatives. Despite many claims to the contrary, it brought very few new faces into the political process.

What the Tea Party public relations campaign did was simply “re-brand” the various largely discredited, Right Wing fringe elements in the Republican Party under a new name. It did con the mainstream corporate media very effectively into calling blatant corporatist, economic elitist policies “populist.” It was a bad joke that the media completely missed or just ignored.

Like the fake ACORN pimp and voter registration scandals, the storyline falls apart completely when the details are examined in any detail. The spin relies on manufactured “facts” that are really outrageous lies being told over and over again. In time, the storyline falls apart but often the damage has been done. It appears the mainstream corporate media has learned absolutely nothing from their Iraq War-Weapons of Mass Deception experience.

The reality is that there is probably not much of a Tea Party movement outside of Republican Right Wing corporate control. When it comes to economic populism, the Tea Party has either been completely missing in action or in outright opposition to every proposal that is populist in nature.

Our middle class has been under constant attack by corporate forces for decades. The Reagan-Bush Republicans have been pushing changes in government policy that benefit only the most elite of economic elitists for 30 years. American workers are being driven out of the middle class by government policy and market power. The Republican Right has successfully placed many of the levers of power in government in the hands of the corporatist economic elite. Some Democrats assisted parts of this corporate take-over of government but it was overwhelmingly Republican effort.

The government is not the enemy if it is controlled by the majority of middle class Americans. It is a check on excessive corporate power under those circumstances.

The genius behind the Tea Party campaign is that it is a corporate created public relations/political campaign designed to promote pro-corporate economic policies via government while calling the movement “anti-corporate and anti-government.” The racism angle is a just a way to hook “poor and middle class whites” into an effort designed to economically benefit the wealthiest of the wealthy at the expense of “the poor and middle class of all colors.”

Racism has long been used to divide working Americans up along color lines so they do not demand a better deal from the economic and political elite. Racism serves an economic purpose and always has served an economic purpose. Racism is a sucker bet for working Americans. It has been a key element in building the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party since Richard Nixon. Republican Right wing economic policies are a disaster for 90% of Americans and social wedge issues including race have been the key to Republican victories for more than a generation.

If the Tea Party was really a new creature, it would be fielding third party candidates everywhere under the Tea Party name. Republican and Right Wing operatives claim it is independent of the Republican Party but at the same time strongly oppose real independence. The Republican Party is the Tea Party. The Tea Party is just the most extreme elements of the Republican Party devoted to driving any remaining moderates out of the Republican Party.

You cannot support Pat Toomey-Club for Growth economic policies and still claim to be a populist movement. You have to support economic policies that increase the wages of American workers, support government measures to help the unemployed, curtail the ability of corporations to move jobs outside the United States and sell untaxed imports in our country, shift the tax burden back in the direction of corporations and the Super Wealthy instead of putting it on the middle classes and seek to regulate corporate market power to be an economic populist.

Economic populists do not make excuses for BP like Rand Paul or Sharon Angle. Economic populists do not oppose government deficits during a severe economic downturn nor support government deficits in good economic times, like the Republicans are doing. Opposing better access to affordable healthcare is not a populist position. Giving massive tax cuts to wealthy people while our government is running massive deficits and local governments are firing teachers, firefighters and police is simply stupid economics and has nothing to do with economic populism.

If the Tea Party is” populist” in nature, as they claim, then the policies they support should demonstrate that populism. If the Tea Party is independent of the Republican Party, then they should field independent candidates in the November general elections to prove their independence. If the Tea Party is not racist, then they should condemn the expression of racism from within their movement every time they occur. If the Tea Party is not an expression of extreme Right Wing sentiments, then they should stop supporting the political agenda of the Far Right.

American voters will learn in coming months just how fake and flakey the Tea Party con job is by watching the Tea Party Republicans seeking office in November. You will learn nothing about this from Fox News but the mainstream media should not drop the ball on this story in 2010. The voters deserve a real discussion about the unreality of the Tea Party reality.

Written by Stephen Crockett (Host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com ). Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702. Phone: 443-907-2367. Email: demlabor@aol.com.

Feel free to publish without prior approval.

DEMS, GOP READING SAME POLL

House Democrats gathered on yesterday to discuss the results of a national survey on the deficit and manufacturing that House Republicans were passing around late last week. Digging into the survey, which was paid for by the Alliance for American Manufacturing and done by Dem Mark Mellman and GOPer Whit Ayers, hints at an answer to why people are so passionate about the deficit: It’s about jobs. Asking whether Congress should address the deficit or the jobless crisis, therefore, is the wrong question. Create jobs and the deficit concern goes away. Reading into the survey, you find that people relate the deficit to indebtedness to China and indebtedness to China is a proxy for American decline and the collapse of manufacturing, a huge concern among voters. About 45% of respondents said the biggest problem is that “we are too deep in debt to China,” the highest-ranking concern, 58% of folks said the U.S. is no longer the strongest economy, with China being the overwhelming alternative people identified. Three-quarters had an unfavorable view of goods made in China and 83% felt the same toward companies that set up shop there. The number one objection people had to China was the $2 trillion the country holds in U.S. debt. Asked how to improve the economy, the number one solution provided by voters was to “crack down on foreign countries who violate their trade agreements with us.” The survey: http://bit.ly/d4gv1F

Free Trade Agreement with Korea will cost U.S. jobs
Robert E. Scott
July 1, 2010

The Obama administration has announced that it intends to finalize a new free trade agreement with South Korea (KORUS FTA) in time for the next G-20 summit in November. Although the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) projects this will have a small positive impact on the U.S. trade balance, and “minimal or negligible “ impact on U.S. employment, history shows that such trade deals lead to rapidly growing trade deficits and job loss in the United States.

The Charts below compare USITC’s estimates of the impact of the forthcoming free trade agreement with Korea to EPI’s own calculation. Unlike USITC’s forecast of a small positive impact, EPI’s research shows it will increase the U.S. trade deficit with Korea by about $16.7 billion, and displace about 159,000 American jobs within the first seven years after it takes effect…..

Click on this link to see charts mentioned above EPI link

The GOP’s Genetic Link to Big Oil
Wednesday 30 June 2010

by: Jim Hightower, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

If scientists were to compare the DNA of Republican congress-critters and of oil corporations, I’ll bet they’d find that they match perfectly. After all, the two species have identical political instincts and seem to have a natural affinity for each other — so I’m pretty sure they sprang from the same genetic pool.

How else can you explain the remarkable gusher of compassion that Republican lawmakers are presently directing toward Big Oil in general and BP in particular? For example, only hours after winning his party’s nomination for a Kentucky Senate seat, GOP teabag darling Rand Paul was on national TV decrying Barack Obama as “un-American” for daring to demand that BP be held accountable for its human and ecological destruction in the Gulf of Mexico.

Next came Minnesota’s Lioness of Loopiness, Michelle Bachmann, implying that the hard-hit people of the gulf are shiftless moochers who’re using the oil disaster to grab corporate cash. Brimming with tears of compassion, the kooky congresswoman wailed that, “(BP) shouldn’t have to be fleeced and made chumps to have to pay for perpetual unemployment and all the rest.”

And who can ever forget the astonishing public apology to BP’s CEO by the oil-soaked Texas Republican Joe Barton? After Obama had gotten agreement from BP to set aside $20 billion to cover some of the damages it has caused, Barton called Obama’s actions a presidential “shakedown.” He asserted that it made him “ashamed” to live in America, and he obsequiously begged forgiveness from the reckless CEO whose faulty wells killed 11 American workers and continues to do inestimable economic and ecological harm……

Read the rest of this article at
http://www.truth-out.org/jim-hightower-the-gops-genetic-link-big-oil60922

Wall Street Front Group Celebrates Record Success Electing Radical Pro-Corporate, Pro-BP Candidates

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/06/26/clubforgrowth-radical-sucess/

Roll Call’s John McArdle reported this week that the radical Wall Street front group “Club for Growth” is “celebrating” a near perfect winning streak this election cycle so far, especially given the results in run-off elections last Tuesday. The Club is known for running hard-hitting attack ads, especially in Republican primaries, against candidates who would consider raising any form of taxes on the rich or have done anything to hold powerful corporations accountable. Noting the Club’s historic role of purging moderates from the GOP, Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-OH) is quoted in the article calling it the “Spanish Inquisition.”

Chaired by prominent Wall Street investors like Thomas Rhodes and Richard Gilder, as well as the wealthy and reclusive Howie Rich, the Club collects funds from employees of J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, while being buoyed by large donations like a $1.4 million contribution from investor Stephen Jacksons of Stephens Groups Inc. The hand-picked candidates of the Club claim to lead the tea party movement, even though polls show that 70% of self identified tea partiers want the government to help create jobs, and nearly half want government to rein in executive bonuses.

Despite this contradiction, the Club-endorsed primary winners are already tacking to the extreme, pro-corporate right. For example, with BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Club candidates are rushing to defend the rights of corporations over the rights of the American victims of the catastrophe:

– State Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC), the Club-endorsed candidate to win in the primary run-off for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, attacked Democrats for holding hearings to investigate BP’s crimes. In a post on his website, Scott said, “Democratic lawmakers seem to enjoy hauling CEOs before their committees so they can grandstand and condescend to them.”

– Mike Lee (R-UT), the Club-endorsed candidate who won in the primary run-off for the Utah Senate seat, said recently that he wants to keep the low $75 million dollar liability cap for companies like BP. Lee said it would be a “mistake” to raise the liability cap for companies like BP and Anadarko, even if maintaining the status quo leaves “taxpayers on the hook for part of the damage.” Lee said he wanted taxpayers, rather than BP, to pay for the oil spill because the low liability cap was part of a “set of settled expectations that you give to a business when it decides to make an investment.”

– Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the Club-endorsed candidate who defeated incumbent Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) in the primary run-off last Tuesday, was asked in a debate last week if he agrees with Rep. Joe Barton’s (R-TX) apology to BP executives. Gowdy recommended that Barton should have “stuck by his guns” and not apologize for apologizing to BP. He then said that the Obama administration should not “use the criminal justice system to extort money” from BP.

– Sharron Angle (R-NV), the Club-endorsed candidate who won in the Nevada Senate primary, told Nevada Newsmakers that in the wake of BP’s spill, the government needs to further deregulate the oil industry.

– Jeff Duncan (R-SC), the Club-endorsed candidate who won the GOP nomination in the South Carolina 3rd Congressional district run-off, closed his campaign by arguing for expanded offshore drilling last week. As one of South Carolina’s most right-wing state lawmakers, Duncan proudly refers to himself as a “states’ rights” politician.

– Mike Pompeo (R-KS), the oil executive and Club-endorsed candidate in Kansas’ 4th Congressional district, said his first reaction to BP’s oil spill was the “fervent hope that Congress doesn’t overreact” and curtail dangerous offshore drilling.

While much has been reported on the impact of the tea parties and their role in elections this year, the true driver for the hard right are corporate front groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth. Using Wall Street cash, these fronts have helped to boost a cadre faux populists who are really just shills for large banks and foreign oil giants like BP. Notably, financial conglomerate J.P. Morgan, which funds the Club, is one of the largest shareholders of BP.