Censored Whig Letters

Boycott FedEx

By Chris Hedges

Dean Henderson’s career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed into his company truck and mangled his leg. His doctor will decide this week if it needs to be amputated. No longer able to drive, stripped of value in our commodity culture, he was tossed aside by the company. He became human refuse. He spends most of his days, because of the swelling and the pain, with his leg raised on a recliner in the tiny apartment in Fairfax, Va., he shares with his stepsister. He struggles without an income and medical insurance, and he fears his future.

Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they work—Henderson made $18 an hour—and they are abandoned when they can no longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost of unfettered capitalism. And it is plunging tens of millions of discarded workers into a collective misery and rage that is beginning to manifest itself in a dangerous right-wing backlash.

“This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles,” Henderson, a 40-year-old military veteran, told me. “My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008 FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers’ compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me and none of this was my fault.”

Our destitute working class is beginning to grasp that Barack Obama and other elected officials in Washington, who speak in a cloying feel-your-pain language, are liars. They are not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. Treasury or jobs from being exported. The gap between our stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities and fatuous academic and financial experts, as well as oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are reaching out to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is being fused with right-wing populism. And once this takes hold, a protofascism will sweep across our blighted landscape fueled by a mounting personal and economic despair. Take a look at Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” It is a good window into what awaits us……

(read the rest of this article at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/boycott_fedex_20100222 )

The Cadillac Crunch

by David Corn

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/02/cadillac-tax-health-care-reform

After over a year of partisan and policy combat, the epic battle for health care reform may come down to an internal Democrat party tussle: whether or not House Democrats yield to President Barack Obama and accept a tax on high-end insurance plans.

After the Democrats in the House and the Senate passed different versions of health care legislation, several critical matters had to be worked out, including how to finance the reform. The House bill called for a surtax on the wealthiest Americans, The Senate measure included a tax on so-called Cadillac plans. This led to a contentious intra-party squabble. A few weeks ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told several columnists (including me) that this excise tax has “no support” among House Democrats and that “the easiest thing is just to get rid of the whole excise tax.”

Yet on Monday, the president released—finally—his own health care proposal, which essentially is based on the Senate measure, with a few changes. And on the excise tax, he sided with the Senate. But he wants it tweaked so that it kicks in 2018, not 2013, and hits fewer plans. His proposal calls for raising the threshold for this tax from $23,000 in premiums for a family to $27,500.

Obama’s reforms address some of the complaints from House Dems—but not their fundamental gripe: the tax is bad policy and bad politics. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, (D-NY), who has led the charge against the excise tax, contends that a tax imposed on high-cost plans would likely not cause insurers to become more efficient and reduce costs (the supposed intent) but to cut back on benefits—and employees will end up with higher deductibles and co-payments as a result. Such a development, Nadler adds, will “violate Obama’s promise that if you like your plan, you can keep it.” Nadler also fears an excise tax is “political poison” because it will hit blue-collar workers (unionized or not) who have managed to obtain high-end health plans. “We lost the Reagan Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s,” he says, “because they came to believe that liberals wanted to benefit other people—the blacks, the Latinos—at their expense. We’ve just gotten them back. And now we’re saying to working people, we have to insure other people at your expense. This will destroy the Democratic Party and progressive politics for 30 years.”

At that meeting with columnists a few weeks ago, Pelosi estimated that at most there were 20 Democrats in her caucus who might support an excise tax. The White House appears to be banking on a wholesale conversion of House Dems. But it’s unclear whether Obama’s alterations to the tax—which also include not counting dental and vision benefits as taxable and easing the tax for firms with higher health-care costs due to the age or gender of their employees—will win over Democrats on the House side. According to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, the White House did not brief the House Democrats regarding its intentions on the excise tax until after the plan was devised. And during a White House conference call about the overall proposal, economic aide Jason Furman was asked if the administration had attempted to work out an excise tax deal with the House Democrats before releasing the plan. He replied that “everyone would appreciate it” if the Obama proposal led to lower premiums. In other words, no.

The immediate reaction from House Democrats on Monday was mixed. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) says, “”I still don’t like the excise tax but I think again the President listened to critics and tried to respond. He significantly increased the threshold—both the individual and family threshold—and he pushed out to 2018 when it would kick in. Those are very substantial concessions to those of us who are uncomfortable with the approach and I think we need to give him a fair shake at looking at that and seeing if that would work.” Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), the co-chair of the House progressive caucus, was non-committal. “It appears that the President has reached 80 percent towards the House,” she notes, but adds “there’s absolutely no detail.”

It appears that the White House may be quasi-sticking it to the House Democrats. On other fronts, Obama’s proposal did more to render the Senate bill more to their liking—by boosting provisions that will make insurance more affordable for families and individuals, by strengthening insurance protections for consumers, by dumping the Nebraska sweetener, and by setting up a new federal authority that will help states regulate insurance premiums. (The Obama proposal says nothing about the difference between the House and Senate bills concerning how far to go in restricting funding for plans that could include coverage of abortions.) But the White House is saying the House Ds will have to swallow the excise tax in some form.

That could bring the Democratic Party to a dramatic Tarantino-like stand-off. Can the House Dems accept the modified excise tax as the price of passing health care reform? Will they balk and force the White House and the Senate Dems to yield? Or will the Cadillac crash into a ditch and explode? For health care reform to become law, someone in the Democratic Party is going to have to blink.

Additional reporting by Nick Baumann.

David Corn is Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief.

Toward A Progressive Tea Party Movement

Most progressives have little respect for the Fox News generated “Tea Party” movement. However, it has tapped into a very real populist anger with the direction the country is headed in at this point in our history.

Progressives should see a real opportunity in the emergence of the “Tea Party” movement to educate the public and re-direct the anger to the real villains whose actions and policies created the many problems faced by the citizens of the United States of America. Our government has failed the American public by serving corporate interests and private profit instead of the public good.

The Republican Right has been somewhat successful in twisting this legitimate anger and aiming it against those who have been fighting this corporate takeover and corruption instead of themselves. They do this by lying to the public and twisting reality.

Of course, Fox News has been the leading force in this evil propaganda campaign. However, a few corporatist Democrats like Senator Ben Nelson, independents like Joe Lieberman and almost every elected Republican in the nation have helped advance the corporatist agenda by deceiving the reformist elements in the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party activists should realize that Fox News was formed by corporatists to advance the corporatist agenda. The corporatists have captured the “conservative” movement. They are playing their followers for suckers. A few Tea Party leaders know they are being used as a tool of the Republican Right and corporatists but most do not.

The American government is not the enemy if it is actually controlled by the American public instead of by the rich and powerful elite who make up the corporatists power structure. The American government needs to provide a check and balance against corporate power. We must recapture our government from corporate interests. This will never be done by Republicans. It will never be done by the small corporatist faction of the Democratic Party. It can be done with an alliance of progressives, real Tea Party reformers, economic populists and grassroots Democrats.

The Scott Browns and Sarah Palins of the nation only play at being populists. They act in support of the corporatist agenda while talking like reformers. Scott Brown was financed by corporatist forces. He was heavily financed by the debt collection industry, banking interests, health insurance companies and the like just like Sarah Palin. Brown opposes Wall Street reforms and regulation. He wants corporate power to go unchecked. These ideas are clearly enemies of the American public and real functional democracy. Folksy talk is just more hot air. It is actions that count.

Fox News seems designed to act as a financial and political backer of Republican Right corporatist politicians. They spin everything to defeat real reforms and undermine real reformers.

Labor unions act as a check and balance on corporate power. Fox News and the Republican Right corporatists demonize them at every opportunity. Union leaders are always elected by the membership. They are the only truly democratically-elected populist element in our economic system. The Fox News crowd calls these elected leaders “union bosses.” You do not get to elect your “boss.” Try suggesting free elections for all the management positions at your place of employment and you will probably be joining the ranks of the unemployed. Corporations are basically organized in a top down dictatorial manner. It is their nature and mindset to be dictatorial with very, very few exceptions.

Suing corporations act as a check and balance to corporate power. Fox News and the Republican Right corporatists are trying to eliminate the effectiveness of this check and balance under the disguise of “tort reform.”

Campaign finance laws slightly reduced the ability of corporations to buy elections, smear reformers and defeat reforms. While in power, the Republican Right corporatists packed all our federal courts with corporatists. This is why the Republican Right corporatists on the Supreme Court have recently overturned over 60 years of established law to give corporations unlimited power to spend shareholders’ money to advance their corporatist political goals.

Most corporations are not loyal American citizens like the recent Supreme Court ruling implies. Almost all the large corporations operating in America are international in nature. International corporations should not be controlling the American economy, the American political system or the American government. American citizens should be. No matter what the Supreme Court says, international corporations are neither people nor American citizens.

The percentage of the American economy going toward debt is growing rapidly. Why? The answer is corporate power and corporatist government policy. So-called “free trade” has failed the American public while enriching the corporatists. Tax revenue has gone in the toilet because we do not tax imports and tens of millions of former taxpayers have lost their jobs. Without good-paying jobs, these workers/taxpayers are not paying nearly as much in taxes.

Tax cuts for over 30 years have been focused on enriching the corporatists and screwing the middle classes. The Fox News and the Republican Right corporatists want you to place the blame on the poor for government debt. This is pure nonsense. Unfair tax cuts are the real villains along with corporatist “free trade” policies. Additionally, the corporatists start unnecessary wars financed by public debt that enrich the international corporations while killing and maiming American soldiers.

So-called “free trade” is undermining our national security by crushing our industrial manufacturing base and crippling our national finances.

Government spending as a percentage of our economy is excessively large mostly because our economy has not really grown the way it should because of so-called “free trade.” Free trade has not been free for American citizens. Our public and personal debts have exploded. Our wages have not grown as quickly as our cost of living. Our jobs are disappearing or have already disappeared.

Government debt to enrich international corporations instead of improving the lives of American citizens is nearly criminal. Why does Medicare money get paid to drug companies without bargaining down the price of drugs? Corporate power is the only answer.

Why do Americans pay twice as much for medical care than any industrialized nation but have worse results? Why are medical costs exploding here at the same time as millions of citizens are being kicked out of their health insurance plans? Why are our companies paying the cost of health insurance while all our foreign competitors get subsidized by government payment of healthcare costs? The answers are corporate power.

The real reformers of the Tea Party movement need to look at corporate power instead of government as the villains threatening the future of America. The Republican Right, corporatists and Fox News are threatening your civil liberties and Constitutional Right not the ACLU, Obama or the Democratic Party. Republican Right, corporatists and Fox News are those who support the “national security state”, torture, jailing citizens without trial, wiretapping without court orders, etc.

International corporate interests have much more control over the lives of the average American citizen than our government does. When the government gets captured by these corporations, like it did under George W. Bush and his allies who are still in office, the American public gets hammered!

You are not ignorant or out of touch with reality just because you watch Fox News or listen to right wing talk radio but prolonged exposure will eventually get you there. Watching only Fox News will likely stop reform supporters of the Tea Party movement from realizing that they have much more in common with progressives than they ever realized. The real reformers in the Tea Party movement and progressives should unite in a Progressive Tea Party movement. Fox News and the Republican Right corporatists should not control or define the Tea Party. Both progressives and the real reform elements in Tea Party movement should reach out to each other and make common cause on many issues.

It is time for a Progressive Tea Party movement.

Written by Stephen Crockett (Host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com).

Terror suspect kept visa to avoid tipping off larger investigation

From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20100127/NATION/1270405/Terror-suspect-kept-visa-to-avoid-tipping-off-larger-investigation#ixzz0fKedkjEn

Unions bash Democrats, warn of political fallout

By JAMES HOHMANN

Labor groups are furious with the Democrats they helped put in office — and are threatening to stay home this fall when Democratic incumbents will need their help fending off Republican challengers.

The Senate’s failure to confirm labor lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board was just the latest blow, but the frustrations have been building for months.

“Here’s labor getting thrown under the bus again,” said John Gage, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 600,000 workers. “It’s really frustrating for labor, and a lot of union people are thinking: We put out big time in money and volunteers and support. And it seems like the little things that could have been aren’t being done.”

The 52-33 vote on Becker — who needed 60 to be confirmed — really set labor unions on edge, but the list of setbacks is growing.

The so-called “card check” bill that would make it easier to unionize employees has gone nowhere. A pro-union Transportation Security Administration nominee quit before he even got a confirmation vote. And even though unions got a sweetheart deal to keep their health plans tax-free under the Senate health care bill, that bill has collapsed, leaving unions exposed again.

Union leaders warn that the Democrats’ lackluster performance in power is sapping the morale of activists going into the midterm elections.

“Right now if we don’t get positive changes to the agenda, we’re going to have a hard time getting members out to work,” said United Steelworkers International President Leo W. Gerard, in an interview.

“There’s no use pretending any longer.”

The biggest threat, of course, is apathy from a Democratic constituency that has a history of mobilizing for elections.

“You’re just not going to be able to go to our membership in the November elections and say, ‘Come on, let’s do it again. Look at what the Democratic administration has done for us!’” Gage said. “People are going to say, ‘Huh? What have the Democrats done for us?’”

Kim Freeman Brown, the executive director of a D.C.-based nonprofit called American Rights at Work, acknowledged “frustration” with the lack of movement.

“I implore Congress to listen to the voice of their constituents who want change, and so far we haven’t delivered good enough on that promise,” she said. “To the degree that we don’t address these real bread-and-butter issues, we will have failed America’s workers.”

Gage warned that Democrats will struggle to energize blue-collar voters if they don’t score a few victories soon. Union leaders say they will closely watch as a new “jobs bill” emerges to see if it includes more labor-friendly provisions or tax cuts for small businesses.

When you talk to labor officials these days, much of their animus is directed at Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who helped filibuster Becker’s confirmation.

“Ben Nelson has got principles until you buy him off,” Gerard said. …….

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/32781.html#ixzz0fFAlz6FN

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/32781.html#ixzz0fFAm1qx9

The Obama/Democratic Stimulus Worked

Simple proof…

It’s up to the wingnuts. If they want to keep lying about Obama, then we’ll do our best to set the record straight. If they want to bring up legitimate criticism, and there’s plenty of it, then we’d likely join them, and we could all have an Obama bashing party together. But they’re not that smart…

FULL STORY: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7679

Taking Elections Back From the Corporations and the Constitution Back from the Gang of Five

By Robert Borosage

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010020503/taking-elections-back-corporations-and-constitution-back-gang-five

Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mi) and chair of the House Judiciary Committee today introduced an amendment to the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United that gave corporations the right to spend unlimited funds in election campaigns as a matter of free speech.

Edwards, a brilliant first term legislator with a long commitment to free elections, quoted Justice Lewis Brandeis: ‘We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’ It is time we remove corporate influence from our policies and our politics. We cannot allow corporations to dominate our elections, to do so would be both undemocratic and unfair to ordinary citizens.”

“The ruling reached by the Roberts’ Court overturned decades of legal precedent by allowing corporations unfettered spending in our political campaigns,” said Congresswoman Edwards. “Another law will not rectify this disastrous decision. A Constitutional Amendment is necessary to undo what this Court has done.”

Judiciary Chair Conyers concurred and co-sponsored the amendment, noting that “”The Supreme Court’s idea that corporate political is no different than an individual citizen’s political speech was not the law when the Constitution was written, was not the law before the Supreme Court’s decision two weeks ago, and should not be the law in the future.”

Senator John Kerry announced a plan to introduce a similar amendment in the Senate

A broad coalition of groups are joining together to push the drive for the amendment, while supporting legislation to limit the Court’s ruling.

This should lead to campaigns in every state to pass the amendment - and force legislators to decide which side they are on: Should corporations be guaranteed the same free speech rights as American citizens?

The Supreme Court’s decision - imposed by the gang of five activist conservative justices - is wrong on the law, wrong on the history, wrong on the principles of a Republic (as opposed to the interests of Republicans). Scorning decades of precedent, and dozens of settled federal and state laws, the right-wing majority imposed a power-grab every bit as egregious as the decision in Bush v Gore that made Bush president by shutting down the vote count in Florida.

If citizens begin to understand the stakes, then this decision may well backfire on the Gang of Five and their conservative allies.

See amendment and Edwards and Conyers’ statement here http://donnaedwards.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=54&sectiontree=29,54&itemid=121 .

See Edwards’ floor speech on issue here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysUr0fj3aRY .

For more information go to www.freespeechforpeople.org.

Shareholders Forced Political Spending

When we make an investment by buying shares in a corporation are we endorsing the political goals of corporate CEO’s or other corporate executives? For most American citizens, the answer is clearly “NO!”

The recent Supreme Court ruling stating that corporations have the right to spend the shareholders’ money to influence federal elections seems designed to trample on the property rights of individual shareholders, empower the international corporate executive class and distort the electoral process in favor of the pro-corporate Republican Party. It completely fails to protect the property rights of shareholders against politically-motivated abuse by corporate executives.

While the ruling was both bad law and bad for American democracy, as most commentators have stated publicly, few editorialists or pundits have examined how badly the ruling tramples on the property rights of shareholders. I might want to buy shares to fund my retirement or meet unexpected future financial demands. I want my money used in the core missions and functions of the business. I did not invest my money to have it misused by corporate executives to fund their political goals or agenda instead of mine.

Why did this radically activist Supreme Court empower corporate executives to use my money for politics instead of for the legitimate business purposes that are the reasons shareholders bought shares in the first place?

Every member of Congress should support a new federal law that would require all shareholders agree before any corporate money can be spent to influence elections. This does not violate the premise of the Supreme Court ruling that states (incorrectly in my opinion) that corporations have the right to spend corporate funds on elections. Such a law would not require a Constitutional Amendment.

Shareholders should never be forced to make a political contribution to a candidate or campaign that the individual shareholder does not support. These forced contributions are unjust. In fact, corporate executives who spend corporate funds on influencing elections are frankly stealing from the shareholders.

Even before the new federal law is passed, shareholders should consider suing any corporate executives who misuse corporate funds to influence election outcomes directly or indirectly. The lawsuits should seek both to injunction the corporation from using shareholders money without universal approval from all shareholders and to fire the corporate executive involved “with cause” so that any “golden parachute” provisions (where more shareholder money gets stolen by executives) might get blocked.

Any officeholder who fails to support a new federal law restricting corporate executive power and empowering individual shareholders to veto spending corporate money on elections is helping in the politically-motivated theft of shareholder property! We need to identify these officeholders regardless of political party and vote them out of office. They are corrupt!

While corporations are not people, shareholders and corporate executives are people. The corporate executives should not overrule shareholders when it comes to political spending of corporate funds. The corporate executives work for the shareholders and never should be legally permitted to forget this basic fact.

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: midsouthcm@aol.com.

Feel free to publish at no charge without prior approval.