What is the Republicans/TeaPuplicans Plan for Jobs Since they are Blocking Every Jobs Bill the President Endorses?

Similar to Healthcare – We don’t Have a Plan; But We’ll Block Any Plan You Have For Jobs Mr. President

Bobblehead S. E. Cupp, on CNN’s Crossfire this week, had Former Labor Secretary, (under President Clinton,) Robert Reich (who helped create a net 22 million job increase) and Governor Tim Pawlenty. and what she had was Republican talking points, typical of right-wing media and talking heads. She kept spewing prepared Republican/Teapublican talking points, not listening, or even hearing what her guests were saying. What is the Republican’s plan for creating jobs? They don’t know, but they know their willing to obstruct any ideas the President has, sound familiar? What’s their plan for healthcare for 40 million Americans that didn’t have it, and/or couldn’t afford it? OH! That’s right, they don’t have one, but they spent taxpayer money to the tune of over $60M voting 48 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  Here’s just a snippet from the conversation on CNN’s Crossfire where Governor Pawlenty says what he thinks business is saying, and what Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said to set him straight:
   
PAWLENTY: “Guess what? There’s a consistent answer from those folks about what they want. And they basically say to government, do things to encourage me, not discourage me. Make the load lighter, not heavier. And that includes things like taxation, like energy policy, like health-care policy and more. But they’re basically saying don’t do things to make my life more difficult, more expensive, more bureaucratic, more inefficient.”
CUTTER: “Well, Governor…”
REICH: “Actually, it’s…”
CUTTER: “Go ahead.”
REICH: “Stephanie, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to say that — that I’m very proud to be part of an administration that presided over the creation of 22 million net new jobs. That was the Clinton administration.”

 See the interview from CNN’s Crossfire Here

Original meme by http://www.Facebook.com/StoptheObstructionistTeaParty and http://www.Medic3569.blogspot.com

What Does Raising the Minimum Wage Do? Help or Hurt Job Creation?

Republicans and Tea Party members say that government wants to force employers to raise wages, raise taxes on “top job creators,” (which we absolutely know has been proven not to be true that the “trickle down theory” by cutting taxes on the rich creates jobs,) and force employers to cut-off hiring at 50 employees to avoid the Affordable Care Act mandates, is not a recipe for creating jobs. Robert Reich speaking on raising the minimum wage says: “Raising the minimum wage, we’ve been raising the minimum wage in this country since 1935. Raising the minimum wage is good for the country. It puts more money in the pockets of people. Sixty-five percent of Americans want to raise the minimum wage. Most minimum- wage workers these days are not teenagers. They are breadwinners. If you help them, you are helping the economy overall.”

“And a lot of employers will benefit from a higher minimum wage. We know empirical studies show that. This is not a matter of government planning. This is a matter of doing what we have done in this country — in fact, if we had a minimum wage today that was as high as it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation, it would be $10.40 an hour. And if you add in productivity improvements, minimum wage actually would be $15 an hour.”

 A large swath of economists agree, raising the minimum wage is a good idea. 

 In a letter released Tuesday, January 14, 2014 through the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, 75 economists, including seven Nobel Laureates, argue that the government should hike the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour by 2016 and then peg future increases to inflation. A proposal from Senate Democrats, backed by President Obama, to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour is currently stalled in Congress. Read More from The Huffington Post. Economist Joseph Stiglitz and Larry Summers, argue that the “weight” of the evidence indicates past minimum wage hikes haven’t hurt the job market.  

 “Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front.”

Original meme by http://www.Facebook.com/StoptheObstructionistTeaParty and http://www.Medic3569.blogspot.com

 Republicans Say President Holding Up  “All There Jobs Bills”

 The problem with that statement is that they don’t have ANY jobs bills. So how do they get around that? Call every bill a “Jobs Bill.” On Speaker John Boehner’s Blog page he says that the White House is “pivoting” back to jobs and the House doesn’t have to pivot because they have always been about jobs. He offers a list of “Jobs Bills,” the problem? He lists numerous bills, but in the description of the bills offers misleading or straight out false information. He lists bills that favor the oil & gas industry by more deregulation (remember, after 300,000 people in West Virginia had their drinking water contaminated by a Koch Brothers affiliated chemical company he said “there are plenty of regulations in effect.”) and bills that help the ultra-rich with more tax relief, etc., but none of the bills actually create a significant number of jobs. Check the Speaker’s page and then check the actual bills at www.GovTrack.us.

But for Boehner, the best course of action is to cut off those struggling most, while asking the Senate to pass the “jobs bills” already approved by the House.

What “jobs bills”? As it turns out, Boehner has decided that every time House Republicans pass a bill that advances House Republican priorities, the party gets to label that a “jobs bill.” The GOP approved more oil drilling? That’s a “jobs bill.” The GOP voted to take away health care benefits from millions of Americans? That’s a “jobs bill,” too. The GOP disapproves of clean-air regulations? “Jobs bill.” The GOP wants more “transparency” in federal spending? “Jobs bill.” Republicans cut food stamps? “Jobs bill.”

I’m not exaggerating in the slightest; this is all from the list of “jobs bills” the Speaker of the House has pulled together and presented to the public. How many actual jobs would be created if these bills became law? No one knows because Republicans never submitted them for independent economic scrutiny, but GOP leaders are confident the answer is, at a minimum, some.

Photo by legalinsurrection.com

  What the Republicans “Say” and “Do” are Different, as Usual

Republicans came out this year saying they have a “Jobs Agenda,” and it’s not just the same old “cut taxes to the rich job creators” and “remove all those pesky regulations that tie the hands of industry.” 

Nationwide, many our lifeline systems are approaching a different kind of catastrophe. One trillion dollars is the price tag on the U.S. infrastructure deficit, an issue President Obama knows well.

“We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy,” Obama said.
Quietly and consistently, infrastructure is emerging as one of the three key elements of Obama’s clarion call to returning to the domestic agenda.

Second only to jobs—above even energy—infrastructure, that critical and unsexy topic has come to the fore of the president’s mind and message.

Back in June, 2011 The U.S. Conference of Mayors, put forward a resolution to Congress that the $126 billion dollars going annually to pay for America’s wars abroad be spent at home instead.

The mayors set an agenda that mirrored the presidents: jobs, sustainable energy, and rebuilding America—roads, dams, water and sewer systems, among others.

“That we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kandahar and not Baltimore and Kansas City, absolutely boggles the mind,” L.A.’s flamboyant and outspoken Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. Read More from The Daily Beast June 23, 2011 article.

Michael Tomasky in an article The GOP’s “Jobs” Hypocrisy for The Daily Beast on January 3, 2014 writes about a piece by Michael R. Strain of National Affairs “A Jobs Agenda for the Right” whereas Michael makes some suggestions to the Republicans. It includes, ready? wait for it, INFRASTRUCTURE! Where did we hear that before? One particular part of Michael’s work is this: 

 “This employment crisis is one of the most important and immediate social and economic problems facing the country today, and none of our elected leaders can afford to ignore it. Yet both parties are more or less doing just that. The Democrats talk about jobs policies, but their approach to the problem — with its emphasis on massive short-term fiscal stimulus and inefficient public spending — has proven neither popular nor (at least in the form attempted at the beginning of the Obama years) up to the challenge. It consists of the timeworn economic mantras of the left and is not equipped to address the problems we now have.

 Republicans are, if anything, worse off. They often refuse to even acknowledge the problem, or to acknowledge the fact that it requires ambitious policy solutions. They, too, mostly repeat familiar formulas from their party’s glory days which offer proposals that do not seem well connected to today’s economic realities. Some of their ideas — fostering a more stable business climate and financing lower tax rates by shrinking a few tax loopholes, for example — could help, but they are not nearly adequate for the challenge America confronts. To offer the public a plausible agenda for a true recovery of the labor market, Republicans will have to dig deeper.”

  

 He continued “Anyone who has driven on a highway in Missouri or has taken an escalator in a Washington, D.C., Metro station knows that the United States could use some infrastructure investment. And expanding public-transportation options from poor neighborhoods to commercial centers could increase economic mobility and the incomes of the poor — a goal conservatives should certainly support. Today’s low interest rates only increase the desirability of a multi-year program of high-social-value infrastructure spending.

 The 2009 stimulus bill failed to direct funds effectively to such projects, but that does not mean that infrastructure spending, if properly conceived and directed, cannot do a great deal of good. And, of course, to ensure that federal debt is on a stable trajectory, any large increase in spending should be coupled with restraints on the future path of middle-class entitlement spending and a reining in of tax expenditures.

 Carefully targeted infrastructure spending should also be coupled with a more pro-growth monetary policy. Monetary policy surely offers the best way to boost aggregate demand in the short term. By keeping the federal funds rate at zero and pursuing its long-term asset purchase program (known as quantitative easing or QE), the Federal Reserve has done much to support the economy during the Great Recession. But growth is still slow and the labor market is still very weak. Is there more the Fed could do?”

 Back to Michael Tomasky “UM, O.K. There are people who’ve been trying to do just that. And not only Barack Obama. John Kerry led this effort in the Senate, and he was joined by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison (who’s since retired). Their attempts to fund a modest infrastructure bank were supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But it could never get anywhere because of rock-solid GOP opposition. Does Strain not even know this? Or is he pretending it never existed so he doesn’t have to deal with the political reality of Republican obduracy?

I think, of course, it’s the latter, and there’s further evidence for my guess in the way Strain talks about recent history. The 2009 stimulus was not a failure in infrastructure terms at all (has he read Michael Grunwald?). But even if you believe it was an infrastructure failure, or have to say so for political reasons, should you not acknowledge in fairness that it was Democrats and liberals who wanted it to have more infrastructure spending, and that nearly 40 percent of bill took the form of tax cuts because that’s what Republicans demanded (before they decided en masse to vote against it anyway)?”

Meme by waliberals.org

President Obama’s Proposed Jobs Bills

First there’s  The American Jobs Act which calls for:

1. TAX CUTS TO HELP AMERICA’S SMALL BUSINESSES HIRE AND GROW.

2. PUTTING WORKERS BACK ON THE JOB WHILE REBUILDING AND MODERNIZING

    AMERICA.

3. PATHWAYS BACK TO WORK FOR AMERICANS LOOKING FOR JOBS.

4. TAX RELIEF FOR EVERY AMERICAN WORKER AND FAMILY.

5. FULLY PAID FOR AS PART OF THE PRESIDENT’S LONG-TERM DEFICIT REDUCTION

    PLAN. 

Learn more at www.WHITEHOUSE.gov

Photo by www.whitehouse.gov

 80% of our infrastructure is deemed “obsolete” or “in need of immediate repair.” Infrastructure bills in the past have gone through the House and Senate with ease, but that’s before the day after our current President’s first inauguration where Senator Mitch McConnell laid out the 1st priority of the Republican Party, which was to “make the President a one-term President.” That was their first priority, not the wars, not the great recession created by President George W. Bush, who came into office with a $500M surplus and left with a $10B deficit, with two unpaid wars going on, one of which President Bush out right lied about to get us into. Or the unpaid “Prescription Drug Bill” that cost us over $720B that they said would only cost us $320B and gave drug companies a windfall by not allowing Medicare and Medicaid to negoiate the prices of prescription drugs, not the 700,000 jobs per month being lost when President Obama took office, no, first priority was to make the President a one-term President. The Republican Party then started to have other problems, the ultra-rich backed Tea Party started to challenge Conservatives and blocked anything that didn’t fit into their absurd agenda. The Republican Party became broken and produced the “Worse Productive Congress in the History of the United States,” the 113th Congress. Obstruction was to put it lightly. Closing down the government to try to repeal The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare,) after already spending $59M to have 47 votes to repeal the law may have been the beginning of the fall of the Tea Party, but we’ll just have to hope and see in the 2014 elections. House Speaker John Boehner finally stood up to some of the “groups” like Freedom Works, The Club for Growth, and Heritage Action, when the House passed the Ryan-Murray budget. But came right back and said there was no way they were going to raise the minimum wage, extend the Emergency Unemployment Compensation, and said, after Freedom Industries, a chemical company affiliated with the Koch Brothers, contaminated the drinking water for over 300,000 people in West Virginia, that “there are plenty of regulations in place.”

 We need jobs, not deregulation, not blocking of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill, not Voter ID Laws, not blocking raising the Minimum Wage, not cutting Food Stamps by $40B, not easier permitting processes for drilling and Fracking, not a Keystone XL pipeline that will bring tar sands oil through our country only to go to a refinery in the Gulf owned by a Saudi Arabian oil company and Shell oil, to be exported to China and other nations, that will raise gas prices 25-40 a gallon here in the U.S., not stalling immigration legislation, not spending more than $70B of taxpayer money voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare,) not giving $154B in tax subsidies to corporations like we did last year, WE NEED JOBS!

How Fair Are Our Elections? Do the Democrats Have a Chance of Winning Back the House?

Thursday, January 16, 2014

 Gerrymandering, Voter ID Laws Created for a Virtually Non-Existent Problem, Voter Suppression, Disenfranchising Voters, How Fair Are Our Elections?

Original meme by http://www.Facebook.com/StoptheObstructionistTeaParty and http://www.Medic3569.blogspot.com

 Republicans have passed “Voter ID” laws in 34 states that often address things other than preventing people to vote when their not eligible. Laws that restrict early voting hours, types of ID acceptable, not extending voting hours when their are long lines, limiting the number of voting stations in particular areas (where Democrats are more likely to vote,) all suppress, and disenfranchise the vote of minorities and other specified voting demographics. 

 A twitter friend of mine @HenryStradford  tweeted this: “The only true Democracy is India…imagine that! 1+Billion people…consider the logistics of holding elections. Yet, they do..” I have to wonder if he’s right.

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The following is from a Center For American Progress Action Fund article on January 16, 2014:

With election administration delegated to officials and boards in more than 3,000 counties and localities in the United States, the ease with which one exercises his or her right to vote can depend on where he or she lives. Not only do state voting laws differ across the nation, even within a state, county-based election administration varies widely.

Take, for example, Florida’s Duval County, which during the 2012 election had provisional ballots cast at a rate four times higher than the state average. This is particularly alarming given that Duval County also rejected more than 34 percent of the provisional ballots cast in the county during the 2012 election. Similarly, voters in Indiana’s Tippecanoe County cast provisional ballots at a rate more than seven and a half times the state average. While provisional ballots are legally prescribed and serve as a fail-safe mechanism that allow voters to cast a ballot when questions regarding his or her eligibility to vote arise, both examples raise questions as to why these counties issued provisional ballots at rates so much higher than their state’s average.

Read the Report: http://www.scribd.com/doc/200129107/Unequal-Access-A-County-by-County-Analysis-of-Election-Administration-in-Swing-States-in-the-2012-Election
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Anything Different in the Upcoming Elections?

(CNN) — The midterm elections are around the corner. The big question will obviously be what happens to control of the House and Senate. But control of Congress is only one part of the equation. There are a series of issues that will shape the individual races that will tell us a lot about which way American politics is heading.

Former Ohio Rep. Steven LaTourette and the Main Street Partnership, a group with strong backing from the corporate world, are trying to counteract the power of the tea party, which they believe is damaging the standing of the GOP. “We want our party back,” LaTourette explained to the The New York Times.

The most visible battle between a mainstream Republican and tea party Republican is taking place in Kentucky, where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is facing a challenge from Matt Bevin in the primary. In Texas, the controversial right-wing Rep. Steve Stockman is running against Sen. John Cornyn.

There are certain must-wins for Democrats if they are to show that they are capable of taking advantage of this moment. In Florida’s 13th District, Alex Sink, a well-known and well-respected Democrat, is attempting to win the seat of long-term Republican veteran Bill Young, who recently died, leaving  open this highly competitive district. If Democrats can’t win this special election on March 11, it will signal trouble. Read More of CNN.COM’s Five Big Questions on 2014 Elections

Retirements Hurt Democrats’ House Prospects

AP Photo

The Democratic quest to win the House majority has always been something close to mission impossible. A procession of lawmakers opting for retirement is pushing the prize even further beyond the party’s grasp.
Seventeen seats shy of the majority and confronting an electoral landscape tilted against them, Democrats have virtually no room for error in the November midterms. Yet the problems they’re encountering of late are coming from within their own ranks. Read More Politico – House Democrats Retiring

Democrats Will Need to Get Out the Vote To Have Any Chance

 With all the Republicans efforts to tip the elections in their favor through Voter ID laws, suppressing votes, disenfranchising voters, gerrymandering, and the backing of the ultra-rich and corporations, it will be very difficult, to say the least, to keep control of the Senate, much less, to win back the House.  If the U. S. Supreme Court sides with McCutcheon in the McCutcheon v FEC, which it heard arguments for on October 8, 2013, it will be that much harder and a total disaster for our beloved country. The U. S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision created “Corporate Personhood” and removed limits on how much corporations could contribute to political campaigns, and donors could be kept unanimous. As you can see in the meme below top donors from the fossil fuel industry contributed  over $11M in the 2012 election cycle. If the court sides with McCutcheon those same donors could contribute over $312M, or, 27x more.

Fixing a Big Part of the Problem – Taking Money out of Politics

Overturn Citizens United

There is a growing movement across the country that is calling for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, in the 2010 Citizens United v FEC case to overturn it through one or more amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

There are currently Constitutional amendments pending in the Congress that would overturn Citizens United by (1) making it clear that corporations do not have constitutional rights, such as “free speech,” which are only for natural persons; and by (2) restoring Congress’ and the states’ authority to limit campaign gifts and spending. See H.J. Res 20 and  H.J. Res 21.

Overturning the disastrous Citizens United decision is NOT a partisan issue, it is an Across-the-Aisle effort. In a 2010/2011 Peter Hart poll 79% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, 82% of Independents, and 87% of Democrats “support a Constitutional amendment that would overturn the Citizens United decision and make clear that corporations do not have the same rights as people.”

Furthermore, a 2012 Associated Press poll found that 83% of Americans, including 81% of Republicans, 78% of Independents, and 85% of Democrats believe “there should be limits on the amount of money corporations, unions, and other organizations can contribute to outside organizations trying to influence campaigns for President, Senate, and U.S. House.”

Free Speech For People has compiled:

• 111 Republicans who have called for an amendment to overturn Citizens United;
• 9 Republicans who have criticized Citizens United for it’s claim that corporations have constitutional   rights; and
• 10 more Republicans who have criticized Citizens United in more general terms.

Information in this section of the post, some which has been reprinted was provided by Free Speech For People. 

More than 120 National Organizations — have endorsed the United for the People collaborative’s unified Call to Action for a Constitutional amendment. For information click the link above or go to www.United4ThePeople.org.

 Find an organization operating in your area. Get involved For A Better America and make your voice heard by contacting your;

U.S. Senators and Congressmen and women through GovTrack.us. and

State Assemblymen/women and State Senators at VoteSmart.org

Organizations involved in the effort that you should look at are:

Democracy is for People                        and as a resource: Siena College Moreland Commission poll

Move To Amend                                                                Huff Post Politics – Pearl Korn: Mission is Clear

United For The People