Archive for June, 2012

Bain, Romney and Obama Support Offshoring/Outsourcing of U.S. Jobs

by , posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2012 at 5:55 pm

In an attempt to differentiate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign is working hard to draw attention to Mitt Romney and Bain Capital’s agenda to offshore and outsource jobs.

While not necessarily connected to the Obama campaign, there is a new push inside labor circles to draw attention to a small company based in Freeport, IL named Sensata. The company is owned by Bain Capital and is preparing to move 170 Illinois jobs to China. Factory workers are calling on Mitt Romney to step in and stop the plant closure.

I support the move to target Romney on this issue and I hope that national pressure causes Bain Capital to keep those jobs in Illinois and sign a union contract with the workers.

At the same time, I can’t help but call out the hypocrisy of the Obama Administration for blasting Romney in public while secretly (and I mean very secretly) holding closed-door meetings with 600 corporate advisors to write another free trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that will result in more off shoring and outsourcing of U.S. jobs. TPP is expected to be the largest and worst free trade agreement in global history.

In a recent RT article titled, “TPP secrets: Obama covertly granting more power to multinational corporations,” a doctor chastizes the president.

“Bush was better than Obama on this,” Judit Rius of Doctors Without Borders Access to Medicines Campaign tells HuffPo. “It’s pathetic, but it is what it is. The world’s upside-down.”

So, who do we blame?

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“Mr. Hultgren, does this bother you when you see this?”

by , posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2012 at 7:01 am

“I have a job and I have health insurance,” Representative Hultgren (R IL-14) said, and then paused for a moment proudly emphasizing the Republican spin talking point that when one has a job, one automatically has health insurance. It’s as if life is that simple. If you work, the spin goes, you have insurance. He was attempting to say that if we have jobs, we don’t need a national health insurance plan. We don’t need “Obamacare.”

The subtle part of this ‘argument’ is that not only is it flawed logically, it blames the victim. If you don’t have insurance, it’s because you don’t have a job. A job will furnish good insurance. And if you don’t have a job, it’s because you’re either not looking, or—to serve the Republican spin even further—it’s because Obama won’t do what the Republicans want so people can have jobs. So therefore, we can all blame Obama.

But this time his audience at the Oswego Town Hall meeting was not buying it as I noticed they have in the past. No one applauded. No one said, “Yeah!” There was silence as Hultgren paused and looked around for support he did not get.

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Hultgren long on spin, wrong on facts, empty of solutions

by , posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2012 at 7:00 am

Representative Randy Hultgren (R IL-14) showed typical Republican spin at his Oswego Town Hall meeting recently. When asked direct questions regarding taxes, healthcare, social security, and Citizens United, he was long on spin, wrong on facts, and empty of solutions.

One frustrated attendant who tried to get a direct answer on healthcare, commented after the meeting that Hultgren “…seemed detached and unfeeling. His voice was just so syrupy and sweet he appeared unbelievable and unconcerned.”

His comments on Social Security were a surprise but shouldn’t have been, given the Republican Party’s relationship to corporate money and financial companies wanting to gamble with social security investment money.

“I’m not planning on Social Security,” Hultgren said. “Most people my age aren’t planning on Social Security.”

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Bill McKibben of 350.org on Colorado Wildfires, Debby, Keystone XL, and Failure of Rio+20

by , posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 at 10:23 am

from Democracy Now!

With extreme weather fueling wildfires in Colorado and record rainfall in Florida, the Obama administration has moved closer to approving construction of the southern section of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. We’re joined by environmentalist, educator and author Bill McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org. “Today is one of those days when you understand what the early parts of the global warming era are going to look like,” McKibben says. “For the first time in history, we managed to get the fourth tropical storm of the year before July … These are the most destructive fires in Colorado history and they come after the warmest weather ever recorded there … This is what it looks like as the planet begins to warm. Nothing that happened [at the United Nations Rio+20 summit] will even begin to slow down that trajectory.”

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Margaret Flowers: Obamacare Doesn’t Go Far Enough

by , posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 at 10:15 am

from GRITtv with Laura Flanders

Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program sees one major flaw in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act: It did not go far enough. The only solution, Flowers argues in this conversation with Laura Flanders, is to push for universal healthcare by expanding medicare so that it covers all Americans.

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What the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Arizona’s Immigration Law Means

by , posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2012 at 9:27 am

from the Center for American Progress

Angela Kelley and Marshall Fitz of the Center for American Progress’s Immigration Policy team, discuss what the Supreme Court’s ruling on Arizona’s immigration law, S.B. 1070, means for Arizonans, other states and Latino voters.

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Van Jones: “Re-electing Obama won’t solve all of our problems”

by , posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2012 at 9:12 am

from Current TV’s The War Room

Van talks about the importance of having two forms of power: a President willing to be moved, and a movement in the streets willing to do the moving.

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The Death of the Family Farm and the Death of Real Capitalism

by , posted on Monday, June 25th, 2012 at 7:00 am

It was 1921. He was a young man with a bunch of hopes and dreams, just barely twenty, and entering this country from Sweden with a trunk as his only possession. He came from the farms of Sweden hoping to some day buy a farm in America. Someone there had told him it might be possible to own a farm here. It was a wild dream really, but one in which he believed.

In Sweden he knew it was an impossible dream. All the farms and all the land was owned by a small group of large moneyed families and rented out in parcels to tenants. Reuben’s family had been tenant farmers for generations and generations, able to eke out a living but never able to build a secure foundation from which a family can grow. As far back as records can document, no one in his family had ever owned any of the land they farmed.

And so for over two decades in America, Reuben toiled the land. Milked the cows. Learned to read and write English. Fell in love. Married a farmer’s daughter named Rose. Had three boys. And did buy that farm.

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Amber Hollibaugh: How Far Has the LGBTQ Movement Come?

by , posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2012 at 11:00 am

from GRITtv with Laura Flanders

Amber Hollibaugh of Queers for Economic Justice argues that though there’s plenty to be proud of this Pride weekend, there’s still a long way to go for the LGBTQ movement.

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Rep Gutierrez: In Obama Deportation Move, Long-Term Immigration Activism “Has Been Rewarded”

by , posted on Monday, June 18th, 2012 at 8:20 pm

from Democracy Now!

In a major policy move, President Obama has issued an executive order that will stop the deportations of some undocumented youth. Under the administration’s plan, immigrants who meet certain requirements will not be deported if they were brought to the United States before they turned 16 and are younger than 30. We speak with one of the key lawmakers dealing with immigration reform today: Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ Immigration Task Force.

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