A group of Democratic donors have announced they will withhold some of their financial support from President Obama’s re-election campaign for not speaking out more about climate change. The group of roughly 100 political donors say Obama should directly address mocking by Republican rival Mitt Romney on climate change last week during his acceptance speech in Tampa. President Obama is also being urged to use his acceptance speech tonight to reaffirm his 2008 campaign promise to aggressively tackle climate change. We’re joined by Betsy Taylor, political consultant and president of Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions. She is working with the donors who are threatening to withhold support.
Assassination has always been a tool of the American state, but before the “War on Terror” it was not something our leaders bragged about. As TomDispatch.com‘s Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse explain in their new book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, President Obama has gone beyond his predecessors, even beyond George W. Bush, and consolidated his power to the point of becoming the Assassin-in-Chief. Whether the American people are in favor of this type of warfare has never been asked, leaving the decision of who lives and who dies squarely with the president.
As Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney names Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his vice presidential running mate, we speak with two Wisconsinites about the seven-term congressman’s record, and how his views are influenced by the controversial philosopher, Ayn Rand. “This is not necessarily a foolish choice by Romney,” says John Nichols, political writer for The Nation magazine. “It is an extreme choice and it does define the national Republican Party toward a place where the Wisconsin Republican Party is — which is very anti-labor, willing to make deep cuts in education, public services, and frankly, very combative on issues like voter ID and a host of other things that really go to the core question of how successful and how functional our democracy will be.” Ryan is chairman of the House of Representatives Budget Committee and architect of a controversial budget plan to cut federal spending by more than $5 trillion over the next 10 years. “Ryan gets a lot of mileage for understanding so-called the budget and economics,” says Matthew Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive magazine. “But if you look closely, he doesn’t really get it.” Democrats argue Ryan’s planned Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security reform would essentially dismantle key components of the social safety net.
“Mitt Romney’s creepy hand wants your $2k to pay for tax breaks for his millionaire and billionaire friends. Tell Mitt Romney: Get your hand out of my pocket!”
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
In 2008, Barack Obama pledged to raise the minimum wage every year once elected, but the hourly rate of $7.25 hasn’t increased since 2007. Low-wage workers now make far less than they did four decades ago. Last week Illinois Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. introduced The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2012. It draws its name from the idea that the federal minimum wage would be $10.55 an hour now if it had kept up with inflation over the past 40 years. While the bill has about 20 co-sponsors so far President Obama has yet to endorse it. We speak to longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
