Friday Fogs on the hills

Crap-O-Cuts!!!

<-- Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy speaks to the media. (Photo: Douglas Healey / The New York Times)

Time for Public Sector Unions to Fight Back
Friday 29 July 2011
by: Shamus Cooke, Truthout | Op-Ed

The media attack on public sector unions has reached a timely zenith, perfectly in sync with the politicians' anti-union deathblow. This coordinated campaign is happening nationwide, and includes Democratic and Republican marauders on a state-by-state basis. There are several state battlegrounds where this war is coming to completion, but no winner has been declared. If Democratic and Republican governors are able to force massive concessions on public sector unions - and the corresponding cuts to the services their members deliver to the public

- the labor movement and the social safety net will both be decimated, paving the way for even more brutal, future attacks.
…

(Read On)

a shameful day in american history

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), released a statement on using the Chained Consumer Price Index to determine Social Security Cost of Living Adjustments, saying "This is a benefit cut that would hit current retirees, most of whom are not especially affluent."

Gang of Six Plan Gives Tax Breaks for Wealthy, Social Security Cuts for Ordinary Workers
Tuesday 19 July 2011
by: Dean Baker, The Center for Economic and Policy Research | News Analysis

"The budget plan produced by the Senate’s “Gang of Six” offers the promise of huge tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in the country, while lowering Social Security benefits for retirees and the disabled. Despite claiming that they will "reform" Social Security on a "separate track, isolated from deficit reduction," the plan includes cuts to Social Security that would be felt in less than six months, as the plan calls for a new inflation formula that will reduce benefits by 0.3 percentage points a year compared with currently scheduled benefits. The plan also calls for a process that is likely to reduce benefits further for future retirees.

(Read it All)

midnight and dark morning

Crap-O-Gaza-Seige!

<-- Demonstrators on the American boat, "The Audacity of Hope" at a port near Athens, Greece, June 30, 2011. (Photo: Nadia Shira Cohen / The New York Times)

Neocons Fume Over US Boat to Gaza

Exclusive: At the behest of Tel Aviv and Washington, Greek authorities stopped a small flotilla from sailing to Gaza in a challenge to Israel’s four-year blockade of the narrow strip of land and its 1.6 million people. Now, apologists for Israel’s right-wing Likud government are heaping scorn on the passengers, as Ray McGovern notes.

By Ray McGovern
July 16, 2011

The bottom line is this: Dershowitz’s Likud friends and their neocon chums in the Obama administration realize they have suffered a stinging - and unnecessary - PR defeat. They could easily have let our peaceful boat carrying passengers, media and letters of goodwill reach the isolated people of Gaza. What we boaters appear to have accomplished is to provoke the mighty diplomats of Israel and the United States into a full-court press that brought renewed attention to the plight of the Gazans.

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Crap-A-Chamber-o-Commerce !

Climate Regulations a Job Killer? Quit Crying Wolf

Sunday 17 July 2011

by: Donald Cohen, YES! Magazine | Op-Ed

There’s an old adage that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. That seems to be the unofficial motto of the United States Chamber of Commerce, which has spent the last forty years repeating (and repeating and repeating) the mantra that government regulations on businesses “kill jobs” and economic growth. But their predictions have been repeatedly wrong. The laws they warned would bring economic ruin have become the basic health, safety, and environmental safeguards we now take for granted.

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Happy the 4th of july: 00:30AM

A supporter at a Sarah Palin/Tea Party rally, Boston Commons, Mass., 04/14/10. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Fourth of July, 2011 - Running Against the Wind
By Leslie Griffith, Reader Supported News
03 July 11

"I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then."

We live in a nation born of a small group of revolutionaries determined not be slaves to any monarch. They were "young and strong and running against the wind." But, they were also building a nation on lies. While vowing to be no man's slave, America was built on the backs of the enslaved. And that is where the hypocrisy began … at the very beginning … and the hypocrisy lives on today.

Despite it all, we swore the good times "never would end." But, we know now what we didn't know then.

Could the founders have ever imagined the handful of unpatriotic monarchs currently ruling our lives and lining their gilded pockets with our money? With money accumulated from schemes that decimated the nation? And 235 years after the signing of a Constitution declaring all men equal and all religious beliefs tolerable, we must acknowledge that wondrous dream is still deferred. So, on this Fourth of July weekend…

(Read the Article)

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