Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

The Connecticut Education Association (CEA) announced their support for Chris Murphy today. The CEA has a membership of over 41,000 K-12 teachers in Connecticut public schools as well as retired teachers and college students preparing to become teachers.

“Chris understands the need to ensure all children have access to a high-quality education, so that our state can have a globally competitive, 21st century workforce,” said CEA President Phil Apruzzese. “It’s why he has fought for programs to have young children enter school ready to learn. It’s why he’s been an ardent advocate for federal resources for public schools. And it’s why he recognizes the need for NCLB reforms.”

“I’m humbled to receive the support of the CEA today,” said Murphy.“ Our children deserve an education system that prepares them to compete in the global economy and right here in Connecticut. To achieve this goal, it’s critical that we have a strong federal and state commitment to support the work of thousands of teachers and parents in our communities who make it their daily mission to educate the next generation. I promise to be an unwavering voice for them and for all of Connecticut in the U.S. Senate.”

CEA President Apruzzese added, “Bottom line, our students and our public schools need a leader like Chris Murphy in the Senate, and we’re confident he will deliver on that expectation.”

The CEA endorsement announced today is the result of a multifaceted process. The endorsement follows a recommendation by CEA’s Political Action Committee followed by a vote the CEA Board of Directors.

Since April 1st, Murphy has been endorsed by four statewide labor organizations representing 20,000 workers – the United Auto Workers, the Connecticut Firefighters, the Connecticut Building Trades, and the Connecticut Laborers.

Murphy has also been endorsed by over 5,000 Democratic leaders and progressive activists from across Connecticut.

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

By Pat Garofalo at ThinkProgress

ROMNEY: “Marginal income tax rates and tax rates on savings and investment must be kept low. Further, taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains for middle-income taxpayers should be eliminated.”

REALITY: Taxes are the lowest they’ve been in 60 years, far lower than under several Republican presidents. Taxes on dividends and capital gains are far below the level at which they were under President Reagan. Furthermore, 68.3 percent of the capital gains tax is paid by the richest 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom 95 percent of Americans pay just 10 percent of them, so it is unclear how Romney thinks a capital gains tax cut can be fashioned as a middle class tax break.

ROMNEY: “Our corporate tax rate is among the world’s highest. It leaves U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage and induces them to park their profits abroad, benefiting the rest of the world at our expense.”

REALITY: While the U.S. corporate tax rate is high on paper, once all the credits, deductions, and loopholes are accounted for, the U.S. has the second-lowest corporate taxes in the developed world.

ROMNEY: “President Obama has vastly expanded the regulatory reach of government. The federal government has estimated the price tag for its regulations at $1.75 trillion.”

REALITY: This is a bogus number favored by the big business lobby, and widely cited by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It comes from a study that, according to John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute, “contains basic conceptual mistakes and relies on extraordinarily poor data.” “Its results should neither be used as a valid measure of the economic costs of regulation nor as a guide for policy,” he said.

ROMNEY: “I will not tolerate federal intrusions of the kind that the National Labor Relations Board initiated when it filed suit against Boeing for opening a plant in a right-to-work state.”

REALITY: The NLRB suit against Boeing has nothing to do with the company opening a plant in a so-called “right-to-work” state, but that the company, by its own admission, shifted production from Washington state to South Carolina in retaliation against workers for striking, which is a violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

ROMNEY: “Tellingly, while the private sector shed 1.8 million jobs since Barack Obama took office, the federal workforce grew by 142,500, or almost 7%. A rollback is urgently required.”

REALITY: This is a favorite stat for conservatives, but it isn’t true. The GOP engineers the stat by leaving out all of the jobs lost by the U.S. Postal Service. As Politifact noted, “If the postal workers cuts were included, the overall increase in employees under Obama would be about 40,000, or a modest 1.4 percent increase in the workforce.” The federal workforce is also smaller than it was 20 years ago. Overall, the public sector has lost 600,000 during the Great Recession.

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

By Jon Pelto, from Wait What:

The award for political pandering clearly belongs to one person and one person alone. Connecticut’s Republican State Chairman Jerry Labriola Jr. who ran and lost to Congressman Rosa DeLauro in 2010 has proven, without a doubt, that nothing should ever stand in the way of political pandering.

DeLauro was in Italy for a family wedding and a vacation when the storm hit. While she reports that she monitored the response effort from abroad and participated in numerous phone calls with federal and state officials she didn’t actually come back to Connecticut until the end of the week.

The Republican Chairman called Rosa DeLauro’s action “a perfect example of how out of touch Congresswoman DeLauro is with the residents of her district and the needs of our state.”

He went to claim that not only should DeLauro have returned to Connecticut immediately (even though Members of Congress have no role in disaster relief) but she should not have been on vacation in the first place.

Labriola’s press statement begins with the view that “The Congresswoman should never have been abroad to begin with…” He then added “on the other hand, given her continued endorsement of President Obama’s failed economic policies, perhaps our state would be better served if DeLauro chose to take a permanent vacation.”

It could certainly be dismissed as the absurd ranting of an “over-eager” political operative who has no shame and is looking to score points at the expense of the people who are really suffering from the Hurricane’s impact, but the Republican leader was not the only one using such outrageous language.

A Hartford Courant blog claimed that “DeLauro was vacationing on the posh Amalfi coast when the tropical storm hit, leaving a swath of devastation in several towns in her district.”

Another columnist wrote that DeLauro was in her “Hotel Poseidon lair on the Amalfi Coast” and concluded that “In this maximum hour of suffering for thousands of constituents, where in the world is Rosa DeLauro?”

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

Democracy for America – Fairfield County Presents:

Democratic State Representative Matt Lesser
“ALEC” EXPOSED!
Wednesday September 7th, 7 PM- Silver Star Diner in Norwalk (Exit 14 off I-95)

You may never have heard of it, but Middletown’s Democratic State Representative Matt Lesser knows exactly how much power “ALEC” holds in State Legislatures nationwide. “ALEC” is the acronym for the right wing American Legislative Exchange Council. As Vice Chairman of Connecticut’s Government Administration and Elections Committee, Matt sees first-hand how influential ALEC is at proposing – and passing – corporate friendly laws that kill jobs, damage environmental protection and hurt workers.

Representative Lesser describes “ALEC” as a secretive collaboration between Big Business and right-wing conservative politicians. Its tentacles reach into the legislatures of every State in the country – including Connecticut. There are at least 21 State representatives in the Connecticut legislature with ties to ALEC.

Founded 1973 ALEC rapidly evolved into a corporate-funded organization for promoting pro-business and free market doctrines by bringing State legislators together with corporate donors at all expenses paid “get togethers,” often held at high-end vacation sites! Behind closed doors ALEC’s ghostwriters create model “bills” to be introduced by its legislative members in State capitols across the country. ALEC corporate executives (UPS, AT&T, Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, Pfizer and Coca-Cola are just a few) are focused purely on issues that affect the corporate bottom line.

In Connecticut, “bills” that would have weakened laws regarding environmental protections, carbon emissions and undermined the separation of church and state were all introduced by ALEC sponsored legislators during the last session.

Much to their credit, Connecticut legislative leaders from both parties have so far resisted the more blatant attempts to pursue any “model legislation” proposed by legislators affiliated with ALEC.That’s the good news – the bad news is that they are still trying and with even more money and pressure ALEC is likely to succeed!

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult, an absolutely must-read essay by Mike Lofgren.

Mike Lofgren retired on June 17 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees.

(I’m quoting the best parts here, but please read the whole thing)

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics…

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel – how prudent is that? – in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization….

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe…

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the “birther” issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal – “I take the president at his word” – while never unambiguously slapping down the myth…

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors….

2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia – a nuclear-armed state – during the latter’s conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? – “we are all Georgians now,” a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading “defense experts,” …

3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file….

Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

In yesterday’s post I argued, with the assistance of Robert Reich, that the Republicans are either fools or knaves, or possibly both, for fighting any efforts to reduce joblessness through increased government spending.

BUT THE Republicans do have a “program” to reduce joblessness. They argue that deregulation will do the job. This of course is nonsense, as Jared Bernstein and the Washington Post point out:

As meticulously described in this analysis of EPA anti-pollution regs by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, is that the costs typically assumed by industry lobbyists are a lot higher than what actually comes out of the policy process.

The WaPo, in an excellent editorial today on these points, summarizes the CRS findings:

“Fears of disruption to the power sector are overblown, the CRS said: Newer coal power plants already have pollution controls, and many older ones are set to shut down anyway, in part because burning cleaner natural gas is now so cheap. Meanwhile, studies that many critics continue to rely on in their forecasts of expensive regulatory disaster assume stringent provisions that the Obama administration never proposed.”

Again, from the WaPo editorial:

“Reasonable people can disagree on how much economic cost is worth bearing for how much environmental benefit. But the Republican critique seems to deny that such a trade-off even exists.”

Suppose an allegedly “job-killing” regulation led to the improvement in public health, thus decreasing health costs or lost work days.. Job-killing claims are largely, if not wholly, speculation.

This also squares with recent history and what employers themselves tell us (re that link, these McClatchy folks consistently do great work getting at the facts behind misleading political arguments). The regulatory regime simply hasn’t changed much over the years, and much of what they do complain about has been around forever.

So are Republicans fools or knaves to buy in to the “job-killing” regulation myth? Have their corporate masters sold them a bill of goods, or are they fighting for deregulation simply to please those masters? Who knows?

The saddest part of this story is that just as with reducing the deficit, President Obama himself as felt it necessary to bow to this narrative: White House decides to delay new ozone standard.

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

Robert Reich:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports today no jobs were created in August. Zero. Nada…

In reality, worse than zero. We need 125,000 a month merely to keep up with population growth. So the hole continues to deepen.

Since this Depression began at the end of 2007, America’s potential labor force – working-age people who want jobs – has grown by over 7 million. But since then the number of Americans with jobs has shrunk by more than 300,000…

The problem is on the demand side. Consumers (whose spending is 70 percent of the economy) can’t boost the economy on their own. They’re still too burdened by debt, especially on homes that are worth less than their mortgages. Their jobs are disappearing, their pay is dropping, their medical bills are soaring.

And businesses won’t hire without more sales…

So why don’t Republicans get it? Either they’re knaves – they want the economy to stay awful through next Election Day so Obama gets the boot. Or they’re fools – they’ve bought the lie that reducing the deficit now creates more jobs.

But even if they’ve bought into that lie, why won’t they agree to raise taxes on the rich and close corporate loopholes? Perhaps because they are both fools AND knaves?

Comments

|

E-mail

|

Print

Today, the White House issued a press release stating they would not move to issue a final standard on ozone pollution. The American Thoracic strongly condemns this decision. “This is not change we believe in,” said ATS President-Elect Monica Kraft, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Asthma, Allergy and Airway Center at Duke University.

Ozone, also known as smog, is known to endanger patients with asthma, COPD and other respiratory conditions. Scientific studies have consistently shown that ozone at the current EPA-approved levels leads to missed school days, more emergency room visits and hospitalizations—and even premature death.

“What President Obama has called a ‘regulatory burden’ is what we physicians call a protective health standard,” noted Dr. Kraft.

A number of physician groups have called upon President Obama to issue a stricter ozone standard, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Thoracic Society.

“President Obama’s announcement today represents a big set back for the public’s health,” said Dr. Kraft. “The ATS urges the President to reconsider today’s disappointing decision, and we plan to redouble our efforts to educate and advocate for cleaner air for the benefit of all U.S. citizens.”