Well, his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president.Right-wing website Newsmax also reports that longtime Obama opponent Alan Keyes also says Obama has failed constitutional muster to become president, since, he argues, Obama was born in Kenya. You really have to listen to his diatribe at an interview last week in order to get the full impact of the right-wing desperation and loss of touch with reality. These people may seem like extremes but I think they are in the mainstream of the right.
Can you take a minute to stand up for workers?
This Sunday's PARADE Magazine promotes an online poll asking: "Does America still need labor unions?"
Please VOTE YES right now and pass this along to your friends and family.
I think you'd agree that it's a pretty absurd question from PARADE. With the gap between the rich and the poor wider than it's been since 1928, and with working families bearing the brunt of the economic downturn, it's clear we need unions more than ever.
That's why we're fighting so hard for the Employee Free Choice Act. Workers deserve to be able to negotiate for better wages and benefits, but the deck is stacked against them.
Chances are good you saw the poll in yesterday's paper too. PARADE calls itself America's most widely-read magazine, reaching more than 70 million readers. Please be sure your voice gets heard in this poll! Tell PARADE America needs unions!
And with anti-union special interests waging a well-funded campaign of misinformation about the Employee Free Choice Act, you can be sure our opponents will be sending this poll around.
Let's make sure they don't skew the results. Vote YES today – America still needs unions!
Thanks so much – and don't forget to pass this along to everyone you know!
Sincerely,
Liz Cattaneo
American Rights at Work
www.AmericanRightsatWork.org
It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period. But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism. This was certainly not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologizeThen they went on to attack the so-called opportunists in the media and public life who are taking advantage of the situation. This kind of half-assed apology does nothing to alleviate the situation. In fact, it tends to demean "those who were offended by the image," which obviously is in their heads.
In 2006, for the sixth straight year, the U.S. economy grew at a decent rate - on average. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth was up by not quite 3 percent. But that comforting average conceals a widening gulf. For the vast majority of Americans, wages and salaries declined and economic life became less secure. Layoffs accelerated. Health insurance cost were shifted onto employees more and more. Pension coverage deteriorated. Reconciling work and family life became more of a struggle. The notable gains went to the top 10 percent, and most of that to the top 1 percent. Since 2000, median income, adjusted for inflation, has actually fallen by 5.4 percent for all families of working age, despite GDP growth of more than 18 percent. (The Squandering of America: How the Failure of our Politics Undermines our Prosperity)I know it's always satisfying to blame Bush and certainly everything has gotten worse over the last eight years, but it's really a result of 40 years of growing inequality. That's the core of the current capitalist crisis. Labor is the most important commodity. Capitalists need to keep the cost of labor as low as possible.Kuttner puts it this way:
...though the trend [widening inequality] accelerated under [George W.] Bush, it actually started in the 1970s, when the postwar pattern of high growth producing more broadly shared prosperity went into reverse.The Republicans know exactly who they work for: the same military-industrial complex that Ike warned us against in his farewell address. And that is what fascism is after all, isn't it? The military-industrial complex using the state to carry out its nefarious deeds . Unfortunately the Democrats are not at all as clear as the GOP about who they work for. They've supported the invasion of Iraq, the Wall Street "bailout" ( the greatest theft in American history), and gone along with almost every proto-fascist (anti-American) proposal put forward by Bush and the Republicans (yes that's a band, a band of thieves). So if capitalism collapses, who's going to stand-up for a progressive agenda? Perhaps for the moment a progressive capitalism is the better of the alternatives (I can't believe I really said that, did I?). But the real question is: what will this version of capitalism look like? In order to answer that question (even hypothetically) we have to look at how the problem began. But one thing needs to be emphasized first, capitalism is rife with contradictions and therefore it constantly tends toward crises. So the best the king can do with Humpty Dumpty is temporarily put him together (Humpty will almost surely fall off that wall again).
Old-fashioned voodoo economics -- the belief in tax-cut magic -- has been banished from civilized discourse. The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point that it contains only cranks, charlatans and Republicans.Although the immediate cause of the crisis was the explosion of credit and the effects of many borrowers' inability to repay those loans (toxic loans). And how the lending institutions tried to profit from this situation. And how administration after administration failed to police Wall Street.
A SENIOR Israeli diplomat has warned that Israel is ready to launch a military offensive against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.Global Research responds to this sabre rattling with this:
In an interview with The Age, Dan Gillerman, who was Israel's permanent representative at the United Nations from 2003 until last September, said time for diplomatic efforts to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear capability might have already expired. Mr Gillerman said:The world cannot afford to live with a nuclear Iran, I hope diplomacy will work, but I'm not sure we have the time for diplomacy to work.
The truth is that, after witnessing Israeli war crimes in Lebanon and in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, the world cannot afford to live with nuclear Israel. As opposed to Iran, Israel has secretly developed hundreds of nuclear warheads and delivery weapons outside of any supervision by international community. Iran continues to run its nuclear program in cooperation with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).That seems quite reasonable to me. It further seems to me the prudent thing to do would be to label Israel a terrorist state.
[the] trustees [divested because they] concluded that the fund held stocks in more than 200 companies engaged in business practices that violated the college’s policy on 'socially responsible investments.' These violations included unfair labor practices, environmental abuse, military weapons manufacturing, and unsafe workplace settings, trustees said.That seems to me like a more semantic difference than a real one. Also according to the Globe,
The six companies that formed the basis of the student group's complaints were: Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola, and Terex.
$50 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts — all of us are for the arts, Tell me how that creates any significant number of jobs? After-school snack program is probably a good idea. Do we really want to spend $726 million on it?I know that McCain is probably as ignorant about the arts as about economics. But Senator arts are created by people. Funding for the NEA employs visual artists, actors and other creative artists. But it also employs people in galleries, stagehands, ushers, box office personnel, and, Senator, sometimes even plumbers. People, Senator, also prepare and serve school lunches. Other people maintain the facilities. And others construct new facilities. But, of course, from some Republican points of view these are just work not jobs.
The whole point, Mr. President, is to enact tax cuts and spending measures that truly stimulate the economy. There are billions and tens of billions of dollars in this bill which will have no effect within three, four, five or more years, or ever. Or ever.Much could be said about this latest McCain economic lecture, but in addition to his ignorance he also obviously doesn't listen to what Obama actually says before he shoots off his mouth.
At a press conference today by Wall Street mogul Peter Peterson, he and his invited speakers informed Americans who are losing their jobs and homes in record numbers that our nation’s biggest problem is the national deficit—and that the solution is to cut Social Security and Medicare.Who is Peter Peterson? Here's what Wikipedia has to say about him:
Peter George Peterson (born June 5, 1926) is an American businessman, investment banker, fiscal conservative, author, and politician whose most prominent political position was as United States Secretary of Commerce from February 29, 1972 to February 1, 1973. He was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations until retiring on June 30, 2007, after being named chairman emeritus. He is the Senior Chairman of the private equity firm, the Blackstone Group. In 2008, he was ranked 149th on the "Forbes 400 Richest Americans" with a net worth of $2.8 Billion. In 2008, he established The Peter G. Peterson Foundation with a $1 billion endowment.But the most important piece of information (besides his $2.8 billion net worth) is:
In 1951, he received an MBA degree from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, before returning to Market Facts as an executive vice president.That, of course, was the height of the influence of Milton Friedman's laissez-faire economic theory at the University of Chicago. Laissez-faire is the basis of
monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation [which has] informed the policy of [right-wing] governments around the globe, especially the administrations of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the US, Brian Mulroney in Canada, Roger Douglas in New Zealand, and (after 1989) in many Eastern European countries.Or as Ronald Reagan more popularly put it: " In this present crisis Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."
The New York launch of muckraker Pratap Chatterjee's brilliant expose of Halliburton, the Texas oil company that transformed how America wages war. Chatterjee will discuss the history of Halliburton’s government contracts, Dick Cheney's murky relationship with the company and how he used his Washington connections to orchestrate lucrative contracts in such trouble spots as Angola, Azerbaijan, Iran and Nigeria. As Chatterjee will demonstrate, the company’s fortunes are irrevocably linked to the war in Iraq. And even as it answers its critics and faces government audits, Halliburton continues to be the predominant U.S. government contractor in the Iraq.Phone: (212) 242-4201 - Email: brechtforum at brechtforum.org
Pratap Chatterjee is an award-winning investigative journalist and managing editor/program director of Corpwatch. He is the author of Iraq Inc. He has hosted a weekly radio show on KPFA, was global environment editor for Inter Press Service and has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Independent. Chatterjee has also appeared on the BBC World Service, CNN International, Democracy Now!, Fox and MSNBC. He is a shareholder of both Halliburton and KBR. He is the winner of a Lannan Cultural Freedom Award and lives in Washington,
DC.
