A new study from Congress’ Joint Economic Committee (JEC) debunks the prevailing conservative notion that Unemployment Insurance (UI) dissuades people from looking for a job. “On the contrary,” the report finds, “beneficiaries of federal UI benefits have spent more time searching for work than those who were ineligible for UI benefits.”
In the United States, abortion is technically a legal right, but as these cases show, it’s not functionally a right. . .
Abortion’s long descent from being a true right to being only a technical right began in 1976, when Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortion. Once you needed to be able to get the cash together to pay for an abortion, it stopped really being a right and instead became a commodity, out of reach of those who often need it the most. . .
In reality, women’s lack of access to affordable, safe abortion hurts all of us . . . In the short term, that means higher costs for Medicaid and other social welfare programs. But there’s also long-term costs to all of us. Having children they don’t feel ready to have often limits women’s employment and educational opportunities, depriving society of their talents and labor. If women can’t have children until they’re ready, they’re often limited in their abilities to educate and care for those children as well as they’d like to, which increases the burden for everyone.
Found on MoveOn.org 12.14.2011
With a powerful Tea Party movement framing Republican policy in Washington and across the US, Fault Lines looks into the links between the Tea Party movement, the Christian conservative movement and Republican politics ahead of the GOP primaries.
As the race for the Republican presidential nomination for the 2012 elections heats up, Fault Lines follows the Iowa campaign trail to investigate the underlying forces shaping candidates’ strategies.
How have politics, religion and the far-right conservative movement reshaped the political landscape of the US?
The project would provide, at most, 6,000 temporary construction jobs, very few of which would be local hires, according to an analysis performed by the U.S. State Department. Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute did its own evaluation, concluding that the project would employ between 2,500 and 4,650 construction workers. “Most jobs created will be temporary and non-local,” the institute concluded in its report, appropriately titled, “Pipe Dreams?” The real jobs in the region come from the ranches and farms, more than a quarter of a million of them in the Great Plains states the pipeline would pass through. Why would we put these fertile croplands, and the wheat, corn, and cattle they produce, at risk for the profits of the oil industry? It had, by the way, more than $100 billion in profits during just the first nine months of the year. Nothing wrong with profits, but let’s not pretend this is about anything else.
Citizens United is but the latest battle in the class war waged for thirty years from the top down by the corporate and political right. Instead of creating a fair and level playing field for all, government would become the agent of the powerful and privileged. . . We have already amended the Constitution twenty-seven times. Amendment campaigns are how we have always made the promise of equality and liberty more real. Difficult? Of course; as Frederick Douglass taught us, power concedes nothing without a struggle. To contend with power, Clements and his colleague John Bonifaz founded Free Speech for People, a nationwide nonpartisan effort to overturn Citizens United and corporate rights doctrines that unduly leverage corporate economic power into political power.
The standard “he says/she says” coverage of the issue keeps to what is called “balance”: the overwhelming majority of scientists on one side, the denialists on the other. The scientists who issue the more dire warnings are largely ignored. . . The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives is now dismantling environmental measures introduced by Richard Nixon, in many respects the last liberal president. This reactionary behavior is one of many indications of the crisis of U.S. democracy in the past generation.
Because everything in the world must revolve around Beck and the United States, no exceptions. . . He was pissed and the target was South Korea. His rage was so pure that he was demanding that the U.S. pull all of our troops out of the country immediately. Why? Because one of the S. Korea’s planned skyscrapers made him think of 9/11.
Wake up Europe, [and, until the OWS movement , the politically apathetic U.S.]
and smell the treachery.
Always Question Authority 