Campaign for America’s Future: It’s The Economy, Stupid!

B’Man: I joined CAF (Campaign for America’s Future) a while back because most of their issues are progressive and I agree with (on the whole). There are a few issues where I find myself in disagreement (and shared those with the editors today). We are over 400,000 strong.

Nonetheless, I wish you would check them out and join if it makes sense for you.

Just before the holiday, they issued this email newsletter giving hints on how to address these issues when you are picnicking with that curmudgeonly old uncle that loves Rush and Bush. They pointed out these disturbing facts about the economy:

* America is losing jobs. The private sector has lost more than 400,000 jobs in the last six months. Over the past seven years, 3.4 million manufacturing jobs—one out of every five—has been shipped overseas. Today, a smaller percentage of Americans have jobs than at the beginning of the Bush administration.

* Basic costs are skyrocketing. The price of gasoline has increased by more than $2.50 per gallon since George W. Bush took office and the average household will spend $2300 more on gas this year than in 2001. The cost of health insurance has nearly doubled during the Bush Administration. Tuition and fees at public four-year colleges are up 46 percent since 2001. And now food prices have begun to rise.

* American incomes are stagnant. Adjusting for inflation, American workers haven’t made any salary gains since Bush took office. In fact, real median household income dropped nearly $1000 from 2000 to 2006. The number of Americans in poverty increased from 31.5 to 36.5 million from 2000 to 2006. Now, one out of every eight Americans is considered poor.

* We’re mired in debt. Sixteen percent of mortgaged homes are now “underwater”; that is, the mortgage owed equals or exceeds the value of the house. It is estimated that by June 2009, nearly one in four homes will be underwater. At least two-thirds of college students graduate with some debt and the average debt among graduates exceeds $19,000. More than 850,000 families filed for bankruptcy last year, a 38 percent increase over 2006.

We’re losing jobs, income if we can keep the job, our homes and owe more than ever before. But we sure do pump money into military and the politician’s favorite industries. As CAF puts it in their solution:

For heaven’s sake, let’s stop squandering $340 million dollars per day on the war in Iraq; let’s put that money to work here in the U.S. instead. For example, to soften the blow of the current recession, state and local governments need federal aid so they can continue providing critical community services. To restore America’s economy, we need to invest in ourselves. That means fixing our nation’s bridges and roads, expanding mass transit and broadband access, becoming energy independent, developing new “green” technologies, and ensuring that every child receives a high-quality education. To redirect spending to where it’s needed, we need to eliminate tax breaks for wealthy corporations, especially those that reward companies for sending jobs overseas.

You can read more at www.ourfuture.org/makingsense2008

A little bit more about CAF from their ‘About Us’ page:

The Campaign for America’s Future is the strategy center for the progressive movement. Our goal is to forge the enduring progressive majority needed to realize the America of shared prosperity and equal opportunity that our country was meant to be.

To attain our ultimate goal, we spearhead a compelling progressive agenda that addresses the kitchen-table issues working families face. We regularly convene and educate progressive thinkers, organizers and community activists so our voices will be coordinated, cogent and potent. And we incubate national campaigns on the critical issues that will define America for generations to come.

Americans have had it with tired conservative politics that divide us, an economy that squeezes us, a foreign policy that weakens us and a government that serves few of us.

But while conservatism may be exhausted, progressives are just getting started. The Campaign for America’s Future is driving our progressive movement and offering the new vision, bright ideas and bold leadership Americans rightly demand.

We are showing the way toward accessible education, affordable health care and secure retirements for all. Toward a clean energy future and away from Middle East occupation. Toward the representative, responsive and responsible government needed for all of us to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We cannot let the conservative failure that brought us to this precarious moment tip America into another Gilded Age and leave the world at the mercy of unaccountable multinationals, oil-drenched autocrats and merchants of terrorism.

It’s our job to turn this precarious moment into a prosperous progressive era. Together, we can.

Robert L. Borosage
Roger Hickey
Co-Directors, Campaign for America’s Future

I will be featuring more of their transmittals and ideas as things progress and we eventually erase the idiotic neoconservative foolishness that has torn this country asunder.

Jen’s Update: Avastin Treatment Continues This Week

Jen: Tiny Dancer

MONDAY, JULY 07, 2008 11:02 AM, EDT

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Back from Lake, Chemo Resuming

Entry by TRH from Ohio

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Greetings Jen Nation!

I met my family at Lake Chautauqua (NY) WED-SAT last week. My sister and Matthew had been there since Monday. Check the PHOTOS section …

She tolerated the trip pretty well as long as she paced herself — which actually applied to all of us!

There was plenty good to eat — sponge candy and orange chocolate from Buffalo, Perry’s “Piece of Cake” ice cream, breakfast and dinner at Hotel Lenhart …

We played 9 holes of golf most days — Matthew even played twice and is getting the bug that afflicts me and my Dad (ha ha). Granny had the best shot Wednesday on a steep downhill par 3 that overlooks the lake!

I joined my Dad for fishing THU & FRI morning — we could not subsist on our fishing skills — ha ha. He actually did quite well, catching a small bass, a couple sunfish and a perch, none of which unfortunately were large enough to keep. I hooked the anchor a couple times and hauled in lots of lake weed, but we had lots of fun!

Granny also taught us a new “rummy-based” card game called “Manipulation”. Supposedly cousin Julie brought it down from Detroit. My sister even got in on a few hands the last day before we shut down the “Parlor B Casino” — ha ha!

Mrs. Blair visited the first of the week, then Granny thru Saturday. I was able to drive her back to Smethport, enjoying some quality time and getting a big bag of chocolate chip cookies for my effort!!!!

Aunts Ellen, Marie, Uncle Larry & Smitter also drove down from Buffalo multiple days, which made it extra special.

As we watched fireworks in the distance from the shoreline ablaze with red flares, it surely seemed like a special occasion none of us will soon forget.

A little back to reality — Avastin treatments resume this week, so your ongoing prayers and support are appreciated. You know ours are with you! — TRH

Read Journal

Pro vs Con: A Look At Health Care

If government can run health care so well, why is Medicare going bankrupt? Medicare has worked for 40 years. But the price pressures driving up costs in the private health care system affect Medicare as well. Medicare actually has lower overhead than private health insurance. And if we design a comprehensive program to cover all Americans, we can save $1 trillion over the next 10 years. That will get health care costs under control and stabilize Medicare. more pro vs con >>

Hey, America: Its The Military Industrial Complex Ruining Our Country

Sherwood Ross has an excellent post up at OpEdNews that describes the problem perfectly. Our country (and the Big Two Presidential Candidates) has been hijacked by the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) and it has become quite clear to anyone paying any attention that it will be this hijacking that will be the demise of our country.

We were warned, but Americans are too stupid and scared shitless by the leadership’s complicit lies that we won’t do or say anything about it. What? Do you mean that we don’t need to spend more than the rest of the WORLD combined to keep a superior military?

McCain is an old fool who is their biggest cheerleader, but Obama is is worse. Why worse? Because he misleads Americans who know we need change. He will GROW the MIC. That is the very last thing our country needs and he knows it. But, he will never allow the Right to paint him as weak on defense, when we are the very strongest country in the world. Period.

Read Sherwood’s article:

What Military-Industrial Complex?

by Sherwood Ross

One issue the American people likely are not going to hear about in this presidential campaign are arguments for slashing a bloated Pentagon down to size.

No matter that each passing day brings some new revelation of gross mismanagement, cronyism, waste, and extra-legal activity, it is a topic no candidate for the White House dares to broach lest he or she be deemed “naïve” or “soft” on the subject of defense.

Yet, the military-industrial complex(MIC) is here and it is running this nation into the ground, sucking trillions of dollars out of taxpayers’ wallets and, by starving other human services, laying waste to civilian sectors in urgent need of repair and regeneration.

When the Pentagon was under construction, members of the Roosevelt cabinet questioned the wisdom of bringing together under one roof the numerous military offices scattered around Washington, D.C. They feared the impending consolidation of awesome martial powers into one of the greatest structures on earth; they worried, too, that the war machine might take on a life of its own.

Tragically, their fears have been realized. As James Carroll writes in “House of War”(Houghton Mifflin), by 1965 nearly 6 million Americans were employed in Pentagon-run enterprises. After all, in the 20 years following World War II, “the Pentagon spent nearly $100 billion, ten times the federal expenditures devoted to all aspects of health, education, and welfare in the same period.”

By 1997, Father Philip Berrigan, humanitarian and anti-war activist, could tell the judge who would shortly sentence him to two years in prison for spilling blood on a U.S. warship: “The United States has spent fourteen trillion dollars on arms since 1946. Our government has intervened in the affairs of fifty nations and has violated the laws of God and humanity by designing, deploying, using, and threatening to use atomic weapons.”

Carroll sees it in much the same light: “The Pentagon is now the dead center of an open-ended martial enterprise that no longer pretends to be defense…the Pentagon has, more than ever, become a place to fear.”

“What the Bush administration has done,” Carroll writes, “is to lay bare the real character of the ‘disastrous rise’ of Pentagon power of which Eisenhower warned in 1961. In Iraq, despite America’s overwhelming military might, there will be no winning ever.”

Carroll’s words sound more prophetic each time another general testifies the Pentagon is “making progress” but the situation remains “fragile” and so we must stay on an on. Two years ago Carroll literally predicted Senator John McCain’s comment about staying in Iraq for a hundred years if need be, writing, “there will be no winning ever. Whether the U.S. occupation is terminated abruptly or is maintained for years, violence and mayhem will define Iraq indefinitely, while the rest of the Middle East copes with Iraqi-spawned waves of chaos.”

McCain says, if elected, he will be out of Iraq by 2013, but as Senator Joseph Biden pointed out in a recent talk carried on C-Span, McCain gave no specifics. And so one begins to suspect the goal in Iraq is not necessarily to win a war but to make war again and again, forever and a day, so the MIC can prosper while non-defense sectors starve, so that government contractors can erect a monster embassy in Baghdad and huge, permanent military bases nearby to dominate the oil-rich Middle East.

Carroll writes the U.S. under President Bush has “normalized” war: “Not noted by most Americans, a new archipelago of U.S. military bases stretched across the Middle East into the heart of the former Soviet Union…Such forward basing of forces was designed to control, by means of ‘regime change’ and ‘prevention,’ emerging political trends around the globe, with the unabashed goal of guaranteeing U.S. dominance everywhere.” (America operates about 1,000 military bases at home and more than 700 overseas.)

“Such a strategy,” Carroll goes on to write, “assumes not only the possession of unparalleled military power but the display of it and the ready use of it. Under George W. Bush, a self-styled war president, ‘the normalization of war’ was thus established.”

What’s more, Carroll writes, under former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon in 2002 embarked “on the stunning project of developing a new generation of nuclear weapons including a burrowing device designed to go after underground targets and ‘mini-nukes’ to be used in concert with a conventional attack.”

The effect of all this, Carroll writes, “is to legitimize nuclear-based power politics, giving other nations, friend and foe alike, compelling reasons to acquire a nuclear capacity, if only for deterrence, and prompting them to behave in similar ways.”

Carroll says the U.S. return to nuclear development was to spur Iran and North Korea to become nuclear-capable and to make states that renounced the atom—such as Brazil, Egypt, South Africa— rethink that decision. Meanwhile, Carroll says, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan “are all furiously adding to their nuclear arsenals” and “The Pentagon has become the engine of proliferation.”

If the public hasn’t figured it out yet, the United States of America cannot go on this way forever, spending nearly half of every tax dollar on war. Besides the tragedy of our own 4,000 killed and 30,000 wounded in a deceitful war for oil, and the tragedy of perhaps 1 million Iraqis killed and a million more wounded, and four million forced from their homes, and their nation in ruins, the Bush regime has also turned much of the world against America and American brands.

Americans workers and their families soon may be suffering economically as they never have since the Great Depression.

And the tyrannosaurus Rex in the family room smashing our domestic tranquility is the MIC. President Eisenhower had the guts to warn us of it. Senator McCain is a traveling salesman for it. And now Senator Obama, who called for expanding the military July 3rd, appears to have sold out to it. Yuk! #(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer. Contact: sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)

My Nader Petition Drive

It was actually more like a petition crawl.

I have never been so frustrated with something. It appears that I can only convince about 1% of the SW TN voters to sign him on. I approached at least 1,000 (and believe me, approaching 1,000 people in and around Savannah, TN is no easy task) and gathered only 14 signatures. Of those, only 3 came without more than 5 minutes of steady prodding. I also estimate that 3 are no good. So a net of 11 in almost 2 weeks sucks to high heaven.

I walked over to my next door neighbor (he apparently had relatives in) to approach a group of 5 or 6 voters. The neighbor would not even acknowledge my presence (he is a cat-killing asshole, but that is another story) and his wife simply waved me off without even a “hello”.

But they had a person there (I assume a relative) who answered my question about being a registered voter in TN by saying yes. I began explaining what I was doing and why and he told me, “the best thing you can do is find a hitman for that nigger running.”

Nice.

He then explained that he was actually from Georgia (having lied to me and wasted my time) and that Bob Barr would be his choice.

I looked him in the eyes and said, “well, I am not asking for signatures for Bob Barr and since you actually live in Georgia, you are wasting my time.” I gave the woman a nasty look and turned away. However, as I was leaving, one guy walked up and said, ” Sorry about that. I agree with what you are doing and think we need someone else to pick from.”

I explained that the only way to make that happen was for people to sign the petition.

“Oh, I don’t feel right about signing ‘anything’?”

I looked at him and said, “Well, there you go. Demcracy in action”, and left.

What a bunch of murderous assholes (murder because I was warned by others in the neighborhood that the man will poison cats because he hates them so much). And yes, they spend every Sunday at church. Lovely.

Did you realize that the Union at Wal-Mart voted against any solicitations even in their parking lot? So says management. Please explain how in the hell it behooves the union to stop a Nader petition drive? Somehow I am under the impression that I have been lied to by Wal-Mart. What else is new?

I have hardly ever been this disgusted with my performance or the lack of education among my peers here. People are so ignorant, but they realize that what is being offered is no good. yet, they have a stigma about ralph, even though one can go back and show where Ralph has stood for their issues all along. Never changing. That cannot be said about the Big Two.

One pointer: never do this by yourself. Have someone there to assist, for I would be forced to spend several minutes with each person I convinced to sign or approached. If there are mulitples around, it is difficult to manage the sigs and the conversation.

Also note that I estimate that 5-10% of flea market folks are ex-cons of some fashion and cannot vote. Of course, people are hesitant to offer that info initially, so you end up wasting time (and there is no cool way to ask someone if they are a convicted criminal). Even simply asking if they are a registered voter does not necessarily get the truth. I wasted a lot of time dealing with people that WANTED to vote, supported my effort, but ended up that they could not sign.

There was one guy who had Ron Paul stickers everywhere and I approached him. He said he was voting for Ron. I explained that Ron had pulled out and that there were many issues that ralph and Ron agreed upon. “I’m voting for Ron.”

I think there is a contingency of Ron Paulites who are freaking crazy. Sorry, I feel Ron is a bit crazy, himself. Fitting.

I have no real idea what I am doing and that compounds my frustration.