Pacific Progressive

Federal Marriage Grant Funded Anti-LGBT Iowa Group

This material was created by Campus Progress.

by Brian Stewart

A right-wing Iowa group that successfully campaigned for the ousting of three state Supreme Court justices, whose ruling legalized same-sex marriage, used federal funding to support some of its efforts, aninvestigation by the Associated Press reveals.

The FAMiLY Leader, formerly called the Iowa Family Policy Center, collected $2.2 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2006-2010 to offer marriage counseling services.

But those taxpayer dollars helped the socially conservative group function while it persuaded voters to kick three Supreme Court justices off the bench—the first time in the state’s history voters have removed a judge. The group also turned away same-sex couples from the counseling services despite the fact that gay marriage was legal in the state.

“During this grant time the group was working to promote an agenda that included their involvement in politics in terms of trying to defeat the retention of three Iowa Supreme Court justices," Randall Wilson, the legal director for Iowa’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter, told the AP. "It becomes concerning, too, when federal money subsidizes or potentially could have been used to subsidize a political effort."

Republicans Are Not Being Truthful When They Blame "Uncertainty" for Lack of Hiring

From Beat the Press at the Center for Economic and Policy Research

The Washington Post has a front page article outlining President Obama's plans for deficit reduction. It then quotes Representative Paul Ryan blaming "uncertainty" for slow growth and high unemployment.

If it were the case that firms would actually be hiring except for uncertainty then we would expect to see firms increasing the average number of hours worked per workers and also turning to temporary workers. The argument here is that firms are seeing demand for labor, but they are scared to take on the commitment of hiring another worker because they think that President Obama would regulate them to death. This means that they would seek to fill this demand through alternative routes.

The data contradict the uncertainty story. Average weekly hours worked is still about 1 percent below its pre-recession level when firms presumably did not suffer from uncertainty.

                           Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

Michigan Failing to Offer Voter Registration to Public Assistance Clients

From Demos

National Voting Rights Groups Put Secretary of State Johnson on Notice of Voting Rights Violations

Detroit, Michigan - Citing clear evidence that the State of Michigan is failing to provide low-income residents with a legally-mandated opportunity to register to vote, attorneys from Demos, Project Vote, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRUL), and the NAACP sent a pre-litigation notice letter on August 19, 2011 to Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, on behalf of the Michigan State Conference of the NAACP.  The letter demands that the Secretary immediately act to bring Michigan into compliance with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) or face litigation.

Section 7 of the NVRA requires state public assistance agencies, which provide services such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid, to provide voter registration services to their clients. In the first two years after the NVRA became effective in Michigan in 1995, the State registered more than 79,500 people through public assistance agencies.

However, according to evidence cited in the notice letter, the local offices of the Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) have largely disregarded this law in recent years.  For example, looking at registration data for 2005-2006 and 2007-2008, there was an 82.5% decrease in the number of voter registration applications submitted through public assistance agencies in Michigan - even though 2008 included a historic presidential election for which high voter registration at public assistance agencies would be expected.  Field investigations found that public assistance clients around the state are not being provided with voter registration applications, contrary to the requirements of the NVRA.

Perry and the HPV Vaccine: Selling Women's Health (and Everything Else) to the Highest Bidder

by: Martha Kempner, RH Reality Check | Report via Truthout

In 2007, Governor Rick Perry shocked both public health officials and his conservative base when he signed an executive order mandating that female students in Texas be vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) before entering the sixth grade. The order referred to Gardasil, a vaccine that had been approved by the FDA only a few months earlier after having been found to prevent infection with four strains of HPV, including two strains that account for 70 percent of cervical cancer and two that account for 90 percent of genital warts.  The FDA approved the three-shot regimen for young women ages nine to 26 and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that this become part of the routine vaccinations of girls at ages 11 or 12 because “it is important for girls to get HPV vaccine before their first sexual contact – because they won’t have been exposed to human papillomavirus.”

Public health advocates argued that because HPV is so easily spread through sexual contact, universal or near-universalvaccinations would be the only the way to eradicate the disease.  They pointed out that, although cervical cancer can be preventedthrough early detection using Pap Smears and other medical tests, approximately 10,000 women in the United State do become infected each year.  As a result of these arguments, anumber of states considered legislation and rules similar to Perry’s order which would make the vaccine a requirement for school attendance.  (It’s worth noting that many public health advocates stopped short of supporting these types of mandates because of the fear that such requirements and the steep price of the vaccine –- about $390 for the series -– would be too much of a burden on the Vaccines for Children program, “a federally-funded program that provides vaccines at no cost to children who might not otherwise be vaccinated because of inability to pay.”)

Auto Workers Vote to Approve Contract with General Motors

Laura ClawsonFollowforDaily Kos Labor

UAW workers voted strongly to approve the contract negotiated last week; 65 percent of production workers and 63 percent of skilled trades workers were in favor.

"The UAW and GM entered into this set of bargaining as America struggles with record levels of unemployment and an economy that shows little sign of improvement," said UAW President Bob King.  Because of President Obama's and the American taxpayers' backing of our jobs and our companies, we were determined to work together with GM management to grow jobs in  the U.S. and to get more Americans back to work and we are doing just that.

"With the continued support and solidarity of our members at GM, we stood strong and not only stopped these proposed givebacks, but we made important gains for our members in this contract," King added.

UAW Vice President Joe Ashton, who directs the union's GM Department said, "We are enormously proud of our union and the UAW GM National Negotiating Committee.  In these uncertain economic times, we were able to win an agreement with GM that guarantees good American jobs at a good American company. When GM was down, our members sacrificed and saved GM. Now that GM is posting strong profits, our members, as a result of this agreement, are going to share in the company's success."  

According to the Detroit Free Press:

Just three UAW locals representing 3,400 workers were known to have voted against the contract. GM is planning to brief Wall Street analysts on the details of the deal this afternoon, an indication that management was confident the agreement will be ratified.

Some locals only narrowly approved the contract.

The Free Press also reports that:

At Ford, the UAW is optimistic it can reach an agreement by week’s end. UAW President Bob King and UAW Vice President Jimmy Settles met with the company on Tuesday and bargaining sessions are expected to continue until a deal is reached.

Things are moving rather more slowly at Chrysler, where the most recent contract extension lasts until Oct. 19.

 

Eyewitness to Texas Wildfires Watches Austerity Burn Rural Community

by: Dallas Darling, Truthout | Report

I knew the economic and political situation in Texas was dire, but I was completely unprepared for just how appalling conditions have become. As an emergency medical technician (EMT) from a large city, I volunteered to go to rural Bastrop, Texas, to assist the residents who are fleeing from the wildfires raging there; many of them have been injured. I was looking forward to working in a small community for a change. As an urban EMT, I have witnessed too many drug and alcohol overdoses, stabbings, beatings and shootings, along with vehicular fatalities. 

On the drive to Bastrop, I learned that the town was originally a small Spanish fort. It came under Texas' control when Texas fought a secessionist war against Mexico. Overlooking Bastrop is the Lost Pines Forest, which contributed to the local economy by supplying Austin and San Antonio with large supplies of lumber. A fire destroyed Bastrop during the Civil War, but the town was soon rebuilt. Bastrop has only 5,000 residents, while Bastrop County's population is over 70,000. Many people commute to work Austin, making Bastrop a wealthy county. Hollywood filmmakers shoot in Bastrop when they need to create historically accurate footage of the old frontier.

When I arrived in Bastrop, I encountered a second set of wildfires: angry, bitter citizens. At one meeting, residents - who had spent nearly a week wondering if their homes had been destroyed by the fire or remained standing - shouted questions at county officials. While some of the Bastrop homeowners demanded an immediate return to their properties (even making threats to state and federal authorities), others were paying "smugglers" to drive, undetected, into off-limits areas in order to retrieve their valuables and keepsakes. Frustration rose again at the meeting after an announcement that, due to some type of administrative confusion, some of Bastrop's evacuees would have to re-apply for hotel vouchers.

Department of Labor Cracks Down on Wage Theft Through Misclassification

by Laura Clawson for Daily Kos Labor

The Department of Labor announced agreements  to cut down on wage theft through misclassification of workers. The agreements, with the Internal Revenue Service and a number of states, allow improved information sharing and law enforcement efforts against employers who misclassify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits or overtime and other pay.

Cracking down on wage theft has been amajor focus for Labor Secretary Hilda Solis:

In 2010, the Labor Department collected nearly $4 million in back wages on behalf of about 6,500 employees who had been misclassified, a 400 percent increase over the amount collected in 2008. The department has hired about 300 additional investigators to probe wage theft complaints.

That includes cases like this:

Earlier this year, for example, the department recovered over $219,000 in back wages for 44 Boston-area restaurant workers who were misclassified as independent contractors by two restaurants. The restaurants had failed to pay them overtime and also weren't paying their payroll taxes.

Recently, the Department of Labor has been investigating large residential construction contractors. There are many more such examples out there. Wage theft takes many forms, from workers who work through lunch breaks or continue working after they've clocked out to those who simply aren't paid for their work; misclassification of workers as independent contractors frames exploited workers as entrepreneurs, a category our society values, while really depriving them of the freedom of self-employment and the stability and benefits of being a direct employee.

 

Reid Holding Vote on China Trade Bill Before Obama's Jobs Plan

Laura ClawsonFollowforDaily Kos Labor

Since the trade deficit with China has cost the United States 2.8 million jobs since 2001, there can be no serious question that addressing that issue is a jobs bill. And that's just what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is arguing as he schedules a vote on legislation creating penalties on Chinese currency manipulation before the vote on President Obama's jobs plan:

“I don’t think there’s anything more important for a jobs measure than China trade. That’s what we’re going to work on next week. China trade is a jobs bill. It’s long, long overdue,” he told reporters. “It’s a bipartisan bill, and I feel very comfortable we’re going to pass that.”

The bill passed the House overwhelmingly in 2010, but the politics of passing it now are complicated: Many Republican legislators support it, but Republican House leadership, namely John Boehner and Eric Cantor, do not. Reid and many Democratic legislators support it, but Obama "is not eager to confront China over its currency policy." However, Obama also has reasons not to oppose it, especially needing Reid to schedule a vote for his jobs plan:

One Senate Democratic aide said the Obama administration would be wise not to take potshots at the legislation, knowing it will depend on Reid to pass the jobs package and the trade bills.

Another Senate Democratic aide predicted the administration would steer clear of the issue regardless of Reid’s political maneuver because it does not want to oppose the popular bipartisan legislation.

If the bill passes the Senate but House Republican leadership refuses to bring it to a vote, Democrats have a weapon for their 2012 campaigns; meanwhile, Obama is likely hoping for just that outcome since it strengthens Democrats without forcing him to make a tough call.

 

Tax Breaks Are Heavily Tilted Toward High Income Taxpayers

From Beat the Press at the Center for Economic and Policy Research

The Post (Sunday Sept 18, 2011)  had a front page column reporting on the cost of tax breaks. The piece likely gave many readers a misleading picture of the main beneficiaries of these tax cuts when it told readers that:

"the bulk went to private households, primarily upper-middle-class families that Obama has vowed to protect from new taxes.'The big money is in the middle-class subsidies,' said Syracuse University economist Leonard Burman, former director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center."

In fact, by far the largest beneficiaries of these tax cuts are upper income individuals as the chart accompanying the piece shows. For example, tax breaks amount to average of $82,400 for families with income between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Close to 70 percent of the mortgage interest deduction goes to families with incomes above $100,000 a year.

These tax breaks tend to be worth less to more moderate income families since in most cases they do not amount to much more than the standard deduction. That means that most families near the median income (@$60,000) see little benefit from these tax breaks.

 

Conservative War On Workers Continues With Gutting Of Labor Board

By Isaiah J. Poole for the Campaign for America's Future

House conservatives  threw another grenade today in their war on workers and the institutions designed to protect worker rights. They also continued to show their willingness to politically interfere in an administrative law process to impose their ideology and protect their political contributors.

Legislation passed by the House would prevent the National Labor Relations Board from punishing a corporation that, as an act of retaliation or intimidation against union workers, decides to move its operations out of a unionized facility. As The New York Times reports:

Republicans are angry that the labor board’s acting general counsel filed a complaint against Boeing in April, asserting that the company had built an assembly line in South Carolina to retaliate against unionized workers in Washington State for engaging in numerous strikes.

The National Labor Relations Act bars employers from taking any actions, including transferring an operation, in retaliation against workers for exercising their federally protected rights, including forming a union or going on strike.

Minority Trauma Patients Are More Likely To Die At ‘Minority’ Hospitals

 BY SHEFALI S. KULKARNI

Source: Archives of Surgery

Dr. Adil Haider, a trauma surgeon and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, thought trauma would be the one medical area free from racial disparities — emergency rooms don’t check insurance, and they are required to treat anyone who comes through their doors.

“With trauma, you call and the ambulance comes. We think we treat everyone the same when they come into the Emergency Department,” he said. But he and his research colleagues found Hispanic and black trauma patients faced a higher risk of death compared to whites—especially if they are served in hospitals with a high percentage of minority patients.

Postal Workers and Allies Rally Across the Country to Save the Postal Service

Laura ClawsonFollowforDaily Kos Labor

(Wisconsin AFL-CIO)

Save America's Postal Service rallies were held across the country Tuesday, each drawing dozens to hundreds of postal workers and supporters.

Many of the individual rallies were small, but they were everywhere. In Joliet, Illinois, 200 workers rallied and brought 3,000 petition signatures to the office of Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who insists on referring inaccurately to the Postal Service asking for a "bailout." Dozens gathered outside Rep. Dave Reichert's office in Washington state. In Washington, D.C., a suspicious package reported within blocks of the planned rally left dozens marching and chanting on a street that had been blocked to pedestrian and car traffic. Grand Rapids, Michigan. Charleston, West Virginia. Chico, California.

A Political Casualty of 9/11: The Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement

by: Daniel Denvir, Truthout | News Analysis

Nine-eleven's ten-year anniversary is sparking retrospectives ranging from lives lost to a War on Terror launched. But media accounts have omitted an important political casualty: the short-lived "anti-globalization" movement, perhaps the largest American social movement since the civil rights and Vietnam War era.

I watched the massive November 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) from my computer, a high school student with a budding interest in social justice eagerly clicking "refresh" on the brand new Indymedia web site: Teamsters and Turtles, steelworkers and socialists shutting down streets and anarchists smashing Starbucks' windows. The police conducted mass arrests and unleashed tear gas, but a shocked elite was forced to hunker down in hotel rooms: the summit failed and the march of global capitalism stumbled.

We had no idea it would come to such a quick and sudden end. A rapid-fire series of mass demonstrations forced secretive financial institutions, corporations (and political parties) to make their case to the American people for the first time in a very long time, and there was a sense of incredible optimism and power. Older activists were amazed to see people back in the streets and I felt like it was an incredible time to be a young activist. We expected major social change and so did everyone else.

Postal Service Employees Rally to End Manufactured Crisis

by: Rose Aguilar, Truthout | Report

US Postal employees and their supporters held rallies in every Congressional district across the country from 4:00 to 5:30 PM yesterday to urge politicians to save the postal service.

The rallies came just weeks after Postmaster General Patrick Donohoe told Congress that the US Postal Service (USPS) is "on the brink of default."

"Without the enactment of comprehensive legislation by September 30, the Postal Service will default on a mandated $5.5 billion payment to the Treasury to pre-fund retirement retiree health benefits. Our situation is urgent," he said.

The USPS says radical changes must be implemented in order to save the organization up to $3 billion a year. The plan is to eliminate 220,000 full-time jobs and shut down 3,700 post offices and 300 processing centers by 2015, scale back services and cut retirement benefits. Since 2007, the USPS has cut 110,000 jobs. Since January, 280 post offices have closed.

Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents 220,000 employees in the clerk, maintenance and motor vehicle crafts, called the changes a "reckless assault on the Postal Service and its employees. Crushing postal workers and slashing services will not solve the Postal Service's financial crisis."

Daily Health Policy Report - Thurs Sept 29, 2011 - Provided by Kaiser Health News

KHN ORIGINAL REPORTING & GUEST OPINION

• Capsules: Fla. CHIP 'Treading Water'; N.C. Insurer Invests $15 M In Docs' Health IT; HHS Offers New Push For Coordinated Care
• Building Ambitions: The Big Money World Of Kids' Care
• Political Cartoon: 'Alternate Realities'

HEALTH REFORM

• Obama Administration Asks High Court To Rule On Health Law
• Analyzing The Health Law's Tax Credits And The CLASS Act's Future
• Initiative Pays Primary-Care Docs For Coordinating Medicare Patients' Care

CAPITOL HILL WATCH

• States Join Forces To Fend Off Medicaid Cuts

COVERAGE & ACCESS

• Military Benefits Face Same Cost Challenges As Social Security, Medicare

MEDICARE

• IOM Offers Additional Ideas To Revamp System Of Geographic Adjustments To Medicare Payments