Mexican Farmers, Missouri EEZ, Nature

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: This morning, my heart is with Via Campesina and the Mexican farmers on a hunger strike to stop Monsanto, DuPont and Dow from planting six million acres with GM (genetically modified) corn. Remember, dear reader, that Mexico is the birthplace of corn, created by indigenous peoples through crossing vigorous, productive strains. It is an outrage that the native strains will be polluted by American GMO technology. They have chosen to camp at the Monuement of Independence from Spanish colonialism, and some are on hunger strike. The police have surrounded them. One of the peasant leaders, Alberto Gómez Flores, coordinator of Via Campesina North America, said, "It's very symbolic because they are preventing people of this country from being in front of the Monument of Independence from Spanish colonialism, and thus they are really serving their current masters, the new colonialists of Monsanto, DuPont and Pioneer." He continued, "We will stay here in camp, as close as we can be to the Monument, and if they come to evict us we will sit peacefully in resistance. They will not take us away from here." When I got to school yesterday, my friend Dr. John, the political scientist, said, “Congratulations! You won!” and I pretended to know what he was talking about. Knowing that he’d rattle on until he revealed the secret, I just said thanks, and “We always win, John.” And, true to form, he kept on effusing until I figured it out. We’d won the EEZ fight! It was in the papers, but we don’t get the Fulton Sun until late on the farm. At least for now, the Fulton Area Development Corporation has dropped its effort to declare my neighborhood blighted. They promise to return in March with a new map, based on the new census, but for now we’re un-blighted and, as far as FADC is concerned, un-develop-able. See, the EEZ scheme allows them to drop taxes for new developers. I mean, um, job creators. Even though I let John think I had something to do with the win, because he’d read my letter to the editor a week back, the real heroes were the Tea Party Patriots and Fair Tax advocates that kept calling meetings. All we had to do, from our neighborhood, is show up and ask questions. To be honest, I’m not generally with the Tea Party and Fair Tax folks. But we were united on EEZ. When I said, “We always win,” I was pretty much right. Problem is, it usually takes more than 3 months for the win to be recorded. In the Mexican farmers’ fight for social, environmental and health justice, which centers around GMO seeds, mid-Missouri will lose for another 2 generations because our present-day farmers are committed to the seeds. But nature will win in the end. Nature bats last, that’s for sure, but Nature is super slow. She’s like the kid from out-of-town that’s never played baseball, but knows all the rules for cricket. Once she figures out baseball, she’s gonna win.

Does golfer Phil Mickelson plan to seek Russian citizenship to avoid paying U.S. taxes?

By Marc Jampole

 

What do KPMG, Exxon-Mobil, Rolex, Barclay’s Bank and Calloway Golf have in common?  All of these corporations are paying tons of money to Phil Mickelson to say nice things about them. 

 

Mickelson is a professional golfer who has won more money playing golf than all but one other person in the history of the game. But his big pay-off comes from lending his name to products and companies. Mickelson earned a total of $53 million in endorsements in 2011 in addition to the $9 million he made playing golf that year. Mickelson routinely has made more than $40 million per annum for years.

 

And yet he’s complaining that his federal and California state taxes have gone up. After a golf tournament this past weekend, Mickelson made a veiled threat to change his public life because his taxes are too high. His exact words: “There are going to be some drastic changes for me because I happen to be in that zone that has been targeted both federally and by the state and, you know, it doesn't work for me right now.”

 

Some pundits think he’s threatening to retire from golf, while others think he’s threatening to relocate to a state that has lower taxes than California.

 

What’s he really threatening to do is become the poster child for tantrum-throwing selfishness.

 

Mickelson complains that his tax rate is 62% or 63% of his income.  That percentage is completely bogus, of course, because it doesn’t include the many deductions he probably takes and it applies the highest tax rate for both California and federal income tax to all his income, not just the amount above the floor for the highest marginal (or incremental) rate.

 

But even if we assume that Mickelson is actually paying 63% of all his income in taxes, that means that he and his family would have to get by on a mere $14.8 million a year, assuming he continues to make his low end of $40 million income before taxes.  Does that mean more hamburger helper and Top Ramen for the Mickelson household?  Of course, he could always supplement the budget by dipping into his estimated $150 million net worth.

 

Mickelson’s problem could be that he lives in a hermetically sealed environment of golf courses, resorts, country clubs and gated communities in which he only interacts with other golfers and a lot of rich folk who love golf.  He may never see the maid who cleans his hotel room, the guy who mows the green, the crews that repair the roads on which he drives or the TV engineer who makes sure his swing is transmitted to the millions of fans watching the tournament on TV. He may have never thought about how much—or how little—money his children’s teachers make, or how much or little the cashier makes who works the cash register where the hired help buy his family’s groceries.

 

Mickelson may have not done the math, so let’s do it for him: The $14.8 million that he would pocket a year if he only earned $40 million gross and he was taxed 63% on it computes to about 285 times what the average employed Californian earns before taxes.  

 

In his sequestered and rich little world, Mickelson may not be aware of the fact that our roads and bridges need work, that our public schools have been starved of funds, that we need to develop new technologies to address the threat of global warming, that the cost of public colleges is skyrocketing primarily because of a cutback in state support or that millions of people are unemployed or underemployed.

 

Mickelson may not know that he would have paid more in taxes in 1980, before Ronald Reagan began the conservative retrenchment that has led to the growing inequality of wealth in America. Mickelson may not know that he would have paid more before the Bush II tax cuts for the wealthy. He may not know that he would pay more taxes in virtually any other industrialized country.

 

I’ve had my fill of selfish a__holes like Phil Mickelson.  As far as I’m concerned he can follow the tax avoidance strategy of that overrated French actor Gérard Depardieu, who, rather than pay French income tax, has given up French citizenship and now makes his home in Luxemburg.  Maybe like Depardieu, Mickelson will be granted Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin. 

 

I say, let Mickelson play 18 holes somewhere in Siberia. 

Walmart’s private sector economic stimulus package helps no one but Walmart

By Marc Jampole

Walmart is making a big deal about two moves it announced this week, for which it is demanding applause and gratitude.  You could call it the Walmart private sector economic stimulus plan. The trouble is, it’s nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Walmart’s first contribution to the American economy is a pledge to buy an additional $50 billion in goods and services from American companies over the next 10 years. It seems like a lot until you run the numbers, which I am not the first to do. It works out to $5 billion a year, a drop in the bucket of more than $250 billion in goods and services that this modern leviathan buys each year. Walmart is making a big deal about what for them is a minor adjustment that will make but a minor ripple in the U.S. economy.

More odiously self-serving is Walmart’s announcement that it will hire 100,000 veterans, or every veteran who left the service with an honorable discharge this past year. Sounds like a great combination of patriotism and economic growth until you start to think about it. Walmart literally has more than 2.2 million employees. Between growth and turnover, in any given year it is going to be hiring 100,000 people as greeters, cashiers, stockers and other in-store positions. Walmart has not created a single job, it has just said that it would give special consideration to one demographic group—recent veterans.

 

I’m also not the first to point out that the type of job that virtually all these vets will get at Walmart is low pay and with minimal or no benefits and little chance for advancement. Is this the best that we can do for those who have risked their lives on the frontlines of the wars prosecuted in our names?

 

The most interesting aspect of the Walmart hiring veterans announcement is what it will do to the demographics of its workforce: In the overall economy, more than 50% of all jobs today are held by women, and yet women are only 20% of the armed forces and therefore about 20% of the veterans in any given year. The disparate impact of hiring veterans is that the Walmart workforce will begin to skewer towards the male. Given the many past and ongoing lawsuits accusing Walmart of discrimination against women, the focus on veterans could make one begin to wonder if Walmart’s motives were less than patriotic.

Like the executives of many large companies, Walmart’s leaders could easily get lost in the internal rhetoric of the company, which lauds itself with the inexorable regularity with which parents laud four year olds for finishing their plates and zipping up their flies after potty.  These guys might actually get themselves to believe that it’s a big deal to bump up domestic purchases by a small amount or to focus hiring on one demographic group. And they probably thought the U.S. news media and public would believe it, too.

 

But it doesn’t matter how thickly Walmart’s public relations flaks paint the happy face on Walmart’s announcements. The news media and the public are more cynical after decades of seeing Walmart destroy small towns, bankrupt small business owners, squeeze suppliers and pay low wages.

Coke’s heavy-handed try to position itself as committed to good health ignores heavy people

By Marc Jampole

Coke’s two-minute commercial telling us what it’s doing to fight the epidemic of obesity sweeping across America must contain two hundred people—all happy, many engaged with a Coke product, and none of them obese, or even overweight. Okay, okay, maybe two of the hundreds of people in the ad could stand to lose a few pounds, but even these still-happy few were in pretty good shape and shown being active.

Imagine. If instead of getting attractive models to shill their messages about a wider variety of smaller portions and lower calorie drinks, Coke had shown a cross section of the population—or better yet, a cross section of their drinkers—we would have seen a mesmerizing montage of saggy and billowing mid sections, big tushes, thunder thighs and quadruple chins. In short (and in large) one third or more of the happy Coke drinkers (shown or implied) in the commercial would have been obese and another third would have had more pot-gutted waddle than spring in their step.  That’s what all the statistics say: about a third of us are obese and another third are overweight.

Unfortunately for Coke, in the ideal world depicted in its commercial, a world of all healthy and happy people, there is no room for Coke or its products, other than the unscented water. The 100% juices that Coke mongers substitute a less healthy way to consume fruit—drinking it—for the healthier and lower calorie option of eating a real piece of fruit.  The sugared sodas are empty calories and the low-calorie ones have chemical substitutes that make people crave more food, so both lead directly to weight gain.

The ad and Coke’s overall campaign repeat the Big Lie that gets told whenever food companies get involved in an anti-obesity campaign. The big lie is to overstress the importance of exercise in losing weight. Don’t get me wrong: everyone should exercise a lot because it’s good for the brain, the heart and the psyche, and it does work off calories.

But exercise can only go so far. It takes about a half an hour on a treadmill to work off one chocolate chip cookie. So for the two thirds of Americans who already have a problem, exercise is no substitute for eating less…a lot less. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less. And what better place to start reducing what you eat than to stop consuming the empty calories of Coke products?

Justice Dept should spend more time prosecuting gun liars and no time prosecuting med. pot dispensaries

By Marc Jampole

The absurdly ironic impact of politics on the justice system shines brightly on the front page of today’s New York Times. First we learn that, of the 80,000 Americans who the Justice Department (DOJ) knows committed the federal crime of lying or providing inaccurate information on gun purchase background checks in 2010, only 44 were charged with a crime. And surprise, surprise, those who lie on background checks are more likely to commit violent crimes than the average person.

The 80,000, of course, are only the ones who got caught lying.  Some unmeasured number succeeded and thereby own guns that should legally not be in their possession.

Certainly many of the 80,000 were telling little stretchers and don’t deserve prosecution, but I’m betting that a goodly number were involved in identity theft, had a record or a restraining order or were under the care of a therapist. Prosecuting a large number of people who lie on their gun background applications would certainly send a message. It would lead to fewer people prone to lie on background checks filling them out. If we required background checks for all sales, it would lead to fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.

Now that’s a message that the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the rest of the moneyed anti-gun control lobby doesn’t like.  Few lawmakers have the guts to openly support gun control and insist that we go after these lawbreakers. And as with the environment and global warming, Obama talks a good game but has actually done nothing about gun control except commiserate with victims and do a little tough-talking.

While I’m hopeful that the Biden Task Force will lead to some action (finally!) on controlling the proliferation of guns with inadequate regulation, I’m also wondering how in the world the DOJ is going to be able to summon up the resources to investigate those who lie on gun purchase background checks, given shrinking federal budgets.

 

To our good fortune, the Times provides the answer right there on the very same front page in a story about federal prosecution of a California businessman who has all his state licenses, follows all state laws and regulations to a tee, keeps pristine records, pays all taxes, files his forms on time  and yet faces years in jail because his business is growing and selling medical marijuana.  The prosecution of Matthew R. Davies for being a sharp but law-abiding entrepreneur is only the latest in DOJ efforts to squelch the use of medical marijuana in states in which it’s legal.  Barack Obama and his attorney general Douglas Holder seem to hold a special animus for those who facilitate the legal use of marijuana, as if they have a kind of juvenile envy of people allowed to puff the magic dragon. No study links pot smoking with violent crime or even any increase in crimes (except the crime of buying/selling/using it where it s not legal or under illegal conditions). The DOJ thus does nothing to help make our lives safer and more secure by going after California or Colorado pot entrepreneurs. 

 

Let’s review: Instead of prosecuting people who are willing to lie to get their hands on a loaded gun, the DOJ goes after a business person who has broken no state law and is supplying a medical service.  

 

Perhaps the folks at DOJ have been smoking a bit too much of the stuff they’re confiscating.

Editorial: Collateral Damage

The War on Terror has gone on too long. Collateral damage from the war has hurt us at home and abroad. We must restore the rule of law and put terrorists on trial in US criminal courts for crimes against US citizens. Treating them as prisoners of war — even in isolation at Guantanamo — is an insult to soldiers.

This is the frame for our viewing of President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense and John Brennan as director of the CIA.

Shortly after he took office on Jan. 20, 2009, President Obama stopped the use of torture and other forms of “enhanced interrogation” by the CIA and other American forces. He also closed CIA “black sites” but continued “renditions,” the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the US. He initially ordered the closing of the Guantanamo military prison, though he backed off from that order under pressure from Congress and announced that the Pentagon would move ahead with military trials for detainees in Guantanamo.

Obama also signed a four-year renewal of several controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act in May 2011, including the use of “roving wiretaps” and warrantless wiretaps, the government’s expanded access to business records, and the “lone wolf” provision, which allows surveillance of individuals not affiliated with any known terrorist organization. On Dec. 31, 2011, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012, which included a controversial provision authorizing the military to indefinitely detain civilians who are believed to have supported the enemy. Obama has said he would not use that provision, but Congress kept the provision in the NDAA for 2013

The Obama administration has justified the use of targeted killings, including at least two US citizens involved in Al Qaeda in Yemen, and expanded the use of remotely piloted armed drone aircraft. The New York Times May 29, 2012, reported that Obama personally signs off on about one-third of drone strikes, including each one launched in Yemen or Somalia.

Brennan, as Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, acknowledged the widely reported drone activity in April 2012, and admitted that some civilians have died from strikes.

Government officials have asserted that civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan under Obama are in the “single digits,” but independent counts are considerably higher. The New America Foundation analysis of news reports show 337 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan have killed an estimated 1,934 to 3,239 people since 2004, of which 1,489 to 2,605 were reported to be militants. “This means the average non-militant casualty rate over the life of the program is 18 to 23 percent. In 2012 it has been around 10%, down sharply from its peak in 2006 of over 60%.”

But human rights groups have challenged the administration to be more open about its drone program. “It is not enough that care is taken to avoid harm to innocent civilians,” said Raha Wala, an official with Human Rights First, in an interview with NBC News in April 2012. “Brennan’s assertion that any ‘member’ of al-Qaida or ‘associated forces’ is legally targetable is wrong. Under the laws of armed conflict, only members of the enemy’s armed forces, or those directly participating in hostilities or who perform a continuous combat function, may be targeted.”

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international dispute resolution at the University of Notre Dame and author of What is War?, wrote in an Aug. 15, 2012, column at CNN.com that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the US is a party, prohibits the “arbitrary” deprivation of life, though “the military may use lethal force against enemy fighters during an armed conflict if the use of force meets the requirements of military necessity, and if it will not have a disproportionate impact on civilian lives and property. ...

“President Bush declared a ‘global war on terror’ after 9/11 to, presumably, gain the advantage of more relaxed rules on killing and detention. Some of the same lawyers who tried to develop legal cover for the use of torture produced an even flimsier analysis of why the entire world was a war zone, so that the president could authorize killing and detention of individuals worldwide. ...

“Today, the United States is engaged in armed conflict only in Afghanistan. To lawfully resort to military force elsewhere requires that the country where the United States is attacking has first attacked the United States (such as Afghanistan in 2001), the UN Security Council has authorized the resort to force (Libya in 2011) or a government in effective control credibly requests assistance in a civil war (Afghanistan since 2002).”

Our view is that the use of extralegal rendition, torture and CIA secret prisons during the Bush administration and the continued use of rendition, targeted killings and the informal attitude toward due process under Obama has played into Al Qaeda’s game plan.

Osama bin Laden intended to provoke the United States to overreact to the terrorist attacks and do bad things that would tarnish our reputation around the world in the name of national security. It’s past time that we stop giving terrorists those propaganda victories. Remember that after the 9/11 attacks the world — including Muslim nations — lined up in support of the United States against Al Qaeda’s terrorism. Remember also that Iran offered to cooperate with the US against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the Bush/Cheney administration rejected Iran’s overture. Instead, George W. Bush charged in his Jan. 29, 2002, State of the Union speech that Iran was part of an “axis of evil” with Iraq and North Korea. Then Bush led an invasion of Iraq in March 2003, disregarding Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s warning that the move would create “one hundred new bin Ladens,” driving more Muslims to anti-Western militancy.

Bush’s war transformed Iraq from a secular dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, an enemy of Al Qaeda and rival of Iran, into an Islamic republic with strong ties to Iran. The blowback toppled Mubarak in Egypt last year, and Sharia law — real Sharia law, not the imagined threat to Oklahoma — is enshrined in Egypt’s new constitution as Muslim fundamentalists consolidate their hold on power.

In the past decade the world’s support for the US “War on Terror” has evaporated and every drone strike that kills a purported Taliban or Al Qaeda leader — even if they are well-worth killing — helps to recruit more Muslim youth to the terrorist ranks. We don’t have enough Seal teams to take out every militant extremist holed up in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, and the alternatives for reaching out to touch them are cruise missiles and B-52 bombers. If you don’t want collateral damage, don’t go to war.

We think Chuck Hagel is the right nominee for secretary of defense to get us out of Afghanistan and keep us out of other unnecessary wars. As Mideast observer Juan Cole noted at JuanCole.com, “Hagel is a decorated war hero, having won two Purple Hearts as an infantry squad leader in Vietnam. He knows what war is, unlike the usual gaggle of chickenhawks who have emerged to accuse him of not being warlike enough ... Hagel not only knows war but knows it from the point of view of the infantry and NCOs, not just the officer corps. Hagel is cautious about wars and what they can achieve, and has become more cautious over time, as his hands got burned by the Iraq resolution.” Hagel also is an advocate for veterans. He has supported the use of diplomacy instead of sanctions in the Middle East and he supports withdrawal from Afghanistan. And he takes the sensible view that US interests should guide US policy toward Israel and Palestine, and that Israel should not have a blank check on US support, which appears to reflect Obama’s view.

John Brennan as CIA chief is a more complicated case. If he can follow Obama’s lead in restoring accountability at the agency, he can do good work there. But at his confirmation hearings senators should probe his role in the use of torture, renditions and drones and other questionable elements of the “War On Terror.” And Congress should follow up with laws that restore real due process for our national security agencies. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2013

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Selections from the February 1, 2013 issue

COVER/Hal Crowther
Twilight of the pale patriarchs

EDITORIAL
Collateral damage

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Nation needs to invest in mental health again

DISPATCHES
Republicans grab disaster relief at home but oppose Sandy relief;
GOP croc on payroll tax hike;
Funny what fascinates D.C. media;
Thanks, GOP, for Sen. Warrent;
Pope slams capitalism, inequality in New Year message;
FreedomWorks paid Beck and Limbaugh;
Killings increase in ‘Stand Your Ground’ states;
Current, we hardly knew ye;
Hannity loses half his TV audience after election debacle;
Wendy's franchise cuts worker hours to avoid Obamacare;
Health insurers hike rates;
Yes, there is still a World Almanac!;
Presidential vote updated;
Gerrymandering keeps GOP up in House;
AIG mulls suing government for bailing it out:
Fish flee Northeast waters;
'Right-to-work' doesn't bring jobs ...

BOB BURNETT
Can America curb gun violence?

DON ROLLINS
Oregon legislators chase Nike and ‘win’

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
New nukes, same as the old nukes

WENONAH HAUTER
University research, sold out
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Facts of reproductive life

SAM URETSKY
Empty bottles won’t pay for quality health care

WAYNE O’LEARY
The fellow behind the tree

JOHN BUELL
The fiscal cliff and other imaginary monsters

JOSEPH B. ATKINS
Attention Walmart shoppers
POPULIST PICKS

ROB PATTERSON
Surrender to the digital revolution

and more ...

Do you want to get your opinions from someone who won’t even vote?

By Marc Jampole

One sure sign someone has remained on stage too long is when they begins to embarrass themselves. Exhibit One this week is Jeff Greenfield, long-time political pundit who has worked for both ABC and CNN news and for the New York Times, Time and Slate.com.  In a cranky article titled “Why I never voted for Barack Obama,” Greenfield admits that he has not voted in any election since 1996. His excuse: it enables him to distance himself from the candidates because he isn’t going to vote for either one.

It’s not the first time Greenfield has admitted he never votes. He did so in an article in late October 2012 in which he asked the undecideds to stay home. 

What is more embarrassing? That Greenfield admits to not voting? That he thinks he has a great excuse?  The smugness with which he declares his objectivity and implies his superiority? Or the very fact that he doesn’t get it?

He doesn’t get that a big part of the code ethics of any professional—journalist, attorney, accountant, physician, architect, advertising guy—is to set aside beliefs when practicing the profession.  Moreover, in Greenfield’s case, having an opinion and expressing it is part of the job title. We know Greenfield isn’t objective and, since he’s a pundit, we wouldn’t expect or want him to be. We know his work bubbles with opinions and assumptions, and like virtually all mainstream pundits, the opinions express a narrow right-centrist view.  

Greenfield must hold himself in pretty low self esteem: he’s afraid that voting for a candidate is temptation enough for him to lie, to build an argument which he doesn’t really believe or to withhold material evidence.  Only in the severe purity of non-voting will Greenfield not succumb to the temptation of  unethical reporting.

Greenfield wants us to admire the sheer Zen objectivity he achieves through the consecrated act of not voting. Instead, all we see is a cranky guy abdicating his freedom and his responsibility as an American citizen.  And bragging about it.

Why do prosecutors and judges obstruct justice?

By Marc Jampole

 

In today’s New York Times, Adam Liptak details another case in which judges and prosecutors obstinately defend a wrong decision and thereby put a man’s life at stake.

The headline of the article, “Lawyers Stumble, and Clients Take Fall” says it all:  A man on Alabama’s death row may fry because his attorney—addicted to meth at the time—missed a filing deadline for appealing his sentence. At issue was the fact that the jury voted the man a life sentence and a judge overruled it and gave him the death penalty.

The Atlanta appeals court ruled 2-1 that the guy can not pursue a challenge to his conviction, even though our ultra-right U.S. Supreme Court has twice rebuked the same court for its rigid attitude regarding filing deadlines in capital cases.

 

Whenever I read about another case in which prosecutors and/or judges persist in upholding a wrong decision, I wonder where their sense of justice is. While the defense attorney is supposed to represent the defendant, the mission of the prosecutor and the judge should be to represent the state and the people. It must be in the best interest of the state and the people to get it right, even if that means admitting that an original decision to prosecute or seek the death penalty was wrong, or even if that means, as in this case, using a looser interpretation of the rules. In this case, the prosecutor did not have to object to the late filing and could have recommended waiving the rule, knowing that the attorney was at fault. The judges, chastised on this issue already, could have also given the guy a break. After all, a man’s life is at stake. But prosecutor and judges preferred an extremely strict interpretation of the law.

The inflexibility of prosecutors and judges is a leading argument against capital punishment. While many are in favor of capital punishment, few approve of executing anyone who is innocent or whose crimes do not meet the legal standard for the death penalty.  How can we ever be absolutely certain of a capital conviction given the sad reality that our judicial system seeks convictions and executions, and not justice?

Every month another example of an injustice hits the national media. A few weeks back it was the man with an I.Q. of 51 who has been in jail 30 years, unconvicted of any crime, waiting for a new trial after his first capital conviction for murder was overturned. The Texas state government is appealing a recent ruling that would either finally give the guy a new trial or free him. Texas would rather see a man convicted of no crime continue rotting in prison.

These two cases involve unfair treatment of defendants. Even worse is when the state suppresses evidence that shows the defendant or convict is innocent.

These cases of unfair treatment or suppression of exonerating evidence tend to occur to the poor, minorities or those with severe mental disabilities, and they tend to happen in the south. This lack of consistency—of fairness—represents another argument against the death penalty.

Many believe, and I count myself among them, that the best argument against capital punishment is the moral one—that society should not stoop to the level of the murderers and engage in state assassination, and that cost of housing a convicted killer is a small price to pay for remaining human and humane. But even if one rejects the moral argument, the practical ones remain: the cost of making certain the innocent are not executed is too high in a venal world in which justice gives way to the preference of prosecutors, judges and states for preserving their own record of infallibility or pursuing some blood thirsty political agenda.

With all this talk of helping the middle class, both parties ignore the poor

By Marc Jampole

Whenever there is a contentious issue between the two dominant political parties, the Democrats and many Republicans immediately depict their positions as better for the middle class.

Below you’ll find a few of the thousands of quotes which put the middle class front and center in the recent “fiscal cliff” confrontation. I place “fiscal cliff” in quotation marks because the term hides the true battle between those who want to continue starving government and the economy so that the rich can pay historically low tax rates and those who want to return the country to the firm and equitable financial footing it had before the Reagan revolution by making the rich pay their fair share. If the “fiscal cliff” negotiations were really about the deficit and if the deficit were really so important, our leaders would have let us fall over the cliff, which was erected a few years back to enforce deficit reductions. But in fact both sides realize that government support of the economy is important.

Here, then, is a sprinkling of quotes on the “fiscal cliff” in which the “middle class” is evoked as if it were a magical incantation:

• “We’ve stopped that middle-class tax hike”/ President Obama
• “Our first and foremost priority is protecting the middle class”/House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
• “President Obama sold out the Middle Class for the wealthy.”/Tony Katz, a political columnist
• “The decline of the middle class threatens our ability to fund health and retirement programs, to maintain a safety net for the most vulnerable and to invest in our future.”/an AARP newsletter
• “The most recent negotiations saw a massive grassroots effort that successfully protected Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and investments in the middle class.”/Minnesota Representative Keith Richardson
• ‘This deal is the right move to protect America’s middle class families, who were facing a New Year with higher taxes, and to prevent two million Americans from losing their unemployment benefits.”/Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry
• “Thus far, negotiations suggest that the fight for the middle class in the fiscal cliff ring may in fact be a draw.”/Sharon Poczter in Forbes

If you review media coverage of the presidential election campaign, the last debt ceiling deadline and the debates on the government stimulus, aid to college students and healthcare reform, you will consistently find this same focus on meeting the needs of the middle class, especially byDemocrats.  Republicans will often focus on one part of the middle class—small businesses—in an attempt to tie the interests of the middle class to those of the wealthy.

My question: what about the poor—those who need the help of society?

No one seems to want to help the poor very much, and Republicans like Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann and even Romney constantly demonize them.

To those who say that what we should want to do is  lift people out of poverty into the middle class, my answer is—help the poor then, not those already in the middle class.

Certainly the Democrats are interested in protecting and expanding programs for the poor, but their rhetoric always puts the concerns of the middle class first and foremost.

 

We can see the poor getting the shaft in the “fiscal cliff” compromise. The working poor may not pay income tax, but they do pay payroll tax, which will go up by two percent, ending the temporary cut instituted two years ago. Our elected officials were extremely and profoundly concerned about making sure that the income tax increase did not affect the middle class, but cared not a whit about keeping money in the pockets of the working poor by agreeing to keep the two-percent decrease in payroll tax in place for those earnings less than $40,000 or $50,000 a year. Another solution would have been to remove the cap on income that is taxed for Social Security. Removing the payroll tax cap would have had the double benefit of 1) allowing the poor to keep pumping money into the economy by spending the payroll tax cut; and 2) providing funding for the Social Security system during the “Baby Boom” years, when the large number of retirees compared to workers will burden the system.

 

But while thoughts of helping the poor may have entered the minds of Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, Boehner, McConnell, et. al., the idea of actually helping them never crossed their lips.

 

That’s what’s called business as usual.

If violent movies and games are the cause for gun deaths, why are there so few in other advanced countries?

By Marc Jampole

In his press conference on the Sandy Hook elementary school slaughter of the innocents today, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) executive vice president, gave new meaning to the term American exceptionalism, the theory that there is something inherently different about the United States from other nations.

 

LaPierre blamed violent video games, movies and other entertainments for the large number of guns death in the United States.

 

But Canadians have ready access to the same violent amusements. The French have access to them. The English, Japanese, Koreans, Spanish have access to them. In fact you can find a plethora of violent games and movies in every westernized industrial country of the world.

 

But only in the United States is there a high level of gun deaths. In fact, 80% of all deaths from guns in the 23 populous, high-income countries of the world occur in the United States. We have both the highest number of gun deaths and the highest rate of gun deaths.

 

That certainly makes us exceptional—but are we exceptionally susceptible to suggestion? Exceptionally given to playing out fantasies? Exceptionally stupid?  Do an exceptionally large number of our citizens have violent tendencies?

 

No, no, no and no.

 

What we are is exceptionally inundated with guns and exceptionally lacking in laws to control their registration and use.

 

LaPierre, whose job is to be the chief salesperson for gun manufacturers, proposes an interesting and very expensive way to prevent future Sandy Hook massacres: have government pay to place an armed police officer in every single school in the country. I assume he means private schools as well as public schools.

 

The solution is absurd for several reasons. Let’s start with cost: right now public education is underfunded. We’re talking about cutting all kinds of government programs that help the poor, children and senior citizens. Our roads and bridges are in disrepair. Mass transit is being cut in many cities. We have to shore up our shorelines to protect our citizens from another Sandy or Katrina. How do LaPierre and the NRA expect us to pay for all that extra security? I guess he doesn’t care since his industry is going to benefit from its plan to militarize schools because it will likely require the purchase of more firearms and more ammunition.

 

And what do we do about malls? Movie theatres? Churches? Universities? Health clubs? Hospitals? Public buildings? Over the past few years, there have been mass murders at all of these locations. Many of them already have police officers or armed security on detail. Evidently there weren’t enough in place.

 

Then there are the killers who operate on the run, like the Washington D.C. sniper or the western Pennsylvania nutcase who went out hunting ethnic and racial minorities. Do we place a policeman at every intersection and every quarter mile of freeway?

 

If we were to take the NRA’s proposal seriously, we would become a police state in which there would be a security force on every block and in every building. And even then we wouldn’t be safe from the proliferation of guns and weak gun control laws.

 

There are two characteristics that mass murderers have in common. First of all, they are all crazy. There is no way to guarantee we can keep guns out of the hands of all the nuts, although every other industrialized nation seems to do a pretty good job at it. But stiffer gun ownership requirements, a longer wait before one is able to purchase a gun, requirements that gun owners get licenses like drivers of automobiles, a more extensive FBI database of criminals and the mentally ill—all of these gun control initiatives would make it much harder for the nuts to get their hands on firearms.

 

The other characteristic shared by many of the mass murderers is their use of semi-automatic assault weapons. It makes sense to ban these weapons.  Of course that would take sales away from LaPierre’s clients, the gun manufacturers. And we can’t have that, can we?

 

Lobbyists for industries never want to regulate their industries, and they often give reasons that defy logic and stretch the truth. But in this press conference, the NRA has hit a historically slimy and self-serving low.

None of the four arguments against gun control make any sense when you analyze them

By Marc Jampole

Through the years, I have read and heard four basic arguments by those who oppose gun control. Those who favor making it easier for people to buy and carry guns repeat these arguments with an almost religious fever, as if the incontrovertible logic of their statements trumps all other facts and reasoning. But careful examination shows that each of these arguments is illogical or non-factual or both.

Let’s examine the four arguments against control one at a time.

#1 The Second Amendment forbids gun control.
The second amendment states, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  The key words are “well-regulated” and “infringed”:

• Well-regulated: The amendment clearly says that the reason to allow people to keep and bear arms is to have a well-regulated militia, and regulated means rules, laws and control. You are allowed to have arms so you can be part of the militia and the militia can be regulated. Thus you and your weapons (arms) can be regulated. 
• Infringed: Infringed is a mighty broad word, and many constitutional lawyers could drive a truck through the leeway it gives to regulate.

The interpretation of all of the Constitution through the years by both the right and the left demonstrates that our society understands that the document is not rigid, but pliable to the point that you can twist it into anything. While the Second Amendment unfortunately seems to clearly state that people do have the right to own guns, the amendment per se and as part of a document that has been stretched in every direction has nothing in it that prevents as much gun control as is necessary to keep order and safety, which is, of course, the primary job of a well-regulated militia.

I asked my cousin, Marshall Dayan, a renowned death penalty attorney who often deals with constitutional issues, for his view of the Second Amendment and here is what he wrote: “I would take issue (though Alito and the SCOTUS would not) that the Amendment clearly states the right to individual handgun ownership. It refers to the right of THE people, not the right of PEOPLE, so I read that to be a communal right, not an individual right. Hence, if AS A PEOPLE, we chose to keep arms in an armory for the purpose of maintaining a well-regulated militia, I don't think the federal government could preclude that under the 2nd Amendment by its terms. But I don't think a reference to the right of THE PEOPLE is the same as the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. But my interpretation is, at least for now, mooted by U.S. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago.”  FYI, Jeffrey Tobin makesthe same argument as Marshall in The NewYorker.

Of course, a simplistic and somewhat snider approach is to say that the amendment refers to firearms and not ammunition, and ammunition can therefore be regulated or even prohibited.

#2 Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

Glib, but inaccurate: People with guns kill people. As we saw in the Newtown tragedy, someone with a semi-automatic assault rifle can take out a lot of people in a matter of minutes. If the Newtown shooter had only knives, he would not have been able to kill more than a few people in that time, and maybe would not have been bold enough to attempt his mass murder.  I heard someone on National Public Radio this week quote former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said that it’s bullets that kill people, which is another clever argument for allowing the sales of guns but not of the ammunition that make the guns lethal.

The evidence for a causal relationship between gun ownership and gun violence is stunning. All other industrialized nations have much stricter gun control laws and far fewer people who own guns. The result is that they have much lower rates of deaths by guns. In fact, among the 23 populous, high-income countries, 80% of all firearm deaths occur in the United States.

#3 Bad guys will get guns no matter what; or “when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

But if guns were more restricted, it would be harder for the outlaws to obtain their firearms, which would discourage many potential bad guys. There can be no doubt that the Newtown shooter would not have been able to buy a gun by himself; that he was allowed to practice shooting without going through a qualification process that included a certification of mental health is truly appalling. 

 

Keep in mind, too, that restrictions on private sales of guns would give law enforcement agencies another arrow in their quiver in fighting violent crime.

Finally, as gun control organizations such as the Brady Center substantiate, many more people are killed by guns because of accidents, domestic disputes and mass murder by deranged nut-jobs than by criminals in the course of robberies, mob hits or other crimes. An estimated 41% of gun-related homicides and 94% of gun-related suicides would not occur under the same circumstances had no guns been present.

#4 If more people carried guns, the criminals would be afraid to use theirs

With this argument, gun advocates enter a Wild West fantasy in which we always know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. In a shooting situation, that just isn’t so.

These fantasists don’t really think through their scenarios at all.  Imagine, for example, an attempted bank robbery or convenience store stick-up: The police arrive to find a shooting gallery. How do they know who the robbers are and who are merely defending themselves?

Or think of the mass murder of 12 people in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado earlier this year: You’re in the theatre and all of sudden the air is filled with smoke and gun shots. So you pull out your gun and start shooting back in the direction you think it’s coming from. Someone on the other side of the theatre sees you fire your weapon and thinks you’re the shooter and starts aiming at you. Meanwhile, the hundreds of other people in the theatre now have gunfire coming at them from three, maybe even more, directions. When you think it through, it’s clear that many more dead would have been the likely scenario if a vigilante had pulled a weapon out and started firing at the Aurora mass murderer.

Police are trained to know when to fire their guns and when not to. The average citizen does not receive this training.

At this point in American history, the argument is not about prohibiting hunters or range shooters from practicing their sport. It’s about protecting the public from the proliferation of weapons in society. As I pointed out about twoyears ago and others are saying now, no one objects to rigorous testing for driver’s licensing, complicated rules of the road and the requirement that people who drive cars must have insurance. Why should legitimate hunters and range shooters object to regulation of their sport?

Now’s the time for a rapid fire assault on gun manufacturers and elected officials

By Marc Jampole

Now is the time to put the pressure on elected officials, gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association (NRA) to strengthen gun control laws.  What I’m talking about is a rapid fire assault of letters, emails and tweets. Let’s prove that sometimes the pen can be mightier than the sword and the gun.

 

I’m asking all my readers to pen emails and letters to the President, both your U.S. Senators, your Congressional representative and the representatives and senators to your state legislatures telling them you are in favor of greater gun control. You can find their names and mailing addresses at the websites for your state.

 

Here are some specific changes in the gun laws that you can advocate to elected officials:

• End the sale of all semi-automatic weapons and ban the sale of ammunition for semiautomatic weapons.
• Establish a longer waiting period before people are allowed to buy guns.
• Ban all sales of guns and ammunition that do not require a background check, such as sales between “friends.”
• Allow licensed gun dealers to sell guns only at their place of business, the way it used to be before the law was changed in 1986.
• Ban all sales of guns over the Internet.

I also think we should let the gun manufacturers know how angry we are that they continue to encourage and lobby for recklessly loose gun control laws. We should demand that these companies start supporting gun control.

Some may ask: why would the gun makers want to do something that could impede the steady flow of new gun sales? The answer lies in the history of regulation in the United States. Once government and the public start to clamor to regulate any industry, the tendency has always been for the industries in question to propose their own, usually milder, regulation. Additionally, the industries about to undergo regulation always have a seat at the government policy table. We can see that this week in reports about regulation of mortgage lending. The banks would prefer no regulation, but if there has to be regulation, they want—and are getting—a hand at shaping the new rules. Let’s make sure gun makers fear regulation enough to want to participate in the process of developing new regulation.

Here are the names of the leaders of the three leading American makers of guns. One letter from every concerned citizen should be enough to convince these amoralists that they should come to the negotiating table:

• James Debney, President & Chief Executive Officer, Smith & Wesson, 2100 Roosevelt Avenue, Springfield MA 01104
• Gerald R. Dinkel, President, Colt Defense LLC, P.O. Box 1868, Hartford CT 06144
• Steven Feinberg, Cerebus Capital Management LP, 875 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022: owner of Bushmaster Firearms International LLC

I am also proposing a full-out assault on the NRA and its many affiliates. If you go to Twitter and search for “NRA” you will find about six Twitter accounts. I am tweeting a gun control message every day to all of these accounts, and I advocate that others do the same. Let’s tweet them into submission!

If the public doesn’t keep the pressure on, as soon as the Newtown massacre of the innocents falls out of the media spotlight gun makers and legislatures will retreat to their cozy clubby bloodless little world. Only a concerted effort by many will make sure that doesn’t happen.

Instead of trying to stop voters from voting, states should stop semi-automatics

By Marc Jampole

To think that the killing of 32 college students at Virginia Tech in 2007 once marked for many the epitome of the unspeakably horrific. Now we see even worse—the mass murder of 20 children aged 5-10 and seven of their teachers, followed by the killer’s suicide.

What could be worse than the killing of these innocents to the psyche of any nation? Like parents everywhere, I remembered when my son was that age and I must say he was delightful, as were all his friends and classmates and the kids of my cousins. It’s the golden age of childhood, at least for most parents.  So most of the country felt the loss in a visceral way that made the mass media coverage seem all that much more tedious and pedestrian.

The little we know about the killer convinces me that lots of people knew this kid was a loonie, including his mother who nevertheless kept a .223 caliber rifle in the house. Without getting into the essence of the second amendment, which I believe has been stretched apart by gun rights advocates, what person ever has the need for a semi-automatic weapon, either for hunting or for protection?  The semi-automatic is the weapon of choice of mass murders. Let’s just outlaw it.

I don’t see how anyone’s rights suffer infringement if we prohibit gun ownership in households in which someone is having or is under treatment for emotional and mental problems. The argument that someone who wants a gun will find a way to get one is completely rhetorical once you look at the alarmingly high statistics for gun deaths by friendly fire or of other household members.

Outlawing semi-automatics and tightening restrictions are two moves that might stop a lot of mass murderers from committing their henious acts, or at least slow down their planning and/or execution.

Unfortunately much of America doesn’t seem to agree with me. As Charles Blow reports in his weekly column in the Saturday New York Times, 53%of Americans don’t support a law making it illegal to manufacture, sell or possess semi-automatic weapons.  Of course that survey was taken before the Newtown tragedy.

State legislatures everywhere have passed laws that make it harder to vote in most cases overruling the wishes of the people who elected them. In the case of voter suppression laws, the states were addressing voter fraud, a non-existent problem. You would think that despite the opposition of the electorate, state legislatures would now vote to ban assault rifles and strengthen restrictions on firearm ownership. Don’t hold your breath

It seems as if the Unites States has been betting against the dice for years and now it’s catching up to us. Sandy and Katrina demonstrated that we have been wrong not to listen to the engineers and build levees, barriers and sand dunes to protect population from the effects of global warming. And now we see once again what happens when we let guns proliferate and remove restrictions on their possession and use; we see it in the faces of the grieving parents and in the imagined faces of our own children—dead by gunfire, never again to smile at you openly or hug you in the warm unaffected way of the eight-year old.

Let Uncle Sam Do Health Care Exchanges

When Congress approved the Affordable Care Act, it allowed states to set up insurance exchanges to help their uninsured residents shop for health insurance. Ironically, 18 states, largely run by Republicans, have opted to leave the exchanges up to the federal government. The punting governors probably are doing their insurance consumers a favor.

An estimated 25 million people who don’t get insurance through their job are expected to get insurance coverage through the exchanges, once the system is set up in October 2013 to start signing up people for new insurance plans that will take effect in January 2014. The exchanges also will help people find out if they qualify for insurance tax credits, which are available to uninsured people who earn up to $44,680, or four times the federal poverty level, which is $11,170 this year.

As of Dec. 9, 17 states and D.C. have decided to establish their own state-based exchanges; five states will partner with the federal government to set up their exchanges; and 18 states have indicated they will leave the exchange up to the federal government, Melissa Harris-Perry noted on her MSNBC show.

Jay Engoff, a former official with the federal Health and Human Services Department, told Harris-Perry that a federal exchange is more likely than state exchanges to provide individuals with the sort of bargaining power against insurance companies that they would have if they worked for a large business. The exchanges will offer “apples to apples” comparisons that will make it easier to find the best deal, Engoff said. Insurance companies and hospitals actually would prefer that states run the exchanges because they “will not standardize benefits packages, will not really enable people to make apples to apples comparisons,” whereas federally created exchanges will do so, Engoff said, according to RawStory.com (Dec. 9).

“So the insurance companies, ironically, they want the governors and the states to elect to do the state exchange, whereas the other part of the Republican’s constituency, the Tea Party people, they just want the state to do nothing, and to allow the federal government to do it,” he said.
Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) said that some in Congress originally wanted more “universality” in the system and the option for state control was a compromise. But now, she said, a large state like Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry has publicly dismissed the exchanges, “becomes a major major marketplace for experimentation.”

Texas has a miserable record on health insurance regulation, which consists largely of clerks filing rate increase announcements from the insurance companies. Anybody who shops for individual insurance coverage in the past few years, as this editor has, has wondered over a bewildering array of choices with little recourse. We ended up with a policy with a large deductible, a few exceptions for pre-existing conditions and a bunch of riders that leave us wondering what, if any, coverage we actually would get if we got sick. We have more confidence in Obama’s administration than we do with Perry’s administration to drive hard bargains with the insurance companies and to hold those companies accountable.

The Affordable Care Act also offers states the option to expand Medicaid to cover the working poor who earn up to 133% of the poverty level. That is $14,484 for a single person and $29,726 for a family of four and the expansion would cover many of those unfortunates who work, usually part-time, for skinflint organizations such as Papa John’s, the Olive Garden, the Red Lobster and Walmart, which have suggested that they would reduce the hours of part-timers to avoid being required to provide insurance for them. If all states implemented the expansion, Medicaid would cover an additional 21.3 million people by 2022, including one million uninsured low-income adult Texans who don’t qualify under the current program. The expansion costs the states nothing for the first three years. After that, the states would pay 5% of the Medicaid cost in 2017, and up to 10% in 2021. But that’s too much for nine Republican governors, including Perry of Texas, which has the highest rate of uninsured at 24%; Florida’s Rick Scott, Georgia’s Nathan Deal Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, whose states are tied for fourth on the list of uninsured with 20% each; Alabama’s Robert Bentley (14% uninsured); Maine’s Paul LePage (10%); Mississippi’s Phil Bryant (19%); South Dakota’s Dennis Daugaard (13%); and Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin (17%). They are rejecting the Medicaid expansion because it would increase their states’ costs in future years. In fact, they just don’t care about the working poor. The cost of caring for the uninsured will fall on hospitals who must treat those who show up at their emergency rooms.

According to the Advisory Board Co., which keeps a daily tally at advisory.com of how each state stands on ACA’s Medicaid expansion, six states are leaning against participating in the Medicaid expansion: Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Virginia and Wyoming. States that will participate in the Medicaid expansion include Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Four states leaning toward participating are Kentucky, New Hampshire, New York and Oregon; and 18 others are undecided.

Ironically, the states that reject the Medicaid expansion might end up spending more for health care and pass more uncompensated costs on to hospitals and local governments. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes that the individual mandate likely will encourage half a million Texans who qualify for Medicaid but haven’t enrolled to finally sign up, but at a cost of around $7,000 a head, or $3.9 billion over 10 years under the restrictive old plan, where the state pays about 39% of the cost. Or the state could take the extra federal money, expand its eligibility rules and cover 2.4 million low-income residents for $3,300 a head over the decade.

“In short, the state can pay the retail price for its new Medicaid enrollees, or it can pay the bulk rate,” Jordan Weissmann wrote at TheAtlantic.com (Nov. 26).

Weissman also noted that under the expanded program Medicaid would pay an additional $24 billion to Texas hospitals over the decade. “That, in turn, could bring down the overall cost of care, since patients with health coverage won’t need to subsidize those without,” he wrote. “All that, and it would get to reap the benefits of a healthier, presumably more productive workforce, paid for overwhelmingly with tax dollars they’ll be sending to Washington no matter what.

“Maybe governors like Perry don’t believe in higher spending or a bigger social safety net. But surely they believe on getting a good deal on insuring a large number of their residents, rather than a bad deal on insuring just a few of them. Failing that, they have to believe in retrieving as much of their citizens’ tax dollars as they can. Really, that’s just fiscal conservatism.”

But just as Republicans who oppose the implementation of the Affordable Care Act cannot be trusted to run health insurance exchanges and they are resisting expansion of Medicaid which could show that the government insurance program can efficiently provide health coverage to the working poor, President Obama should not agree to Republican demands that the fiscal austerity negotiations in Washington, D.C., result in cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Republicans have floated the idea of raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 as one way to reduce senior health care spending, and some Democrats appear to be open to the idea of making some cuts, but raising the eligibility age is a terrible idea. If anything, the Medicare age should be lowered.

The proposal to raise the Medicare eligibility age might just be a trial balloon raised by the White House to draw out the Republicans, but progressives should shoot down this trial balloon. Contact your senators and your Congress member, and/or any senators or members of Congress to whom you may have supported, and tell them that regardless of what President Obama might agree to, if they vote for a “Grand Bargain” that cuts benefits to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid they will get a primary opponent and you will donate to that challenger. This is no time to give up hard-fought ground to those who would repeal Medicare, privatize Social Security and deny Medicaid to the working poor. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2013

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