Monday, December 31, 2012

The Secret of How the GOP Has a Lock on the House for the Foreseeable Future.

By Bill Berkowitz

Progressive America Rising via Alternet

Dec 29, 2012  - If somewhere in the recesses of your mind you were wondering how, despite President Barack Obama’s re-election victory and the Democratic Party’s gains in the Senate, Republicans continue to control the House of Representatives, think redistricting.

Redistricting is the process that adjusts the lines of a state’s electoral districts, theoretically based on population shifts, following the decennial census. Gerrymandering is often part and parcel of redistricting. According to the Rose Institute of State and Local Governments at Claremont McKenna College, Gerrymandering is done “to influence elections to favor a particular party, candidate, ethnic group.”

Over the past few years, as the Republican Party has gained control over more state legislatures than Democrats. And, it has turned redistricting into a finely-honed, well-financed project. That has virtually insured their control over the House. “While the Voting Rights Act strongly protects against racial gerrymanders, manipulating the lines to favor a political party is common,” the Rose Institute’s Redistricting in America website points out.

ProPublica’s Olga Pierce, Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer recently reported, in a piece titled “How Dark Money Helped Republicans Hold the House and Hurt Voters [3],” that “Republicans had a years-long strategy of winning state houses in order to control each state's once-a-decade redistricting process,” That strategy helped the GOP put a hammerlock on its goal of creating safe Republican districts that would allow it to control of the House.

“The Republican effort to influence redistricting overall was spearheaded by a group called the Republican State Leadership Committee [RSLC], which has existed since 2002,” ProPublica reported. “For most of that time, it was primarily a vehicle for donors like health care and tobacco companies to influence state legislatures, key battlegrounds for regulations that affect corporate America. Its focus changed in 2010 when Ed Gillespie, former counselor to President George W. Bush, was named chairman. His main project: redistricting.”

Under Gillespie’s leadership, the RSLC launched a project called the Redistricting Majority Project [4], or REDMAP, “to influence state races throughout the country.” In 2010, the RSLC had raised $30 million to pursue what Karl Rove had discussed earlier that year in a Wall Street Journal article headlined, “The GOP Targets State Legislatures,” and subtitled, "He who controls redistricting can control Congress."

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Saturday, December 29, 2012

The One and Only Cause of "Fiscal Cliff" Economic Crisis: Republicans Fear Tea Party Primaries

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

Dec 29, 2012 - Often, economic crises are caused by real physical problems - like draught, war, demography, or technological innovation that robs one economy of a competitive advantage over another.

Other times, economic crises result when asset bubbles burst, or financial markets collapse. That was the case of the Great Depression - and more recently the Great Recession.

The economic crisis of the moment - the "fiscal cliff" - does not result from any of these factors. In fact it is not a real "economic crisis" at all, except that it could inflict serious economic hardship on many Americans and could drive the economy back into recession.

The "fiscal cliff" is a politically manufactured crisis. It was original concocted by the Republican Senate Leader, Mitch McConnell as a way to get past the last crisis manufactured by the Republicans - the 2011 standoff over increasing the Federal Debt Ceiling.

Theoretically, "the cliff" - composed of increased taxes and huge, indiscriminant cuts in Federal programs - would be so frightening to policy makers that no one would ever consider allowing the nation to jump.

Now, America is on the brink of diving off the cliff for one and only one reason: many House Republicans are terrified of primary challenges from the Tea Party right.

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Sunday, December 23, 2012

Class War Redux: How the American Right Embraced Marxist struggle

Neither accident nor gaffe, Romney's '47%' remark was a declaration of war on a proletariat of feckless moochers

By Rick Wolff
Progressive America Rising via The Guardian, UK

Conservatives and Republicans used to keep quiet and private about their views on classes and class war in the United States. They ceded those terms to leftists and then denounced their use. The US was, they insisted, a mostly "classless" society, civilization's pinnacle achievement. We were a vast majority of wondrously comfortable and secure consumers.

Workers or capitalists, like classes, were antiquated, disloyal, and irrelevant concepts. True, a few fabulously rich people were visible (likely, film or sports celebrities or "entrepreneurial innovators"): their antics and luxuries were fun to mimic, admire, or deplore. An annoying and assuredly small underclass of the poor also existed: likely, persons "destroyed" by drugs or alcohol.

However, over recent decades, that approach has given way to a harsher view of US society, and the world beyond. At first, in their homes, country clubs, and unguarded moments with friends, conservatives and Republicans redefined their prime political enemy as the "moochers". Those people – Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney called them "the 47%" always voting Democrat – depend on government handouts, and vote accordingly to secure those handouts.

Moochers include welfare recipients, the poor receiving Medicaid, students getting subsidized college loans, illegal immigrants, and, sometimes, also those "entitled" to get social security and Medicare benefits. They are all society's real "exploiters", using government to tax the other 53% of the people for the funds doled out to the 47%.

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Thursday, December 20, 2012

No End to Republican Plans to Rig the Vote

The GOP's New Electoral College Scheme Includes Pennsylvania

By Reid Wilson
Beaver County Blue via National Journal

Dec 17, 2012 - Republicans alarmed at the apparent challenges they face in winning the White House are preparing an all-out assault on the Electoral College system in critical states, an initiative that would significantly ease the party's path to the Oval Office.

Senior Republicans say they will try to leverage their party's majorities in Democratic-leaning states in an effort to end the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes. Instead, bills that will be introduced in several Democratic states would award electoral votes on a proportional basis.

Already, two states -- Maine and Nebraska -- award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district. The candidate who wins the most votes statewide takes the final two at-large electoral votes. Only once, when President Obama won a congressional district based in Omaha in 2008, has either of those states actually split their vote.

But if more reliably blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were to award their electoral votes proportionally, Republicans would be able to eat into what has become a deep Democratic advantage.

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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Afghanistan and the Future of the Peace Movement

U.S. soldiers stand guard as they watch the transfer ceremony of security responsibilities from NATO troops to Afghan security forces in Qalat, Zabul province south of Kabul, Afghanistan. (Photo: Allauddin Khan)

By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via The Nation

Dec 13, 2012 - President Barack Obama reportedly plans to remove all but 6,000 to 9,000 US troops from Afghanistan by 2014, ending the American combat role, saving tens of billions of dollars, and leaving an unpopular, incompetent and corrupt Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s regime needing a diplomatic fix to avert collapse into civil war.

According to McClatchy, Pakistan and Afghanistan are conducting negotiations aimed at a settlement with the Taliban by 2015. Though the McClatchy headline suggests the US is cut out of the process, it is more likely that the negotiations are being “outsourced” in keeping with US rhetoric about any settlement being “Afghan-led.”

Although there has been no official announcement, the numbers have been published by both the Los Angeles Times and New York Times in recent days. The Los Angeles paper predicts 6,000 to 9,000, while the New York Times reports “no more than 10,000… despite the desire of some military officers for a larger force.” Troop cuts in that range would mean a 90 to 95 percent reduction from the more than the peak 100,000 boots on the ground in 2010. It would require a reduction of 60,000 between now and late 2014. The pace of the withdrawal has yet to be announced, but is expected after Obama meets with Karzai in Washington next month to discuss a US postwar role.

Obama’s decision on a residual force is expected to be well below Pentagon requests, which range from 15,000 troops on up. Opposition to Obama’s reductions is expected from neo-conservative and military advocates, as well as Congressional hawks. Obama has gained political cover, however, from the recent 62 Senate votes cast for an “accelerated” withdrawal and a similar message in a letter from 94 House members. The recent New York Times editorial finally endorsing a one-year withdrawal also provides critical support from within the mainstream political and national security establishments.

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Monday, December 17, 2012

Assault Weapons Are Weapons of Mass Destruction and Should Be Banned

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

Dec 16, 2012 - The tragedy in Connecticut forces America to confront a simple question: Why should we allow easy access to a weapon of mass destruction just because it could conceivably be referred to as a "gun"?

I count myself among the many Americans who at various points in their lives have owned and used long guns -- hunting rifles and shotguns -- for hunting and target shooting. No one I know in politics seriously proposes that ordinary Americans be denied the right to own those kinds of weapons.

But guns used for hunting have nothing in common with assault weapons like the ones that were used last week in the mass murder of 20 first-graders -- except the fact that they are referred to "guns."

Rapid-fire assault weapons with large clips of ammunition have only one purpose: the mass slaughter of large numbers of human beings. They were designed for use by the military to achieve that mission in combat -- and that mission alone.

No one argues that other combat weapons like rocket-propelled grenades (RPG's) or Stinger Missiles should be widely available to anyone at a local gun shop. Why in the world should we allow pretty much anyone to have easy access to assault weapons?

Every politician in America will tell you they will move heaven and earth to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Yet we have allowed the ban on this particular weapon of mass destruction to expire. As a result, a terrorist named Adam Lanza was able to have easy access to the assault weapons he used to kill scores of children in minutes.

Let's be clear, Adam Lanza was a terrorist just as surely as he would have been if we were motivated by an extreme jihadist ideology. It makes no difference to those children or to their grieving families whether their loved ones were killed by someone who was mentally deranged or by someone who believed that by killing children he was helping to destroying the great Satan.

When an individual is willing -- or perhaps eager -- to die making a big "statement" by killing many of his fellow human beings, it doesn't matter what their motivation is. It does matter whether they have easy access to the weapons that make mass murder possible.

And after last week, can anyone seriously question whether assault weapons are in fact weapons of mass destruction? If Lanza had conventional guns -- or like a man in China who recently went berserk, he only had knives -- he would not have been physically capable of killing so many people in a few short minutes.

Of course you hear people say -- oh, a car or an airliner can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction -- many things can become weapons of mass destruction. And there is no question after 9/11 that we know that this is true. But cars and airliners have to be converted from their primary use in order to become instruments of mass death. It takes an elaborate plot and many actors to take over an airliner and it isn't easy to methodically kill 27 people with a car.

More important, assault weapons have no redeeming social value or alternative use whatsoever. The only reason to purchase an assault weapon, instead of a long gun used for target practice or hunting, is to kill and maim large numbers of human beings.

And it is not the case that if assault weapons were banned ordinary people would get them anyway. We certainly don't take that attitude with nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. We make it very hard for a terrorist to get nuclear weapons or dirty bomb. It used to be hard to get assault weapons.

When the former President of Mexico visited the United States some time ago to discuss the drug-fueled violence on the Mexican border, he pointed out that the end of the assault weapons ban in the U.S. had resulted in an explosion of smuggling of assault weapons from the United States to Mexico. Weapons that were previously unavailable in large numbers, became plentiful. He begged the United States to re-impose the assault weapons ban.

Allowing easy access to assault weapons guarantees that terrorists, criminals and mentally unstable people will use them to commit future acts of mass murder -- it's that simple. There are seven billion people on the planet. Try as we may, we are not going to prevent some of those seven billion people from becoming terrorists, criminals or mentally unstable. Why make it easy for them to do harm to their fellow human beings by giving them easy access to a weapon of mass destruction?

Since this tragedy, there have been calls for greater restrictions and background checks on those who can buy guns -- and there should be. But from all accounts, the weapons used in the Connecticut murders were purchased legally by the shooter's mother -- who herself appeared to be perfectly sane right up to the moment that Lanza used those same weapons to end her life.

The NRA will no doubt repeat its mantra about the "slippery slope." "If we ban assault weapons, shotguns will be next," they say. Really? By banning anyone from buying Stinger Missiles that are used to shoot down airplanes do we make it more likely that the government will one day prevent people from hunting ducks?

The simple fact is that no right is absolute because rights come into conflict with each other. Your free speech does not give you the right to cry "fire" in a crowded theater.

Is the NRA's concern that banning assault weapons will put us on a "slippery slope" more important than the lives of those 20 first graders? Should it really take precedence over the fact that today in Newtown, Connecticut there are 20 families with holiday presents on a closet shelf, that were purchased for an excited six-year-old who will never open them?

Are the NRA's fears more important than the terror faced by children in the Sandy Hook Elementary school last week?

Does the right to own an assault weapon take precedence over the right of those parents to see their children grow up, and graduate from college, and stand at the alter to be married, and have children of their own?

The bottom line is that there is no reason why weapons of mass destruction of any sort - chemical weapons, biological weapons, RPG's, improvised explosive devices (IED's), missiles, dirty bombs, nuclear devices, or assault weapons -- should be easily accessible. For 10 years there was a ban on the production, ownership and use of assault weapons in the United States until Congress and the Bush Administration allowed it to lapse when it sunset and came up for reauthorization in 2004.

A serious response to the tragedy in Connecticut requires that Congress act to reinstate the assault weapons ban before the children of other families fall victim to the fantasies of some other mentally unbalanced individual -- or the ideology of a terrorist who has been empowered by our failure to act.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.

Follow Robert Creamer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rbcreamer

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Monday, December 10, 2012

Don’t Throw Wind Power Off Fiscal Cliff: Iowa Blue-Green Advocates

By Rod Boshart
Progressive America Rising via Iowa Farmer Today

Dec 9, 2012 -DES MOINES — With Congress facing an approaching deadline to extend a production tax credit critical to wind energy’s future, an Iowa-based environmental group issued a report Nov. 28  extolling the pollution-fighting, health and water conservation benefits of the state’s major source of renewable energy.

According to Environmental Iowa — a statewide, citizen-based advocacy group — Iowa’s current power generation from wind energy has had the equivalent “avoidance” benefit of displacing as much pollution as taking 1,187,000 cars off the road each year and has saved enough water not used to cool fossil-fuel production facilities to meet the needs of 98,100 Iowans.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 28 Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, joined Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., and about 40 veterans who have found post-military careers in the wind energy industry to push for renewing the wind-production tax credit.

Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, also sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner asking him to “give weight” to the Operation Free veterans’ effort to extend a tax credit that helps secure made-in-America energy and the jobs it creates.

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Thursday, December 6, 2012

Nothing but a Northern Lynching: The Assassination of Fred Hampton, Dec 4, 1969

 

By G. Flint Taylor
Progressive America Rising via People's Law Office

At 4:30 in the morning of December 4, 1969, 14 heavily armed Chicago police officers, acting at the direction of Cook County State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan, raided a tiny apartment on the west side of Chicago where local Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and eight Party members were sleeping. Minutes later, Hampton and Peoria, Illinois BPP leader Mark Clark lay dead, several of the other Panthers were seriously wounded, and the survivors were hauled off to jail on attempted murder charges. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/1970.Hampton-.Search-And-Destroy..pdf

I was a second year Northwestern law student working at the fledgling People’s Law Office when I received a call that “the Chairman had been murdered” and was directed to come to the apartment. The crime scene was shocking - - - the plasterboard walls looked like swiss cheese, ripped by scores of bullets from police weapons that included a machine gun, a semi automatic rifle, and several shotguns. A large pool of blood stained the floor at the doorway where Hampton’s body had been dragged after he was shot in the head, and there were fresh blood stains on all the beds in the apartment. I had met Chairman Fred only months before when I escorted him to the Law School to speak to the student body in venerable Lincoln Hall. He was only 21 years old, but he captivated the audience, as he always did, with his dynamic and analytical speaking skill, a mixture of Malcolm X, Dr. King, and Lupe Fiasco. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.-20th-Anniversary-Booklet-1989.pdf

It was his unique leadership, together with the revolutionary politics he so convincingly espoused, http://www.blackpanther.org/TenPoint.htm that made him a primary target of law enforcement. Directly after the raid, State’s Attorney Hanrahan and his police loudly proclaimed that the “vicious Black Panthers” had instigated a “shootout” during which they fired a fuselage of shots at the raiders. http://mike-gray.org/multimedia/hampton.htm The cold and bloody crime scene made lie of this official story, and Panther members led thousands of people on tours of the apartment for the next ten days while People’s Law Office lawyers and staff documented the evidence that would later establish that the police fired 99 bullets while the Panthers fired but one. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.-1970-FGJ-Report.pdf

A elderly African American lady best captured this reality when she said, while sadly shaking her head during the tour, that the raid was “nothing but a Northern lynching.” Confronted with the ballistics evidence, Hanrahan was forced to drop the attempted murder charges against the surviving Panthers. The Richard Nixon Justice Department investigated, but refused to indict. In response to community outrage, a specially appointed Cook County Prosecutor subsequently indicted Hanrahan, his first assistant, and a number of the raiding officers, not for murder or attempted murder, but rather only for obstruction of justice. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-chicagodays-pantherraid-story,0,3414208.

A Democratic machine judge acquitted Hanrahan and his co-conspirators on the eve of the 1972 election, but an inflamed African American electorate voted Hanrahan out of office, a story spawning a movement that paved the way for the election of Mayor Harold Washington a decade later. All the while, the People’s Law Office continued to litigate a civil rights lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the raid. Through the discovery process, we unearthed FBI documents showing that the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program was behind the raid. http://watchamericangangster.com/american-gangster-season-3-episode-5-j-edgar-hoover/

The documents, which were suppressed by the FBI for years, together with independent toxicological tests, further revealed that an FBI COINTELPRO agent supplied a floor plan of the Panther apartment, complete with markings where Hampton slept, to Hanrahan’s raiders; that William O’Neal, the COINTELPRO informant who drew the floor plan, most likely drugged Hampton so that he could not defend himself; and that after the raid FBI director J. Edgar Hoover rewarded O’Neal with a $300 bonus for making the raid a “success.” http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.7th-Cir-Brief.pdf

In 1983, after an 18 month trial http://openjurist.org/600/f2d/600/hampton-v-hanrahan and 13 years of litigation, the City of Chicago, Cook County and the Federal Government all finally settled with the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the raid. http://peopleslawoffice.com/issues-and-cases/panthers/ While this financial settlement brought some modicum of justice, no one, except the Panther survivors, ever spent a day in jail. But the murderous raid, once falsely depicted as a shootout, is now rightly considered not only to be a northern lynching, but also an official assassination that was instigated by the FBI. http://www.hamptonbook.com/Hampton_Book/Home.html

And while we will never know what heights Fred Hampton would have reached as a leader had he lived, we do know, in the words first spoken in eulogy by People’s Law Office attorney Francis Andrew nearly forty three years ago, that the spirit of Fred Hampton continues to live on.

Flint Taylor is one of the lawyers for the family of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.. For more information on the Hampton/Clark case, the history of Black Panther Party, and the FBI’s Program to destroy it, visit peopleslawoffice.com

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