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An up to date resource of important breaking news and how to frame it; also provided as an RSS Feed.
In an admittedly non-scientific survey of relatively uninvolved citizens I meet, it seems that no matter what other political notions they hold, the most entrenched is an article of faith that the government is inherently more wasteful than the free market. They believe the profit motive in the free market inherently tends toward efficiency. Government has no profit motive, ergo it is inefficient. It is faulty logic, but logic does not win political arguments. But on a far greater scale, the market, in aggregate, can be tremendously wasteful. As the culminating event of years of Republican control of Congress and the Presidency, greedy bankers crashed the world economy throwing millions of people out of their homes, erasing retirment savings and causing millions to be unemployed or permanently underemployed. They may well have relegated our next generation to mere observers of a global economy they'll play little part in. I imagine the calculation has already been made that American workers are superfluous and even a burden on America's wealthy. Tales of government waste form the core of the GOP's public agenda while big business and, astonishingly, even bankers are held up as "job creators" as if the tragic aftermath of the crash had nothing to do with greed. That's certainly the consciously engineered fairy tale the GOP want's voters to believe; i.e. "some other guy did it". The fable is designed specifically for voters with busy lives who, despite their solidly held beliefs don't delve too deeply into the reality, preferring the easily digestable talking points provided by talk radio. But if you go by what Republicans do rather than what they say, their private agenda is to protect wealth at any cost by killing any right of the government (i.e. the American people) to slow the gravy train for the 1%. What surprises me is that I have not found, and you don't hear about, any effort to actually find out if the government is inherently more wasteful than business. It would be a step in the right direction to admit that any enterprise, large or small, will always have some level of waste. Accept this, work to minimize it. It certainly feels to me that the monumental wreckage that three decades of trickle down have visited upon us must certainly be a greater waste of our citizens' treasure, talent and opportunity than any tally of government waste. It's a measure of our desensitization to unproven notions that so many people accept the government waste as the prime cuplrit in all our ills. And that's just the way the GOP wants it.
From Reader Supported News:
19 October 11 I was asked weeks ago by some in the Occupy Wall Street movement to make suggestions for how to frame the movement. I have hesitated so far, because I think the movement should be framing itself. It's a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you - the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. I have so far hesitated to offer suggestions. But the movement appears to maturing and entering a critical time when small framing errors could have large negative consequences. So I thought it might be helpful to accept the invitation and start a discussion of how the movement might think about framing itself.About framing: It's normal. Everybody engages in it all the time. Frames are just structures of thought that we use every day. All words in all languages are defined in terms of frame-circuits in the brain. But, ultimately, framing is about ideas, about how we see the world, which determines how we act. In politics, frames are part of competing moral systems that are used in political discourse and in charting political action. In short, framing is a moral enterprise: it says what the character of a movement is. All politics is moral. Political figures and movements always make policy recommendations claiming they are the right things to do. No political figure ever says, do what I say because it's wrong! Or because it doesn't matter! Some moral principles or other lie behind every political policy agenda. Two Moral Framing Systems in Politics Conservatives have figured out their moral basis and you see it on Wall Street: It includes: The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is "deserving," defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this moral system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy, and especially government. Conservative "democracy" is seen as a system of governance and elections that fits this model. Though OWS concerns go well beyond financial issues, your target is right: the application of these principles in Wall Street is central, since that is where the money comes from for elections, for media, and for right-wing policy-making institutions of all sorts on all issues. The alternative view of democracy is progressive: Democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one's family, community, country, people in general, and the planet. The role of government is to protect and empower all citizens equally via The Public: public infrastructure, laws and enforcement, health, education, scientific research, protection, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, and on and on. Nobody makes it one their own. If you got wealthy, you depended on The Public, and you have a responsibility to contribute significantly to The Public so that others can benefit in the future. Moreover, the wealthy depend on those who work, and who deserve a fair return for their contribution to our national life. Corporations exist to make life better for most people. Their reason for existing is as public as it is private. A disproportionate distribution of wealth robs most citizens of access to the resources controlled by the wealthy. Immense wealth is a thief. It takes resources from the rest of the population - the best places to live, the best food, the best educations, the best health facilities, access to the best in nature and culture, the best professionals, and on and on. Resources are limited, and great wealth greatly limits access to resources for most people. It appears to me that OWS has a progressive moral vision and view of democracy, and that what it is protesting is the disastrous effects that have come from operating with a conservative moral, economic, and political worldview. I see OWS as primarily a moral movement, seeking economic and political changes to carry out that moral movement - whatever those particular changes might be. A Moral Focus for Occupy Wall Street I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed. It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail. We Love America. We're Here to Fix It I see OWS as a patriotic movement, based on a deep and abiding love of country - a patriotism that it is not just about the self-interests of individuals, but about what the country is and is to be. Do Americans care about other citizens, or mainly just about themselves? That's what love of America is about. I therefore think it is important to be positive, to be clear about loving America, seeing it in need of fixing, and not just being willing to fix it, but being willing to take to the streets to fix it. A populist movement starts with the people seeing that they are all in the same boat and being ready to come together to fix the leaks. Publicize the Public Tell the truth about The Public, that nobody makes it purely on their own without The Public, that is, without public infrastructure, the justice system, health, education, scientific research, protections of all sorts, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, … That is a truth to be told day after day. It is an idea that must take hold in public discourse. It must go beyond what I and others have written about it and beyond what Elizabeth Warren has said in her famous video. The Public is not opposed to The Private. The Public is what makes The Private possible. And it is what makes freedom possible. Wall Street exists only through public support. It has a moral obligation to direct itself to public needs. All OWS approaches to policy follow from such a moral focus. Here are a handful examples. Democracy should be about the 99% Money directs our politics. In a democracy, that must end. We need publicly supported elections, however that is to be arranged. Strong Wages Make a Strong America Middle-class wages have not gone up significantly in 30 years, and there is conservative pressure to lower them. But when most people get more money, they spend it and spur the economy, making the economy and the country stronger, as well as making their individual lives better. This truth needs to be central to public economic discourse. Global Citizenship America has been a moral beacon to the world. It can function as such only if it sets an example of what a nation should be. Do we have to spend more on the military that all other nations combined? Do we really need hundreds of military bases abroad? Nature We are part of nature. Nature makes us, and all that we love, possible. Yet we are destroying Nature through global warming and other forms of ecological destruction, like fracking and deep-water drilling. At a global scale, nature is systemic: its effects are neither local nor linear. Global warming is causing the ferocity of the monster storms, tornados, floods, blizzards, heat waves, and fires that have devastated huge areas of our country. The hotter the atmosphere, the more evaporated water and the more energy going into storms, tornados, and blizzards. Global warming cannot be shown to cause any particular storm, but when a storm system forms, global warming will ramp up the power of the storm and the amount of water it carries. In winter, evaporated water from the overly heated Pacific will go into the atmosphere, blow northeast over the arctic, and fall as record snows. We depend on nature - on clean air, water, food, and a livable climate. And we find beauty and grandeur in nature, and a sense of awe that makes life worth living. A love of country requires a love of nature. And a fair and thriving economy requires the preservation of nature as we have known it. Summary OWS is a moral and patriotic movement. It sees Democracy as flowing from citizens caring about one another as well as themselves, and acting with both personal and social responsibility. Democratic governance is about The Public, and the liberty that The Public provides for a thriving Private Sphere. From such a democracy flows fairness, which is incompatible with a hugely disproportionate distribution of wealth. And from the sense of care implicit in such a democracy flows a commitment to the preservation of nature. From what I have seen of most members of OWS, your individual concerns all flow from one moral focus. Elections The Tea Party solidified the power of the conservative worldview via elections. OWS will have no long-term effect unless it too brings its moral focus to the 2012 elections. Insist on supporting candidates that have your overall moral views, no matter what the local issues are. A Warning This movement could be destroyed by negativity, by calls for revenge, by chaos, or by having nothing positive to say. Be positive about all things and state the moral basis of all suggestions. Positive and moral in calling for debt relief. Positive and moral in upholding laws, as they apply to finances. Positive and moral in calling for fairness in acquiring needed revenue. Positive and moral in calling for clean elections. To be effective, your movement must be seen by all of the 99% as positive and moral. To get positive press, you must stress the positive and the moral. Remember: The Tea Party sees itself as stressing only individual responsibility. The Occupation Movement is stressing both individual and social responsibility. I believe, and I think you believe, that most Americans care about their fellow citizens as well as themselves. Let's find out! Shout your moral and patriotic views out loud, regularly. Put them on your signs. Repeat them to the media. Tweet them. And tell everyone you know to do the same. You have to use your own language with your own framing and you have to repeat it over and over for the ideas to sink in. Occupy elections: voter registration drives, town hall meetings, talk radio airtime, party organizations, nomination campaigns, election campaigns, and voting booths. Above all: Frame yourselves before others frame you. George Lakoff is the author of "Moral Politics, Don't Think of an Elephant!," "Whose Freedom?," and "Thinking Points" (with the Rockridge Institute staff). He is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and a founding senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute.
President Obama was in Cincinnati, Ohio yesterday to tour the Brent Spence Bridge, which connects the U.S. House Speaker’s home state with the Senate Minority Leader’s home state. The bridge was declared “functionally obsolete” and is in severe need of reconstruction – as are so many crumbling roads and bridges across the country. In this potent setting (especially to Minnesotans who lived through a bridge coming down killing and injuring so many of our neighbors), the President spoke again about how the American Jobs Act will improve the economy by getting more Americans back to work now and putting more money back into the pockets of working folks. The American Jobs Act will give people jobs rebuilding and repairing our nation’s bridges, roads, airports and schools – this will result in more construction workers, masons, plumbers, carpenters, engineers and architects being paid for their labor. As they spend their wages, they'll help their neighbors' businesses become more prosperous. So, everyone wins. The President’s jobs bill has 3 critical parts concerning infrastructure: It immediately invests $50 billion in construction jobs to rebuild our nation’s roads, railways, airports and transit systems. It includes a proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank, with upfront funding of $10 billion. This is based on the bipartisan model crafted by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) that has gained steam with Senators on both sides of the aisle. And, the President has directed departments and agencies to find infrastructure projects that have a significant impact and will produce jobs, so that we can get quick sign-off on these projects and put more people back to work. We have infrastructure projects in every corner of America that are simply waiting for the green light, and we have millions of workers who are unemployed and ready to fill construction jobs. Congress can put them to work immediately by passing the American Jobs Act. Here’s how the American Jobs Act works for everyone: It gives a tax cut to small businesses, not large corporations, that expand and hire more employees now, and it provides a tax cut to small businesses that decide to raise salaries for current workers. It gets Americans back to work, including
These are projects chosen based on their necessity and their impact, not on special interests or political influence. It also increases employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of low-income young people and adults via a new Pathways Back to Work Fund, which provides resources for: summer and full-year jobs for young Americans, newly designed job training programs to quickly place low-income workers in jobs, and vetted programs encouraging employers to hire disadvantaged workers. It aids Americans who are out of work, by extending unemployment benefits that provide families a lifeline as they seek new employment, and by offering a reformed system with programs that build new skills, connect unemployed Americans with actual jobs, and provide needed assistance to those who have been out of work long-term. It also prevents companies from discriminating against out-of-work Americans in hiring and offers a tax credit to companies who hire those who have been unemployed for more than 6 months. It helps everyday Americans keep more of their hard-earned money, by slashing in half the payroll tax that is taken out of every employee’s paycheck – this will save working families $1,500 per year, on average. It also eliminates existing barriers in the current federal refinancing program, the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP), allowing more Americans to refinance their mortgages at historically low rates, keep their homes and save their money. The plan won’t increase the deficit and is fully paid for, as the President has instructed the Congressional Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction to do additional deficit reduction to cover the cost of the bill. If the committee fails to do so, the bill will be paid for by a range of offsets, including: 1) Eliminating subsidies and special tax breaks to Big Oil. Even oil and gas company executives have admitted that there is little genuine need for these breaks, with high gas prices already driving the industry’s success. 2) Limiting tax benefits for high-income Americans – households making over $250,000 and individuals making over $200,000 – to 28% of their income. This ensures that our tax code is fair for all Americans, not just our nation’s wealthiest individuals. 3) Abolishing the carried interest loophole. This ensures that some hedge fund and other investment managers who had been paying a lower tax rate due to a loophole will now pay an ordinary tax on their income, just like other middle and working class Americans. 4) Eliminating the corporate jet loophole. This closes the special loophole that currently allows corporate jets to be depreciated 2 years faster than standard commercial airliners, moving it back from 5 years to 7 years. Americans know the recession and our national economic crisis did not occur overnight, and we won’t have it solved overnight either. Middle class Americans have watched their economic security erode for decades. President Obama believes that merely recovering from our economic crisis is not enough. We need to rebuild the economy the American way, through a balanced and fair approach that ensures Wall Street and Main Street are playing by the same set of rules – where honest, hard work is rewarded and folks who game the system are penalized. The American Jobs Act is about rebuilding the economy for the long haul, producing the jobs of the future. We need to make sure Washington is not living beyond its means, so that we can make smart investments in small business innovation, education, and American-made products that will sell in the global economy – rather than outsourcing jobs, allowing for costly loopholes, and making reckless fiscal deals at the expense of America’s middle class. Ordinary Americans work hard every single day to pay their bills and meet their responsibilities – now, the question is whether or not Washington will do the same. President Obama has emphasized that it’s time for Congress to do its part and help our nation’s job creators now by passing the American Jobs Act and putting more Americans back to work. Minnesota lawmakers seek to hide budget plan’s effects Following a legislative session marked by unprecedented political rancor that eventually shut down the government, it’s hard to imagine things could get worse. By: Cynthia Moothart, INFORUM Following a legislative session marked by unprecedented political rancor that eventually shut down the government, it’s hard to imagine things could get worse. But now comes this: With passage of the Republican budget in July, a historic number of school districts across the state will be forced to ask for help this November just to educate our kids. The final tabulation of levy requests won’t be available until Friday, but a survey by the Minnesota School Board Association found that 133 districts, about a third statewide, are looking to make up budget shortfalls by going directly to voters. (Sixteen districts did not complete the survey.) Of those, only a dozen cited capital projects as the reason for additional funding; the vast majority of districts need day-to-day help simply to keep classrooms a vital place for learning. That large number has raised the ire of Republican lawmakers, who claim that their budget adequately addressed the needs of schools. These same lawmakers are now trying to pressure administrators into abandoning their levy plans – and vow a fight against those appearing on the ballot. State Rep. Pat Garofalo, a Farmington Republican and chairman of the House Education Finance Committee, is leading the charge, denouncing these districts for “abusing the process.” In an interview Monday with Minnesota Public Radio, he said: “Unfortunately, we have some school boards that are using people’s generosity to engage in the fleecing of taxpayers, and that’s just not acceptable.” Republicans like Garofalo claim that their budget provides for an average bump of nearly $500 in per-pupil spending starting next year. But an independent analysis by Beth Hawkins, a journalist with the award-winning online news site MinnPost, finds that accounting tricks underpin this so-called windfall. In reality, the only real new money in the education pot this year and next comes from Gov. Mark Dayton, who demanded a $50 increase in per-pupil spending. “The GOP leadership arrived at the numbers via a wholly new calculation that depicts public education as the session’s big winner, not by using the traditional method of calculating ups and downs in education revenue,” Hawkins noted. After taking control of the Minnesota House and Senate in January, Republicans pursued a budget plan opposed by nearly two-thirds of all Minnesotans. They’re now using strong-arm tactics and budget trickery to cover up its effects and punish those who would speak the truth about it. Republicans, it seems, could use some schooling in civics – as well as math. Moothart is policy director of the League of Rural Voters, a Minnesota-based nonprofit working to strengthen rural communities nationwide. The current Congress and Minnesota Legislature with its predominance of far right Republicans were elected by running on a platform of "jobs, jobs, jobs". Of course, since then, it's been nothing by "corporations are people, too", attacks on people they think they can bully and denigrate like labor union members (who needs a middle class when you're hobnobbing with the Koch Bros?), women, minorities and the elderly. Now, they're doing the same old do nothing dance with the President's jobs act. Why should we care and why should we speak out? Families are working hard every day to meet their responsibiliteis. The question President Obama is asking Congress is whether Washington will meet its own. America knows how to create jobs. The question is: will Congress put the American people ahead of politics. The Middle Class has been under attack for decades, and short-sighted politics have thwarted a full recovery for too long. The American people know this crisis wasn't made in a day and won't be solved overnight. BUT, they demand we start moving in the right direction. To restore economic security for more than hedge fund managers and Wall Street gurus, we have to rebuild the economy in a balanced manner — one that makes sure everyone from Wall Street to Main Street plays by the same rules, where hard work and responsibility are rewarded and cheating is penalized. That's the American way. What the plan does: Helps America's small businesses hire and grow by cutting their payroll taxes by 50%. Small Business are the engine of job creation, which is why President Obama has already cut their taxes 17 times. Puts more money in the pockets of working and middle class Americans. When we cut their taxes, the average family will get to keep $1,500 more from their paychecks each year. Puts more people back to work in jobs that keep us safe today and strengthen our future including:
While this bill will create American jobs, it won't add a dime to the deficit. It's fully paid for in a fair way the American people support: closing corporate tax loopholes and asking the wealthiest Americans to finally pay their fair fare. What Republicans are offering: The Republican candidates for President are actively soliciting support from the far-right Tea Party policies like:
All of this while providing more tax breaks for special interests and tax cuts for the wealthiest while opposing a payroll tax cut for working Americans. The Republican plan for the economy is only higher unemployment for MInnesota. New analysis shows these extreme Tea Party policies would cost Minnesota 123,029 jobs. Extrapolating that across the US, could mean the US sinking into a depression this country hasn't seen since the Great Depression (where the Republicans did the same type of thing, leading to several years that were the worst America endured during this time period). The Republican apporach is like setting dynamite to your home to fix a leaky faucet — and these misguided choices are the result of a Republican Party which has turned over an increasing amount of power to it's Tea Party fringe. |
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