“We Need To Support All The Troops”: Military Women In Line To Get Same Rights As Civilian Women
If you’re a member of the U.S. military and you happen to be a woman, you might think you were entitled to the full range of health care allowed your civilian counterparts. But you would be wrong. That’s why Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., crafted an amendment to the National Defense Appropriation Act that would grant, according to the Ms. magazine Web site:
the same rights as civilian women under federal policies that provide affordable abortion care to women who are the victims of rape or incest. Under the current policy, servicewomen are only eligible for abortion care if the woman’s life is at risk.
On Thursday, just in time for the Memorial Day weekend, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved the amendment by a 16-10 vote. The measure must next move to the Senate floor, and faces an uncertain future if, as expected, the appropriations bill goes to a joint conference. (The House bill is not expected to include a similar provision.)
Currently, abortions are forbidden to military personnel unless they are victims of sexual assault or the pregnancy endangers their lives. But if the pregnancy is the result of a rape the soldier, sailor or Marine must pay for her own abortion — a cost that can be prohibitive on a military paycheck. And in a war zone, a woman in uniform will likely find no civilian medical professionals available to her who will perform the procedure.
This is all the more galling when one considers the epidemic of sexual assault against military women that continues to grip the armed forces — assaults perpetrated by men who are supposed to be their comrades.
In 2009, reporting for CBS News, Katie Couric delivered this statistic:
One in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military, compared to one in six women in the civilian world.
And the numbers haven’t changed much. Because of the stigma attached to reporting one’s rape by a fellow soldier, it’s not unheard of for a woman made pregnant through rape to try to self abort. (For one account, see Kathryn Joyce’s outstanding 2009 article, “Military Abortion Ban: Female Soldiers Not Protected by Constitution They Defend,” at Religion Dispatches.)
If Congress really wants to show its appreciation to all of our troops, it will pass the appropriations bill with the Shaheen amendment in tact. But with this Congress, whose freshmen claim to love, love them some Constitution, military women will likely learn the limits of the right-wing version of the U.S. Constitution. (Now, what do you need all those rights, for, little lady?)
By: Adele Stan, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 26, 2012
“Delivering For The Well-To-Do”: Romney’s Bain Experience Wasn’t Real American Capitalism
The debate is on. The Obama forces and the Mitt Romney campaign are dueling back and forth with ads and heated rhetoric about Romney’s record at Bain Capital.
Actually, this debate began during the Republican primary season, when Romney was eviscerated by his probusiness foes vying for the nomination. Rick Perry called the Bain approach to business “indefensible,” “inherently wrong,” “vulture capitalism,” and Newt Gingrich called it “exploitation.” So, those who are worried that the critique of Romney’s role as a corporate raider is somehow a criticism of American capitalism or is somehow antibusiness should play back the Republican primary debate tapes.
Here are the fundamental questions about Romney and Bain: Did they help middle class, working families; did they create hundreds of thousands of jobs in America; was this American business at its best?
The answer, in my view, is clearly no. This is not George Romney running American Motors, this is not Steve Jobs creating Apple, this is not Ray Kroc developing McDonald’s. This is Wall Street run amok, with little regard for jobs lost, pensions lost, debt piled up, lives and communities left in tatters. The sole purpose of Bain Capital was to make money, and lots of it, for themselves and their investors. It was not to rebuild companies and rebuild lives. It had nothing to do with job creation.
If this is the Romney business “experience”—thanks, but no thanks.
The scary part of the Bain experience is that we have a candidate who favors $5 trillion in tax breaks, mostly for the wealthy, while unfairly targeting middle class families. The budget and tax policies advocated by Romney and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin are inherently unfair to working families and continue the shift in income and benefits to those who have prospered this past decade.
In short, the Romney platform and the Romney experience at Bain point to a potential president who delivers for the well-to-do, not those who have been hurt by the economic collapse.
So, why does Romney favor, for himself and his wealthy friends, tax breaks to put money in Swiss bank accounts and the Cayman Islands? Why does he support carried interest deductions for the wealthiest Americans that allow him to only pay 14 percent in taxes? Why will he not admit that just because he can afford the lawyers and fancy accountants does not make it right?
Romney’s problem is that he is not supportive enough of real, fair, honest American capitalism—he is too tied to fast and loose Wall Street “exploitation” that got us all into this economic mess in the first place.
One can argue strongly that these money-making tactics have done far more harm than good to our economy and to American businesses over the past 20 years. That is why Bain and Wall Street excesses are so important to main street voters. That is why this debate about America’s future course is so important this election year.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, May 26, 2012
“End Of A Traditional Marriage?”: Republicans And The Military No Longer BFF’s
Republicans are adept, as we know, at taking a piece of existing conventional wisdom, finding one (usually totally irrelevant) fact that seems to reinforce it, and spreading that talking point far and wide. Take defense. The piece of c.w. is that Republicans are pro-military and Democrats anti. Then they find a technically true but meaningless fact, like the assertion often made by Romney and Gingrich on the campaign trail that our Navy is at its smallest size since 18-something and of course this is all Obama’s fault because, naturally, he hates the Navy. The part they leave out, of course, is that the reduced fleet size and slower “build rate” are part of the Navy’s own strategic plan.
Which brings us to the Law of the Sea Treaty, currently being held up in the Senate by a few Republicans. The United States is not yet party to this convention, but groundwork to join had been laid by leaders from both parties over a number of years. George W. Bush supported joining. Far richer than that, though, is the fact that the then governor of Alaska in 2007 said: “I want to put my administration on record in support of the convention as the predicate for asserting sovereign rights that will be of benefit to Alaska and the nation.” But that before she flowered, shall we say, into the creature she is today.
Now, of course, because Obama supports joining, the treaty is an assault on American sovereignty. Heather Hurlburt, a leading expert on military matters, writes that joining the convention “is supported by all the current Pentagon brass, six former Secretaries of Defense and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, five former commandants of the Coast Guard, eight former Chiefs of Naval Operations.” I guess they’re all communists or at least Trilateralists.
The Hurlburt article I link to above is well-worth reading as she lays out five areas in which today’s conservatism is actively thwarting Pentagon planning and goals, from the aforementioned treaty to the jailing of terror suspects to the question of war with Iran and other matters. One of those is alternative energy, on which the story gets even weirder.
The Pentagon is the biggest user of fossil fuels in the world. Hurlburt refers to one estimate that every gallon of gas used in Afghanistan needs seven gallons to get it there. Reasonably, the Pentagon would like to reduce its bill. It has a green initiative. Uh-oh! Green? You know that’s trouble!
Here, read David Roberts of Grist, who explains how Republicans in Congress are trying to pass laws that would prevent the Pentagon from using less-expensive fuels, but force it to use more expensive fuels (coal-to-liquid technology). He concludes:
So, let’s pause and review. The Republican position on military fuel choices is as follows: Congressional restrictions are an “unacceptable precedent” when they prohibit dirtier fuels, but necessary when they prohibit cleaner fuels. Also, it is unacceptable for the military to pay more for cleaner fuels, but necessary for it to pay more for dirtier fuel.
Part of this is their debt to Big Dirty Energy, but most of it is just ideology. It’s just a party gone mad with opposition and hatred. Which isn’t exactly news, but bears repeating and repeating in all its guises and forms.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 24, 2012
“The Spine Holding The Book Together”: Bain Is Just Chapter One In The “Book Of Romney”
The real Mitt Romney is finally running for president — but not in his own first television spot, a superficial checklist of issues which provides no insight into who he is or what makes him tick. It’s the Obama commercial on Bain and the destruction of GST Steel that starkly reveals the real Romney as a vulture capitalist. And this is just the beginning of what we will hear about Bain, and of a narrative arc that will position Romney as the candidate of the few, by the few, and for the few.
The Obama ad is so powerful because, like the Ted Kennedy ads in Romney’s losing 1994 Senate race, the story is told not by a smoothly modulated professional narrator, but by working people whose jobs and lives were shredded so Mitt and his men could amass their millions. One of the workers voted for John McCain in 2008 and for George W. Bush before that. Now these authentic blue-collar voices, these Reagan Democrats, are talking directly to swing voters — to folks who could be brothers or sisters, friends or cousins — in the battleground industrial states. It’s a different kind of political media — gritty, unslick, and therefore quite convincing.
My then-partner Tad Devine and I conceived and produced the Kennedy spots in 1994. They hit the Massachusetts airwaves with devastating force. In that landmark Republican year, Romney had a slight lead in September, but he swiftly fell in the polls and then melted down in a televised debate that outdrew the statewide audience for most Super Bowls. On Election Day, the boy from Bain lost in a landslide — by 18 points.
It was fascinating to watch how Romney responded as his campaign unravelled. In fact, he mostly didn’t. He seemed paralyzed — a guilty guy caught in the act. In a token push-back, his spokesman alleged that we had “put words in people’s mouths.” The Boston Globe checked and slapped down the story. The workers were spontaneous and unscripted. No political consultant could ghostwrite the rebuke of a packer laid off after 29 years, who looked into the camera and addressed Romney directly: “If you think you’d make such a good senator, come out here to Marion, Indiana, and see what your company has done to these people.”
The workers boarded a bus for Massachusetts and demanded a meeting with Romney. For days, he refused — which kept the episode in the headlines. When he finally sat down with them, he coldly said he’d consider their comments.
He wasn’t ready then, but that was 18 years ago — and he had to know this was coming at him again in 2012. Newt Gingrich stumbled onto the issue in South Carolina, where Romney was routed. But it was never going to be as devastating in Republican primaries as in the contest with Barack Obama. And the presumptive GOP nominee once again appears unready or unwilling to answer beyond offering up ritualistic bromides about “free enterprise”.
This is the false banner under which he campaigns — the claim that he is a job-creating businessman. The total has oscillated from 10,000 jobs to 100,000, to maybe not exactly that. But the abstract number, unsubstantiated and as soulless as Mitt himself often seems, is no match for a steel worker named Jack Cobb, discarded in Romney’s profiteering deal, but sad and defiant now: “To get up on national TV and brag about making jobs… he has destroyed thousands of people’s careers, lifetimes, just destroying people.”
The ads shatter the candidate’s fundamental rationale — that with his business experience in creating jobs, he’s Mr. Fix-It for the economy. It’s a thin rationale, but voters might have believed it. Now disbelief will deepen as the Obama campaign rolls out a dishonor roll of Bain’s depredations. The campaign already has a website that state by state — just coincidentally the battleground states, of course — pinpoints other companies exploited and extinguished by Bain.
I suspect that Romney will eventually have to abandon his strategy of treating the election as a referendum and not a choice — and attempt to defend his business record in paid media. The 1994 outcome suggests that any other course is a road to defeat.
I doubt he will make an ad repeating his disingenuous and dangerous claim that Obama also cut jobs while saving the auto industry. It’s disingenuous because the president saved GM and Chrysler — and Romney frequently did precisely the opposite to other companies. It’s dangerous because if he hopes to compete at all in Michigan and Ohio, he shouldn’t mention the auto bailout outside a confessional. His approach would have doomed the industry.
More likely, Romney will trot out workers — say, from Staples — to highlight jobs he claims to have created. The problem here is that during his tenure, Bain had two businesses. One was venture capital investing in start-ups. The other, which Romney drove, consisted of buying out a firm, hollowing it out, loading it up with debt, cutting wages — and making millions before the firm went belly-up. The one endeavor doesn’t redeem the other: What’s at issue here is not an accounting question, some mere matter of addition and subtraction, but the crass calculation of pillaging jobs and oppressing workers as a conscious business plan while occasionally grabbing a government bailout along the way.
Moreover, the response irresistibly invites a challenge: Romney should release the records of all Bain transactions from which he profited. He probably can’t afford to because the picture could be pretty grim. Presumably, he’s about as likely to risk this kind of full disclosure as he is to release tax returns for years when he may have paid little or no taxes.
There’s a (literally) rich vein to mine in Romney’s record at Bain. But it’s just the beginning of the narrative arc because the Obama campaign will move from the vulture capitalism of his private endeavors to his failures as a public official and the unfairness of his far-right agenda.
Thus the financial manipulator who decimated jobs in the private sector was a governor whose policies left his state 47th in job creation.
The takeover artist who slashed health benefits for workers would end Medicare as we know it, subject seniors to the harsh mercies of insurance companies, and raise their costs by approximately $6,500 a year.
The mega-millionaire with his offshore bank accounts would slash taxes for the very wealthy, and everything from education to food safety for the middle class.
The rapacious Romney, who in business took a government bailout and then would have let the auto industry collapse, now rails against bailouts and calls for rolling back financial regulation for the Wall Street firms that benefited from them.
The list goes on. The narrative is compelling. We haven’t heard the end of Bain — and we won’t until the end of the campaign — despite the inexplicable comments of Newark’s “Democratic” Mayor Cory Booker, who must be spending too much time cozying up to Republican Gov. (and potential running mate) Chris Christie. On Meet the Press, Booker equated the race-baiting, anti-Obama ads about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that were recently proposed to billionaire clown Joe Ricketts with Obama’s Bain attack: “It’s nauseating.”
Well, Ricketts and his now-renounced smear job certainly was nauseating. But with Romney, what’s nauseating is what happened at his hands to ordinary hardworking Americans thrown out of work so he could rake in the bucks. And what’s worrying is Romney’s austerity agenda that would drive the U.S. into a double-dip recession, which is what such policies have already done to Great Britain.
Within hours, Booker retracted his comments and conceded the point: It is Romney who has made his business experience the centerpiece of his campaign. Bain is the spine that holds the whole Book of Romney together. As one of the workers in that Obama commercial put it, “If he’s going to run the country like the way he ran our business, I wouldn’t want him there. He would be so out of touch… How could [he] care?”
By: Robert Shrum, The Week, May 21, 2012
“Failing The Test Of Courage, Integrity And Loyalty”: Romney Messes Up And Tells The Truth About Austerity
Romney has periodic breakdowns when asked questions about the economy because he sometimes forgets the need to lie. He forgets that he is supposed to treat austerity as the epitome of economic wisdom. When he responds quickly to questions about austerity he slips into default mode and speaks the truth – adopting austerity during the recovery from a Great Recession would (as in Europe) throw the nation back into recession or depression. The latest example is his May 23, 2012 interview with Mark Halperin in Time magazine.
“Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”
Romney explains that austerity, during the recovery from a Great Recession, would cause catastrophic damage to our nation. The problem, of course, is that the Republican congressional leadership is committed to imposing austerity on the nation and Speaker Boehner has just threatened that Republicans will block the renewal of the debt ceiling in order to extort Democrats to agree to austerity – severe cuts to social programs. Romney knows this could “throw us into recession or depression” and says he would never follow such a policy.
Romney, however, has not opposed Boehner’s threat to use extortion to force austerity on the nation. Romney has the nomination sown up, but I predict that he will stand by and let Boehner try to throw us into a Great Depression rather than upset the Tea Party-wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, Romney will attack Democrats who have the political courage to defend our nation against his Party’s demands for austerity that would throw the nation into recession or depression. What does one call a politician who, solely to advance his personal political ambition, supports his Party’s efforts to coerce austerity even though he knows that the austerity would cause a national economic catastrophe and states that he, “of course,” would never adopt such self-destructive austerity if he were president? Romney is failing the tests of courage, integrity, and loyalty to our nation and people.
Later in the interview, Romney claims that federal budgetary deficits are “immoral.” But he has just explained that using austerity for the purported purpose of ending a deficit would cause a recession or depression. A recession or depression would make the deficit far larger. That means that Romney should be denouncing austerity as “immoral” (as well as suicidal) because it will not simply increase the deficit (which he claims to find “immoral” because of its impact on children) but also dramatically increase unemployment, poverty, child poverty and hunger, and harm their education by causing more teachers to lose their jobs and more school programs to be cut. Fewer children will be able to get college degrees. Austerity is the great enemy of children – it is the epitome of a self-destructive, immoral economic policy.
Listen for the sounds of silence from Romney in coming months. I predict that he will not act to protect our children or our economy from the suicidal and “immoral” austerity his Republican allies are trying to coerce the Democrats to inflict on our economy and our children.
By: William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives, May 25, 2012
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