“Vote For Yourself Tuesday”: When The 99% Vote, They’re More Likely To Get What They Want From Politicians
The rich always vote for themselves. They go for their self-interest, their tax breaks, their liability escapes (think Wall Street). Meanwhile, they’ve relentlessly instructed the non-rich that they too must vote for the rich.
They’ve promised for decades that if the 99 percent just comply with the wishes of the wealthy, bow down, kiss their feet, shine their shoes, then some paltry portion of the bucket-loads of dough that the rich are amassing will dribble down upon the 99 percent.
That trickle-down trick didn’t work for the vast majority of Americans. The rich got richer, all right. But the rest slid backwards. Now income inequality is worse than it was during the era of robber barons. It’s time to turn that around. Political leaders must focus on the needs of the 99 percent. For that to happen, the 99 percent must vote for themselves on Tuesday. They must go for their self-interest, their wages, their health insurance, their Social Security.
Vote for higher wages for the 99 percent.
Minimum wage workers in the United States are paid so little that taxpayers subsidize the likes of Walmart and Wendy’s through government programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. That doesn’t happen everywhere.
As the New York Times pointed out last week, McDonald’s, Burger King and Starbucks all pay their workers in Denmark at least $20 an hour and provide paid vacations and pensions. And the companies still make profits.
The one percenter CEOs of these companies, who demand millions in pay for themselves, have squashed efforts to raise the U.S minimum wage, a pittance stuck five years at $7.25. Instead of improving paychecks, McDonald’s told its workers to get second jobs, forego heat in their homes and find health insurance for $20 a month.
When the minimum wage rises, it bumps up pay for everyone else. The 99 percent benefit. And the majority supports lifting the wage.
Voting for raises means voting for Democrats. President Obama has called for an increase, and U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the U.S. minimum wage is an international embarrassment. “I mean, we suck. We really do,” he said.
Republicans have consistently blocked a raise. New Jersey’s GOP Gov. Chris Christie, the nation’s fourth highest paid governor at $175,000 a year, said last month that he is “tired of hearing about the minimum wage.”
Vote for health insurance for the 99 percent.
The majority of Americans believe that health insurance should be accessible to everyone. The Affordable Care Act moved the nation closer to that, enabling tens of millions to get covered.
It prevented insurers from dumping clients when they get sick and from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, like diabetes. It covered millions of young people to age 26 on their parents’ plans. It protected millions with an expansion of Medicaid.
National surveys have shown that low-income Americans are obtaining health insurance at a faster rate than the rich. There are two reasons for this. The rich already were covered. And the law was designed to help the working poor. This is creating fairness in access to medical care.
Republicans hate the law. Two dozen GOP governors refused to expand Medicaid in their states, and those places now suffer from the highest rate of uninsured residents. Republicans are so intent on denying health care to the working poor that they rejected a program that would cost them nothing for three years.
Now, Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, has again pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act if the GOP takes control of his chamber. Republicans want to regress to higher inequality in health insurance coverage.
Vote to preserve and expand Social Security and Medicare.
These programs are not priorities of the rich. The wealthy are riding high on golden parachutes, gilded pensions, tax-sheltered off-shore accounts, and the built-in security of immense salaries. Social Security wouldn’t pay their country club fees.
For the rest, however, Social Security and Medicare mean fear relief. They’re crucial to the 99 percent.
For years now, however, Republicans have tried to privatize, cut and destroy these programs. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, repeatedly has issued a “roadmap” for an America in which the rich drive new Ferraris bought with tax breaks and the rest forfeit their wheels because of cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose cuts. Among Democrats, there’s a movement to increase benefits by lifting the $117,000 cap, after which income no longer is taxed for Social Security. The cap means that the rich pay proportionately less into Social Security than the rest.
Vote for the overwhelming majority, the non-rich, to get their needs met.
The nation’s richest are more politically engaged and get easier access to high-level politicians than the 99 percent. That isn’t just obvious. It’s also according to surveys and interviews of one-percenters conducted by three university professors. They are Northwestern University’s Benjamin I. Page and Jason Seawright and Vanderbilt’s Larry M. Bartels. Their report is called Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans.
The rich minority gets its way. Bartels and another researcher showed in earlier studies that federal government policy corresponds much more closely with the wishes of the rich than the needs of the rest.
Bartels, author of Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, has noted that no other rich country came close to the United States in cutting the budget based on class preferences. It went this way: the workers lost programs; the wealthy kept perks.
This has got to change. And it could. In states with low voter turnout inequality – that is balloting by the non-rich more closely matching participation rates by the wealthy – there are higher minimum wages, stricter anti-predatory lending laws and better health benefits for the working poor. In other words, when workers vote, they’re more likely to get what they want from politicians.
Vote for yourself on Tuesday.
By: Leo W. Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers; The Huffington Post Blog, November 3, 2014
“Everybody Should Vote!”: If The Concern Is Voting Interferes Too Much With ‘Normal’ Life, Shouldn’t It Be As Convenient As Possible?
One of the crazy-making things about elections in this country, and particularly low-turnout non-presidential elections, is that we’ve lost a presumption that used to be a goo-goo truism: it’s a good thing for everybody to vote. Nowadays you get the feeling–not just from Republicans but from pollsters and the MSM–that there’s something unsavory about people voting when they’re not “enthusiastic” about it. Along with this is the suggestion that encouraging people who aren’t enthusiastic about voting or politics or the candidate choices to nonetheless vote is some sort of dark bearing, a slight aroma of fraud.
There’s an age-old conservative ideological argument often embedded in the contrary presumption against universal voting–I discussed it at some length here. But people naturally are reluctant to fully articulate the belief that only those who hold property or pay taxes should be allowed to vote; that’s why such beliefs are typically expressed in private, with or without a side order of neo-Confederate rhetoric.
More often you hear that poor voter turnout is a sign of civic health. Here’s an expression of that comforting (if not self-serving) theory by the Cato Institute’s Will Wilkinson in 2008:
[L]ower levels of turnout may suggest that voters actually trust each other more — that fewer feel an urgent need to vote defensively, to guard against competing interests or ideologies. Is it really all that bad if a broad swath of voters, relatively happy with the status quo, sit it out from a decided lack of pique?
First of all, everything we know about the people least likely to vote is not congruent with an image of self-satisfied, happy citizens enjoying a “lack of pique” or trusting one another too much to resort to politics. But second of all, nobody’s asking anyone to stop living their lives and raising their kids and going to work in order to become political obsessives. Voting, and even informing oneself enough to cast educated votes (or to affiliate oneself with a political party that generally reflects one’s interests), requires a very small investment of time relative to everything else. And if the concern here is that voting interferes too much with “normal” life, shouldn’t we make it as convenient as possible?
Everybody should vote, and everybody’s vote should count the same–that goes for my right-wing distant relatives who think Obama and I want to take away their guns, and for people struggling with poverty, and for people fretting that those people want to take away “their” Medicare, and for people trying to rebuilt their lives after incarceration. And it goes for people who aren’t happy with their choices because failing to vote simply encourages the same old choices to persist. Hedging on the right to vote takes you down a genuinely slippery slope that leads to unconscious and then conscious oligarchy and even authoritarianism. And so to paraphrase Bobby Kennedy, we should not look at eligible voters and ask why they should vote, but instead ask why not? There’s no good answer that doesn’t violate every civic tenet of equality and every Judeo-Christian principle of the sisterhood and brotherhood of humanity.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, October 31, 2014
“Obamacare Is Here To Stay”: Kentucky Is Emblematic Of The States That Have Received Substantial Assists From Obamacare
You’ve heard of Obamacare, right?
It’s that disastrous, costly and intrusive policy that President Obama and his fellow Democrats rammed down the throats of Congress back in 2010 — a failed plan that conservative Republicans have pledged to “repeal and replace.” According to its critics, it is un-American; it destroys the health care system; it burdens businesses; it hollows out Medicare. Right?
Ah, wrong. Despite what you may have heard and despite the caprice of electoral campaigns, the changes wrought by the Affordable Care Act are here to stay. That’s because it accomplishes much of what it set out to do — and its beneficiaries mostly like it.
Don’t expect Republicans to try to turn back the clock. Oh, some of them will continue to bash Obamacare and to blame it for any negative effects on the country’s dysfunctional health care “system” — including rising costs. And some will even go so far as to continue to insist that it ought to be repealed.
Take Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who expects to lead the upper chamber if Republicans claim a majority. In a debate last month with his Democratic rival, Alison Grimes, McConnell suggested that he would repeal the Affordable Care Act but leave in place Kentucky’s popular state exchange program.
“… The best interest of the country would be achieved by pulling out Obamacare, root and branch,” he said. “Now, with regard to Kynect, it’s a state exchange. They can continue it if they’d like to.”
McConnell’s pronouncement was a tour de force of dissembling, a virtuoso performance of fabrications and disinformation. The Washington Post’s fact checker awarded him three Pinocchios.
That’s because the state’s health care exchange, Kynect, is a part of Obamacare, made possible by the 2010 law. If Obamacare is ripped out “root and branch,” the state exchanges could not continue to exist. (The GOP has continually pledged to find a mechanism to replace Obamacare, but its warring factions have failed to agree on any plan that would leave state exchanges in place.)
Here’s the rub: Kynect is very popular with Kentucky’s residents, many of whom are enjoying health insurance for the first time in their lives. They have been primed by Republican politicians to hate the president and any policy he endorses — including his signature health care plan — but they don’t want to give up Obamacare’s benefits.
Kentucky is emblematic of the states that have received substantial assists from Obamacare. It is largely rural and is among the poorest states. It has also long ranked near the bottom in several health indicators, including obesity and smoking rates and cancer deaths. Obamacare has been a boon for its residents, cutting the rate of uninsured in half.
According to The New York Times, people who live in rural areas are among the biggest winners from the Affordable Care Act. Other groups who have reaped substantial benefits are blacks, Latinos, women and younger Americans between 18 and 34.
Here’s another reason that Obamacare is here to stay: Its expansion of Medicaid is a boon to the states that have taken advantage of it. After the Supreme Court ruled that Medicaid expansion was optional, most Republican governors vowed to resist it — even though the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost for the first three years and 90 percent thereafter.
But some of those GOP governors are now having second thoughts as rural hospitals are forced to close down for lack of funds and poor people are sidelined by preventable illnesses. Several GOP governors have already expanded Medicaid — which provides health insurance for the poor — and others are considering doing so.
Last month, Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, advised his GOP colleagues to stop fighting the Medicaid expansion. The opposition, he said, “was really either political or ideological. I don’t think that holds water against real flesh and blood, and real improvements in people’s lives.”
Some Republicans have trouble admitting that on the campaign trail, but they all know it’s true.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, November 1, 2014
“Modern-Day Voter Suppression”: A Poll Tax By Another Name Is Still A Poll Tax
For supporters of voting restrictions, opposition to voter-ID laws seems practically inexplicable. After all, they argue, having an ID is a common part of modern American life, and if these laws prevent fraud, the requirements deserve broad support.
We know, of course, that the fraud argument is baseless, but it’s often overlooked how difficult getting proper identification – never before necessary to cast a ballot in the United States – can be in practice. To that end the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU published a report this week on “stories from actual voters” in Texas who are facing disenfranchisement for no good reason. Emily Badger flagged one especially striking example:
Olester McGriff, an African-American man, lives in Dallas. He has voted in several Texas elections. This year when he went to the polls he was unable to vote due to the new photo ID law. Mr. McGriff had a kidney transplant and can no longer drive; his driver’s license expired in 2008. He tried to get an ID twice prior to voting. In May, he visited an office in Grand Prairie and was told he could not get an ID because he was outside of Dallas County. In July, he visited an office in Irving and was told they were out of IDs and would have to come back another day.
He is unable to get around easily. Mr. McGriff got to the polls during early voting because Susan McMinn, an experienced election volunteer, gave him a ride. He brought with him his expired driver’s license, his birth certificate, his voter registration card, and other documentation, but none were sufficient under Texas’s new photo ID requirement.
One person was prohibited from voting because his driver’s license ”was taken away from him in connection with a DUI.” Another Texan discovered he’d need a replacement birth certificate and a new ID, which required a series of procedural steps and a $30 fee he’d struggle to afford.
To hear opponents of voting rights tell it, voter-ID laws sound simple and easy. The practical reality is obviously far different – and in all likelihood, the laws’ proponents know this and don’t care. Indeed, a federal district court recently concluded that Texas’ law was designed specifically to discriminate against minority communities.
Under the circumstances, it seems hard to deny that we’re talking about a policy of modern-day poll taxes.
Jonathan Chait’s recent take of the larger dynamic summarized the issue perfectly.
During the Obama era … [Republicans] have passed laws requiring photo identification, forcing prospective voters who lack them, who are disproportionately Democratic and nonwhite, to undergo the extra time and inconvenience of acquiring them. They have likewise fought to reduce early voting hours on nights and weekends, thereby making it harder for wage workers and single parents, who have less flexibility at work and in their child care, to cast a ballot.
The effect of all these policies is identical to a poll tax…. It imposes burdens of money and time upon prospective voters, which are more easily borne by the rich and middle-class, thereby weeding out less motivated voters. Voting restrictions are usually enacted by Republican-controlled states with close political balances, where the small reduction in turnout it produces among Democratic-leaning constituencies is potentially decisive in a close race.
The simple logic of supply and demand suggests that if you raise the cost of a good, the demand for it will fall. Requiring voters to spend time and money obtaining new papers and cards as a condition of voting will axiomatically lead to fewer of them voting.
There is ample reason to believe that for Republican opponents of voting rights, this is a feature, not a bug. For all the rhetoric about “voting integrity” and imaginary claims about the scourge of systemic “voter fraud,” the underlying goal is to discourage participation, and in the process, improve GOP candidates’ odds of success.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 30, 2014
“Electing Judges Is Insane”: Justice Judith French, ‘Forget All Those Other Votes If You Don’t Keep The Ohio Supreme Court Conservative’
With a couple of minor exceptions, like a few local judgeships in Switzerland, the United States is the only country where judges are elected. Indeed, to the rest of the world, the idea of judges running for office—begging for money, airing attack ads against their opponents, thinking always about their next election even after they take the bench—is positively insane. And they’re right.
We’ve had elected judgeships for our entire history, but until the last few years, those elections were nothing like races for Congress or governorships. But those days are past—now not only are judges acting like politicians, outside groups (yes, including the Koch brothers) are pouring money into judicial races to produce courts more to their liking. And when you make judicial elections more partisan, you get more partisan judges, like one Judith French, a member of the Ohio Supreme Court who is running to retain her seat:
At a Saturday event at which she introduced Republican Gov. John Kasich, French said, “I am a Republican and you should vote for me. You’re going to hear from your elected officials, and I see a lot of them in the crowd.
“Let me tell you something: The Ohio Supreme Court is the backstop for all those other votes you are going to cast.
“Whatever the governor does, whatever your state representative, your state senator does, whatever they do, we are the ones that will decide whether it is constitutional; we decide whether it’s lawful. We decide what it means, and we decide how to implement it in a given case.
“So, forget all those other votes if you don’t keep the Ohio Supreme Court conservative,” French said.
Well, at least she’s being forthright, not bothering with “I’ll rule according to the Constitution” and “It’s not my job to make the laws” and “I just call balls and strikes” and all the other baloney that Republican judges offer up when asked about their judicial philosophy. “I am a Republican and you should vote for me.” That pretty much sums it up. What a terrific system.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 31, 2014
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