The Real News: Socialists Sweep Venezuelan State Elections As President Chavez Recovers in Cuba

Source:The Real News- left to right: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez & Vice President Nicolas Maduro.

"Greg Wilpert: It's likely Chavez will not remain in office and Maduro will head into elections" 

From The Real News

It's easy to win elections for the Chavez Socialists in Venezuela when the Chavez Administration prevents the Liberal Democratic opposition from getting their message out to the people and being the real opposition. 

AlterNet: Thom Hartmann: 'Why Do We Get Riled Up About Gun Rights & Not Rights to Healthcare & Education?'

Source:Thom Hartmann is a left-wing, nationally syndicated, radio talk show host.

"The suicide/mass-killing in Newtown has provoked Senator Dianne Feinstein to propose going back to the assault weapons ban that George W. Bush let lapse in 2004. That’s a nice start, but increasing numbers of Americans are calling for a ban on all guns, except for those carried by people who actually need them.

And there’s a strong argument to be made for it.

The Charles Koch Foundation, which was founded in 1974 and then changed its name to the Cato Institute two years later, would like you to know something about gun control. In a commentary titled “Gun Control, Myths and Realities,” their director of publications, David Lampo, writes:

[T]he facts show that there is simply no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates across a wide spectrum of nations and cultures. In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a license to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr. Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel “have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States.”

Sounds pretty compelling, right?

It sounded so solid to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein that he quoted it in an op-ed for that publication right after the Newtown murders. And then he discovered that just because something comes from the former Charles Koch Foundation – now the Cato Institute – doesn’t mean that it’s true.

In an article titled, “Mythbusting: Israel and Switzerland are not gun-toting utopias,” Klein set the record straight when he interviewed assistant professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health at the State University of New York, Janet Rosenbaum. She’s an expert who’s actually researched the issue of gun control and gun violence in Israel and Switzerland.

In both countries there is no equivalent of our Second Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Hellerand, two years later,McDonald. In other words, there is no “right” to own a gun in either of those nations.

It’s worth noting that both countries recognize physical and mental healthcare as a “right.” But here in America we reverse that – the Supreme Court tells us (largely by omission) that physical or mental healthcare are merely privileges, while they explicitly declare that we have the right to own a gun.

Not so in Israel or Switzerland.

As Dr. Rosenbaum told Klein, and today essentially repeated on my radio program: “Both countries require you to have a reason to have a gun. There isn’t this idea that you have a right to a gun. You need a reason. And then you need to go back to the permitting authority every six months or so to assure them the reason is still valid.”

As a consequence of this, she pointed out to Klein, “There are only a few tens of thousands of legal guns in Israel, and the only people allowed to own them legally live in the settlements, do business in the settlements, or are in professions at risk of violence.”

For centuries, Switzerland has had a citizen’s militia instead of a standing army, much like that envisioned by Jefferson and many of the other Founders for America. Every able-bodied male spends a bit of time in the militia and, so the story goes, has a gun in his home.

But the story is wrong, says Rosenbaum. Instead of keeping guns in people’s homes, she told Klein, in Switzerland, “They’ve been moving to keeping the guns in depots. That means they’re not in the household, which makes sense because the literature shows us that if the gun is in the household, the risk goes up for everyone in the household.”

And, interestingly, they’re doing the same thing in Israel. As Rosenbaum told Klein, “In Israel, it used to be that all soldiers would take the guns home with them. Now they have to leave them on base. Over the years they’ve done this — it began, I think, in 2006 — there’s been a 60 percent decrease in suicide on weekends among IDS [Israeli] soldiers.”

That’s because there’s a clear correlation between having a gun in the house and the risk of suicide, because suicidal impulses come and go, but if they come when guns are around they’re a lot easier to carry out. And, as in the case in Newtown and most of our mass shootings, to carry out in a way that is made very, very high-profile by being able to kill a bunch of other people at the same time.

We have our priorities totally wrong in the United States.

The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, which brings together corporate lobbyists and Republican state legislators to write “model” legislation to introduce in Republican-controlled states on behalf of the corporations, has been doing everything they can to help out the gun industry.

As reported by Alex Kane on AlterNet, they include:

·Guns on campus

·Doing away with waiting periods to buy guns

·More “Stand Your Ground” laws like the one ALEC got passed in Florida

·No borders to firearm movement between states

·Annulling local gun-control regulations

·Putting in jail government officials who take away people’s guns in emergencies

·Promoting more semi-automatic weapons like those used by the Newtown killer

So we have this “right to guns” in America, that the Koch brothers are heavily invested in. While the rest of the developed and civilized world has granted their people universal rights to free healthcare and free education, and declared that owning a gun is a “privilege” and not a right, the Kochs have helped make sure that we’ve done the exact opposite.

Which is insane.

We no longer have a “well-regulated militia” in this country – Jefferson lost that battle two centuries ago – and therefore there’s nobody who should have a “right” to a gun in America.

Instead of talking about “gun rights” in this country – a phrase that’s being used more and more thanks to a hard push by gun manufacturers lobbies and their bought-and-paid-for members of Congress – we should be asking who needs to own a gun. And, then limit gun ownership to only those people who can demonstrate that need.

Meanwhile, we should be looking at things that the rest of the developed world long ago determined are basic human rights – even the UN has enshrined them as such – and move toward making physical and mental healthcare free and fully accessible to all our citizens, along with a high-quality and free education from kindergarten through a PhD.

The former Charles Koch Foundation now named “Cato” is right that Israel and Switzerland are models we should look at, even though they got their facts about those countries wrong. In both countries people have rights to education and healthcare, and no right to own a gun unless they can prove they actually need one.

And it’s worked out very well for the citizens of both countries.

We should learn from – and copy – their example.

From the AlterNet

New America Foundation: The Next Social Contract

Source:New America Foundation hosting a discussion about early education.

"Research shows that education investments in the earliest years of life make the greatest difference in the educational outcomes of children. America has an opportunity to provide children with high-quality instruction throughout the earliest years of their schooling by making changes at the local, state and federal levels. These reforms would lead to significant improvements in the educational outcomes of our students, citizens and future workforce.

As the Obama Administration and Congress consider how to revamp education policy, join the New America Foundation's Education Policy Program and Next Social Contract Initiative for the release of a paper that argues for a fundamental rethinking of public policy related to children's primary years in education, starting at age three and reaching up through the third grade, and for a lively conversation about education reform." 

From the New America Foundation

Salon Magazine: Graham Kates- 'Re-Inventing College For Prisons'

Source:Salon Magazine- some say prison is an education in of itself.

"Two ex-inmates are trying to bring higher education to the incarcerated, one maximum security facility at a time. 

At the height of the tough-on-crime era in the mid-1990s, prisoners in New York State seeking access to college-level courses were dealt a one-two punch that seemed to deliver a crushing blow to inmate higher education.

When then-President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, he revoked inmate access to federal Pell grants. In 1995, New York Governor George Pataki followed suit, eliminating Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) funding for prisoners in the state.

For Kathy Boudin, at the time an inmate of the maximum security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, it seemed like college programs “disappeared overnight.”

“When college was removed, instead of having a line of people walking to school, we had people sitting up in the day rooms playing cards, playing dominoes, getting in fights,” said Boudin, now the director of the Columbia University School of Social Work’s Criminal Justice Initiative." 

From Salon Magazine

Because of the fact that we have such a high level of prison inmates going back to prison after they are released and in a lot of cases within a year of getting out of prison the previous time and in a lot of cases because they simply don't have the skills that they need to be successful legally on the outside, which means that society, meaning taxpayers get stuck with the bills of having to take care of these people while they are in prison and then, get stuck with the bills of having to pay for them while they are back in prison, because these inmates enter prison as criminals and leave prison as criminals, screw ups going in and screw ups going out and coming back in, knowing all of these things, you would think that society would get the message that there's a better way in how we could incarcerate our prison population then having them remain uneducated screw ups who repeat their same mistakes from the past that landed them in prison in the first place.

Some say that funding education and schools for prison inmates costs money and of course they are right. Anything worth doing does. But done well, it's cheaper to pay for that then funding things that aren't worth doing. Like inmates to remain criminals while in prison with no hope of making it on the outside once they leave prison and end up coming back to prison and once again being wards of the state. Which is exactly what prison inmates are: adult children who can't make it on their own and can't be taken care of by anyone and must live in an institutional environment to be able to function at all. 

If we give prison inmates the opportunity to improve themselves with skills that they can use once they leave prison, (something like 7-10 inmates leave prison while they are still young and healthy enough to work) so instead of having no hope of making it on the outside, we could empower them to get the skills so they can become productive citizens.

We could fund education for prison inmates through things like Pell grants and student loans that they would pay back while either still in prison or once they are out of prison. And also by putting inmates to work in prison with what's called prison industries, which would be companies that operate inside of prison that would hire inmates. And pay our inmates for the work that they do to cover their room and board. But it's just a matter of priorities, what we believe we should fund in this country.

The American Prospect: Anna Clark: 'Far From The Final Defeat in Michigan'

Source:The American Prospect- a pro-labor organizer in Michigan.

"The right-to-work bill may now be law, but organizers are already planning the next move. 

Protester Paula Merwin, of Leslie, Michigan, stands with an American flag outside the George W. Romney State Building, where Governor Snyder has an office, Tuesday, December 11, 2012. The crowd is protesting right-to-work legislation passed last week. Michigan could become the 24th state with a right-to-work law next week. Rules required a five-day wait before the House and Senate vote on each other's bills; lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene Tuesday and Snyder has pledged to sign the bills into law. 

In Michigan, the birthplace of the labor movement, this week's abrupt passage of a "right-to-work" law incited the largest protest in Lansing's history: at least 12,500 people, wearing red, chanting, singing, drumming, committing civil disobedience, and otherwise battling to be heard as lawmakers in a lame-duck session overhauled the state's labor laws without public input or committee meetings. State house Democrats' attempts to pass amendments that would, for example, put right-to-work up for a public vote or eliminate the $1 million appropriation seemingly designed so that the law withstands the threat of voter referendum, all failed. That $1 million appropriation is supposed to go toward educating workers and union about life under right-to-work, and, in the budget-strained state, it's not clear what the source of the money will be.

Barely two hours after it left the House, and just days after it got on the agenda, Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed the bill. The overhaul will affect both public and private employees (police and fire excepted). Once the law takes effect in the spring, Michigan will become the 24th right-to-work state, and the second in the past decade. The only other states to pass right-to-work in the last 25 years? Oklahoma did it in 2001, and Indiana in 2011, becoming the first state in the Rust Belt to do so.

In Michigan on Tuesday, the display of public dissent prompted authorities to close the Capitol when they said it reached its 2,000-person capacity. Several Lansing streets were shut to traffic and some police wore riot gear. Two school districts closed for the day because of teachers and other workers joining in the demonstrations. Former Democratic Rep. Mark Schauer, a member of Laborers union Local 355, was among those hit with pepper spray as he led protestors outside the Capitol. Ironically, a rallying point for protesters was the Romney building-named for George Romney, the father of Mitt and the former governor who, in 1965, helped craft the very labor laws that right-to-work undercuts. The Romney building houses Snyder's office, and stands as a reminder of legislation that Governor Romney and bipartisan lawmakers passed that provided full collective bargaining rights to public employees and improved bargaining rights for private employees.

Now that Michigan, with its symbolic power as the home of the United Auto Workers, has become a right-to-work state, what's next for workers concerned about fair wages and fair working conditions? What is the long view of organizers here?

Those I spoke with say there is no substitute for votes. They are acutely aware that right-to-work passed in part because of unprecedented Republican and Tea Party wins in 2010-they took control of Michigan's House, Senate, Supreme Court, and the offices of the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. Redistricting followed, putting progressive leaders in Michigan at an even greater disadvantage. The 2012 election saw some Democratic gains, however; enough for the GOP to decide to use the lame-duck session to move swiftly not only on right-to-work but on other controversial measures too, including serious limits to reproductive rights.

"The Obama campaign did a good job of training organizers in 2008, but people didn't seem to realize that in politics, you don't just win once, but you have to keep winning," said Chris Savage of Eclectablog, a popular progressive site with a Michigan focus. We talked as he was driving to Lansing to join the demonstrations on Tuesday. "The upshot is that we lost everything in 2010, and we need to start seriously looking at 2014. We need to harness the emotions people are feeling right now and do more work."

When I asked Sarah Schillio, a legislative aide for Representative Jeff Irwin, a Democrat from Ann Arbor, what the best thing for Michigan people concerned about right-to-work to do, she said, "they should vote. That is literally the only thing that can happen."

But how to keep voters motivated when the next major election is nearly two years out? Savage hopes local organizers start building local wins that can keep momentum going. More concretely, he said organizers have a lot to learn from the excellent coordination of conservative groups, like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a think tank in Michigan.

"They waited a long time for their day in the sun, and when it came, they were ready to go," Savage said. "We won't be successful unless we learn from that. We can't come into power and spend 6 or 12 months hemming and hawing about what we're going to do next."

Coalition building is the other major strategy for Michigan organizers. Too often, environmental groups fought for environmental issues, labor for labor issues, women's rights activists for women's rights-and little to no energy has been spent on common cause. This week's right-to-work protests brought diverse activists and citizens together in an all-too-rare way. That collective power needs to be carried forward for exponential political influence.

One such effort at collaboration is We Are Michigan. It describes itself on its website as "a coalition of faith, community, labor and progressive groups united by a common commitment to strengthening Michigan's middle class." The labor organizer I spoke to from the coalition said that it launched days ago, specifically as a response to the right-to-work threat. It focused first on facilitating the "Day of Action" in Lansing on Tuesday. Created on December 9, its Facebook page had 56,500 "likes" by December 11.

The labor organizer I spoke with said right-to-work is not a "final defeat" for Michigan, and that activists are considering a number of responses, both legal and political. While the appropriation money in the right-to-work bill is getting a lot of attention as a savvy move by lawmakers to ensure that it cannot be overturned by voters, the organizer I spoke with said this isn't quite true-right-to-work could still be overturned, not as a referendum but as a ballot initiative to "approve or reject" the law. This would mean, though, that it has to meet the higher threshold of turning in petitions with enough signatures to equal 8 percent of the turnout in Michigan's last gubernatorial election-more than 258,000 signatures. Organizers will have 90 days to do it, starting after the legislature adjourns. If they are successful, right-to-work would then go to a state-wide vote.

A short-term tactic? Building union membership to help mitigate the threat of devastation from right-to-work, which will go into effect in April. Free riders who don't pay union dues but get the benefits of labor wins are a real problem that won't go away with an uptick in membership; this is part of why right-to-work is nonsensical in the first place, which Rich Yeselson wrote about beautifully. But more workers who are aware of their stake in collective bargaining, the better.

With the long view in mind, Savage said that he "thinks it's important not to waste the next two years," particularly with the heightened motivation and alarm felt this week by Michigan workers.

"I'm not a fan of fear and anger as a motivating tactic, but in the short run it can be effective," Savage said. "We just have to figure out a way to turn that into something positive for the long term."

Even as We Are Michigan considers large-scale responses, the labor organizer I spoke with detailed small actions as particularly powerful, including Michiganders and their allies nationally making intentional choices to put their money toward businesses and organizations that support labor rights.

"People need to stay involved, and talk to their friends and family," he said. "While the outcome of today is not great for middle class people, the future depends on what we do tomorrow."

From The American Prospect

Salon: Alex Halperin: 'McDonald’s Pay Chasm": $8.25/Hour to $8.75 Million/Year'

Source:Salon Magazine writer Alex Halperin.

"Bloomberg has an article today highlighting the pay gap at McDonald's. The whole piece is worth a read but the beginning is particularly striking. It highlights Chicago man Tyree Johnson, who holds positions at two different McDonald's. Between shifts he has to give himself a quick scrubbing in one of the restaurant's bathrooms because he can't even show up for work at a McDonald's smelling like a McDonald's.

“I hate when my boss tells me she won’t give me a raise because she can smell me,” he said.

Johnson, 44, needs the two paychecks to pay rent for his apartment at a single-room occupancy hotel on the city’s north side. While he’s worked at McDonald’s stores for two decades, he still doesn’t get 40 hours a week and makes $8.25 an hour, minimum wage in Illinois.

This is life in one of America’s premier growth industries. Fast-food restaurants have added positions more than twice as fast as the U.S. average during the recovery that began in June 2009.

Johnson's circumstances look particularly grim when they're compared, as Bloomberg does, to the compensation enjoyed by executives whose pay gives a whole new meaning to "McJob."

Johnson would need about a million hours of work -- or more than a century on the clock -- to earn the $8.75 million that McDonald’s, based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, paid then- CEO Jim Skinner last year.

... Twenty years ago, when Johnson first started at McDonald’s, the CEO’s compensation was about 230 times that of a full-time worker paid the federal minimum wage. The $8.75 million that Thompson’s predecessor as CEO, Skinner, made last year was 580 times, according to data compiled by Bloomberg." 

From Salon Magazine

AlterNet: Richard Eskow: 'Four Terrible Arguments For Raising The Medicare Age'

Source:The Zero Hour With Richard Eskow. And I'll leave it at that.

"It’s tempting to read these pieces by Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Chait and decide that, all things considered, liberals should at least consider raising the Medicare age to 67 as part of a budget compromise.

They shouldn’t. 

“This seems like a useful time for liberals to sort out the difference between budget ideas we don’t like and budget ideas we can’t or shouldn’t accept,” Chait writes. I couldn’t agree more. Put this one in the “can’t accept” column.

Here are four arguments for compromising on the Medicare age – and why they’re wrong.

Bad Reason #1: As a bone to throw to the right. 

“When the question comes to what concessions the Democrats are going to have to accept,” Chait writes, ” … raising the Medicare age seems like a sensible bone to throw the right.” That’s the first bad reason to compromise. Raising the Medicare age would increase the number of uninsured Americans, and would do so for people who need substantially more care than the average person.

It would also cost more money than it saves. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that its $5.7 billion in projected Federal savings would lead to an additional $11.4 billion in health spending elsewhere in the economy.

More uninsured Americans? Higher healthcare costs? That’s not bone. It’s meat. 

Bad Reason #2: To protect the Affordable Care Act.

“Raising the Medicare retirement age would help strengthen the fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act,” Chait writes. He argues that “a side effect of raising the Medicare retirement age would be that a large cohort of 65- and 66-year-olds would suddenly find themselves needing the Affordable Care Act to buy their health insurance.”

There’s something seriously wrong about the cost/benefit logic in Chait’s position, and the moral logic too. Do we really want to put a segment of our population in distress in order to provide artificial political support for a health reform law that needs substantial strengthening? 

Yes, says Chait, because “Republicans attacking the Affordable Care Act would no longer be attacking the usual band of very poor or desperate people they can afford to ignore but a significant chunk of middle-class voters who have grown accustomed to the assumption that they will be able to afford health care.”

That’s a little like saying Democrats should cheerfully accept natural disasters because they build support for FEMA.

Bad Reason #3: Because Medicare has symbolic value.

Medicare “has weirdly disproportionate symbolic power,” Chait writes, “both among Republicans in Congress and establishmentarian fiscal scolds.” 

Yes, it does – and conservatives have consistently been more effective than liberals in reframing both the terms of debate and the public’s perception of the economy.  Here we go again: By cutting Medicare, Democrats would be “acknowledging” – falsely – that it’s a burden on society, an ineffective program, and a drain on economic growth.

Medicare’s “symbolic power” is an argument for strengthening it, not cutting it.

Chait goes on to say that “Mitch McConnell and Erskine Bowles alike would regard raising the retirement age as a sign of serious belt-tightening and the ‘structural reforms’ conservatives say they need.”

Yes, and so would our sadly misinformed mainstream media. We have to change that perception, not reinforce it. Yet a deal this kind would reinforce their misleading narrative, further undermining public support for the social contract we need to defend. 

Bad Reason #4: The Affordable Care Act will protect most of the 65 and 66 year olds affected by the change.

“Strengthening the political coalition for universal coverage seems like a helpful side benefit” to a Medicare age deal, says Chait. What universal coverage?

Remember when a lot of liberals, including Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein, were saying that Hillary Clinton’s 2008 health plan (now the Affordable Care Act) will provide something like universal coverage? I said it would leave at least 15 million people uninsured. I was wrong: The CBO concluded that 25 million people will be left uninsured under the Affordable Care Act. (That figure was later raised to 28 million after the Supreme Court overthrew the bill’s Medicare provisions.)

A lot of people will be unable to afford private health insurance under the Act, even with subsidies. (I was also shouted down back then for saying that the subsidies would be unreachable for a lot of middle class families.)

People who are making the argument for the Medicare age as a “compromise” seem to have also forgotten that the Act allows insurers to charge as much as three times in premiums for covering older (and therefore costlier) enrollees.  This “significant chunk” of middle class voters wouldn’t find itself fighting for an Act that requires them to buy that insurance.

They’d be hit with a tax penalty instead – and still be uninsured.

Style Council

And yet Matt Yglesias writes that it would be “foolish to categorically rule … out” increasing the Medicare age.

“There’s no need for the ritual scourging,” Yglesias adds, linking to a piece by David Dayen which takes Chait to the woodshed.  ”Ritual scourging,” like “ideological inflexibility” and “reflexive hostility,” is a phrase which means “a strong argument against a position I support.”

Yglesias’ position is unclear.  At first he defends Chait’s position, at least in principle. Then he says that “people will disagree” about whether or not the Affordable Care Act is an acceptable substitute for Medicare, “but we can all see why theObama administration would be inclined to think that it is the case.”

Yes, people will disagree. But does Yglesias disagree? It’s unclear.  And yes, we can see why the Obama Administration might be biased toward the idea. But is it a good or bad one?

By contrast, an earlier Yglesias piece about the Medicare age lays out much (though not all) of what’s wrong with the idea of raising it, and makes his position perfectly clear: It’s a bad idea.

Getting It Right

In that earlier piece, Yglesias makes one of the clearest, most concise arguments I’ve seen yet for the approach I and others favor.

“Rather than shrinking Medicare,” he writes, “we ought to be taking advantage of the program’s lower costs. One way to do that would be to lower the retirement age—potentially all the way down to zero—and bring more people into the program. That would reduce system-wide costs but require higher taxes or bigger deficits.”

That’s exactly right, and any self-described “deficit hawk” who doesn’t embrace should be called out for hypocrisy – even if that amounts to a “ritual scourging.”

What’s more, I would argue that deficits could go down under this scenario. The economy would expand more quickly, which is likely to put deficits in better balance as a percentage of the GDP.  We would also eliminate the tax breaks for employer-sponsored health insurance, which would provide another offset.

Yglesias also proposes reviving 2008′s “public option,” reminding us that the CBO said it would save $68 billion in subsidies while lowering out-of-pocket costs.  That’s another idea we’ve embraced as well.

Medicare works. It delivers good coverage, and it does so more cost-effectively. It should be strengthened, not weakened. It shouldn’t be “compromised” or sacrificed on the altar of lower expenditures, especially for an alternative that will actually cost more."

From the AlterNet