Monthly Archives: August 2012

On September 1, it will be 122 days until New Year’s Day. At last report, the General Assembly continues to sit on a surplus of $122 million, and they gave none of it back to taxpayers for this year’s budget. Last year, they gave back $62 million of their $184 million surplus.

Whether you observe Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, the winter solstice, or any other mid-winter celebration, putting $122 million back in the state Treasury would be a good holiday present for taxpayers.
That’s a million dollars a day without having to cut anything.

Lawmakers often say that if they give the money back it will go to Philadelphia or some other purpose supposed to frighten or anger taxpayers. That’s a lie. Unlike its repository in the various House and Senate accounts, money in the Treasury can’t be spent unless the General Assembly appropriates it and the governor approves it. Once in the Treasury, the legislature and governor have to pass a law for it to go anywhere….

The liberal group Keystone Research Center paints a discouraging picture of Pennsylvania in its latest jobs reports.

The findings, released Wednesday, show lagging employment numbers and declining median household income.

Center economist Mark Price says Pennsylvania’s job numbers are not recovering fast enough to absorb people laid off during the recession and young people entering the job market for the first time.

“One of the more grim facts from the past year is that the jobs deficit has actually increased in the last 12 months by roughly 74,000 jobs. So, essentially, the Pennsylvania labor market is not performing very well,” Price said, “It’s losing ground.”

Price says a weak labor market has held down wages — except among those with the highest income, according to the latest data available from 2010. Price says that the top 1 percent of earners captured three-quarters of Pennsylvania’s income growth.

The report, which now goes out to state legislators, recommends increasing government spending to stimulate job growth and a hike in Pennsylvania’s minimum wage.

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Bayard Rustin, one of the most significant yet ignored figures in U.S. history. Rustin was the brilliant strategist of the pinnacle event in U.S. protest politics: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He was also an openly gay Quaker often cast into history’s shadows by his colleagues in the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr.

The story of King and Rustin is particularly shocking.

In 1960, Rustin had arranged for King and the great labor leader A. Phillip Randolph to announce that they would lead nonviolent demonstrations at the national conventions of both parties.

But for reasons still not clear, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of Harlem, wanted to squash the march on the Democrats. So he enlisted an intermediary to phone King with a threat: Unless the civil rights leader called off the march, Powell would tell the media that King and Rustin were having a gay affair.

They were not; the threat was hollow.

But King was not a profile in courage when confronting potential media coverage of Rustin’s gay sexuality, and because of deep fears of being tainted, he cut Bayard out of his inner circle of advisors. …
Continue reading at Huffington Post

The news that New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the nation’s most prominent Catholic prelate, will deliver the closing blessing to the Republican National Convention in Florida next week was seen as a huge coup for Mitt Romney, the party’s presumptive nominee. But the move has also prompted a sharp debate within the church over the increasingly close ties between leading bishops and the GOP.

“The cozy relationship between a sizable portion of U.S. bishops and the Republican Party should be cause for concern, and not just among progressive Catholics,” Michael O’Loughlin wrote in a post on the website of America magazine, a leading Catholic weekly published by the Jesuits.

“Cardinal Dolan’s appearance in Tampa will damage the church’s ability to be a moral and legitimate voice for voiceless, as those who view the Catholic Church as being a shill for the GOP have just a bit more evidence to prove their case,” O’Loughlin concluded.

Similarly, David Cruz-Uribe, a member of the Secular Franciscan Order and a professor of mathematics at Trinity College, wrote on the Vox Nova blog that Dolan’s decision “will only drag the Church further into a partisan divide and fuel the perception (true or not) that the Catholic Church wants to replace the Episcopalians as the Republican party on its knees.”

Conservative Catholics have, not surprisingly, welcomed Dolan’s appearance and hope it augurs well for Romney.

“I now predict that if Mitt Romney wins the White House in 2012 there will be a very healthy relationship between a Romney administration and the U.S. Bishops, led by a close working relationship between Cardinal Dolan and President Romney,” said Thomas Peters, who writes for CatholicVote.org, which has endorsed Romney and his Catholic running mate, Paul Ryan….

Romney’s selection of Ryan as his running mate has brought an outpouring of praise from several bishops. Some of them like Ryan’s proposals on cutting entitlements and taxes, despite the conflict that other bishops see between those policies and Catholic teaching.

Others, like Dolan, who was archbishop of Milwaukee before coming to New York in 2009, have close personal ties to Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman. Dolan has often taken a softer line on Ryan’s policies than other Catholic leaders, and his praise has grown as Ryan’s visibility has increased.

Dolan recently told a radio program that he is “happy” Ryan is on the GOP ticket and called him a “great public servant.”

Equality Fraternity Reality

Strong children

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken ones" —Frederick Douglass

Ignorance and Power

“Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” -- James Baldwin

Money is power….

"Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
— Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States 1877-1881

Let the people think….

Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.”
-- William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

Taxes & budgets

Women's rights

Dehumanization

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human" - Aldous Huxley

Money is power

Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
-- Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States (1877-1881)

Riots

“Riots are the language of the unheard” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cost of War

Currently nearing $1.6 trillion, for Iraq and Afghanistan alone; watch it grow at Cost of War

The cause of war

"The cause of war is the preparation of war." -- W.E.B. DuBois

Presidential limits

"The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

--Barack Obama, 2007

Totalitarianism

“To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

-- George Orwell

Reimagining capitalism

"Politicians argue over big government so they can avoid talking about big capitalism" -- William Greider in The Nation

The problem with democracy

Progressive calendar

Click hereto view calendar of progressive events in and near Chester County.Agenda view (click in upper right of calendar) may be best.

Links to other sites:

Let the people think …

"Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed."
--William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

On humor

"When oppressed peoples have no other remedy they resort to humor" --E. O. Wilson

Koch Brothers index

For a list of all posts relevant to the Koch Brothers on this site, click here.

Truth and consequences

"If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out." -- Oscar Wilde

Power

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

-- Frederick Douglass, 1817-95

Schools, parents, democracy

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” -- John Dewey

Search

Liberty v. power

“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”
-- William Hazlitt, 1778-1830

On war

"No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic." - A. J. P. Taylor

Bill Moyers says

"The opposite of poverty is not wealth; it is justice."

Ain’t they got no shame

In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame

-- Nikki Giovanni

Need & Greed

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed" -- Gandhi

Normalcy?

"If this is normalcy, I'd hate to see what real trouble is" - the late Daniel Shore on Iraq, Morning Edition, NPR, 3/29/08

Freedom and tyranny

"...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom,
those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." --Voltaire, 1764

Thoughts on War

"Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac." -- George Orwell

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -- Leon Trotsky

Total Cost of War

The cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to Pennsylvanians alone is over $57,000,000,000 and to the entire US is over $1.3 trillion; now wouldn't that be helpful in Harrisburg and DC these days? Track our dollars' alarming and destructive disappearance at CostofWar.com

The American oligarchy

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not