Category: Ethics (Page 4 of 24)

Represent Us: A Movement For The People

February 5, 2014 / MCDC

Our message: You shouldn’t have to buy access to your own government. That’s why we’re building a movement big enough to force our leaders to stop answering to special-interest cronies and start answering to the people.

America’s government is bought. Those who can throw campaign fundraisers and hire lobbyists get better treatment from our elected leaders than those who can’t. We refuse to accept that this is how our country should work.

Here are a few things you can do right now to help make that happen:

SIGN the petition. Click “Add My Name” to join over 424,000 Americans in support of the American Anti-Corruption Act, a proposal that would overhaul campaign finance, lobbying, and ethics laws.
SHARE this page on Facebook, Twitter, Email… everywhere. Help build a movement big enough to hold politicians accountable.
LEARN the details of the American Anti-Corruption Act, as well as our plan to get it passed.
VOLUNTEER across America. We’re organizing district-by-district because real political power comes from real people on the ground. Click here to join us.

McDonnell Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

January 21, 2014 / MCDC

Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, were indicted today by a federal grand jury on 14 counts stemming from the first couple’s acceptance and solicitation of thousands in gifts and loans from a wealthy businessman during McDonnell’s term.

The indictment, spelled out in an extensive document filed by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District, paints a detailed portrait of how the governor and his wife accepted more than $135,000 in direct payments as gifts and loans from then-Star Scientific CEO Jonnie Williams Sr., in addition to golf outings and other things of value, in exchange for the first couple’s assistance in promoting his struggling Henrico-based company’s dietary supplement, Anatabloc.

It also asserts that the McDonnells lied on loan applications and forms requiring them to declare debts and then tried to cover their tracks.

Taken together, the charges, if they resulted in convictions and maximum sentences, could produce fines in excess of $1 million and put the McDonnells behind bars for decades.

Action Alert: Google is funding ALEC.

January 21, 2014 / MCDC

For decades, one shadowy right-wing group has helped powerful corporations introduce and pass legislation quietly in nearly every state. They write entire bills from start to finish in a massive coordinated effort to push their conservative agenda at the state level. Their bills attack voting rights, weaken gun control laws, undermine unions, privatize education, block efforts to raise the minimum wage, deregulate major industries, allow unrestricted damage to the environment, and much more.

#googleALEC, it’s evil.

It’s not a conspiracy. The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, brings corporate lobbyists together with state legislators. Multinational corporations like ExxonMobil vote on “model bills” designed to increase their profits, then distribute the legislation to mostly conservative lawmakers in state houses across the country. These laws allow employers to skimp on fair wages and health benefits; protect corporations that poison our air and water; and weaken consumers’ ability to have recourse against corporate malfeasance in the courtroom. The oil and pharmaceutical industries have spent millions and made billions.

These are some of the laws ALEC has introduced, just regarding fair wages for workers:

“Full Employment Act” would suspend all anti-poverty social programs and require former beneficiaries to work below the minimum wage.
“Living Wage Mandate Preemption Act” prevents cities and counties from setting minimum wages that exceed state or federal law.
“Resolution Opposing Comparable Worth” opposes Paycheck Fairness requirements, requiring the government pay men and women equally.

Incredible activists have been dragging ALEC’s operation into the sunlight. Over the past few years, 72 corporations have cut all ties with ALEC under public pressure, including: Walmart, McDonald’s, Visa, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft, and Johnson & Johnson.

Quietly, though, Google has become a corporate member of ALEC. Even though their slogan is “Don’t be evil,” the Internet giant is headed firmly in the other direction.

“Google has widely mythologized itself as some kind of humanistic techno-pioneer. Obscured in a fog of digital legend is the agenda that more than ever is transfixed with maximizing profits while capitalizing on anti-democratic leverage of corporate power. Google’s involvement in ALEC is consistent with the company’s mega-business model that relentlessly exploits rigorous data-mining of emails, online searches and so much more.” -Norman Solomon, Huffington Post.

Google can’t have it both ways. They cannot say “don’t be evil” in public then fund ALEC in private. Voter suppression laws. Union-busting “right to work” laws. Stand your ground. Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB1070. They all come from the same place, and Google is helping pay the bills.

The Assault on The Pursuit of Happiness

January 4, 2014 / MCDC

extracts from Wikipedia and PoliticsUSA

The Second Bill of Rights was a list of rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944. In his address Roosevelt suggested that the nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second “bill of rights”. Roosevelt’s argument was that the “political rights” guaranteed by the constitution and the Bill of Rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt’s remedy was to declare an “economic bill of rights” which would guarantee:

Employment, with a living wage
Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
Housing
Medical care
Education
Social security

Roosevelt stated that having these rights would guarantee American security, and that America’s place in the world depended upon how far these and similar rights had been carried into practice.

Roosevelt’s argument was that “political rights” guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were “inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness,” particularly after toiling to build America over a lifetime of labor; labor that enriched the privileged few who never had to face poverty when their bodies could no longer work. Republicans have spent the past seventy years attempting to force Americans to work until they drop dead and their efforts are bearing fruit according to “The Oxford Handbook of Retirement 2013.”

It is becoming a common concern amongst blue-collar baby boomers, the 78-million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, that they will have to “do like my father did; I’ll work ’til I die.”

Coupled with low wages, and their stated intent to eliminate Americans’ Social Security and pensions, Republicans, the Koch brothers, and Wall Street will be successful in guaranteeing an entire generation will never enjoy FDR’s basic “right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment” borne of work-worn bodies.

GOP’s 2014 horror strategy: Exploit Americans’ misfortune, drum up fake outrage

January 2, 2014 / MCDC

by BRIAN BEUTLER

A quick look at the House and Senate vote calendars indicates that Congress did not in fact come back into session over the holidays to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which means that as of today (depending on how you count it) millions and millions of people who were previously uninsured now have comprehensive healthcare coverage.

There’s the 3-or-so million young adults under 26 who have been covered under their parents plans for a couple of years now, about 4 million new Medicaid beneficiaries, and some large percentage of the 2 million who have enrolled in a private plan via Healthcare.gov or one of 14 state-based insurance exchanges and submitted their first premium payment.

When someone finds he’s eligible for fewer subsidies than he believed, conservatives will pretend to share his outrage; when a family earns more money than expected and must rebate subsidy dollars to the IRS (a clawback provision Republicans supported!) the GOP will be there.

Their benefits are now active, which means proponents of repealing the law have a severe entropy problem on their hands. Just like you can’t re-create an erased image by unshaking an Etch-A-Sketch, you can no longer re-create the pre-Obamacare status quo by repealing the law. Some new beneficiaries would be returned to the ranks of the uninsured, just as they were before, but others would return to an individual market they were happy to leave behind, and even the thin skim of people who were happy with plans that have been canceled wouldn’t necessarily be able to reclaim them.

After spending three months effusing sympathy for people who’ve had their insurance plans canceled, Republicans can’t really continue to support repeal while ignoring the (2 million? 6 million? 9 million?) who would lose their coverage as a result. But the GOP lacks a consensus replacement for Obamacare, and the plans that caucuses within the party do support don’t do anything for the new beneficiaries, and fall well short of Obamacare’s coverage expansion in the long run.

They’ve walked into a cul-de-sac planting mines behind themselves along the way.

Category: Ethics (Page 4 of 24)

Represent Us: A Movement For The People

McDonnell Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Action Alert: Google is funding ALEC.

#googleALEC, it’s evil.

GOP’s 2014 horror strategy: Exploit Americans’ misfortune, drum up fake outrage

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