Franklin County Democrats

It’s not like Democrats don’t have popular progressive ideas at the ready. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put forth the “Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act” on Wednesday.

Under her plan, the following policies would be implemented:

• The School Improvement Corps would create 400,000 construction and 250,000 maintenance jobs by funding positions created by public school districts to do needed school rehabilitation improvements.

• The Park Improvement Corps would create 100,000 jobs for youth between the ages of 16 and 25 through new funding to the Department of the Interior and the USDA Forest Service’s Public Lands Corps Act. Young people would work on conservation projects on public lands including the restoration and rehabilitation of natural, cultural, and historic resources.

• The Student Jobs Corps would create 250,000 more part-time work study jobs for eligible college students through new funding for the Federal Work Study Program.

• The Neighborhood Heroes Corps would hire 300,000 new teachers, 40,000 new police officers and 12,000 new firefighters.

• The Health Corps would hire at least 40,000 health care providers, including physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, and health care workers to expand access in underserved rural and urban areas.

• The Child Care Corps would create 100,000 jobs in early childhood care and education through additional funding for Early Head Start.

• The Community Corps would hire 750,000 individuals to do needed work in communities, including housing rehab, weatherization, recycling, and rural conservation.

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The new labor blog at DailyKOS featured this story about Republican efforts to further weaken the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  Democrats are calling this the “outsourcers bill of rights”.

If a company wanted to move jobs overseas or subcontract work because their workers exercised their legal rights … well, it would still be illegal for them to do so. It’s just that if they did, the NLRB couldn’t make them move the jobs back.

The bill has little chance of getting past the Senate and the president, but it once again shows where Republicans’ priorities lie. At a press conference this morning, Nancy Pelosi pointed to this as one of a number of bills House Republicans have pushed that would take jobs rather than creating them:

For 200 days, we have not seen a bill passed, signed into law that creates jobs. In fact, it has been just the reverse.

This strategy of turning an agency and regulations originally designed to promote labor and collective bargaining dates back to the 1940′s and the crowning achievement of those opposed to Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.  The effects of this and other legislative tactics to hamstring labor are outlined in Joe Burns new book, The Outlawing of Solidarity and the Decline of the Strike.

In particular, look for the story of the three picketers standing outside the toy store. Hint: all three have different reasons for being there but one has less rights than the others!

Ezra Klein:

[...] What’s been uncommon about the past two years is that the Democrats in Congress managed to do more than argue: they legislated. They took the agenda they’d run on and made much of it law. This was no do-nothing Congress. This Congress did lots.

Polls have found that the public doesn’t realize how extraordinary this was. Most voters—and that holds for Democrats, too—don’t think the 111th got more accomplished than most Congresses. But they’re wrong. The 111th came to Washington promising to get things done on behalf of the American people. More than any other Congress in decades, it did.

This is the single most frustrating thing for me. We elect politicians expecting them to get things done. And that’s what the 111th Congress did. And as reward voters effectively dismantled a working Congress without understanding how extraordinary the last two years have been legislatively, and put back in charge the very same people who caused most of our problems in the first place, the very same people who are likely to get very little done in the next two years (save playing political games to gain more power in 2012).

People may disagree with some of the legislation that was passed but no one can argue that Democrats did not accomplish most of what they campaigned on in 2008 and were ultimately elected to do — and they somehow managed to do it with relentless opposition from the right.

Today is the first day of benefits created by the health care reform (Affordable Care Act) passed by Congress and signed by President Obama.

This partial list of benefits is from the www.healthcare.gov website,

September 23, 2010 represents a new day for American consumers in our health care system. This is the day that a series of new rights, benefits, and protections under the Affordable Care Act begin to bring to an end some of the worst abuses of the insurance industry. Combined, these new will put consumers, not insurance companies, in charge of their health care. Below is a brief summary of the new restrictions for insurance companies and new rights for consumers beginning to take effect:

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Enjoy this video of elected officials commenting about the International Trade Commission hearings regarding the use of illegal Chinese subsidies to their paper industry and the resulting threat to American jobs. The United Steelworkers filed the suit against China and remains the most effective organization in the country in fighting for American jobs put at risk by unfair trade practices.

The Representatives and Senators featured in this video are the ones representing their constituents and the American economy. Yes, there is a difference between the political parties but as the failed trade policies of the recent past are exposed public officials of all parties are recognizing the need to fight back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkYvx7EDE8s

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Have you heard about the One Nation Working Together? On 10/2/10 people from all over the country will be marching on Washington D.C. to support job creation and support for the unemployed. For more information check out…

http://www.onenationworkingtogether.org/content/main

More information on Ed Schulz website, including current clips of the Ed Show.

http://www.wegoted.com/

If you earn less than $250,000 a year and vote Republican, you are cutting your own throat. And here’s why: The Republican Party is the political arm of corporate America. The Democratic Party is trying to regain some of the security and benefits that middle class Americans enjoyed between 1950 and 1980. continue reading…

Conservatives elected both a Hollywood B-movie actor and a recovering drunk and cocaine abuser to the presidency, not once, but twice, so I guess it should come as no big surprise that their new spiritual mentor and political Caliph is none other than Glenn Beck, former morning zoo radio shock jock from the 80s and 90s, whose many shows include at least one rented monkey named Zippy the Chimp.

We have devolved into a low-info, entertainment culture, and there’s no better proof of that than seeing a clownish entertainer, such as Beck, elevated to the spiritual equivalent of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King by the thousands who made pilgrimage to the National Mall on Aug. 28 to hear him speak.

These are strange times.