Five Million Voters May Lose Rights in the 2012 Elections
- According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as five million eligible voters could meet difficulties this Election Day due to these new, imposing voter laws.
Looking at those stipulations, it’s not hard to imagine how low-income citizens, African Americans, Latino Americans, college students, and elderly voters—groups the Brennan Center has identified as the most burdened by new voter laws—might get tangled up on voter day. The Center estimates that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters lack proper identification right now. For African Americans, it’s 25 percent—that’s 5.5 million voting-age black Americans who could get turned away at the polls for being undocumented and unphotographed.
Other groups like Native Americans, transgendered people, newly divorced, newly married couples or people who’ve recently lost their homes could all have information on their drivers licenses that reflect names, addresses and faces that aren’t current. The costs for these groups will be more than an inconvenience: fees for new birth and marriage certificates, hours lost waiting in lines for updated materials and transportation costs to handle it all.
(Source: humanizingimmigration, via immigrantstories)
Good news for the wealthy classes who might have worried that the recession would throw the country into the arms of French-style socialism…
New wage statistics just in for 2010 show that what’s called the mean income, which accounts for the actual number of people making a certain wage, has half of Americans making less than $26,000 last year.
And the percentage of Americans earning less than $200,000 a year remains at…guess where? 99 percent.
So good news for the anti-Wall Street crowd — they can keep the chant…
But it’s even BETTER news for the people we now call the Job Creators. Job Creators have worried that if the 99 percent were to start joining unions it might boost their wages, making it harder for the Job Creators to create all the jobs they want to create. Well, rest easy, the new numbers show that in 2010, the bottom 99 percent saw their wages DROP by a total of $4.5 billion.
While at the same time, the Job Creators in the 1 percent, presumably through the creation of jobs, saw THEIR total earnings rise by $120 billion. In fact, those in the upper fraction of the 1 percent, the uber-Job Creators earning at least $1 million a year, saw their payroll income rise of 22 percent.
The economy also created MORE job creators — the number of people in the top 1 percent rose by about 300,000.
So like Herman Cain said, you folks in the lower 99 percent need to quit complaining and get a job. My advice would be to get a job as a Job Creator. It pays really well.
Our Fantasy Nation? by NYTimes Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof
“But as America has become more unequal, as we cut off government lifelines to the neediest Americans, as half of states plan to cut spending on higher education this year, let’s be clear about our direction — and about the turnaround that a Republican budget victory would represent.”
Capitalism is failing the middle class
Globalization and the technology revolution are increasing productivity and prosperity. But those rewards are unevenly shared – they are going to the people at the top in the United States, and enriching emerging economies over all. But the American middle class is losing out.
In truth, both parties have been wildly irresponsible, but in cycles. Democrats were more irresponsible in the 1960s, the two parties both seemed care-free in the 1970s and 1980s, and since then the Republicans have been staggeringly reckless.
After the Clinton administration began paying down America’s debt, Republicans passed the Bush tax cuts, waded into a trillion-dollar war in Iraq, and approved an unfunded prescription medicine benefit — all by borrowing from China. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney scoffed that “deficits don’t matter.
This borrow-and-spend Republican history makes it galling when Republicans now assert that deficits are the only thing that matter — and call for drastic spending cuts, two-thirds of which would harm low -income and moderate -income Americans, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. To pay for tax cuts heaped largely on the wealthiest Americans, Republicans in effect would gut Medicare and slash jobs programs, family planning and college scholarships. Instead of spreading opportunity, federal policy would cap it.
In 2009, as unemployment hit its highest level in seventeen years, Morgan Stanley paid its employees over fourteen billion dollars. Goldman Sachs paid out over sixteen billion. In 2010, bonuses were even higher. For decades, the American financial system was stable and safe.
But then something changed.
The financial industry turned its back on society, corrupted our political system, and plunged the world economy into crisis. At enormous cost, we’ve avoided disaster, and are recovering.
But the men and institutions that caused the crisis are still in power; and that needs to change.
They will tell us that we need them, and that what they do is too complicated for us to understand.
They will tell us it won’t happen again.
They will spend billions fighting reform.
It won’t be easy, but some things are worth fighting for.
(Source: soupsoup)
Soup: Ending The Afghan War Would Save Taxpayers 40,000 Times More Money Than Defunding NPR
Ending the Afghan war would save approximately 40,000 times more taxpayer dollars than defunding NPR’s grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additionally, as the National Priorities Project shows, ending the…
(Source: thinkprogress.org)
