Winning Progressive

One of the most powerful moments of President Obama’s State of the Union Address earlier this week was when he spoke passionately about the need for us to support the men and women who serve our nation in the military, their families, and our veterans, stating:

Tonight, let us speak with one voice in reaffirming that our nation is united in support of our troops and their families. Let us serve them as well as they have served us – by giving them the equipment they need; by providing them with the care and benefits they have earned; and by enlisting our veterans in the great task of building our own nation.

What made this statement even better is that,  in contrast to the empty pro-troop rhetoric spouted by conservatives, the record shows that President Obama and progressives truly fight for our troops by enacting policies that support and reward them for their service.

A great example of progressives backing up pro-troop rhetoric with real world action was seen earlier this week when President Obama, joined by Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, announced the official launch of the Administration’s Strengthening Our Military Families initiative.  The initiative is the result of a May 2010 Presidential Study Directive, which ordered all federal government agencies to work together to create a coordinated approach for supporting military families.  The resulting plan identified four areas where all government agencies will work together to benefit military families:

* Enhancing the well-being and psychological health of the military family.

* Ensuring excellence in military children’s education and their development.

* Developing career and educational opportunities for military spouses.

* Increasing child care availability and quality for the Armed Forces.

Just a few examples of steps that will be taken include:

* The DOD, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services will work together to improve mental health services and accelerate suicide prevention efforts

* The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by last year’s Wall Street reform legislation, will have an Office of Service Members Affairs, to help curb predatory lending practices targeting military families, which is a major problem as we’ve previously explained

* The Department of Education will make supporting military families one of the supplemental priorities for its discretionary grant programs

You can learn more about the initiative at the Defense Department’s website about it.

The Strengthening Our Military Families initiative is far from the only example of progressives taking the lead in working to meet the needs of our troops, military families, and veterans.  For example, as we have discussed previously, a recently released 2010 Congressional Report Card from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America ranked the voting records of members of the U.S. House and Senate on issues such as full and advanced funding for the Veterans Administration health care system (so that the VA does not always have to stand by nervously to see if they are going to get enough funding), supporting improvements to the post-9/11 GI Bill, modernizing the VA claims system, and providing unemployment benefits to combat veterans just returning from war.   All of the Senators earning an A+ or A ranking are Democrats, while almost all of the Senators who earned a D or lower grade are Republicans.  On the House side, most of the representatives earning an A+ or A are Democrats, while most of the D or lower grades went to Republicans.   Similar results can be seen in IAVA’s 2008 report, IAVA’s 2006 report, and a recent ranking from the Disabled American Veterans.

In short, the record is clear that, when it comes to supporting our troops, military families, and veterans, Democrats offer real action.  If you’d like to help push back on the conservative canard to the contrary, write a letter to your local newspaper editor thanking President Obama for his Stengthening Our Military Families initiative and the other steps that Democrats have taken to support our troops, military families, and veterans.

Here are links for submitting letters to the editor for national papers, and to newspapers in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware,  Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

On Tuesday night, the country will get a great illustration of the contrast between the two major political parties when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) offers the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address.  Rep. Ryan became known last year for issuing a radical budgetary proposal called the “Roadmap to America’s Future.”  In reality, the plan is a roadmap to privatizing Social Security and Medicare, eliminating Medicaid and other critical social spending, raising taxes on the middle class, and increasing the deficit in order to cut taxes for the wealthiest two percent.   Let’s use this opportunity to remind America just how radical the Republican Party has become by writing letters to our local newspapers highlighting what Rep. Ryan’s roadmap to nowhere is all about.

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama is expected to offer a mildly progressive agenda focused on promoting economic growth and increasing our nation’s competitiveness in the global economy.  While perhaps not the boldly progressive rallying cry many of us would love to hear, the President’s focus on competitiveness should provide us with a good basis for arguing in favor of much needed investments in clean energy development, education, infrastructure, and other policies that will help us as a nation compete.  You can watch the President’s address with real time access to supporting charts and graphs here.

Then Rep. Ryan is scheduled to provide a response.  While it is not yet known what he is going to say, his selection to give the response effectively represents the Republicans’ adoption of Rep. Ryan’s radical roadmap to nowhere.  As explained by the folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, that roadmap includes:

*  Massive tax giveaways to the wealthiest two percent through elimination of the estate tax and capital gains taxes, reduction of the top tax brackets, and repeal of the corporate income tax

* Replacement of the corporate income tax with an 8.5% value added tax, which would hit middle class families the hardest

 * Eliminating Medicare for people currently under 55 years of age, and replacing it with an $11,000 voucher that would shrink in comparison to expected health care cost increases for people to try to purchase insurance on the market.  Total spending on Medicare would be cut by 37% by 2040 and 76% by 2080.

* Cutting Social Security benefits by 16% by 2050 and 28% by 2080, while blowing a $1.2 trillion hole in the Social Security Trust Fund in order to shift people to privatized accounts.

* Eliminating Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, replacing them with a tax credit and a voucher that would be insufficient for many lower income folks to purchase insurance.

* Freezing federal spending to 2009 levels for the next decade

While Rep. Ryan has attempted to sell his roadmap as a way to cut taxes and restore fiscal responsibility, it does neither for most Americans.   Under the roadmap, people making income over $1 million per year would pay approximately 13% of their income in federal taxes, while folks making between $30,000 and $100,000 per year would pay between 14% and 21%.  Meanwhile, the national debt would increase from its current level of 60% of GDP to a peak of nearly 175% by 2050 and remain at 100% or more of  GDP through 2080.

Rep. Ryan’s selection to provide the Republican response to the State of the Union is a great chance for us to highlight just how out of step the Republicans’ ideas are with those of the American people.  Help do so by writing a letter to your local newspaper editor explaining that you reject Rep. Ryan’s radical roadmap for privatizing Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on the middle class, and increasing the budget deficit.   Here are links for submitting letters to the editor for national papers, and to newspapers in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware,  Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

We here at Winning Progressive have long believed that the war on drugs is a horrible nightmare that has done little to stem drug use in America while wasting vast resources on incarceration, leading to problematic curbs of our civil liberties, and having a horribly destructive impact on African Americans and other people of color.   This is ground that has been very well covered by others, so for the basics on the absurdity of the war on drugs, we’d recommend reading the following:

Smoke and Horrors, by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, which focuses on the racial disparities in arrests and sentencing for marijuana possession

War on Drugs: $1 Trillion Wasted  – Nothing Accomplished, a blog post by Ted McLaughlin at Best of the Blogs about how we’ve spent more than $1 trillion on the war on drugs over the past 40 years, but have only made the drug problem worse, not better

Let’s Stop Both Wars – by redwagon at Booman Tribune – an overview of the impacts of the drug war on African American families

What compelled us to write about the war on drugs right now is this truly sickening video of a police raid on the house of Todd Blair, an apparent meth addict in Utah who was believed to have a small amount of drugs in his possession.  In essence, 10 heavily armed police officers busted down the door to Mr. Blair’s house in the middle of the night, hearing someone break in Mr. Blair came out of his bedroom brandishing a golf club, and the police immediately and fatally shot him three times.  (Warning, the video is quite disturbing):

This video is a graphic example of how militarized our police forces have become and how we are increasingly giving up basic civil liberties in the name of fighting an unsuccessful war against drugs.  There is no dispute that Mr. Blair was a drug addict who had a history of arrests and convictions for drug possession.  But there is little to no evidence that he was a major or dangerous drug dealer (which is what led the police to have a no-knock warrant that allows them to enter a person’s house without knocking), that he had committed any violent crime, or that police could not have subdued Mr. Blair without fatally shooting him three times.

There is no dispute that drug addiction is a serious problem and there is no perfect solution to the drug issue.  But it also seems indisputable that the war on drugs has been an economically and socially costly mistake.  A new approach is needed, involving decriminalization combined with increased funding for drug addiction treatment and education to keep people from becoming addicted to begin with.  Such an approach has been largely successful in Portugal over the past nine years, and holds great promise for better outcomes here in the U.S.

The main hurdle to stopping the drug war is the fear that politicians have of a great public backlash from appearing “soft on crime.”  Therefore, it is critical that we make our voices heard in favor of a more sensible approach to drugs that focuses on decriminalization, treatment, and education rather than police and prisons.  If you’d like your voice to be heard on this issue, write a letter to your local newspaper editor about the Todd Blair case or other problems with the war on drugs.  Here are links for submitting letters to the editor for national papers, and to newspapers in Connecticut, Delaware,  Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

(This post is by our first guest blogger, reader Mark McCutchan from Athens, Ohio.  Welcome, Mark!)

With Republicans taking over the Governors’ mansions and state legislatures in many states this month, progressives need to be prepared for a major onslaught on funding for and services provided by state and local governments.  A prime example is Ohio, where State Rep. Jay Hottinger (R-Newark), was recently quoted as saying:

In the days and weeks and short months ahead, how state and local government functions, what services are delivered and how services are delivered are going to be transformed unlike they have ever been in the state of Ohio.

As reported in the Columbus Dispatch, a repeal of the Ohio estate tax is among the first bills introduced on the House floor last week, and is one of the GOP’s top priorities.  Why does the Ohio Republican Party support cutting state income through tax reductions of any kind?  It is half of a conservative program to destroy the social safety net carefully built to protect our most vulnerable citizens – the young, the sick, the elderly, and the poor.

Why would they want to do that?  The Ohio Republican Party, like the rest of the GOP, has come to be dominated by conservatives.  “Conservatives” really don’t conserve anything, but the word is used to describe adherents of the “strict father morality,” as discussed by George Lakoff in his book, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”.  It is an Old Testament philosophy most recently promulgated by Dr. James Dobson (of Focus on the Family fame):

1)      The father alone is a moral authority who knows right from wrong, and is strong enough to enforce it.

2)      The child is required to be obedient to the father.

3)      Physical punishment for disobedience will result in the child learning internal discipline.

4)      Internal discipline will lead to self-reliance and success.

5)      Those people who are not self-reliant and or successful are bad, and should be punished.

6)      Those who are successful are good, and should be rewarded.

Thus, those individuals with the richest estates are good, and deserve to pass all of their wealth on to their children, according to the conservatives (they also deserve to keep more of their income too, through a repeal of the income tax, which Ohio’s new Governor John Kasich advocated during the campaign).

The second half of the program (the punishment for the bad) comes in next: the conservative “fiscal hawks” use the increased budget deficit to reduce all social funding – Medicaid and other health care, local school funding, unemployment and retraining expenses; it really doesn’t matter because all of these expenses are “nurturant” (the opposite of strict father morality) and a high priority to Democrats.   Cutting social programs will put Democrats on the defensive, and make it easier for Republicans to pass other legislation important to their donors – rich individuals and large corporations eager to increase their share of wealth and power.

Why do progressives and many moderates support keeping the estate tax?

* Budgetary Costs: The Ohio estate tax brings in about $245 million a year to local governments and about $60 million a year to the state of Ohio.  The recession has hit Ohio especially hard, lowering income tax revenues and increasing social service demand. As a result, Ohio has an estimated $8 billion budget deficit over the next two years.  State legislators are looking to cut local support to balance the budget, so repealing the estate tax would be a second punch in the gut for city and county governments.

* Fairness: The people who pay the estate tax are paying it on money that they did nothing to earn.   It follows that inheritors should pay taxes on their gift at least as high as their earned income.   Taxes for government services have to come from somewhere, and collecting them from unearned income is the least painful source.

* Restoring Meritocracy: The estate tax is the most progressive tax in the state, as no tax is assessed on estates valued below $ 338,333, and above that estates are only taxed at 6 or 7 percent.   Only the largest 7% of Ohioan estates are taxed, so the tax helps slow the concentration of money and power in wealthy families from generation to generation.

What can we do about the Republicans’ efforts to repeal the estate tax?

* Write letters to your local newspapers in support of the estate tax.  Links to Ohio newspapers can be found here.

* Contact Ohio Governor Kasich and your Ohio State Representative and Senator to demand that the estate tax stay in place.

Another major progressive victory is within reach in Illinois after the Illinois House voted yesterday to abolish the death penalty.   The legislation now goes to the Illinois Senate, which must pass it by the end of next Tuesday, January 11.  If you live in Illinois, call your State Senator and urge him or her to vote for SB3539, contact Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, and write a letter to the editor of your local Illinois newspaper in support of abolishing the death penalty.

The National Coalition to End the Death Penalty has a great overview of the top ten reasons to abolish the death penalty.  The short summary is that the death penalty is barbaric, ineffective, biased, and costly.  The evidence shows that the death penalty costs taxpayers more than life in prison without parole,  does not deter violent crime, and is marred by significant racial bias and far too frequent ineffective legal representation for those who are charged with capital crimes.   Since 1973, at least 138 people have been released from death row after being proven innocent, and there are at least 23 cases in the last century of people who have been killed by the death penalty but are now believed to be innocent of the crimes they were killed for.

Thirty five states and the federal government currently have the death penalty.  And of those states, Illinois is perhaps the poster child for both how flawed the death penalty is and the impossibility of fixing it is.  As the Chicago Tribune explained in a recent editorial urging abolition:

Lawmakers have had 10 years to reflect — and act — on the failures of a system that sent at least 20 innocent men to death row. Illinois hasn’t executed an inmate since 1999, the year before then-Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium that continues to this day.

Three years later, Ryan emptied the state’s death row, commuting the sentences of 167 condemned inmates and pardoning four others.

But the system isn’t fixed. Far from it. A flurry of reforms were enacted: The Illinois Supreme Court set minimum standards for attorneys in capital cases and mandated more training for judges. The General Assembly passed a law requiring homicide interrogations to be recorded, to guard against coerced confessions, and created the Capital Litigation Trust Fund to ensure that death penalty trials aren’t compromised for lack of resources.

But lawmakers haven’t taken steps to ensure that the death penalty is applied evenly across geographic or demographic lines, or to prevent wrongful convictions based on errant identifications by witnesses or mistakes at forensic labs. An unintended consequence of the moratorium is that there is less pressure to finish that job. We’re not executing anyone, the reasoning goes, so what’s the harm?

Plenty. Prosecutors continue to seek the death penalty; they may in fact be more likely to do so in marginal cases so they can tap into the trust fund to pay for the trial. Statewide, there have been more than 500 capital cases since the moratorium began. Those cases — typically twice as expensive as noncapital cases — have cost taxpayers more than $100 million and sent 15 prisoners to death row.

Because of these significant flaws with the death penalty, there has been a growing trend of moving away from the death penalty.  Since 2007, three states – New Mexico, New Jersey, and New York – have abolished the death penalty.  And now we have a chance to continue that trend in Illinois.  The Illinois House passed abolition of the death penalty this past Thursday, and the Illinois Senate has until next Tuesday, January 11 to pass the same legislation before the lame duck session ends.  The State Senate President, John Cullerton is a death penalty opponent and has promised to bring abolition up for a vote before the session ends.

Now is the time to act to get another state to abolish the death penalty.  If you live in Illinois:

* call your State Senator and urge him or her to vote for SB3539,

*contact Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and urge him to sign the death penalty abolition legislation if it passes the General Assembly

* write a letter to the editor of your local Illinois newspaper in support of abolishing the death penalty

If you don’t live in Illinois, write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper urging that we abolish the death penalty nationally and/or in your state if you live in one of the thirty four other states that still have the death penalty.

And, as always, let us know if you get a letter to the editor published, reach your elected officials, or have any feedback on this post.

Reader Mark M. writes to let us know that his following letter to the editor was published in both the Athens (Ohio) News and Athens Messenger.  Two things we especially like about this letter is that it frames the health care reforms as benefiting everyone in America, and it specifically names the local Democratic Congressperson (who, unfortunately, lost re-election) who voted for the legislation, and the two area Republicans who may vote next week to repeal it.

Thanks to the Dems in Congress for improving our health-care system

To the Editor:

Taking care of the sick and elderly is one of the most humane and decent functions of our society. The health-care reform legislation of 2010 passed by the Democrats in Congress and signed into law by President Obama makes it easier for our nation to take care of our sick and elderly. Since we will all be elderly and sick someday, this law helps everyone in America.

Thank you, Charlie Wilson and the other Democrats in Congress, for taking a stand for all of us by voting to improve our health-care system. These improvements will prove very popular, and Republicans attack it at their political peril (in Appalachian Ohio, that means you, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gibbs).

This week, the following sections of the law go into effect:

• Health Insurance Companies Are Required to Spend Your Premiums on Providing Benefits: The new law requires that 85 percent of premiums for large plans (and 80 percent for medium- and small-sized plans) go toward providing health care, rather than more marketing and profits.
• Closing the Medicare Doughnut Hole:Under the Medicare prescription drug coverage program, which was established in 2005, millions of Americans are required to pay monthly premiums all year around, but lose coverage after incurring $2,700 in prescription expenses in a year. Coverage does not restart until the senior has spent $6,154. For seniors on fixed or limited incomes faced with significant prescription drug needs, this doughnut hole in coverage can pose a significant economic burden. Drug companies are now required to provide a 50-percent discount on the cost of drugs while seniors are in the doughnut hole. That discount will continue until 2020, when the doughnut hole will be entirely eliminated.
• Eliminating Medicare Preventive Services Co-Pays: In an effort to improve health and reduce long-term health-care costs, Medicare co-pays have now been eliminated for preventive services identified by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, including diabetes and cancer screenings, tobacco-use cessation counseling, and healthy diet counseling. Deductibles for colorectal cancer screening have also been eliminated.
• Saving Taxpayer Money: End of the unnecessary subsidy to privately run Medicare Advantage insurance plans, which receive 14 percent more taxpayer money than similar Medicare plans run by the government. This subsidy begins to be eliminated this year.

If you get a letter to the editor published, let us know and we may post it here.