Millionaires to Congress: ‘Tax Me More!’
As the congressional Super Committee struggles to meet next week’s deadline for a plan to find $1.2 trillion in budget savings over the course of the next decade, some millionaires are targeting Capitol Hill with an unlikely message: Tax us more.
Earlier this week, we reported that Republican members of the committee proposed permanently extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, a move that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka dubbed “Robin Hood in reverse.”
At an ad hoc hearing on job creation, sponsored by the Congressional Progressive Caucus today, members of the group Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength testified to advocate for a more progressive tax structure that would ultimately tax them more. The alternative to continuing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will likely mean cuts in programs vital to the well-being of working people, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Trumka: Nation’s Future ‘Begins and Ends’ with Jobs
The debate about America’s future “begins and ends concretely with the question of jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this morning in a speech outlining a working families’ vision for the nation.
In the address at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Trumka urged President Obama to make next week’s State of the Union address a “call to action, a call to invest in our future, to create jobs, to be the country we can and must be.”
We have just been through one lost decade—when America’s standard of living fell, when our wealth shrank, when millions lost their homes, when young people could not find work America cannot afford another lost decade.
Click here for the full video from the address.
Joined by a New York City firefighter veteran of the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing and an Ohio child care worker who will lose her freedom to have a union if Gov. John Kasich (R) has his way, Trumka said Stan Trojanowski and Ella Hopkins are examples of “American heroes”–
the hard-working everyday champions who make America great, and their lives illuminate the choices facing our nation as we enter a fourth year of economic crisis. The choice between coming together as a nation or turning on each other….Working people know we can build that future only if we act together to put America back to work—to educate our children, to build a clean energy future, to build a 21st century America.
E-Mails Show Fox Driving Radical Right Agenda
Reports that a Fox News editor directed his staff to use a politically charged phrase recommended by a Republican pollster to misrepresent the Democrats’ health care reform plan is proof that Fox is driving a radical right-wing political agenda, says Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now (HCAN).
In a statement released today, Rome says:
At a time when right-wing extremists were trying to make the case that the health care reform bill was a government takeover plot, Fox News incorporated politically charged language into its day-to-day reporting to mislead its audience into thinking the public option was something that it wasn’t.
Fox News’ policy is to drive a political agenda and systematically influence its audience’s views.
HCAN is a grassroots coalition that includes the AFL-CIO and several affiliated unions.
Shareholders Object to Fox Donations to Chamber/Republicans
Even shareholders in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire says he’s gone too far.
In August, News Corp.—the media company owned by Murdoch and the operator of Fox News—gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. Several weeks later, it donated another $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
News Corp. shareholder, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, is objecting to the donations and is demanding the company disclose “the use of corporate assets for any and all political spending.” The foundation says it intends to bring the issue up on the floor at the company’s shareholder meeting Oct. 15 in New York City.
The Truth About Taxes
Have you heard about the so-called “tea parties” happening today? Honchos of the extremist right are orchestrating top-down events to protest paying taxes for a proposed federal budget that’s designed to stimulate the nation’s flattened economy and support basic infrastructure and public services. Ironies abound in these protests: In some areas, protestors are urged to take public transportation to the events. Key word here is “public,” as in paid for by taxpayers.
The media talking heads pushing these events are spewing a lot of venom toward a presidential administration they can’t control, one not beholden to special corporate interests. In doing so, their rhetoric is bordering on the treasonous: Fox’s Glenn Beck, who’s holding a $500-plate fundraiser for the San Antonio tea party, has begun advocating secession. (Hat tip to Media Matters for this and all its great work.)
