President Obama exposed the Republican agenda by
calling out the morally repugnant GOP budget plan to give 4,000 of the
wealthiest Americans a $4 million tax cut while passing the bill on to
every other citizen.
Five years ago, after the worst financial crisis
in decades, we passed historic Wall Street reform to end the era of
bailouts and too big to fail.
As part that reform, we created an independent
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with one mission: to protect
American consumers from some of the worst practices of the financial
industry.
They’ve already put $5 billion back in the pockets
of more than 15 million families. And this week, they took an important
first step towards cracking down on some of the most abusive practices
involving payday loans.
Millions of Americans take out these loans every
year. In Alabama, where I visited this week, there are four times as
many payday lending stores as there are McDonald’s. But while payday
loans might seem like easy money, folks often end up trapped in a cycle
of debt. If you take out a $500 loan, it’s easy to wind up paying more
than $1,000 in interest and fees.
The step the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
announced this week is designed to change that. The idea is pretty
common sense: if you’re a payday lender preparing to give a loan, you
should make sure that the borrower can afford to pay it back first.
As Americans, we believe there’s nothing wrong with
making a profit. But there is something wrong with making that profit
by trapping hard-working men and women in a vicious cycle of debt.
Protecting working Americans’ paychecks shouldn’t
be a partisan issue. But the budget Republicans unveiled last week
would make it harder, not easier, to crack down on financial fraud and
abuse. And this week, when Republicans rolled out their next economic
idea, it had nothing to do with the middle class. It was a new,
more-than-$250 billion tax cut for the top one-tenth of the top one
percent of Americans. That would mean handing out an average tax cut of
$4 million a year to just 4,000 Americans per year, and leaving the
rest of the country to pay for it.
I don’t think our top economic priority should be
helping a tiny number of Americans who are already doing extraordinarily
well, and asking everybody else to foot the bill. I think our top
priority should be helping everybody who works hard get ahead. This
country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does
their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.
That’s what middle-class economics is all about, and as long as I’m your President, that’s what I’ll keep on fighting to do.
The reason the budget process is always a bad time
for Republicans is because it is the one moment where the true GOP
agenda gets exposed. Republicans want to cut taxes for the super wealthy
while passing the bill on to the non-rich. The Republican budget isn’t
just bad economics. It’s morally wrong. Since 2011, President Obama and
his fellow Democrats have repeatedly stung Republicans on their agenda
to shift all wealth upwards to the top.
It could be argued that President Obama won
reelection in 2012 based on his middle-class economics campaign. What
Republicans are trying to do with their budget is a form ideological
illness that refuses to see reality. The nation tried the tax cuts for
the wealthy grow the economy approach under George W. Bush, and the
result was a historic failure.
The
role of government should never be to make the rich richer and life
more difficult for everyone else. The budgets paint a clear picture of
the contrast in priorities between the two parties. Democrats have got
your back while Republicans are trying to pick your pocket.
The Senate blasted through votes on
amendments to the Republican budget Thursday, and against all odds, two
major amendments proposed by Democrats passed. Sen. Patty Murray’s
measure would…
A new Wikileaks-published leak from
the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty reveals a January
2015 draft "Investment Chapter" of the agreement, where the
investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are set out. They allow companies to repeal nations' environmental, health and labor laws. The
ISDS work is led by the USA. Under its terms, a treaty-established
tribunal would have the power to overrule national courts, and to award
millions from tax-coffers to companies who believe that laws undermine
their future profits.
The US Congress is preparing to hand
Obama's trade rep fast-track authority to enter into TPP, though the
terms of the deal can't be disclosed for at least four years (Congress
only just got its first look at the TPP, and the USTR threatened to jail
Members if they disclosed its contents to voters).
When Pink Floyd sang that "we don't need no education," I don't think cult ministries are what they had in mind.…
Indiana has gotten a lot of attention lately for their religious tyranny law,
but let’s not forget that teabagger gulag-in-the-making, Michigan.
Republican anti-education efforts don’t get much worse than the teabaggers’s own Michigan State Rep. Gary Glenn’s (R-Larkin Township) House Bill 4394.
If Glenn’s bill – House Bill 4394
– becomes law, schools can hire anyone they want. The criteria
currently used would be tossed out the window. The bill literally
strikes out all of the criteria. In addition, it removes the words
grades “9 through 12″ meaning that schools could hire anyone they wish,
with or without a teaching certificate, for any grade level. No training
as an educator required.
Can you imagine being a parent in a state where
suddenly your children’s competent, trained teachers are fired and
replaced with any Tom, Dick, or Harry, whose sole qualification is that
he or she is willing to work for a fraction of what a teacher would be
paid?
Can you imagine the effect on the state’s
educational standards? Can you imagine the effect on your children when
they go to school and are told that the earth is flat and only 6000
years old?
As the father of a fourth-grader, I can imagine the effect on my blood pressure.
Bad as this seems, it could get worse, believe it or not. And as these things go, it does: Glenn’s fellow Representative, Todd Courser,
an attorney in real life, who represents the 82nd District, posted his
own brilliant idea on Facebook. Courser later deleted the post, but
Electablog was able to capture it (below):
As you can see, Courser opposes “Soviet-style”
central planning, and like most Republicans, he seems to think Common
Core standards are federally imposed standards (they are not). Courser
is an attorney, mind you. He should know better. But then a lot of
Republicans, Ted Cruz included, should know better.
So instead of the public schools our Founding
Fathers envisioned, education should return to being a cult ministries. Excuse me, but I think that’s what the Founding Fathers wanted
to move away from.
Look, I know Ted Cruz has said,
“This country remains a country, I believe, grounded in values,
grounded in faith, but far too many Christians have ceded the public
arena to people who aren’t believers,” but come on.
And while we’re talking about the lunatics
representative the Republican Party in state after state, I can’t leave
out Arizona State Sen. Sylvia Allen, R-Snowflake. It know it’s a whole
other state, but trust me, it’s relevant: Allen actually told the
state’s appropriations committee on Tuesday that corrupt souls are at
the root of our nation’s problems (as opposed to whack-a-doodle’s like
her) and that therefore,
We are slowly eroding
religion at every opportunity that we have. We should probably be
debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their
choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.
Yes, because that jibes so well with the First Amendment!
I guess while we’re forced to sit in cult it would
be a good time to be forced (at gunpoint) to listen to David Barton.
Then Mike Huckabee could get his wish too. I guess this would be a sort
of jobs bill, because then the GOP could give all those open-carry wackos jobs pointing guns at us, because that’s the only thing that
could get many of us into a cult.
Yes, gay people – not the Republican Party – are going to destroy social security.
That seems bad enough, but she also “Allen even offered a bill
to protect her son-in-law who was under investigation for harassing
female inmates while working in a country prison.” The young Republican
was apparently forcing female inmates to give him oral sex.
I’m sorry, but as a metaphor of the Republican War on Women, I can’t think of a more apt metaphor.
If only the mainstream media would tell people the
truth about their elected representatives. You have to wonder how many
of them would get elected again, if they only knew.
It is interesting how Republicans think if only we
“put the bible back in school” and force people to go to cult, our
“free” society can be saved. But what’s free about coercion?
Of course, our young people won’t know what
“coercion” means if Michigan’s Courser and Glenn get their way. After
all, it doesn’t matter who teaches the scriptures. Anyone can do that,
and the bible’s the only textbook kids really need.
It’s much easier for the elites to lead them around
by the nose that way. And really, it does put them a step above Europe’s
serfs in that those poor unfortunates had to have the bible read to
them.
See how progressive the Republican Party is! If you
want to know just how progressive, check out with Cindy Gamrat and Todd
Courser have been up to in Michigan with their “contract for liberty,”
which would dismantle the Constitution just the way the Founding
Fathers intended, and their “life at conception” legislation to do away
with that pesky freedom women have to control their own reproductive
functions, and finally, their plans to turn Michigan into a theocracy, yay!
Fortunately, Eclectablog explains that they “have
heard from multiple sources that the Republicans in the state
legislature are doing everything in their power to make sure these two,
along with [Cindy] Gamrat, are not seen as representing the Republicans
as a whole and that they are neutralized and unable to have an impact
that would harm their brand.”
Wingnuts are struggling to prove Germanwings pilot suspected of
intentionally flying plane into ground was “secret” muslim and the
results are really, really sad.
From the "Someone spoke the truth and Fox went ape-shit. OK, so now tell us something we didn't already know" Department:
On
Fox News, it's okay to compare unionized teachers to ISIL, but don't
label racist police a bigger threat to safety than the terror group half
a world away.
