From Tom Dispatch
By Robert S. Eshelman

Juanita Borden, 39 and jobless, patiently waits as her résumé methodically works its way, line by line, through a fax machine at a state-run job center in downtown Philadelphia. Lying open before her on a round conference table is a neatly organized folder. “This is my résumé and everywhere I’ve been faxing to. This is how I keep track of what day I’ve sent them on, so I can call and check back,” she says, leafing through pages of fax cover sheets. “I usually give five business days before I inquire whether or not they’ve received it and whether or not they’re interested.”

Juanita was fired last October, when her employer found out that her driver’s license — a job requirement — had expired. “It was only a matter of twenty-six dollars. I was under the impression that it expired in November of ‘08, but it was actually November of ‘07, and because I hadn’t been driving I wasn’t aware of it.” The one occasion on which she was required to drive, though, she couldn’t, and that was all her employer needed to fire her for failing to fulfill her employment responsibilities. She has since renewed her license and says with an air of futility, “I’d like to have my job back if they would give it to me.”

She hasn’t been asked back and, despite her persistent efforts, she hasn’t received a single call from a prospective employer either. “The good thing,” she says, remaining remarkably buoyant despite her misfortune, “is that usually when I interview I get the job. So… I’m hoping for an interview soon.” Until then, her carefully managed folder serves as a small measure of control over an otherwise steady drift into poverty and homelessness.

Juanita isn’t the only one at this job center on the precipice of acute need. And she isn’t alone in relating a story about being fired for what would seem to many a frivolous reason. Chris Topher, 25 and making his first visit here, was axed in March of last year. The telecommunications company he had been working for sent him packing when, as he tells it, he installed cable equipment a customer hadn’t ordered. It didn’t matter that the mistake was on the work order Chris was given. “It was the best job I had since I graduated high school and I’ve had a few: Turnpike Commission, working in a Senator’s office. I’ve had some nice jobs, but that one, I enjoyed it the most.”

Read more War on Workers

From In These Times
By David Sirota

In the March 3 special primary election for the 5th congressional district seat in Illinois, formerly held by White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, many progressives voted their hopes, supporting Tom Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer and author.

Geoghegan’s candidacy had been endorsed by The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, Salon’s Joe Conason and OpenLeft.com, among others. (Disclosure: I wrote a fundraising letter for the campaign.) Yet in the end, reform-minded Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley won the Democratic primary with 22 percent of the 55,000 Democratic votes cast. Geoghegan placed seventh out of a field of 12, with 6 percent of the vote.

Geoghegan was a movement progressive who faced a steep uphill climb in his first race for Congress. Tom would have been a great representative, who would have helped our movement in Congress as he does in his writings and his practice of labor law. But his loss doesn’t make our contributions to his campaign a waste.

Sometimes we support candidates we may not like, but just because they’re in an important contested race for a Republican seat, we’re willing to give our labor or dollars to push them over the goal line. Other times, we give out of movement solidarity to people we fully admire, knowing that they probably will lose.

We need to recognize both contributions are worthwhile. In the first example, they can help win an important seat. In the latter, they help develop solidarity and build a network for future campaigns.

Read more Electoral Success

From The NY Times
Editoriai

There was an impressive breadth of knowledge and a welcome dose of candor in President Obama’s first big speech on education, in which he served up an informed analysis of the educational system from top to bottom. What really mattered was that Mr. Obama did not wring his hands or speak in abstract about states that have failed to raise their educational standards. Instead, he made it clear that he was not afraid to embarrass the laggards — by naming them — and that he would use a $100 billion education stimulus fund to create the changes the country so desperately needs.

Mr. Obama signaled that he would take the case for reform directly to the voters, instead of limiting the discussion to mandarins, lobbyists and specialists huddled in Washington. Unlike his predecessor, who promised to leave no child behind but did not deliver, this president is clearly ready to use his political clout on education.

Mr. Obama spoke in terms that everyone could understand when he noted that only a third of 13- and 14-year-olds read as well as they should and that this country’s curriculum for eighth graders is two full years behind other top-performing nations. Part of the problem, he said, is that this nation’s schools have recently been engaged in “a race to the bottom” — most states have adopted abysmally low standards and weak tests so that students who are performing poorly in objective terms can look like high achievers come test time.

Read more Education

From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman

Elections have consequences. President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.

The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration’s refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished.

For this budget allocates $634 billion over the next decade for health reform. That’s not enough to pay for universal coverage, but it’s an impressive start. And Mr. Obama plans to pay for health reform, not just with higher taxes on the affluent, but by putting a halt to the creeping privatization of Medicare, eliminating overpayments to insurance companies.

On another front, it’s also heartening to see that the budget projects $645 billion in revenues from the sale of emission allowances. After years of denial and delay by its predecessor, the Obama administration is signaling that it’s ready to take on climate change.

Read more Change

From The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson

Barack Obama staged his arrival in Washington to evoke Abraham Lincoln’s, but the historical echo is faint. Lincoln’s famous train ride to his 1861 inauguration traversed a landscape of bitterness and strife. He had to speed through Baltimore “like a thief in the night” for fear of riots and possible assassination. Obama, by contrast, was met by tens of thousands of Baltimoreans who braved subfreezing temperatures to cheer the new president. As Obama made his way to the capital, he crossed a landscape of hope.

Rarely has a new presidency been greeted with such a consensus of goodwill — and rarely has a new president so needed it.

The importance of Obama’s mind-blowing historical breakthrough can hardly be overstated. Slavery vexed the Founding Fathers; if not for Lincoln’s iron determination, it would have ripped the nation apart. For nearly a century after African Americans were freed from bondage, American society still relegated us to a corner reserved for second-class citizens. Having a black man as president does not magically eliminate racial disparities in income or wealth; it does not fix inner-city schools, repair crumbling neighborhoods or heal dysfunctional families. Psychologically, though, it changes everything.

Our mental furniture is being rearranged. The advent of Obama’s presidency brings the African American experience to center stage but does so in a way that allows society to congratulate itself on having come so far. The implications for black Americans are even more profound, because seeing Obama in the White House obliterates any logic behind self-imposed limits on imagination and ambition.

Read more Matter

From The Boston Globe
By H.D.S. Greenway

The club that Barack Obama now joins has traditionally been far more exclusive than just all white and all male. There has never been an Italian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek, Spaniard, or Hispanic elected to the White House. No descendent of the great waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe that washed over this country in the 19th century has ever made it. Most presidential ancestors came from earlier, 18th- and 17th-century British immigrations in which the few names ending in vowels were mostly Scottish or Irish.

Michael Dukakis, of Greek ancestry, went up to the clubhouse door but wasn’t allowed in. Nor have there been any Swedes, Danes, or Norwegians. Walter Mondale, of Norwegian descent, didn’t come close. In more than 200 years there has never been a Jew, and only one Catholic, John Kennedy.

The genealogical background of presidents has been conspicuously narrow. Many are distant relatives of each other. The Bushes are allegedly related to 16 presidents and Franklin Roosevelt to 17.

All presidential surnames, save five, derive exclusively from the British Isles. The exceptions are the two Roosevelts and Martin van Buren from Holland; and Herbert Hoover (Huber) and Dwight Eisenhower (Eisenhauer) from Germany. And even then, both Teddy Roosevelt and FDR were only one-quarter Dutch. Most of their ancestors were English, Irish, or Scot.

Read more Exclusive Club

From TruthDig
By Marie Cocco

Ah, the gowns and the glitter. The spectacular opening concert featuring everyone from Beyoncé to The Boss. The historical drama of watching the first African-American take the oath as president of the United States.

The quadrennial conundrum over how to pay for it all.

Sorry to rain on the inaugural parade, but we need to find a better way. The financing of President-elect Barack Obama’s big day is just as much of an embarrassment to the country as the financing of inaugurations past.

First we force financially strapped municipal and state governments—particularly the District of Columbia—to pay enormous costs for security, transportation and emergency preparedness that simply shouldn’t be their responsibility. Then, because we want to stage an extravaganza that is as big and as bountiful as the day seems to require, we have the president-elect tap the same deep-pocketed donors who finance political campaigns.

Obama’s inaugural committee stresses that it has imposed unprecedented limits on donations, banning direct contributions from corporations, lobbyists and unions and limiting individual contributions to $50,000. “This is not business as usual,” inaugural spokeswoman Linda Douglass says.

Still, the committee has allowed “bundlers”—the well-heeled political fundraisers who tap their well-heeled friends and colleagues for donations—to get credited for raising up to $300,000 a piece. Substantively, what is the difference between an individual who writes a $300,000 check and a “bundler” who raises that amount and gets noted in the books for providing this service?

Read more Hoopla

From In These Times
By David Sirota

In the last two decades, three early November days have witnessed the collapse of movements that shaped the 20th century:

First, Communism fell with the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. Second, New Deal liberalism — weakened by Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election — was crushed as Republicans took Congress on Nov. 8, 1994. And third, free-market conservatism dropped dead with President-elect Barack Obama’s decisive victory on Nov. 4, 2008.

This most recent implosion was both shocking and predictable. Shocking because only a few years ago, Republicans were predicting a permanent conservative majority. And predictable because the attempts to cement such permanence — whether through the war on terrorism, the Iraq invasion, tax cuts, structural deficits or financial deregulation — seeded a foreseeable backlash.

Indeed, the conservative Hoover Institute admits “the country’s political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left.”

Of course, you don’t hear that truism much in the media — even after 67 million Americans voted for a Democratic candidate who was repeatedly billed as a “socialist,” a “Marxist” and/or “the most liberal senator” in American history. Instead, what you hear — from NBC’s Tom Brokaw on down — is that America remains a “center-right nation.” A glance at the empirical data shows nothing could be further from the truth.

Read more Gap

From Salon
By Joe Conason

If Al Franken were not a longtime public figure — and thus severely handicapped by American jurisprudence — he could file a powerful complaint for libel or slander against several of the most prominent wingnuts in the United States. From Rush Limbaugh to Bill O’Reilly to Richard Mellon Scaife, a chorus of familiar voices is loudly defaming the Democrat whose razor-thin win in the Minnesota Senate race will now be tested in that state’s courts. Ever since Election Day, on radio and television, on the Internet and in print, they’ve screamed that Franken is stealing, rigging, pilfering, scamming, thieving and cheating his way to victory.

These media figures, some of whom occasionally pretend to be journalists, have spewed such accusations repeatedly, without offering any proof whatsoever — in plain contradiction of the available facts. Not only is there no evidence that Franken or his campaign “cheated” in any way during the election or the recount, but there is ample reason to believe that the entire process was fair, balanced and free from partisan taint.

For Franken’s most famous adversaries, spewing lies about him may be a form of cheap revenge. A prime example is Fox News host O’Reilly, who has hated Franken for years, dating back to when the comedian and author berated him in a public debate, then exposed him in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” and ultimately provoked him into filing an ill-advised lawsuit that only generated vast amounts of free publicity for Franken’s book before the suit was thrown out of court. Of course O’Reilly was preceded by Limbaugh, that “big fat idiot” whose deceptions and bigotry were featured in the comedian’s first bestselling book way back in 1996.

So Limbaugh, quoting an erroneous editorial from the Wall Street Journal, has been ranting about the supposed theft of the Minnesota election for months now. “We did not elect Al Franken,” he told a caller on Jan. 5. “He stole the race. They are stealing the race up there blind in front of everybody’s nose. They are counting absentee ballots [which election officials are required to do by law]. … They’re counting votes twice — votes that were rejected, all kinds of things [which election officials ordered after determining that some votes were rejected wrongly]. That’s just — the Democrats are stealing the election up there.” Even the Journal’s tendentious and sloppy screeds have never quite accused Franken of “stealing” the race or the recount. Rush just made that part up.

Read more Lying Liars

From TruthDig

Sarah Palin gets all reflective about her recent rise to political fame and her cagey relationship with everyone in the media except Greta Van Susteren in this clip from the upcoming documentary “Media Malpractice.” She feels exploited—hear that, Katie Couric?—exploited!

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