The iWont Campaign

-- by Dave Johnson

Companies that take away middle-class jobs should not be rewarded. Verizon's workers are asking people to buy or upgrade Verizon iPhones only when Verizon gives workers a fair deal and stops downgrading the middle class. On a call today Verizon's workers said that it was public pressure that brought the company back to the bargaining table, ending this summer's strike by 45,000 workers.

This Is Your Fight, Too

Big companies are using the fear caused by the unemployment crisis to take away more and more benefits, cut back wages, make people work longer hours, and basically shred the middle class. Since August Verizon workers have been fighting to protect their health care coverage and other standard employee benefits against Verizon’s demands for takebacks that threaten the living standard of tens of thousands of middle class families. The fight of Verizon’s workers is exactly the fight the rest of us are having to try to preserve America’s middle class.

Now a number of national progressive-aligned organizations are joining in support of Verizon workers as they enter the next phase in the fight for middle-class jobs at Verizon and Verizon Wireless. These organizations recognize that this fight is our fight.

iWont

As Apple announces the new iPhone 5, the Communication Workers of America, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, MoveOn.Org, US Action, Jobs with Justice, and National People’s Action are launching the nationwide iWont Campaign, asking Americans to delay upgrading to the iPhone 5 on Verizon Wireless until the company agrees to a fair contract with its workers.

In addition, as Congress considers ways to close the deficit, these organizations will expose the “Verizon Tax Loophole.” This is Verizon’s use of tricks and tax dodges to pay nothing at all in federal corporate income taxes. Verizon makes billions in profits and pays their top 5 executives hundreds of millions of dollars. Avoiding taxes while paying a few at the top millions and asking their workers to take lower pay and fewer benefits undermines the American Dream of good middle-class jobs.

Support Verizon Workers

Click here to Send a Message of Solidarity

45,000 Verizon workers are back to work and unified as one with their brothers and sisters and community supporters. Our collective fight for the American Dream continues.

Our work is far from complete. Our strike objective from the beginning was a real collective bargaining process. Your support was essential to creating that opportunity. Now begins the hard work of negotiating a fair contract.

If wealthy corporations like Verizon continue to outsource jobs and hold down worker wages, there is no hope for an economic recovery. This is why our fight is your fight and why your support is so important.

Sign our solidarity message to Verizon workers today, and we'll deliver your comments to them.

In addition there will be information campaigns, leafleting at Verizon stores around the country. Information will be posted soon.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

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-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 8:58 PM PST on October 03, 2011.

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Watch Take Back The American Dream Conference Live

-- by Dave Johnson

Watch live streaming of the Take Back The American Dream conference live here. I'm in DC for this.

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 7:18 AM PST on October 03, 2011.

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Another Great Articulation

-- by Dave Johnson

The Occupy Wall Street movement is just forcing out so many great articulations of the problem we are all fighting. This from Chris Hedges:

Also see Hedges' The Best Among Us,

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 1:23 PM PST on October 01, 2011.

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Nobody Can Predict The Moment Of Revolution

-- by Dave Johnson

A video about Occupy Wall Street

(The reason people repeat what the spokesperson is saying is to relay what they say back into the crowd.)

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 10:46 AM PST on October 01, 2011.

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The DONATE Button

-- by Dave Johnson

Over in the left column there and down a ways is a DONATE button. It says PayPal on it. This helps me pay to server company, and once in a while maybe a cup of coffee, too, though not so much for a while...

So please consider donating to keep this site going. Thanks.

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 2:37 PM PST on September 30, 2011.

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Tobacco Companies Covered Up Radiation Risk

-- by Dave Johnson

A recurring question in today's economy that rewards con artists and psycopaths: " Why aren't they in jail?" Torturers, banksters, fraudsters (ratings agencies), bribers, professional climate deniers, and of course tobacco executives. Tobacco is still killing over 400,000 Americans every single year. Remind me, HOW many were killed by al Queda?

Today's news, tobacco companies knew since 1959 that there was concentrated radiation in the smoke, increasing the liklihood of cancer, could have taken it out but the process would have made it less addictive.

See Tobacco Companies Hid Evidence of Radiation in Cigarettes for Decades - ABC News.

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 12:21 PM PST on September 30, 2011.

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Why Does The Right Help China?

-- by Dave Johnson

Why is the right trying so hard to help China capture the green-energy industry?

One example today, Heritage Foundation: The Solyndra Legacies,

Days before a recent deadline, the Department of Energy brazenly approved two additional loans for more than $1 billion for solar energy projects in the Obama Administration’s green jobs program. The latest ill-fated ventures include a $737 million loan guarantee to Solar Reserve for a 110-megawatt solar tower on federal land in Nevada and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150-megawatt solar plant in Arizona.

Loan guarantees like these are destined to fail, because they are either granted to companies that could not remain viable without them or because the loan was supported by political connections; or both. This round of loans includes the latter—just as it appears Solyndra was aided.

Is this campaign to kill off America's green-energy efforts just to help the Koch brothers and other oil-company funders of the right? Is that all there is to it? It's pretty darn convenient for China, either way.

Update - The right is not just on China's side against ours when it comes to the green energy industry. Look at this from Cato Institute: China Currency Legislation Is a Desperate Mistake and keep in mind that the argument is about China allowing its currency to move to market rates. Usually Cato is all about free markets -- until that benefits America instead of China.

Broader support on Capitol Hill for currency legislation boils down to this: with public approval ratings hovering in the low-to-mid teens, an embattled Congress is looking for plausible scapegoats for the dismal state of U.S. economic affairs. Thanks to a lot of media-driven hype about China’s inexorable rise at U.S. expense, Americans fear China almost as much as they loathe Congress. A vote to reclaim American jobs stolen by China—as the currency legislation is so disingenuously characterized by some of its supporters—enables politicians to return to their states and districts with concrete evidence of the seriousness of their efforts.

Only it’s not serious. It’s deeply dismaying. Instead of working hard to change homegrown U.S. policies that inhibit investment, job creation, and growth, our elected officials would choose to lay the blame for our woes at China’s feet, then cross their fingers and hope that their provocative, unilateralist legislation doesn’t unleash a torrent of adverse consequences that would make economic matters even worse. Can there be a stronger admission of failure than to launch such a desperate Hail Mary?

OK, get that? He says we should not be asking China to let its currency float to market rates, which would make American-made goods competitive in the world again.

Worse than that, he is saying America should be more like China, not the other way around. He says we need to stop protecting our people, our workers, stop protecting our environment, make it harder to unionize, and let a top few govern us. Yikes!

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 8:04 AM PST on September 30, 2011.

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Occupy Wall Street Day 12

-- by Dave Johnson

"We are occupying Wall Street. We will not be moved."

"Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."

"We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent. "

People Have Had It

This is what happens when people have had it. The "Occupy Wall Street" crowd has been there for almost 2 weeks, camping out, saying they're fed up and are going to stay until American democracy is restored.

Video: Wall Streeters mock the people marching in the streets, drinking champagne, from above.

"This video shows unidentified occupants watching protests from the balconies of Wall Street in amusement while sipping champagne."

Pilots Union marches:

Report: NYC Transit Union Joins Occupy Wall Street,

New York City labor unions are preparing to back the unwieldy grassroots band occupying a park in Lower Manhattan, in a move that could mark a significant shift in the tenor of the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street protests and send thousands more people into the streets.

The Transit Workers Union Local 100's executive committee, which oversees the organization of subway and bus workers, voted unanimously Wednesday night to support the protesters. The union claims 38,000 members. A union-backed organizing coalition, which orchestrated a large May 12 march on Wall Street before the protests, is planning a rally on Oct. 5 in explicit support. And SEIU 32BJ, which represents doormen, security guards and maintenance workers, is using its Oct. 12 rally to express solidarity with the Zuccotti Park protesters.

Video: Michael Moore talks about what is happening with Lawrence O'Donnell:

Video: See Richard Eskow: Occupy This! TV Interview On The Economy And The #OccupyWallStreet Protests

"Wall Street's fear is understandable. If the public is ever given a voice to express its outrage, their party train will have to stop and some people will pay for their crimes. But when Americans can only express their right to free speech after they've been coralled into a "free speech zone," one that's far from the subject of the protests, that's not free speech at all.

And it's not America."

Go visit the Occupy Wall Street site

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

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-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 3:49 PM PST on September 29, 2011.

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Incentives

-- by Dave Johnson

According to Republicans:

To make the rich work harder you have to pay them more.

To make the poor work harder you have to pay them less.

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 4:45 PM PST on September 28, 2011.

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Important Story About Voting Machines

-- by Dave Johnson

I haven't written about voting machines for a while. Now Salon has an important story. Go see Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control - 2012 Elections - Salon.com

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 10:48 PM PST on September 27, 2011.

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