Spintested

Scarlett Johansson Backs Obama's Campaign At Runway To Win In NYC

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

McCain would probably have approved a failed troop surge in Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination, destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan, failed to bring Israel’s BenjaminNetanyahu to the negotiating table, expanded prosecution of whistle-blowers, sought to expand executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo, failed to act on climate change, pushed both nuclear energy and opened new areas to domestic oil drilling, failed to reform the financial sector enough to prevent another financial catastrophe, supported an extension of the BushTaxCuts for the rich, presided over a growing divide between rich and poor, and failed to lower the jobless rate.

Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more, however, than the fact that has undertaken all of these actions and, even more significantly, left the DemocraticParty far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected. Few issues are more important than seeing behind the screen of a myth-making mass media, and understanding what this demonstrates about how power in America really works—and what needs to be done to change it.

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Scarlett Johansson Backs Obama's Campaign At Runway To Win In NYC

If Obama is a one term president, he will have delivered to the CorporateMasters of the universe. He'll hand the baton off to Republicans for the fleecing to continue and go on to reap the benefits from his treacherous betrayal of the People, i.e., the same sort of corporate payoffs that presidents since Gerald Ford have enjoyed.

Over the course of US history, corporations have managed to game our political system, and done it so effectively that the two-party system competes to serve corporate interests while defending that service as, "What's good for GM (corporations) is good for America (the People)".

Democrats (controlled by the DLC, and that's important to remember) and Republicans are corporate tools. Like siblings competing for the attention and approval (campaign contributions) of a parent, Republicans and DLC-controlled Democrats try to outdo each other in delivering for their real constituent, BigCorporations. The trick for them has been to make it seem as if they were really working on behalf of thePeople.

If you must continue to delude yourself into thinking Obama's a good guy who never would have started those wars, and who has only the best of intentions but got a bad deal (I don't share that opinion anymore), then think of all this as a business plan where the CorporateMasters of the Universe have charted out their plans years in advance (governments do them, too) and select the politician/personality best able to achieve those plans in 4 year increments. If you want to l!e the country into war for oil and war-profiteering, then GeorgeWBush is your man to front it (with DickCheney, the former Secretary of Defense who initiated the privatizing of the military a decade earlier, actually running the operation from the shadows).

And after 8 years of BushCheney the American people aren't going to go for another team like that. They're going to want HOPE and CHANGE, with a persona they can believe in and trust. BarackObama.

The truth is that Obama is no better than BushCheney. Not better, not worse, but the same. His 'most ardent admirers' just like the packaging better. I'm not talking skin color, although that may be a factor for some of them; I'm talking about how a 'D' after the name is a brand they trust believe and trust in, despite the fact that it's the same 'soap' (product).

Unless and until there is drastic and uncompromising change to our campaign financing system, until corporations are no longer 'persons' and are prohibited from participating in elections and politics, all efforts to reform government are useless. But that is NOT going to happen under Obama or the DLC-controlled Democratic Party as we'd hoped when we put them in power in 2008; it's not even on their 'To Do' list.
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Scarlett Johansson Backs Obama's Campaign At Runway To Win In NYC

To hear tell of the LillyLedbetterAct from Obama's 'most ardent admirers', it ushered in a golden age of pay equity in our nation’s employment centers. I don’t know where this comes from.

The Ledbetter bill made a technical fix allowing after-the-fact challenges. It didn't end wage discrimination in our time. In fact, we know that it didn’t, because the statistics are coming in, three years after the passage of the law.

Though the law expanded the legal remedies available to women who've been victims of discriminatory pay, little's been done to address the pay gap that exists between male and female employees. Since the EqualPayAct of 1963 was signed into law, the pay gap has closed at less than half-a-cent per year. That trend's continuing, as the pay gap barely closed from 2009 to 2010.

Women made 77 percent of men’s earnings in 2009, the year the law passed. In 2010, that was virtually unchanged, as women’s wages rose to 77.4 percent of men’s. The gap's even larger for AfricanAmericans and Latinos: black women made 67.5 percent of all men’s earnings in 2009, while Latino women made 57.7 percent. In 2010, those figures ticked up to 67.7 percent and 58.7 percent, respectively.

Wage fairness hasn’t come to any Americans during the GreatRecession, as wage gains are only starting to take hold. But that’s certainly true with respect to gender, regardless of LillyLedbetter.

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Scarlett Johansson Backs Obama's Campaign At Runway To Win In NYC

It's been 3 years since the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Act.

Little has been done to address the pay gap that exists between male and female employees. Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law, the pay gap has closed at less than half-a-cent per year. That trend is continuing, as the pay gap barely closed from 2009 to 2010.

Women made 77 percent of men’s earnings in 2009, the year the law passed. In 2010, that was virtually unchanged, as women’s wages rose to 77.4 percent of men’s. The gap is even larger for African Americans and Latinos: black women made 67.5 percent of all men’s earnings in 2009, while Latino women made 57.7 percent. In 2010, those figures ticked up to 67.7 percent and 58.7 percent, respectively.

Women make up half of the American workforce, and in two-thirds of American families, the mother is the primary breadwinner or a co-breadwinner. But they make less than their male counterparts in all 50 states, though the size of each state’s wage gap varies. While the gap continues to close in places like Washington, D.C., where women make 91.8 percent of men’s earnings, it is growing in others, like Wyoming, where women’s earnings dropped from 65.5 percent of men’s in 2009 to just 63.8 percent in 2010.

Because of the gender pay gap, women with the same education doing the same job as men earn far less over their working lifetimes. The wage gap costs $723,000 over a 40-year career for women with college degrees. In some industries, the gap can cost women close to a million dollars.
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Scarlett Johansson Backs Obama's Campaign At Runway To Win In NYC

Obama didn't end Don't Ask Don't Tell -- Congress did.

Even after repeal passed, Obama refused to issue an executive stop-loss order, allowing gays to be discharged and lose their careers (not to mention the loss of trained military in the 'war on terror') for about a year afterwards.

And even now, Obama's support for gays marrying isn't there -- It is "evolving".
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Scarlett Johansson Backs Obama's Campaign At Runway To Win In NYC

The LillyLedbetter Act has been at the top of Obama's 'most ardent supporters' lists of his "accomplishments". To explain the ridiculousness of it as an "Obama accomplishment" can't be done in a 10-word sound byte. To refer to it as "Fair Pay Act" shows cluelessness about what it actually does -- It has nothing to do with equalizing pay between genders.

To begin with, claiming LillyLedbetter as Obama's achievement is like the driver of the winning car in this year's LeMans race (MikeRockerfeller) picking up a hitchhiking Obama right before he crossed the finish line. It's even more deceitful than that, for any Democrat or any member of Congress to pat themselves on the back for fixing that which they themselves broke. But even that doesn't quite explain it.

Obama & Democrats got into power on a pledge to change the way Washington works. Little is ever said or explained about what that really means. I'm going to attempt it:

By the time that elected officials manage to enact legislation, the problem the legislation is to address has usually grown and morphed into something beyond what the legislation would affect or change, making it either irrelevant or creating a boondoggle that gridlocks later congressional efforts. Or, something else.

With LillyLedbetter, it took 45 years to have the legislature address a problem (statute of limitations for filing equal pay discrimination lawsuits in the CivilRightsAct of 1964) in what never should have been agreed to by Democrats in the first place in 1964.

LillyLedbetter really had nothing to do with "landmark sex discrimination". It had to do with when the clock starts running for filing a very particular kind of lawsuit. It doesn't affect statutes of limitation for any other kind of lawsuit. It doesn't apply to the filing of all lawsuits. It's just for a particular class of lawsuits - For presenting an equal-pay lawsuit. And it wasn't 45 years of Congresses trying to fix it. It was a year and a half.

It was in response to the Supreme Court's decision in 2007 in one woman's lawsuit. It's not going to affect millions, or thousands or even hundreds of others - Ironically, if it were to affect more women, it never would have passed, no matter what party held the Congress, because it would have meant more money paid out from corporations to women, and Democrats work for corporations just as Republicans do.

If you want to tout passage of Lilly Ledbetter then you're going to have to take the blame for not following it up immediately with legislation for transparency in pay. It's a joke without it. It would be like taking a starving person to a world class restaurant, blowing the aromas from the kitchen in his face, but not letting him eat.
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