Priorities USA !!!!

We believe the stakes for protecting our country’s core values have never been higher.   

Any agenda that rewards only the wealthiest few Americans at the expense of middle class Americans is UNAMERICAN...

• Jobs and the Economy: We support meaningful job legislation that will build the foundation for our future prosperity by investing in infrastructure, clean energy and American innovation.
• Taxes: We oppose the “Romney Rule” whereby millionaires pay a lower tax rate than many middle class Americans. We believe tax cuts should not favor corporations, millionaires and billionaires, placing a crushing burden on the American middle class. 
• The Judiciary: With two possible Supreme Court appointments at stake, we cannot afford a Republican president who will appoint leaders with an anti-choice, anti-gay rights and anti-middle class agenda.
• Income Inequality: We oppose the permanent extension of Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and support economic policies rooted in fairness and opportunity.
• Education: We believe education is the most essential investment in our future. We oppose efforts to slash America’s commitment to its future by gutting education. We support policies that strengthen our public schools, support community colleges and make higher education affordable for the daughters and sons of all working Americans.
• Health Care: We support the Affordable Care Act and oppose attempts to repeal it. We support the requirement that health insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions. We support allowing parents to carry coverage of their adult children until age 26. We support shrinking the “Donut Hole” for prescription drug costs, and the other consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act, and will oppose efforts to roll back these hard-won consumer protections.
• Medicare: We believe in strengthening the existing Medicare system, and staunchly oppose the proposed Republican destruction of the system outlined in the Republican/Ryan budget.
• Right to Choose: With the Republican effort to defund assistance at the federal level, we stand for continuing the program which provides critical health services for women across the country.
• Environment: We believe that protection of our air, our water, our Earth is a national priority that requires a national commitment. We oppose the radical right-wing agenda to abolish the E.P.A. and allow corporate polluters to write their own rules of the road. We oppose giving big oil tax subsidies and oppose allowing oil companies to drill in America’s most precious and fragile ecosystems.
• Climate Change: We believe in science. We therefore accept and embrace the overwhelming international scientific consensus that the earth’s climate is warming and that human-generated pollution is a central cause. We support efforts to limit the pollution that causes global warming.
• Energy: Republican energy policies left Americans more dependent than ever on Middle East Oil, while allowing our lead in clean energy technology to erode and, in some cases, even disappear. We are committed to energy independence. We are committed to clean energy. We are committed to American leadership in the clean energy jobs of the future.
• Social Security: We oppose the Republican-proposed privatization of the system, which would make it far less sound and secure for future generations. We believe in strengthening the current system by reform in a sustainable fashion.
• LGBT Issues: We believe in freedom, in equality, in dignity for all Americans. We vigorously oppose divisive right-wing attempts to divide the American family and to besmirch the Constitution with amendments that would single out gay Americans for discrimination. We support gay and lesbian service members who risk their lives for our freedom, and we oppose any attempt to discriminate against them by reinstating “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

Almost half of all Americans lived in households that received government benefits in 2010! Why? Becasue the Middle-Class is being destroyed...

Almost half of all Americans lived in households that received government benefits in 2010, according to the Census Bureau. The share climbed from 37.7 percent in 1998 to 44.5 percent in 2006, before the recession, to 48.5 percent in 2010. 

The trend reflects the expansion of the safety net. When the earned-income credit was introduced in 1975, eligibility was limited to households making the current equivalent of up to $26,997. In 2010, it was available to families making up to $49,317. The maximum payout, meanwhile, quadrupled on an inflation-adjusted basis. 

It also reflects the deterioration of the middle class. Chisago boomed and prospered for decades as working families packed new subdivisions along Interstate 35, which runs up the western edge of the county like a flagpole with its base set firmly in Minneapolis. But recent years have been leaner. Per capita income in Chisago excluding government aid fell 6 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis between 2000 and 2007. Over the next two years, it fell an additional 7 percent. Nationally, per capita income excluding government benefits fell by 3 percent over the same 10 years. 

Rick Santorum, who won 57 percent of the vote in Chicago County in the Republican presidential caucuses last week, has warned of “the narcotic of government dependency.” Newt Gingrich has compared the safety net to a spider web. Mitt Romney has said the nation must choose between an “entitlement society” and an “opportunity society.” All the candidates, including Ron Paul, have promised to cut spending and further reduce taxes.

The Republicans will turn your sons into slaves and daughters into prostitutes.  Vote wisely, the 1% see you merely as a cost function. 

THINK for YOURSELF!!!

Flint Michigan February 11, 1937 = let us never forget America!!! The Battle for who OWNS America rages on...

The middle class and the American Dream were born 75 years ago today, on February 11, 1937, the day the Flint workers won their struggle. And for the next 44 years, working people everywhere got to own their own homes, send their kids to college and never worry about going broke if they got sick. That belief, that life would be good if you were a good citizen and a hard worker, now seems out of reach for nearly half the country which is either living in or near poverty. Perhaps people wouldn't mind it as much if the burden were being evenly shared. But everyone knows that's not the case. In a time of record personal bankruptcies, record home foreclosures, record family and student debt, there are a group of people having the best years of wealth and profit ever recorded in human history. And it is those very people who have made the decisions to export our jobs, to decimate unions, to make college unaffordable, to start wars and to pay themselves with gluttonous joy while paying little or no tax -- this is the 1% that has created the burden so many Americans (and people around the world) now share. 

And so, 75 years after the victory in Flint, the battle is now being fought all over again. But this time it's not just about getting paid a dollar an hour, or having Sunday off, or reducing the chance of your hand being crushed in the metal stamping machine. This time, the stakes are even greater: Who is going to own America and control the basic functions of our democracy -- the richest 1% who buy the politicians to get what they want, or the 99% who don't have much these days and live in anxiety or fear of what's around the bend.

The Bull Market Defined...

The MSCI All-Country World Index of shares in 45 nations completed a 20 percent rally from its October low yesterday, meeting the definition of a bull market. The S&P 500 yesterday closed 1 percent away from its peak nine months ago of 1,363.61, which was the highest level since June 2008. It had risen 7.3 percent this year through yesterday amid better-than-expected economic data and corporate profits.

President Obama wants to "Build the USA to last" which requires a prosperous middle class!!!

The President's themes -- tax fairness, help for homeowners, cracking down on U.S. financial crimes and unfair trade practices in China and investigating the lending practices that preceded the housing crisis -- are those he will be repeating as he campaigns for a second term.


He invoked the teamwork and selflessness of the U.S. armed forces to urge lawmakers toward agreement on changing the tax code for individuals and corporations, promoting energy development and improving job training and education. Still, he is unlikely to get any major legislation through Congress before the November election, which will also decide control of the House and Senate.

Tea Party and Occupy protesters = the system is rigged against them in favor of a privileged few

Obama is your only hope for a renewed middle class.


Besides new policies, he will revive politically popular proposals from the $447 billion job-creation package that he announced after Labor Day, but that Congressional Republicans blocked. He will again call for subsidies to struggling states to keep teachers and first-responders in their jobs, for money for roads and other infrastructure projects, and for extending for the remainder of the year both the temporary payroll tax cut for 160 million workers and federal payments to the long-term unemployed.

Congressional Republicans’ resistance to that agenda last fall, because they oppose both government stimulus measures and Mr. Obama’s proposed taxes on the wealthy to pay for them, helped depress their already low poll ratings.

JOBS kinda what good govt is all about....creating a vibrant middle class!!!

Fewer Americans than forecast filed first-time applications for unemployment benefits last week, easing concern that post-holiday firings were on the rise.

Claims plunged by 50,000 to 352,000 in the week ended Jan. 14, the lowest level since April 2008, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 41 economists in a Bloomberg News survey projected 384,000. A Labor Department spokesman said the decrease reflected volatility seen during this time of year. The four-week average, which smoothes out fluctuations, decreased to 379,000 last week from 382,500.

Former employee of Mitt Romney says, "The only thing he's ever produced is profits for the rich."

Randy Johnson has been a critic of Mitt Romney for around 18 years. He was one of hundreds of people who were laid off when Romney's company, Bain Capital, bought and closed Ampad, an office supply company in Indiana.

"Those were the hardest times, you can imagine, when you see people crying at your desk at the age I am now, all because companies were putting profits before people," said Johnson.


He says Romney is in the business of making the rich richer and doesn't care about the middle class.

Double Down Romney will destroy the middle class and create further extreme poverty in the USA!!!

Mitt Romney wants to double down on the policies that caused the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression.

“Romney is satisfied to settle for an economy in which fewer people succeed, while the majority of Americans are left to tread water or fall behind,” Biden wrote in an opinion essay published today in the Des Moines Register, the biggest newspaper in Iowa, where the caucuses that kick off the Republican presidential nominating contest will be held Jan 3. “Americans cannot afford a return to policies that rewarded the recklessness of a few while millions of small businesses and workers were left to clean up the mess.”

There is class warfare in the USA dummy ....the rich are $#*&% the poor and middle class into extinction

About 25 percent of millionaires in the U.S. pay federal taxes at lower effective rates than a significant portion of middle-income taxpayers, according to a legislative analysis.


Preferential treatment of investment income and the reduced impact of payroll taxes on high earners lets about 94,500 millionaires pay taxes at a lower rate than 10.4 million “moderate-income taxpayers,” representing about 10 percent of those making less than $100,000 a year, according to the report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service dated Oct. 7.

The findings put the U.S. tax system in conflict with the so-called Buffett Rule, which says households making more than $1 million annually shouldn’t pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle class families, says the report, which analyzed 2006 Internal Revenue Service data.

The Buffett principle was proposed by President Barack Obama in September after billionaire Warren Buffett, the 81- year-old chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said it was wrong that he paid taxes at a lower rate than 20 other people who worked in his office.

Obama has said the Buffett Rule should be a guiding principle of efforts to reform the U.S. tax code.