If most polling is correct, many highly contested races this political season will come down to voter turnout. If you’re looking for something you can do to help reach out to fellow voters, remind them of everything that’s at stake this election season, and urge them to get out to the polls, you can join MoveOn.org’s Call for Change; an opportunity for all of us to reach out to fellow voters and discuss the real issues, cut past the hype and the television ads, and hit home with real topics that matter to all of us, and why it’s so desperately important to change up the leadership in Washington.
Calling from home is easy and simple, and getting involved is simpler; just click the image below:
See? It couldn’t be easier, and it’s really refreshing and energizing to be part of a nation-wide progressive voter turnout initiative.
[ Call for Change ]
The supreme court ruling in New Jersey that essentially stated that gay couples deserve the same rights and treatment under New Jersey’s state constitution as heterosexual couples do is a huge victory for equal rights and equality and justice under the law for all Americans regardless of their personal choices, but you can be sure that the conservative right won’t give this matter up without a fight. We can hold the line by not giving a single inch to their prejudicial and discriminatory demands. Understanding is one thing, empathy is one thing-in fact it’s always been the progressive mindset to be willing to accept and listen to the opinions of opponents, even when they’re blatantly and incredibly wrong-but when it comes to the way that America treats its people under the law, discrimination, intolerance, and hatred are not to be tolerated.
The ruling was a huge step forward, proving that at least somewhere in the United States, somewhere that hasn’t jumped on the homophobic bandwagon of both state laws and constitutional amendments banning gay marriage and civil unions, the rights of all people, regardless of how their personal choices do-or most likely do not-affect the lives of anyone else are treated with honor and respect. This certainly isn’t the end of the issue, but it is definite cause for celebration.
Evan Wolfson is author of Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry and executive director of Freedom to Marry, the gay and non-gay partnership for marriage equality nationwide. He wrote in a recent piece at TomPaine:
Once again , America is heading into an Election Day with another round of ballot-measure attacks on gay people. While a shifting mood in the electorate may give our cause a boost—and as the public begins to wise up to Karl Rove’s gay-scapegoat-distraction plan—we are still likely to lose most, if not all, of the ballot measures aimed against us this year. We need to be ready to explain that loss to ourselves, our media and the public so the right-wing cannot spin these defeats into a false claim that our cause undermines candidates or other concerns we share.
At a similar juncture before the election in 2004, in a speech entitled The Scary Work of Winning, I described why we lose these battles. Most basically, civil rights movements rarely win early votes. After all, if it were as simple as a minority turning to the majority and saying, “Please stop discriminating against us,” we wouldn’t need constitutions or courts. Many of these attacks are cruelly aimed at gay people in states with already beleaguered communities, underfunded infrastructure, and few if any existing legal protections—this year’s wave includes Alabama, Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.
But, as I said in 2004, the other reason we are likely to lose in some places is that we have not fully fought the fight; we have not fully engaged in the conversation necessary—sustained and to scale—to move hearts and minds. When we run campaigns that flee from describing who local gays are and why marriage matters—campaigns that fail to connect the dots between fairness and how the denial of marriage harms families and helps no one—we are not giving people what they need over enough time to move them to our side.
He’s absolutely right, and the rest of his piece is equally compelling. Winning equal rights and protection for minorities has never been easy in the history of America and similarly the history of every disadvantaged community in any part of the world-the privileged and the majority and the empowered never willingly and happily yield rights and equal treatment to those they fear, those they hate, and those that are different than they-otherwise these issues would be easily resolved. Hatred and bigotry and privilege are incredibly difficult to overcome, and we mustn’t be dissuaded by initial losses and continue to carry the fight on. As I like to say, injustice is injustice, hatred is hatred, intolerance is intolerance, and bigotry is bigotry, regardless of who it’s aimed at-and we all need to rise to stand against it, lest it be us staring it down alone next.
[ Winning on Gay Marriage ]
Source: TomPaine.com
I’ll agree with the perspective here; there’s been an incredible move in recent years away from organized labor. Labor movements and strikes get horrible press coverage, essentially appearing on television and in the newspapers, thanks to the mainstream media, as some kind of hideous, ignorant underclass that dares to inconvenience the rest of us while trying to shake down their oh-so-gracious employers for an extra several dozen thousand dollars a year.
I’ve seen the mindset in my colleagues and friends; they believe that thanks to unions, train operators and auto workers make tens of thousands of dollars more for doing unskilled work than they make doing middle-class professional work, and whenever they’re the slightest bit unhappy, they use the power of the union to shakedown the company for more money, better benefits, or more perks, and resist any kind of cost-cutting or mutual sacrifice for the health of the business. Unions have been perceived as the downfall of several industries, because apparently the workers are incredibly greedy and the executives, walking away with millions in stock and multi-hundred-thousand dollar salaries and bonuses, only trying to selflessly keep the business afloat.
Where this perversion in logic happened, I’m not entirely sure, but my best guess it had to do with the union-busting tactics and propaganda of the me-me-more-money 1980s, when people actually thought Reaganomics was a valid economic system, and disdain for the common man was key to making a buck in the cutthroat business world.
Still, large businesses from Walmart, who has gone so far as to bring its employers into “voting sessions,” where they claim to tell employees which candidates are best for Walmart (usually Republicans who oppose things like benefits and a minimum wage increase for Walmart’s very employees) but actually tell their employees how to vote, to entire industry groups like the American auto industry, have been engaging in the kind of tactics that essentially smear organized labor in the eyes of the public, and create people who would rather go to bat individually against tyrannical employers and lose than organize and win:
The over-the-top mudslinging by the Center for Union Facts, the National Right to Work Committee and other anti-union groups is nothing more than an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes, hiding the real crisis in the American workplace. Too many workers in the U.S. still can’t adequately provide basic necessities for their families, protect themselves from workplace hazards or take care of themselves when they get old or sick. The firings, intimidation and harassment that often befall workers attempting to exercise freedoms of speech and association by forming unions are threats to our democracy. When faced with union organizing drives, 30 percent of employers terminate pro-union workers, 40 percent threaten to close a worksite if a union prevails and 51 percent coerce workers into opposing unions with bribery and favoritism.
The motives behind assailing organized workers are both financial and ideological. Union-busting is big business. Just ask Center for Union Facts founder and D.C. mercenary lobbyist Rick Berman. He’s the mastermind behind the ads and has earned a living attacking other public interest groups—like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Centers for Disease Control—for clients including the alcohol and fast food industries. Although he won’t reveal who is bankrolling CUF, attacking unions seems to be the source of his latest windfall.
Mary Beth Maxwell, executive director of American Rights at Work, a national labor policy organization in Washington, D.C., has more to say about the topic, and this disturbing trend in American politics. Read the full story:
[ Worse Than Union Busting ]
Source: TomPaine.com
