Plot to kill Post Office cloaked by right wing ‘recess rally’ chaos

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 08/11/09 13:13

Even as it works overtime to disrupt the national debate on health care reform, the radical right is taking advantage of the chaos to quietly destroy yet another public service Americans take for granted – the United States Postal Service.
Working through Sen. Thomas Coburn, R-Okla., they have rolled a huge boulder onto the road lawmakers are taking to close a $7 billion budget deficit hanging over the agency for the year ending Sept. 30.

Coburn attached a killer amendment, just before the Senate’s August recess, to legislation that would grant the Postal Service the $5 billion it needs to cover health care costs for retirees. Without the legislation the agency says that on Sept. 1 it will have to fire more than 50,000 workers, close down hundreds of post offices and kill Saturday pickup and delivery.

The right-wing amendment effectively squashes the collective bargaining rights of the entire Postal Service workforce by ordering arbitrators to place the fiscal condition of the Postal Service ahead of any contractual obligations the agency has to its workers or retirees.

The law, as amended by Coburn, would allow the Postal Service, for example, to withhold a $5.4 billion payment it must make within a month to cover retiree health care costs.

The postal worker unions are warning that attachment of the Coburn amendment to the rescue bill forces them to withdraw their earlier support for the legislation.

“The Coburn amendment serves only to upset collective bargaining procedures,” said Bill Burrus, president of the American Postal Service Workers Union.

The new Letter Carriers president, Frederic Rolando, told senators in a hearing just before the recess, that his union also could not support a bill containing the Coburn amendment.
Witnesses at the Aug. 6 Senate hearing pointed out that health care costs are only part of the problems the agency faces.

Mail volume has dropped by 12 percent in the last year and the drop is expected to reach 16 percent by the end of fiscal 2009, in September, according to the Government Accounting Office.

Postmaster General John Potter told senators that the USPS has lost much of its volume because of the Internet.

Potter, who was named by a GOP-appointed Postal Board during the Bush administration, has proposed cuts in the workforce as the solution. He says that at least 677 post offices should be closed, most of them in major cities, and that 55,000 workers should be fired.

The USPS workforce, the unions note, has already shrunk, through retirements and buyouts, to 603,000 workers, from 773,000 several years ago.
The unions are saying there is a better way than job cuts.

Both union leaders are angry about the radical right amendment to the rescue bill because they have already been working with USPS management on money-saving plans.

The Letter Carriers and the agency, for example, are reviewing 168,000 city letter carrier routes, examining them for possible consolidations.
Senators at the Aug. 6 hearing were non-committal on the Coburn amendment.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Ind., Conn., was among the group of supposedly pro-labor Democrats who weren’t saying too much.

He asked Rolando and Burrus to submit conditions they would attach to any arbitrations.
Both restated their opposition to the anti-labor amendment attached by Coburn but declined to offer any others.

Limbaugh’s Nazi slurs draw condemnation

From: PWW

Author: Susan Webb
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 08/11/09 14:43

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threw Rush Limbaugh into a snit when she objected to use of Nazi symbols by anti-health-reform protesters.

On Aug. 5, when a reporter asked Pelosi if she thought the right-wing-organized protests were real grassroots expressions, she replied, "I think they are Astroturf, you be the judge."

Astroturf, the fake grass used in sports arenas, is being used to refer to fake “grassroots” happenings that are a specialty of far-right groups, going back to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in December 2000 that intimidated Miami-Dade election officials into stopping the vote recounting.

"They're carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town hall meeting on health care," Pelosi noted.

Limbaugh, the next day on his radio talk show, accused Pelosi of being “deranged” because “she's running around now claiming that we're Nazis, that not only are we an unruly mob but that people are showing up wearing swastikas.”

But a spokesman for Pelosi told FOXNews.com that Pelosi was referring to a photo taken at a Massachusetts town hall meeting hosted by Democratic Rep. Ed Markey. The photo showed a protester holding a sign bearing a swastika crossed out over Obama's name and a question mark.

Also in Massachusetts, according to news reports, one protester compared Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern to the Nazi Josef Mengele, who did ghastly medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners.

At a photo site linked to the right-wing freerepublic.com, someone named Dallas59 posted a photo of people at an unidentified rally holding a giant photo of Obama with a Hitler mustache drawn on.

On Aug. 7, CNN’s Rick Sanchez identified the same photo as from a rally outside a health care forum in Romulus, Mich.

Sanchez also displayed a photo from Texas of a man holding a sign depicting Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett as the devil, next to another sign with the symbol of the Nazi SS and a slogan talking about stopping socialism.

Today, Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., told reporters that his district office in Smyrna was vandalized with a four-foot swastika last night.

Viveca Novak, at factcheck.org, writes, “Pelosi did not actually accuse opponents of being neo-Nazis; that’s just the way Limbaugh and others chose to interpret her phrase, ‘carrying swastikas and symbols like that.’ It is clear from the images in hand that the anti-Obama protesters were the ones accusing others of Nazi-like tendencies. And Pelosi turns out to be right.”

In fact, Limbaugh spent much of his Aug. 6 radio diatribe invoking the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in a highly provocative way, with a strong paranoid streak.

Limbaugh declared, “The Democrat Party and where it's taken this country, the radical left leadership of this party bears much more resemblance to Nazi policies than anything we on the right believe in at all.”

“The Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo,” Limbaugh claimed, calling it “right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook.” He likened Obama to Adolf Hitler, saying President Obama is “not who he said he was” and cannot be trusted.

An event today showed that Limbaugh’s provocative language is not just an abstract matter.

MSNBC today aired footage of the crowd gathering before Obama’s afternoon town hall meeting on health care in New Hampshire, and pointed out one man in a group holding protest signs with a gun in a holster on his hip.

The gun-toting protestor was holding a sign reading “It is Time to Water the Tree of Liberty.” It is a reference to the Thomas Jefferson quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Police said the man is legally carrying the gun, is nowhere near where the president will be, and is "under constant surveillance," Talking Points Memo reports.

Last Friday, major Jewish groups condemned the use of Nazi comparisons and images to attack health care reform.

David A. Harris, president of the National Jewish Democratic Council, called the Nazi references "not funny" and "profoundly troubling."

"At these too-well-organized 'mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore' town hall meetings around the country this August, more and more of these disturbing Nazi comparisons are cropping up — and they all seem to be coming from the heart of the Republican base," he said. "And it has to stop."

The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement condemning the use of Nazi imagery by some reform opponents as "outrageous, offensive and inappropriate."

The ADL, the nation's largest Jewish civil rights group, specifically condemned Limbaugh’s Nazi comparisons.

“The use of Nazi symbolism is outrageous, offensive and inappropriate," said ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor.

"Comparisons to the Nazis are deeply offensive and only serve to diminish and trivialize the extent of the Nazi regime's crimes against humanity and the murder of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust," said Foxman. "I don't see any comparison here. It's off-center, off-issue and completely inappropriate."

The National Jewish Democratic Council has an online petition “Tell Rush: Nazi Rhetoric Must Stop.” It calls on Clear Channel Communications (the parent company of Premiere Radio Networks which produces “The Rush Limbaugh Show”) to “stop allowing Limbaugh to abuse the memory of the more than 12 million Holocaust victims who suffered and died at the hands of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.”

suewebb @ pww.org

SickForProfit: Video Series Highlights Insurance Company Greed

From: AFL-CIO Now Blog

by Mike Hall, Aug 7, 2009

United Healthcare’s “mission is to help people live healthier lives,” CEO Stephen Hemsley told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in March.

But the health insurance giant’s real mission is to maximize its profits and executive pay and to defeat health care reform that threatens that pot of gold, says the new website SickForProfit.com.

Launched by Brave New Films, SickForProft will feature a series of Web videos spotlighting several large insurance companies—their profits, their CEOs’ astronomical compensation and the stories of everyday families insured by those firms but denied coverage or turned away altogether.

Welcome to the American health insurance industry. Instead of helping policyholders attain the health security they need for their families, big insurance companies get rich by denying coverage to patients. Now they’re sending lobbyists to Washington, D.C., to twist the arms of lawmakers to oppose reform of the status quo. Why? Because the status quo pays.

United Healthcare’s Hemsley finds the status quo quite comfortable, with nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in unexercised stock options and millions in annual salary, according to the first film posted at Brave New Films.

But that same status quo made the first few years of Isabella Griggs life miserable and painful for the little Watertown, Wis., girl, and heartbreaking for her parents. Isabella was born with several life threatening conditions, says her mother, Stephanie, including the inability to eat solid food.

Isabella was forced to use a feeding tube that delivered liquid nourishment straight to her stomach, a painful and frightening treatment for a young child. But when her parents discovered and were accepted into a treatment program for which doctors said Isabella was “an ideal candidate,” United Healthcare refused to pay. Of course, the company had gladly accepted the Griggs’ premiums for years.

After waiting weeks for approval, Stephanie says:

First, we were told that the paperwork was lost, and then we were told that it was being denied….They make all that money off the backs of people like us.

It was only after Stephanie posted a YouTube video chronicling their battle and United Healthcare’s despicable denials, that the Griggs’ family saw some action. After thousands of views, posting on insurance watchdog websites, United Healthcare, seeing the quick viral growth of the video, suddenly had a change of heart and agreed to cover the treatment.

Click here to see Isabella’s story and those of two other United Healthcare customers coldly denied the life-changing treatment. Click here to find out how much insurance industry CEOs are making out of the broken health care system and here to tell your own story of insurance industry abuses.