My #1 New Year's Resolution in 2014

Everyone's #1 New Year's 2014 Resolution should have almost nothing to do with exercise -- unless it is to become a local activist for Move To Amend. Everyone's top resolution should be to become an EDUCATED VOTER in 2014!

Lesson 101 - Income Inequality. <== Click Here. 
It's time to understand how the United States of America, in only 30 plus years became the nation with the biggest income gap in the world -- greater than India, China, the UK, the income gap that reflects a system that has allowed the CEO's of multinational corporations based in the United States to "earn" 475 times more than the medium wages of the people working for their companies! ... and pay for just 10% of the US Government.

This was not a mistake on the part of the Republicans, who introduced "Reaganomics." The "Trickle-down theory" that has never been substantiated by facts was used as an excuse to give huge tax breaks to millionaires without raising any revenue to offset the tax cuts by the (R) Bush-Cheney presidency -- vaguely calling the rich "job creators" and claiming that the tax cuts would be offset by jobs/revenue growth.... which did not happen. Then they gave the rich a second tax cut during a time of war -- the first time ever in history -- and that also did not produce any offset jobs/revenue growth. But we were never again talking about the "surplus" created during the (D) Clinton presidency. That was gone.

And then there was the 2008 global financial crisis, caused by bankers playing with high-risk derivatives aiming to make phenomenal profits for the rich... Main Street American lost millions of jobs and a huge chunk of their life-savings for retirement and college for their kids that was invested in their home equity... and many Americans became homeless for the first time.

Make no mistake. It was the #GOP that pushed the Supreme Court to allow unlimited, undisclosed amounts of cash to flow into election campaigns. And the Republican Party is a puppet for the ALEC -- Corporate-American lobby group that peddles anti-worker, anti-union, anti-voter and pro-corporate "model legislation." While the Republican-dominated US House managed to gridlock the US Congress -- which passed only 83 pieces of legislature -- the ALEC lobby group managed to push through 40,000 pieces of "model legislation" in Republican-dominated state senates with Republican governors!

These "American" corporations are multinational global players, headquartered in the USA because they have the most power and pay the least amount of taxes here. What's on their agenda in 2014? For openers, an attempt to abandon laws that require companies to pay overtime to employees. 

Getting Republicans out of office in 2014 is important. 

Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the US House of Representatives, explains the GOP's aversion to extending unemployment benefits this way: “We have been trying to focus this Congress on getting back to a more optimistic view of what the economy can do. It is about jobs. It is about growth. Our focus is about wanting people to get a job. It’s on employment, not unemployment.”

Baloney. With 3 (counted) unemployed people for every existing job, Cantor and his colleagues would be more convincing if they'd vote for job-creating measures like rebuilding the nation's crumbling infrastructure, financing a new WPA similar to the national work program of the great depression of the 1930's -- helping the jobless get new skills, providing childcare when they're at work, giving tax credits to employers who add net jobs, and raising worker pay so they have the purchasing power to fuel private-sector job growth. 

But Republicans oppose all these, and continue to sell the supply-side trickle-down snake oil that tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy create jobs. We've had 33 years of trickle down economics and nothing has trickled down. Besides, the best way to keep the long-term unemployed looking for jobs is to provide them extended unemployment benefits, which requires they keep searching. Otherwise they join the now record number of Americans too discouraged even to look.

Besides, the best way to encourage the long-term unemployed to keep looking for jobs is via extended unemployment benefits that require them to keep searching. Otherwise they join the now record number of Americans too discouraged even to look.