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Hello everyone! Welcome to the new website for the Plantation Democratic Club!!!
Earlier posts here are imported from our former website, so some links may not be fully functional. For more information, please feel free to email us at info@plantationdems.org
**Plantation Democratic Club Members and Friends:**
Reminder that there will be NO meeting in July and August. We hope you have a great summer and we look forward to seeing you at our next meeting on September 8th.
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It never ceases to amaze, the onslaught of far flung corporate conglomerates that shape our lives. Some of those influences are as obvious and longstanding as the food we eat, the cars we drive or the electronic devices that for better or worse consume us.There’s Big Agriculture with its stranglehold on food availability, purity and prices; Big Energy and its mission to engineer an oligarchy worthy of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil; and Big Technology as it continues to commandeer whole market shares of military and civilian investments.But equal to any of these macro-economics entities is the behemoth power wielder known as Big Pharma – a focused handful of global, uber-capitalist industries who are playing God with poor folks the world over ...The pharmaceutical industry has long been a global poster child for catering to the privileged to the neglect of ill poor folks, especially those in developing nations – an implicit guiding strategy rarely exposed to the harsh light of public/ governmental scrutiny.For obvious financial and political reasons, the CEOs that head up Big Pharma are a disciplined if sometimes ethically-challenged lot: They know that from where the boards and shareholders sit, nothing good happens once their mega-mogul executives wander off-message in the middle of an interview.But wander they sometimes do. Just ask Bayer CEO Marijin Dekker.Responding to an inquiry about why Bayer is opposed to India’s efforts to lower the costs of a desperately needed compound, Dekker made a proprietary misstep: “We did not develop this drug for Indians. We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.”Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/Don Rollins
Democratic President never have “any class” according to partisan ideological Republicans. Bill Clinton never should have played the saxophone on Arsenio Hall, Jimmy Carter never should have given an interview to Playboy and now President Obama. Florida’s Junior Senator was quoted in regards to a question about Donald Trump by Fox News saying:
“We already have a president now that has no class. We have a president now that does selfie-stick videos, that invites YouTube stars there, people that eat cereal out of a bathtub.”“It’s important to have a presidency that restores dignity and class to the White House.”Read More. Source: The Florida Squeeze/Kartik Krishnaiyer
GOP Presidential candidate Jeb Bush left the Governor’s office over eight years ago, yet his influence continues to dominate the legislative agenda of the state GOP. His views on education have been particularly damaging and each GOP legislator in our state must pass a “Bush litmus test” on education in order to be in the good graces of party activists and donors. But when Bush was Governor, he eventually lost the support of many GOP lawmakers in Florida.While at first Republicans signed on in lock-step to Bush’s “reforms” cracks in the support for school “choice” have been apparent for a decade now. Many Republican elected officials have realized for all of the phony organizations and big corporate cash splashed on the school “choice” effort, that grassroots support for anything that destroys the public schools system is minimal even among self-proclaimed conservatives.Bush failed to deliver on job promises and his funneling of state funds to Scripps Research Center now looks like a disaster. Since Bush began pushing for school “reforms” Florida’s ratings in academic progress and higher education have continued to decline and we have seen countless for-profit schools go out of business. The “reforms” pushed by Bush including an over emphasis on standardized testing has contributed to a downturn in morale among Florida’s best and brightest teachers. Despite all of this, Bush’s allies continue to push “reforms” which cast aspersions on the public school system when in fact the failures in the education system have come from the inadequate funding, constant tinkering of standards, over-emphasis on testing and the push for charter schools/vouchers during the Bush, Crist & Scott Governorships.Now Bush seeks to push this radical agenda forward nationally using his candidacy for President as a vehicle.Read More.Source: The Florida Squeeze/Kartik Krishnaiyer
Editor’s note: This story by Nancy West was sponsored by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and hosted by Vermont’s VTDigger. West founded the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism, which will launch its news website NHinDepth on Sept. 1. Read More... 
Nearly two decades after the federal courts did it, state courts in South Florida and across the Sunshine State have begun to allow the public online access to documents contained in case files.Unlike the federal courts, however, local court clerks in South Florida and other areas aren’t charging any fees to view, print or download millions of available pages of public records. Read More. By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Hillary Clinton was taking questions and answers on Facebook this afternoon and one of the questions came from Wesley Lowery, reporter for the Washington Post. His question hit upon one of the hottest topics among progressives:
You chose not to speak at Netroots Nation this weekend, two of your Democratic primary rivals did -- both were interrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters, who asked: "As the leader of this nation, will you advance a racial justice agenda that will dismantle -- not reform, not make progress -- but will begin to dismantle structural racism in the United States?"How would you have answered?
Hillary Clinton's response below:Read more.Source: Daily Kos
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Deicke Auditorium, 5701 Cypress Road, Plantation
We are pleased to host Saad Khan, South Florida Regional Organizer of Emerge USA. Emerge USA is a non-partisan organization whose work includes voter education, voter registration, phone banking and absentee ballot expansion within the Muslim, Arab and Asian Pacific communities.Emerge has developed a database of 150,000 voters with whom they communicate regularly and they provide feedback to local elected officials and candidates on the issues that are important to their members.Allan Siegel, Community Outreach Coordinator for the Broward County Aviation Department will discuss the airport expansion.Cynthia Busch will update us on changes in the Democratic Executive Committee (DEC) as we head into campaign season and Rick Hoye, our Area Leader, will discuss the formation of the Greater Sunrise Plantation Democratic Club!This will be our last meeting until September and we hope you will join us!
The third of February 2011 was mostly a ho-hum day on Wall Street — but not for companies offering Medicare Advantage plans. Several of those firms hit the jackpot, tacking on billions of dollars in new value after federal officials signaled they might go easy on health plans suspected of overcharging the government.The stocks took off after the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services advised the health plans in a memo that it was rethinking a move to ratchet up audits of the privately run Medicare plans. Some of these plans are run by publicly traded insurance companies whose fortunes can rise and fall significantly upon news of a change in Medicare policy.At the time, health insurers were dreading the prospect of tougher audits, fearing they could wind up owing the government millions of dollars as a result.Read More.Source: Florida Bulldog/Fred Schulte
In the face of public suspicion, a majority of the Broward School Board last week allowed Superintendent Robert Runcie’s move to exclude the public from sitting on a committee that will select companies to manage $800 million in voter-approved construction projects.The suspicion: that Runcie and Derek Messier, his chief facilities officer, want to get around contracting reforms imposed after a scandal in order to control who gets the lucrative management contracts.Read More.Florida Bulldog/William Hladky
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It seems that the fracking industry’s biggest concern is keeping their operations secret. Whether they’re talking about the chemicals in their frac fluid, how they pay (or don’t pay) royalties to landowners, or even whether doctors can tell their patients what they’re treating, industry representatives have pushed to keep their secrets. The industry has been pretty good at keeping people in the dark.But two recent disclosures have shed some light on how the industry manages to obscure the details of its operations. On Tuesday, Mike Soraghan at EnergyWire broke the news that scientists in Oklahoma knew five years ago that the state’s recent unprecedented swarms of earthquakes were probably due to oil and gas operations. (We confirmed with Mike that he had uncovered these emails after pursuing an Open Records Act request in Oklahoma. Previously, he had analyzed federal earthquake data to break the news that Oklahoma had more earthquakes than California in 2014.)Read More.Source: Food And Water Watch/Wenonah Hauter
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — now treated as a serious contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination — and his Republican colleagues are seemingly intent on trying to repeal the 20th century.They have rammed through the Legislature a “right-to-work” law for Wisconsin workers. The Assembly on March 6 passed the bill 62-35, after the Senate narrowly passed it 17-15 a week earlier. After Walker signed the bill on March 9, Wisconsin became the 25th “right-to-work” state in the nation and represent another major victory over workers for Walker in the eyes of his ultra-conservative donors and political base.Walker crushed public employee union rights in 2011, and although the epic battle helped to ignite the massive Occupy movement, it also raised Walker to national popularity among the Right and corporate executives. Since then, two Midwestern states, Indiana and Michigan, have become “right-to-work” states.While Walker and his allies are claiming that a “right-to-work” bill is a prescription for job growth, the pro-RTW forces are actually promoting a fatal “cure” for Wisconsin’s private-sector workers whose wages are already 15% below the national average.Martin Luther King, Jr. accurately captured the impact of right-to-work laws in undermining economic justice and genuine democracy back in 1961: “Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer, and there are no civil rights.”While “right-to-work” advocates among business elites claim to be generously protecting the individual freedom of workers to avoid paying union dues, this display of concern is simply “a fraud,” King declared. “Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone.”Recent data bear out King’s conclusions. The Congressional Research Service concluded in a December, 2012 report that states like Wisconsin, which permitting “fair-share” or “union-security” provisions showed sharply higher median wages: $50,867 compared with $43,641 in right-to-work states, a 16.5% differential amounting to $7,226 per year. Workers in “right-to-work” states are much less likely to have healthcare and pension benefits as well.Read More.Source: The Populist/Roger Bybee
For years, the outsourcing of defense and intelligence work was, with good reason, controversial in political circles. But in the last years of Bill Clinton’s administration, the president authorized the CIA’s creation of the first US government-sponsored venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, designed to invest in cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies. The firm, named after Ian Fleming’s fictional character “Q,” who masterminds James Bond’s spy gadgets, was founded on Sept. 29, 1999, when the intelligence agencies came to realize they couldn’t produce the technology required to make sense of the vast amount of data they had acquired.The firm’s mission is to “identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and broader US community.” This process provided a way of tapping the resources and creativity of Silicon Valley — which undoubtedly had gained a technological edge over government in the post-Cold War period — without the burden of trying to directly recruit the free spirits of Palo Alto into government bureaucracy.Under the guise of In-Q-Tel, the CIA has invested in hundreds of start-ups, including a company called Keyhole, whose satellite mapping software became Google Earth. In-Q-Tel proved immensely successful in its first five years, bringing revenue into the agency and, more significantly, allowing it to discreetly co-opt technologies and companies that would exponentially enhance its spying capabilities without causing the public to ever raise an eyebrow.Read More.Source: Progressive Populist/Robert Scheer
President Obama has his swagger back. Ignoring the electoral rebuke of 2014, he claimed the growing economy as a mandate for his progressive agenda, delivering a State of the Union address bristling with veto threats and challenging the Congress to stand with working families.The speech was designed to rouse Obama’s popular majority coalition against the Republican congressional majority. While it ended with a long, soaring peroration about “one America,” in Obama’s signature voice, the speech itself threw down a gauntlet at Republicans, inviting a debate about direction that will frame the 2016 election. It presented a president willing to compromise but ready to fight.To that end, Obama focused the speech about values and direction, not on programs. This made the choices clear – and neatly closeted the reality that many of the programs are gestures, not near the scope needed to deal with the problem addressed.Read More.Source: Campaign For America's Future/Robert Borosage
When the fossil-fuel divestment movement first stirred on college campuses three years ago, you could almost hear Big Oil and Wall Street laughing. Crude prices were flirting with $100 a barrel, and domestic oil production, from Texas to North Dakota, was in the midst of a historic boom. But the quixotic campus campaign suddenly has the smell of smart money.
One of the biggest names in the history of Big Oil – the Rockefellers – announced last September that they would be purging the portfolio of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of "risky" oil investments. And that risk has been underscored by the sudden collapse of the oil market. After cresting at more than $107 in mid-June, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate dipped below $50 a barrel in early January. The crash carries big costs: Goldman Sachs warned that nearly $1 trillion in planned oil-field investments would be unprofitable – even if oil were to stabilize at $70 per barrel. The industry is already scaling back the hunt for high-cost sources of new oil. Chevron has shelved drilling in the Canadian Arctic, and Hercules Offshore, a significant driller in the Gulf of Mexico, has idled four rigs and laid off more than 300 workers.Plunging profits are also putting the brakes on fracking. The biggest player in North Dakota, Continental Resources, is cutting expansion plans by more than 40 percent for 2015. And if crude prices drop much lower, the U.S. boom could go bust. The break-even price in North Dakota's Bakken field, Continental CEO Harold Hamm confessed to Business Week in November, is $50 a barrel. Oil's collapse threatens to destabilize global governments from Caracas to Tehran to Moscow. And it is punishing the valuations of oil companies: From late June to early January, across the world, the 10 oil firms with the largest proven reserves collectively lost roughly 20 percent of their market value.Read More.Source: Rolling Stone/Jim Dickinson
It's good that many Republicans have joined Democrats in declaring the growth of economic inequality a problem. And some are even looking to solutions beyond making the rich richer through tax cuts. As we've seen, rising stock prices do not necessarily lead to jobs — for Americans, that is.The crumbling of the once-mighty American middle class has two unstoppable causes, globalization and automation, and one stoppable one, a poorly educated workforce. A high-school diploma no longer guarantees a decent income. That's something we can fix.President Obama's proposal for a free community college education is a good start. Two-year colleges are the gateway to more job training or a four-year college degree.Let's dispense with defeatist talk that we can't afford to educate our people. Obama's plan is to pay for the schooling with higher taxes on America's economic elite. It wouldn't even bother with the upper middle class, just the super-rich.Read More.Source: The Creators/Froma Harrop
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