Lets Go Scott Free in 2014 Scott vs. Women

July 1, 2014 SHARE THIS INFORMATION WITH EVERYONE No. 14-8

Senator McConnellWhere Are The Jobs?

Speaker BoehnerWhere Are The Jobs?

Actions Speak Loudly by Rep. Lori Berman (D-District 90)

If you want to know how Governor Scott and Republicans in the Legislature feel about women, look at their actions this past legislative session.

No Hearings Allowed The Florida Legislature did not allow one committee hearing nor did the governor advocate for a bill that would grant women equal pay for equal work. Women in Florida make 16 percent less than men for the exact same job and yet no effort was made to redress this wrong.

Emphasis On Limiting Womens Rights Instead, the Legislature devoted itself to limiting womens reproductive rights.

Legislation was passed that requires doctors to determine viability of a fetus and then restrict abortions. Despite repeated concerns raised about women who are discovered to be carrying fetuses with severe fetal abnormalities, no exception

is made in the legislation for this situation nor are there exemptions for rape or incest. This bill, as signed by the governor, could potentially force a women to carry a fetus with severe abnormalities to term.

Intrusive Legislators It is difficult to understand how legislators think that they are in a better position to make choices about womans health than a women and her doctor.

Chose Not To Protect This same Republican-run legislature and governor chose not to protect pregnant women in the work place.

A bill that would have added pregnant women to the protected classes under the Florida Civil Rights Act was stopped from being heard on the House floor supposedly because a Florida Supreme Court ruling clarified the issue.

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[Continued on page 2, No Protection]

5 TALKING POINTSReasons to Fire Rick Scott:His Disrespect For Women

1. Governor Scott and the Legis-lature did not allow committee hearings on equal pay for women, nor did he advocate for them.

2. Governor Scott and his Legisla-ture continue to limit womens reproductive rights: Doctors must determine the viability of a fetus, but then abortions are not allowed in the event of severe fe-tal abnormalities. No exceptions!

3. Governor Scott and his Legisla-ture refused to protect the civil rights of pregnant women in the workplace, but they passed a law already covered by federal law to penalize physical injuries to preg-nant women.

4. Governor Scott signed a bill mandating medically unnecessary ultrasounds for pregnant women.

5. Governor Scott signed a bill over-riding local earned sick leave ordi-nances. He only cares about corpo-rate interests; not about families.

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Interestingly, multiple other bills were passed solely for the purpose of codifying federal or state case law, including a bill that codified application of foreign law and one that addressed juvenile sentencing guidelines.

Eerily Silent When it came time to protect pregnant women workers, however, the Legislature and governor were eerily silent. It was okay to codify laws that served their purposes but not laws to protect pregnant women employees.

Echoing this hypocrisy was a bill to add enhanced penalties for injuring a pregnant women. Federal law already addresses this issue but the Legislature and governor pushed it forward. Concerns were raised about the lack of required criminal intent in such situations, but these concerns were ignored.

Unnecessary and Harmful The record is clear. The Republican-dominated Florida Legislature pushed throughand Governor Rick Scott signedunnecessary and harmful legislation regarding womens health while totally ignoring legislation that could help women grow and advance in their careers.

My neighbor said The system is rigged. What

good is my voting?The system gets rigged

unless you vote!FL State Rep. Lori Berman

Scott Simply Doesnt Understand What Matters To Women

Former Governor Charlie Christ

Rick Scott won't say whether he believes women should be paid as much as men, but he'll argue proudly that he has the right to influence the conversations women have with their doctors.

That's just wrong.

Right now (June 10, 2014), there is a bill on Scott's desk that attempts to insert politics into a deeply personal decision between a woman and her health care provider and it shouldn't be tolerated.

Women in Florida and all across the country deserve leaders who will advocate for them, and, just as importantly, who will back off when it's not our place to interfere.

I've always trusted women to make their own health care decisions. That's why I vetoed a bill that would have mandated medically unnecessary ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. Scott signed that bill the first chance he got.

Just like so many politicians in Washington, Scott simply doesn't understand what matters to women.

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[No Protection, continued from page 1]

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Scott Doesnt Like Earned Sick LeaveDespite letters from Gloria Steinem and strollers full of petitions left at his Tallahassee office, Rick Scott signed a law overriding any earned sick leave ordinances on the local level.

Critics see the controversial legislation as underscoring Scotts commitment to corporate special interests the bill was backed by Walt Disney and the Olive Garden parent company as well as his apathy towards Floridas working families.

The fact that Rick Scott signed this anti-middle class, anti-family bill into law, then jumped on a plane to France, proves that the governor of Florida does not care about working middle class families and he knows how unpopular and damaging this bill is, Amy Ritter of Florida Watch Action told the Orlando Sentinel.

Supporters believed the bill would stabilize the states business environment, uniting a patchwork of sick leave laws that could vary county to county.

Yet critics believe the law unfairly targets minorities, who often hold the jobs without paid leave, and women, who are often responsible for taking time off work to care for sick family members.

By signing HB 655 Governor Scott shows once again he is beholden to Big Business (Disney, Darden) at any cost, even at the expense of women, children, workers, and those falling behind. The inequity of wealth in Florida widened even more and the real possibility of quality of life enhancements for the people of Florida vanished by a stroke of the pen by a heartless and uncaring man, Fred Frost, Chairman, Miami Dade County Coalition for Healthy Families and Workplaces, said in a release.

A recent poll revealed that 80 percent of Floridians support earned sick leave.

The same poll found that over half of respondents do not trust the Florida legislature to make the right decisions for local communities and middle-class families. Huffington Post

Florida Planned Parenthood PAC Launches Women Are Watching

Electoral CampaignJune 13 2014

Message to Florida Politicians: Womens health is a winning issue.Today, the Florida Planned Parenthood PAC announced its 2014 Women Are Watching (WAW) campaign to educate voters about candidates positions on womens health and rights. The WAW campaign builds off Planned Parenthood advocacy and political campaigns that helped propel President Barack Obama to victory in 2012 and Terry McAuliffe to the governorship in Virginia last fall.In November, Floridians have an opportunity to elect a governor who supports access to womens health and move closer to securing a pro-women state legislature, said Lillian A. Tamayo, chair of the Florida Planned Parenthood PAC. The campaign will hold Tallahassee politicians accountable for the wave of anti-womens health legislation weve seen in recent years by talking with voters about the impact of these policies and motivating them to get out the vote in support of womens health.Over the past few years, a record number of anti-womens health bills have been introduced and passed throughout the country. During Gov. Rick Scotts first term, four pieces of anti-womens health legislation were signed into law in Florida alone.As we see an unprecedented level of attacks on womens health across the country and here in Florida, support for access to affordable birth control, Planned Parenthoods preventive health care services, and access to safe and legal abortion have become a litmus test for many people when deciding who to vote for, said Tamayo.

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Republicans Are Definitely Pro-Birth (theyll do everything they can to make sure that that baby

comes out, regardless of how it got in), but are they pro-life?)

Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, had this to say on Bill Moyers show in November of 2004:

I do not believe that just because youre opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you dont? Because you dont want any tax money to go there. Thats not pro-life. Thats pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

So true, Sister Joan. I say Democrats should not be afraid to talk about the morality of life, of caring for children who are born. It seems the Republican obsession with being pro-life lasts about nine months. After that, its each baby for herself. So Democrats, lets be clear and strong: Being pro-birth is not automatically the same thing as being pro-life. Former MI Governor Jennifer Granholm

Hobby Lobby Ruling Fuels War On Womenby Gwynne Chesher, West Palm Beach

We do not have an abortion problem in America we have an unwanted pregnancy problem. The five conservatives on the Supreme Court just increased the number of future abortions by removing access to birth control to low-wage working women. Excusing corporations from covering IUDs and other types of birth control medication has nothing to do with the religion of the corporation and everything to do with weakening the Affordable Care Act and chipping away at womens reproductive rights.Last month, these five justices gave anti-choice protesters the right to harass patients at womens clinics, and this month, they have ramped up the Republican war on women with the Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby ruling.Without insurance, birth control medication costs are equal to a months pay for minimum-wage and low-wage workers. Bosses will have more control over a female employees personal reproductive decisions than she does. It should also be noted that the court did not rule that Hobby Lobby would no longer have to pay for vasectomies. In other words, the conservative justices have ruled that bosses may discriminate, but only against women.The case makes clear the conservative stance regarding women: Stay home, be quiet and make babies. Sounds more like some Middle Eastern cultures than the America we grew up in.

AND ON OTHER TOPICS

Sleepwalking Toward PlutocracyMarshall C. Whitfield (1935-2012)

for Buzzflash At Truthout

Chapter 7The Hijacking And The Deficit

[Continued from Issue 14-7]

[For example,] take the deficit (approaching $14 trillion in late 2010), falsely attributed by Republicans to tax and spend Democrats. The truth is that all Presidents prior to Reagan patriotically contributed to paying down our WWII debt.

The Hijacking Then came the hijacking, and from Reagan through G.W. Bush, Republican administrations increased our national debt by roughly $9 trillion (Clinton actually ran a small

surplus). Most of that $9 trillion was, quite simply, a Republican payoff to the Plutocrats in the form of irresponsibly low taxes. (An interesting micro-example: the Bush tax cuts continue to put an extra $187,000 in George W.s personal pocket each year.

Voodoo Economics But turning America into a debtor country wasnt bad enough. The hijacking also brought a profound shift in our populations thinking about debt. Reagan came into office preaching Voodoo Economics (so named by George H. W. Bush), severing the link to depression-era realities learned by our grandparents.

We Dont Have To Pay As We Go Suddenly, after years of relative fiscal conservatism, U.S.

Heard on Wall Street: I have a woman friend.

She has $4 million. If they raise her taxes by 3% I dont know how the poor woman is going to live!

[Continued on page 5, Voodoo]

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citizens heard the President himself a lovable and believable father figure telling us we didnt have to pay as we go after all. This permissiveness marks the start of the great American consumer borrowing binge, which brought us to the 2008 housing bubble and crash.

Devious Subtlety The final connection between the Republican hijacking and the deficit is a masterpiece of devious subtlety. Remember, for the Plutocrats, the whole point of the hijacking was to reduce government regulations and taxes and nothing accomplishes those objectives better than shrinking government.

Huge Deficits And how do you scare the American public into supporting smaller government? With huge deficits. Huge, scary deficits that will have to be paid off by your children and grandchildren. With that image filling voters minds, Republicans have neatly framed the entire deficit issue as a matter of cutting Social Security, Medicare, and other programs to avoid impoverishing our grandchildren. No one mentions the other solution to the deficit problem: paying for what we spend.

Top Tax Rate Used To Be 94% No one mentions that in WWII, the top tax rate was 94% (starting at todays equivalent of $2.4 million). If todays top tax rate of 34.5% was raised to far less than that, in order to responsibly fund two wars and recovery from the Bush recession, our deficit would steadily come under control. But Republicans (with rare exceptions like Senator Dick Lugar) are in the iron grip of the Plutocrats and will never let that happen. Yachts for billionaires now trump patriotism.

GUNSAn Open Letter to Lovers of the Gun

Op-Ed by William Rivers Pitt, Truthout.org24 January 2014

Wakefield Elementary School in Turlock, California, was put on temporary lockdown on Tuesday amazing, isnt it, how terms like temporary lockdown have snuggled up next to terms like elementary school in our common-usage lexicon without anyone batting an eye because a man was shot across the street.Two students were shot by a student at the Delaware Valley Charter School in Philadelphia on Monday. According to reports, an 18-year-old graduate of the school gave a 17-year-old student the gun that was used.A 16-year-old student at Albany High School in Georgia was shot at approximately the same time

[Voodoo, continued from page 4]

[Continued on page 6, Guns]

Seduced By Voodoo Economics Sadly, we have all become seduced to some degree by Reagans Voodoo Economics, spoiled by paying insufficient taxes. And alarmingly, even non-Republicans are starting to believe the Plutocrats propaganda that U.S. corporate tax rates are already uncompetitive. Which is patently false if you take into account all the Plutocrat-designed loopholes and exclusions in our tax code but how many people dig through our tax code to find that out?

The Big Threat Then theres the big threat: If we raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy job-creators, theyll leave the U.S. Such bullshit! Big corporations have already outsourced most labor-intensive work because of wage, not tax, differentials and the wealthy job-creators (the Murdochs and Koch brothers, our version of Russian oligarchs) arent going anywhere. They know that the U.S. is the best place in the world to live and bring up a family.

[Sleepwalking, continued in issue 14-9]

Question to ask a plutocrat:

If your taxes are raised by 3%, will it change your standard of living?

Question to ask a Walmart employee:If your taxes are raised by 3%, will it change your standard of living?

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as the student at Delaware Valley Charter was shot. The victim is expected to survive.A student at Widener University was shot on Tuesday while sitting in his car. As of this writing, he is in critical but stable condition.A student at Berrendo Middle School in New Mexico opened fire in a crowded gymnasium with a sawed-off shotgun several days ago, seriously injuring two students. Parents are frightened to let their children go back.A student at Liberty Technology Magnet High School in Tennessee was shot the week before last. He was 17 years old. A police dog found the gun, and the shooter is in custody.A student was shot and killed on the campus of Purdue University on Tuesday. The killer surrendered immediately.A piece of construction equipment on the campus of the University of Oklahoma backfired twice on Wednesday, sending the student body into a shelter in place panic before the police determined there was no threat.Seven school shootings in 24 days? I cant imagine what they were worried about.I said this on New Years Day: In 2010, by comparison, there were nine school shootings in America that killed seven people. In 2011, there were eleven school shootings that killed nine people. In 2012, there were fourteen school shootings including the massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary and Oikos University that killed 43 people. In 2013, there were twenty-three school shootings that killed nineteen people. Nine, then eleven, then fourteen, then twenty-three. If the trend holds, we can look forward to maybe thirty or forty school shootings in 2014.I was wrong. Seven school shootings in the first month of the year means we are on pace, if this keeps up, to have no less than 84 school shootings by the end of December.You.Yes, you, who love your guns.You.I would ask what is wrong with you, but I already know: you love your guns more than you love your

child, or his child, or her child, or my child. You love your guns, period.Prove me wrong, because you havent yet.You.I am puking sick of reading every single day about how your baby, your toddler, your brother, your sister, your cousin, your niece, your nephew, blew their brains into their lap with a gun you left lying around, because freedom, or something.I am sick of mourning the gun dead day after day, every day, because every day someone wins the Someone Gets To Be Dead Today lottery, because of you, and a whole lot of those winners are children.I am sick of how you hide behind gun money, gobs and gobs of political gun money, while complaining about the influence of money in politics. If any other item in common use in America - like aspirin, or a car - was wasting people with the dreary regularity of guns, that item would be banned by congressional fiat . . . but its guns, so the slaughter slogs on, even as you tell your friends you hate the influence of special interests in politics, because youre a fraud in Technicolor.I see you. And I am sick and tired of you.I hope I pray that you are sick of yourself as you watch the bodies pile up around you like cordwood, as you see the shootings at this school, and that school, and this school, and that school, and someday your school, which will be on the TV news from a helicopters view, with a voice guessing at the latest body count, while you are waiting for the word.I would spare you that experience. Please spare me that experience.It is not the anti-gun people who are going to make this right. It is the pro-gun people who know better, who see this slaughter for what it is, who will make this right.Seven school shootings in 24 days.See. Be disgusted. Do something.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

[Guns, continued from page 5]

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