A wealthy businessman is running on the Republican ticket for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, but he has a problem: he thinks he should get to play by different tax rules than the rest of us.
I could be talking about Mitt Romney, who ran unsuccessfully against U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy in the Bay State’s 1994 election. Or I could be talking about what’s going on right now in 2013.
Gabriel Gomez, a private equity investor who made his fortune working with companies like upscale apparel store Lululemon, is the Republican nominee to succeed former senator and current Secretary of State John Kerry. The Massachusetts special election will be held on June 25. And he has more in common with Mitt Romney than you think.
A special rate for some
During the presidential campaign, we learned a lot about Mitt Romney’s tax rate, which was effectively 14 percent in 2011 despite making $13.7 million that year. (For context, a single person making $50,000 paid roughly 23 percent that year.) This is because much of Romney’s income came from stock dividends and investments rather than salary, which are taxed under a lower rate for “capital gains.”
President Obama proposed changing this with the “Buffett Rule,” which would ensure those making $1 million or more a year wouldn’t pay a lower rate than middle class families. Romney rejected that proposal, calling it a “gimmick,” and a 45 Republican Senators blocked the proposal for even coming up for debate.
Free money for not breaking the law
As a fellow investor, Gomez also made much of his income in the form of capital gains, allowing him to pay that lower tax rate than those of us who earn wages – but that’s not all. In 2005, he also used a special deduction to effectively pay $281,500 less in taxes for doing…nothing.
That’s right. In 2005, Gomez claimed a deduction for making “no visible changes” to the façade of his 112-year old home in Cohasset, Massachusetts. Using a federal tax loophole, Gomez claimed this as a charitable contribution to protect historic homes. So poof! An extra $281,500 in the bank.
Here’s the catch: local laws already prohibited Gomez from making changes to his historic home. In other words, Gomez saved over five times the median household income in the United States just by not doing something that was illegal.
Gomez isn’t the only one who has pulled this trick. The IRS considers it one of the “Dirty Dozen” of most common tax cheats, and the organization that Gomez made the easement to has been targeted by the Department of Justice.
There were many reasons the American people rejected a potential President Romney last year, but certainly the idea that he saw no problem with keeping special breaks for a wealthy few was one of them. Gabriel Gomez has demonstrated that he feels the same way: first by making a fortune thanks to the special capital gains tax rate, and then by exploiting a loophole to maneuver an extra $281,500 into his bank account.
We need less of this greedy maneuvering and exploitation, not more.
Tags: gabriel gomez, massachuetts, Mitt Romney, taxes
Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog
While congressional Republicans are heavily focused on cutting Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits and other harmful budget cuts that threaten the 98%, a better approach is to eliminate loopholes that allow the wealthiest 2% of Americans and Wall Street to pay much less than their fair share of taxes. Focusing on loopholes keeps money in the hands of working families, which helps the economy grow without increasing hardship and economic insecurity for working people.
Many current loopholes just aren’t fair. Take, for example, what Think Progress calls the “Mitt Romney Loophole.” People like Mitt Romney who manage investment funds get paid in two ways. Part of their income is a management fee that is taxed as ordinary income, currently at a top rate of 39.6%. But fund managers also get a cut of the profits of the investments, which is taxed as a capital gain, with a top tax rate of only 20%. The typical investment manager takes a management fee of 2% and gets a 20% cut of the profits, meaning they avoid paying the normal tax rate on the vast majority of their income, something working families are not able to do. As Think Progress explains:
This loophole is one of the main reasons that Mitt Romney paid a tax rate of just 13.9 percent on income of more than $20 MILLION. Meanwhile, millions of middle-class workers pay a much higher rate on their much, much lower salaries.
Closing this loophole would not only make our tax code fairer and more progressive, it would help raise revenue to protect vital programs and leave room in the budget for investments to grow the middle class. Closing just this one loophole that often benefits the ultra-wealthy would raise $21 billion over 10 years.
Photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr
Tags: Corporate Accountability, deficit, Medicare, Mitt Romney, Retirement, social security, taxes
We’re never going to be truly satisfied with how the media covers elections – but after last week’s first presidential debate things got a little out of hand.
Mitt Romney came onto the stage in Denver last week and continuously stretched the truth, changed from his previous positions, and made policy proposals that were mathematically and logistically unfeasible. Blogger Igor Volsky counted 27 myths in Romney’s 38 minutes of speaking time.
Sure, we all laughed at the “Big Bird” mention, but let’s be clear: You can’t increase the size of the military, give an enormous tax cut to the wealthy, lower the corporate tax rate, and reduce the deficit and debt by eliminating subsidies for PBS.
Yet too many commentators across the spectrum awarded a “win” to Romney. Why? He earned more “style points,” some said. He “seemed” more confident and forceful, other said. With health care coverage, jobs, and housing for millions on the line, too many people used the same standards that are applied to American Idol to address the most important decision of the decade.
All this talk of style over substance bothered Working America member Sid Washington, who wrote a letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer titled “Stop focusing on candidates’ debate style and start focusing on who’s telling the truth.”
It never fails to amaze me how superficially our society judges winners and losers in political debates. Style and delivery have become the determining factors, while substance and truthfulness have become insignificant side issues.
When Mitt Romney criticizes the president for the size of the deficit, he fails to mention how Republicans ended negotiations on a deficit-reduction plan because they would not consider tax increases on the rich. When he talks about high unemployment rates, he does not discuss how Republicans have fought and voted against every proposal the president has put forward to increase jobs, including the American Jobs Act.
Instead of obsessing on who looked the best and who had the more forceful debating style, while telling lies and deceiving the voters, we should be focusing on who’s telling the truth on how his proposals will affect middle-class Americans.
But before we begin any debate, we must be truthful and acknowledge that the Republicans have vowed from Day One to make Barack Obama a one-term president. And for this vow, they have forsaken all others, including a vow to implement policies that benefit the American public.
Sid Washington Brook Park
Tags: Jobs, Mitt Romney, Ohio
Reposted from EmptyWheel.net – by Marcy Wheeler
Fairly early in Mitt’s speech last night he said this:
But today, four years from the excitement of the last election, for the first time, the majority of Americans now doubt that our children will have a better future.
It is not what we were promised.
[snip]
It’s not just what we wanted. It’s not just what we expected.
It’s what Americans deserved.
You deserved it because during these years, you worked harder than ever before. You deserved it because when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out movie nights and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour with benefits, you took two jobs at 9 bucks an hour and fewer benefits. You did it because your family depended on you. You did it because you’re an American and you don’t quit. You did it because it was what you had to do.
But driving home late from that second job, or standing there watching the gas pump hit 50 dollars and still going, when the realtor told you that to sell your house you’d have to take a big loss, in those moments you knew that this just wasn’t right.
But what could you do? Except work harder, do with less, try to stay optimistic. Hug your kids a little longer; maybe spend a little more time praying that tomorrow would be a better day. [my emphasis]
The passage is fundamentally important to the logic of the speech–and indeed, Mitt’s entire campaign–both because it pretends Mitt understands the struggles of average people and because it suggests Obama failed to deliver on Hope and Change.
And at the core of the passage are $9 jobs that don’t pay enough to live on.
Which is funny, because just a few hours earlier, the Founder of Staples, Thomas Stemberg, bragged about Mitt’s role in this:
The truth is Mitt was not a typical investor. He was a true partner. Where some saw an unproven new business, he saw a store that could save people money. He recognized that efficiency creates consumer value. He never looked at Staples as merely a financial investment. He saw the engine of prosperity it could become.
Today Staples employs nearly 90,000 people. It has over 2,000 stores. Over 50 distribution centers.
The average self-reported hourly wage of a Staples EasyTech Associate is $8.89. The average self-reported hourly wage of a Staples Sales Associate is $8.54.
Those jobs Mitt talked about as a symbol of America’s failed promise, the ones that don’t pay a living wage? That’s what Mitt’s campaign boasted about last night as his idea of an “engine of prosperity.”
And it was an engine of prosperity, for Mitt, for Stemberg. Mitt’s worth at least $250 million. Stemberg is reportedly worth $202 million. And they got that money by running an engine of prosperity that relies on workers who are Mitt’s own example of the failure of the American dream. “This just wasn’t right,” Mitt said himself. (Not to mention that some of the steel jobs Mitt destroyed probably were $22.50 an hour jobs, with benefits.)
And look at the solution Mitt imagines for these Americans in the dead-end jobs he created. Not joining a union, the historically proven way to improve dead-end jobs. But work harder, cut back on expenses.
Pray.
And, vote for Mitt Romney, the guy who destroyed those $22.50 an hour jobs and replaced them with $9 an hour ones.
The RNC spent a lot of time this week appealing to small business owners. Indeed, those small business owners are the customers whose prosperity Stemberg imagines Staples serving.
But to a large and increasing number of American people, Mitt’s actually arguing that he should be President so he can solve the problem he got phenomenally rich by causing in the first place.
Photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr
Tags: Jobs, Mitt Romney
Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog
Although Mitt Romney continues to try and distance himself from his record of offshoring U.S. jobs overseas during his tenure at Bain Capital, a newreport by the Financial Times’ Robin Harding shows there were even more anti-worker tactics occurring under Romney’s watch at the company. Now we might understand more about why he boasted earlier this year that he’s “taken on union bosses before.”
According to the U.S. District Court and federal documents, Key Airlines, controlled by Bain Capital at the time, ran an unlawful campaign to stop the organization of a union in the 1980s. Mitt Romney was a director of the airline, according to regulatory filings, and a shareholder in the company. The Financial Times put together this report with documents from the National Mediation Board in 1986 and a 1992 judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada.
Financial Times reports:
Key Airlines, an early investment for the private equity firm founded by a young Mitt Romney and two associates, broke the law by attempting to coerce and then dismiss two pilots who tried to organize a union. Two months after a union vote failed, Bain agreed to sell Key Airlines at a large profit in 1986.
Those two Key Airlines pilots later brought the union suppression case to court. In 1992, Roger Foley, federal judge for the District of Nevada, wrote:
The anti-union activities in this case are not merely unfair labor practices as Key argues, but blatant, grievous, willful, deliberate and repeated violations of the Railway Labor Act.
According to the Financial Times:
Key Airlines was a small charter carrier with a military contract to ferry personnel to bases in the Nevada desert. The union effort was suppressed under Bain’s ownership in 1985 and 1986, although a court judgment against the company and its management—including Bain Capital founding partner T. Coleman Andrews III—did not come until 1992. The judgment was later qualified by a subsequent court ruling in 1994, together with an agreement to settle an appeal.
Citing safety concerns in 1985, Key Airlines pilots, co-pilots and flight engineers planned to organize a union.
Financial Times reports management began to coerce the pilots after they heard a union was forming:
According to the court ruling, Key held coercive meetings with pilots; said management would leave and the company lose contracts; and told pilots that salaries, bonuses and benefits could be frozen. Federal labor law forbids an airline “to interfere in any way with the organization of its employees.”
Although outsourcer-in-chief Mitt Romney would like us to believe he invested in companies that created U.S. jobs, his record of shipping jobs overseas at Bain Capital speaks for itself.
Now, we have suppressing workers’ right to collectively bargain to the long list of anti-worker tactics Romney and Bain Capital employed.
Read more on Key Airlines here.
Tags: Jobs, Mitt Romney, outsourcing, Rights At Work
With 16,000 members and growing, Working America is ready to make an impact in the 2012 elections for North Carolina working families.
A story in The Nation by Ari Berman details the political dynamics of North Carolina, and asks if President Obama can win the state like he did in 2012. While that’s difficult to predict, one thing is clear: North Carolinans are tired of corporations getting tax breaks to send their jobs offshore, and they are tired of politicians who campaigned on job creation but then ignored the state’s jobs crisis once in office.
There’s no question that Mitt Romney and his fellow partisans fit that bill: Mitt Romney, the Republican standard-bearer for President, is no stranger to outsourcing. And Republican Senator Richard Burr voted just this past July to filibuster (or, “avoid talking about”) the Bring Jobs Home Act, which would’ve ended those tax break for companies who move jobs overseas. (The other North Carolina Senator, Democrat Kay Hagan, strongly supported the bill.)
Berman tagged along with one of our canvassers one evening:
Working America signs up “working-class moderates” who don’t have a union job but respond favorably to a populist economic message. Organizers do this the old-fashioned way: knocking on door after door…
We talked to housewives, truck drivers, teachers, cashiers, construction workers and nurses. Jobs and healthcare were the main concerns. Brandon [the canvasser] told them about the Bring Jobs Home Act, which would end tax incentives for companies that ship jobs overseas. “We’re out here today to keep good jobs in North Carolina, not send them abroad,” he said during his pitch. The issue of outsourcing could play a decisive role in the campaign. “North Carolinians are folks who have read over and over and over again about their textile jobs and other manufacturing jobs going overseas,” Farinella says. “So it is my expectation that this issue of Romney’s role in Bain Capital—and the notion that Bain shipped jobs overseas—is likely to resonate in North Carolina to a greater extent than it even resonates nationally.”
Since the beginning of the year, Working America in North Carolina has swelled to over 16,000 members. We’re going to be pounding the pavement, educating voters about how their politicians have acted – or not acted – to get folks employed and keep jobs from leaving the country.
To get involved with Working America in North Carolina, sign up here or call our Greensboro office at (336) 288-4970.
Tags: Jobs, Mitt Romney, North Carolina, outsourcing
It took approximately five minutes after the announcement of Paul Ryan as the Republican running mate for the spin to begin. Anxious to pre-empt a conversation about Ryan’s plan to end the guarantee of Medicare, the Mitt Romney campaign is on the air with some (strikingly dishonest) Medicare ads of their own. They have plenty of money to advance this message, so it’s worth unpacking what’s really going on.
First and foremost, the Ryan plan, in any form, would mark the end of Medicare as we know it—as a guarantee of health coverage for senior citizens. Instead, it would give older people a voucher to go buy their own private insurance. The Ryan budget would also increase the eligibility age, delaying the time when retirees could get Medicare. That’s the proposal the U.S. House voted on and passed in March and it’s the model Ryan has continued to promote even as he’s suggested possible tweaks.
So let’s move on to the claims the Romney campaign is making. The Affordable Care Act is paid for partly through billions in future savings—about $700 billion over 10 years in reduced payments to health insurance companies and providers. A lot of that money stays in the Medicare system, by paying for free preventative care for seniors and closing the prescription drug “doughnut hole.” The attack leveled by Romney, Ryan and their allies—an attack that’s Jonathan Cohn rightly called “astoundingly cynical”—is that this constitutes a massive cut to Medicare.
But here’s the catch: in the Ryan budget that passed, these future savings are included, even as the rest of the ACA is repealed. So the same reductions that the Romney campaign is complaining about were voted on and approved by Ryan and virtually every House Republican.
In the ACA, the cost savings that come out of Medicare go back into the health care system. In the Ryan budget, they’ll be needed to pay for the massive tax cuts proposed in that plan. Cohn notes that not only does this money get pulled out of providing health care entirely, but the attack the Romney campaign is making is a “brazen misrepresentation of reality.” Or, to say it in fewer and shorter words, “a lie.”
The Ryan plan doesn’t replace the guarantee with the vouchers for 10 years, so that major change doesn’t immediately affect today’s retirees. But the repeal of the ACA’s provisions on prescription drugs and preventative care absolutely will. If those provisions are gone, seniors who are on Medicare now will be paying hundreds of dollars more out of pocket. Ryan’s cuts to Medicaid, which many seniors depend on for nursing home care, would also have a big impact—his proposed cuts to Medicaid and the repeal of the ACA Medicaid expansion are a big and under-covered change in his budget. Some 6 million of today’s retirees depend on Medicaid and could lose out under Ryan’s plan. This is what was in the Ryan budget the House passed, and he hasn’t backed off of this at all.
What’s more, if Ryan’s plan kicks in ten years from now, today’s Medicare beneficiaries will get an unpleasant wake-up call as the voucher plan starts to erode the program:
In 2022, when the limited-subsidy program would be introduced, seniors who qualified for traditional Medicare would be allowed to switch to the new program. If healthier or younger beneficiaries make the change to lower their out-of-pocket costs, those still participating in Medicare would be part of an insurance pool that is less healthy and more expensive. To cover those higher per-person costs, Medicare might well be forced to either raise premiums or limit reimbursements to health care providers—which could prompt many to stop taking Medicare patients.
Romney has suggested he may back off of the Medicare savings that Ryan included in his original budget. But in that case, the Ryan budget math gets even more implausible. And by the standards Romney has laid out for how he wants his budget to work, Medicare would have to be slashed either way. That these cuts to programs for vulnerable people would be required in order to pass his huge tax cuts for the rich adds insult to injury. As Derek Thompson notes, Romney’s proposals “have clear and inevitable conclusions: Tax cuts for the richest and spending cuts for the poorest.”
It’s hard to overstate how hypocritical and dishonest the new Romney-Ryan attacks over Medicare are, coming from two people who have pledged changes so radical that they’d leave it unrecognizable.
Tags: Medicare, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Retirement
This past weekend the Romney campaign posted on Facebook that the Obama campaign is seeking to restrict voting rights for members of the military in Ohio. Not only is this patently false, but Romney’s lie covers up the fact that he supports SB 295, a policy that would restrict early voting for all Ohioans, including over 900,000 veterans.
Let’s back up for a second. Since 2005, Ohio has had in-person early voting three days prior to the election. If you’re a worker who pulls double shifts, a senior without reliable transportation, or a disabled veteran with limited mobility, these early voting days are essential for making your voice heard at the voting booth.
Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature passed HB 194, which removes those early voting days for everyone in the state. Ohioans were outraged, and collected thousands of signatures to get a repeal of the law on the ballot. Republicans in the legislature, embarrassed, repealed their own law, but sneakily kept another voting restriction, SB 295, in place. SB 295 ends early voting for those three crucial days prior to an election. The only people not affected are active duty military, because of a federal law called Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act (UOCAVA).
Now the Obama campaign is suing the state of Ohio because SB 295 literally takes the opportunity to vote from thousands of Ohioans (93,000 voted early in Ohio in 2012). And in a perversion of the truth that has become a Romney trademark, the Romney campaign is claiming that this lawsuit is in fact targeting members of the military!
“Mitt Romney is living in Bizzaro-world,” Iraq War veteran and former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) told reporters this morning, “He’s trying to suppress votes all over the country, and then he lies and accuses Obama of the same thing.”
He added: “He’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes and use our veterans as props.”
This is truly politics at its worst. The truth is irrelevant to the Romney campaign; what they really want is headlines across the country saying that Obama is trying to hurt members of the armed forces. To them, it’s not important that in over a dozen states, because of restrictions on voting rights passed in the last two years, veterans who served our country with honor and distinction are being kept from choosing their representatives – and our next Commander in Chief.
Unlike Romney, we don’t have to “imagine” a situation where military votes are being restricted. We’ve already seen them in action: a Wisconsin Air Force veteran kept from using his VA card as voter ID, World War II veterans in their 90’s arbitrarily purged from voter rolls in Florida, or the Pennsylvania veteran refused state-issued voter ID after an hour-long drive to the nearest PennDOT center. The coordinated GOP attack on voting rights is real, and is being executed “with the precision of a joint military strike,” in the words of Iraq War veteran and former Rep. John Boccieri.
Here’s the bottom line: If the Obama campaign succeeds in this lawsuit, early voting access will be extended to everyone in Ohio; that includes veterans, active duty service members, military families, and anyone else who is registered and over 18.
If the position held by the Romney campaign prevails, and SB 295 is in effect, all Ohioans, including over 913,000 veterans and thousands more military family members, will lose access to early voting. And for many of them, including seniors and disabled veterans with limited mobility, that means losing access to voting, period.
This isn’t opinion, this isn’t spin, and this isn’t Working America trying to cover the Obama campaign. If anything, the Romney campaign is using members of our Armed Forces as political cover while they support policies that make it harder and harder to cast a ballot in this country.
As VoteVets.org Chairman Jon Soltz wrote: “My question for Mitt Romney is simple: ‘Why won’t you join the Obama lawsuit in Ohio, and protect our veterans’ right to vote?’”
Tags: Mitt Romney, Ohio, veterans, voting rights
Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog
The huge export of American jobs (some 6 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade) by U.S. corporations has become a focal point of the presidential campaign. Today, a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) outlines how Republican Mitt Romney’s proposals would “encourage and further accelerate the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries.”
While today’s current corporate tax laws offer tax incentives to firms that move jobs overseas, companies still face some U.S. tax obligations on their foreign profits. But Romney’s proposal would completely exempt all overseas profits by American companies from U.S. taxes. That would, writes Seth Hanlon, CAP’s director of fiscal reform, “exacerbate the worst features of our current tax system.” Romney’s tax-free scheme would:
- Enhance the tax code’s rewards for moving jobs and investments overseas;
- Provide a gratuitous windfall to some of the very companies that have already shifted jobs and profits overseas; and
- Further invite the offshore tax haven abuse that deprives the U.S. Treasury of tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year.
What are we talking about in windfall dollars? According to Hanlon, exempting overseas profits from tax would provide a tax cut for multinational corporations of $130 billion over 10 years. When combined with Romney’s proposal to slash the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, which would cost more than $900 billion, it pushes the total corporate tax cuts in the Romney plan to more than $1 trillion.
Romney claims that U.S. firms would use the $1 trillion tax cut to create jobs in the United States. That’s either a naive and Pollyannaish view of corporate commitment or a cynical campaign lie. My bet’s on the latter. Here’s what Hanlon has to say.
His theory is based on the flawed belief that some of the world’s largest corporations would invest more in the United States if only they had more cash at their disposal. Yet large corporations already are holding onto near-record levels of cash—$1.7 trillion at the end of 2011—and are also able to borrow at historically low rates. Given a windfall tax cut on their foreign earnings, they are likely simply to buy back shares or pay dividends to investors.
There’s precedent for that prediction. That’s exactly what happened, says Hanlon, when Congress enacted a one-time “tax holiday” for foreign profits in 2004:
Corporations used the tax-amnestied profits for share buybacks and dividend payouts rather than investment or job creation in the United States. Many corporations claiming the tax break actually shed jobs.
The report also deals with other corporate-friendly aspects of the current tax code and how Romney’s plan would make them even friendlier (click here for the full report). In addition, it contrasts President Obama’s agenda—including the Bring Jobs Home Act—on corporate taxes to Romney’s tax swag bag for corporations. Obama proposes:
- A minimum tax on corporate profits to ensure that multinational corporations cannot avoid taxes by exploiting tax havens;
- Curtailing tax deductions that subsidize foreign investment; and
- Denying deductions for expenses associated with outsourcing jobs abroad while providing a 20 percent credit for “insourcing.”
Writes Hanlon:
President Obama’s international tax plan and that of his presidential rival Romney offer a clear contrast. By exempting the foreign profits of U.S. corporations from U.S. tax, Romney’s plan would reward and potentially accelerate the shift of jobs and profits overseas. President Obama’s plan, by contrast, helps level the playing field for job creation here at home.
Tags: Corporate Accountability, Mitt Romney, taxes
Source: facebook.com via Working America on Pinterest
The big news on the cable channels last night was the continuing battle for the Republican presidential nomination. But down the ballot in Milwaukee, amidst the unprecedented Scott Walker-inspired anti-worker fervor, a community organizer defeated a longtime Alderman in a nearly overlooked upset.
Pro-working family candidate Jose Perez challenged three-term Alderman James Witkowiak on a platform of economic fairness. A lifelong Milwaukee resident, Perez worked in real estate, economic development, and with the faith community as Executive Director of MICAH, a social justice coalition of city congregations. He took the incumbent Witkowiak to task for voting against policies working families need – and won.
“The people of District 12 went to the polls to make a change,” said Working America State Director Peter Drummond. “Yesterday, they united across demographic lines to get good representation for their families and communities.” Witkowiak used to be popular in this district, in which 49 percent of registered voters self-identify as Latino and 43 percent identify as white.
Working America supported Perez against Witkowiak—who became a symbol of candidates who take labor’s support for granted even as they undermine basic tenets of economic fairness. “Working people are tired of politicians who claim to represent their interests and then vote against minimum job requirements such as a decent wage or the ability to earn time off for maternity leave. That’s not who they want representing District 12,” Drummond said.
This victory would be significant on its own, but think about what’s going on in Wisconsin right now. After six straight months of job loss in the state, major figures like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are standing fast with the incredibly divisive policies of Gov. Scott Walker. Since he has no evidence that his policies are good for Wisconsin, Walker is relying on millions of dollars in attack ads against workers and their unions. “There is a lot of poisonous rhetoric coming out of the right-wing noise machine,” Drummond said, “but, as evidenced yesterday, working families in District 12 know who stands with them and who doesn’t.”
So despite the endless attack ads on the airwaves, the vicious anti-worker agenda coming out of the Governor’s office, and the contentious political atmosphere in the state, this was at the end an election about bringing pro-worker leadership to a city that needs it now more than ever. “We shared our vision of Honesty, Integrity, and New Leadership for our Neighborhoods and the people of the 12th District responded clearly,” Perez wrote last night, “Tonight, we celebrate. Tomorrow, we get to work and begin bringing the leadership to City Hall that the people of the near south side truly deserve.”
The Milwaukee Area Labor Council, SEIU and We Are Milwaukee also played critical roles in this upset.
Tags: elections, Jobs, Milwaukee, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Wisconsin
