This page was last updated on September 27, 2011.
Altmire Votes to Hold Emergency Aid Hostage; Randy Shannon; Progressive Democrats of America – PA 4th CD Chapter; September 23, 2011.
If you’re familiar with the positions taken by Progressive Democrats of America – PA 4th CD Chapter, you won’t be surprised to learn at least three members of Beaver County Reds are communists, whether they still refer to themselves that way or not. BCR leadership consists of Tina Shannon (chairperson), Randy Shannon (treasurer), Robert Schmetzer (vice president), Peter Deutsch (secretary), and Carl Davidson (webmaster and perhaps unofficial leader), a self-described Marxist who once “tr[ied] to create a new communist party.” They also appear to be the leaders of Beaver County Peace Links and some or all are involved with the Marcellus Shale Organizing Committee of Beaver County (MSOCBC) and Can We Afford It? (CWAI). Of this group, one was a leader of the now-defunct Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) and, according to KeyWiki, two are (or at least were in 1993) members of the Communist Party USA. The Shannons were also leaders of the apparently-defunct Beaver County Coalition for Social Justice. In the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) [originally a splinter group of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)], Mr. Davidson is a co-chair and the Shannons are members of the CCDS national coordinating committee. Robert Schmetzer is Democrat party local town chair for South Heights.
From 2004 to 2008, the BCT published at least 17 letters from Mr. Shannon. I found none since 2008. You can find my critiques of those letters here, here, here, here, and here. In addition to what you learned about Mr. Shannon’s positions here and in his letters to the editor, consider the following exchange on a fellow BCR member’s Facebook wall (9/27/11).
Lefty #1: “Capitalism has to go. Merely taxing/regulating always fails in the end.”
Mr. Shannon: “Divide and conquer. Take down the crazy bankers first.”
“PA 4th C.D. Congressman Jason Altmire voted with the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives to hold hostage emergency aid to flood victims in PA and other states.”
[RWC] A more honest sentence would have been “Democrats ‘voted … to hold hostage emergency aid to flood victims in PA and other states’ to protect deficit/debt-raising taxpayer-funded handouts to so-called ‘green’ and labor union management special interest groups.”
Back in April Mr. Shannon proclaimed “THERE IS NO DEFICIT!!!” When my critique of that piece indicated it made no sense, Carl Davidson made the following comment on Facebook: “‘No deficit’ simply means the tax system is broken. There’s plenty of potential revenue out there to correct imbalances with progressive change in the tax laws and their enforcement. A financial transaction tax is an excellent choice, as is taking the $106K cap off FICA. And none of this need significantly harm productive investment in new manufacturing generating real wealth.” Translation: “Deficit” doesn’t mean government spending more than it takes in. As long as our total (local, state, & federal) effective tax rate is less than 100% of family income, there can be no “deficit.” The point of this “blast from the past” is to remind you lefties have a different dictionary than the rest of us and what they appear to say frequently isn’t what they mean.
“Altmire supported the austerity agenda of the far right which says that emergency aid cannot be funded without cutting the funds of programs already in place.”
[RWC] Here’s a question. When you choose to make a personal “emergency aid” contribution, do you take out a loan to do so or do you spend less elsewhere? If you choose to spend less elsewhere, do you consider yourself to be a bad person, or a good person who managed to contribute in a fiscally-responsible way?
Mr. Shannon failed to note among his “programs already in place” was “a loan program that encourages production of energy-efficient cars. Democrats said this program had helped create 40,000 jobs and could yield many more.” You know, like the $535 million we taxpayers lent to Solyndra (a “green” company hyped by President Obama that produced solar panels) that recently went belly-up and laid off its 1,100 employees.
Note the apparent leftyspeak definition of “austerity:” spending the same as before but on different things. What is “far right” about offsetting increased spending in one place with spending cuts elsewhere? Isn’t that what most of us do in our own lives? Comments like this say far more about today’s lefties than today’s right.
Remember the big deal congressional Democrats made about their “Pay-Go” bill to pay for new spending with increased revenue or offsetting spending cuts? Neither do Democrats.
Finally, the “shared sacrifice” lefties constantly talk about apparently doesn’t apply to lefty-favored programs.
“Neighboring Democratic Congressmen Mark Critz and Mike Doyle voted against the bill that ultimately failed due to overwhelming Democratic opposition and the opposition of a handful of Republicans.
[RWC] Mr. Shannon failed to note Democrats and Republicans opposing the bill had different reasons for their opposition. According to the NY Times article cited by Mr. Shannon, “Democrats remained nearly united against the measure because they saw the amount of disaster assistance — $3.65 billion — as inadequate, and they objected to the Republicans’ insistence on offsetting some of the cost with cuts elsewhere.” The same article asserted “more than 40 Republicans rejected the measure because they did not believe it cut spending enough.”
FYI, Mr. Shannon’s “handful of Republicans” was 48, about 20% of House Republicans. Mr. Shannon must have big hands.
In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity.
© 2004-2011 Robert W. Cox, all rights reserved.