Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to affect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.
Small Government Conservatives Bought Off With Big Corporate Checks
Robert Borosage argues "small government conservatives" have been bought off by corporate special interests, in Politico oped: "The Young Guns railing against government corruption are funded by industries at the heart of it ... Much of it ... comes from corporations with a stake in Big Government subsidies, regulatory and tax loopholes and the 'corruption' conservatives pledge to clean up ... This contradiction between conservative ideology and corporate interest lies at the heart of the repeated conservative failure to reduce the size of government."
NAACP documents racism in the Tea Party: "The report released by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People argues that Tea Party groups 'have given platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots,' and have attracted white nationalists looking for recruits. 'The Tea Party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political movement who are in their numerical majority, angry middle-class white people who believe their country, their nation, has been taken from them,' it says."
Conservative superstar Rep. Paul Ryan's Social Security plan would slash benefits, finds official Social Security actuary. W. Post: "[Ryan's plan] would slice initial benefits by about a quarter for middle-income Americans who turn 65 in 2050, according to the analysis. Wealthier retirees would see even deeper cuts, losing about a third of scheduled benefits in 2050 and more than half of scheduled benefits if they turn 65 in 2080 ... [Separate from Ryan's plan,] allowing the retirement age to continue rising two months per year until it hits age 70 would cut initial benefits by nearly 20 percent for anyone turning 65 in 2050."
Conservative candidates opposing cheaper student loans, supporting return to bank subsidies. Wonk Room's Pat Garofalo: "Last week, Washington state’s Republican senate nominee, Dino Rossi, advocated undoing the student loan reforms that passed early this year, thereby sticking bankers back between students and their federal loans (and allowing those bankers to take a generous cut of a federal program) ... [Illinois senate candidate Mark] Kirk said that he also opposed the legislation that cut billions in subsidies to private lenders and plowed the savings back into Pell Grants..."
Big Republican plans after November. Not to create jobs. To create investigations. LAT: "If they win the majority, Republicans say that investigating Obama administration practices will be a special focus."
Big Oil Says "Jump," Tea Party Says "Walking Is A Socialist Scientist UN-Concocted Hoax"
Tea Partiers reject climate science, just like Big Oil told them to. NYT: " If dozens of new Republican climate skeptics are swept into Congress, the prospects for assertive federal action to control global warming gases ... will grow dimmer than they already are. ... More than half of Tea Party supporters said that global warming would have no serious effect at any time in the future, while only 15 percent of other Americans share that view ... Groups that help support Tea Party candidates include climate change skepticism in their core message. Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and largely financed by oil industry interests, has sponsored what it calls a Regulation Reality Tour to stir up opposition to climate change legislation..."
Believe in doing something to avert the climate crisis. You have been christened a "climate hawk." Grist's David Roberts: "...it doesn't carry any implications about The Truth. It doesn't say, 'I'm right, you're wrong. I'm smarter and more enlightened than you.' Instead it evokes a judgment: that the risks of climate change are sufficient to warrant a robust response. By definition, everyone must make such judgments on their own ... it becomes about values, about how hard to fight and how much to sacrifice to defend America and her future. That's the right conversation to be having."
Transportation Department announcing funding to create jobs and improve livability, including the removal of anti-pedestrian elevated highways. Grist's Jonathan Hiskes: "Announcing new projects is politically easier than getting rid of harmful ones, so the tear-downs signal a commitment to ending the federal government's history of auto-only transportation funding. It doesn't hurt that aging elevated highways are uniquely expensive to maintain ... roughly 29 percent of the [new] money goes for road projects, 26 percent for transit, 20 percent for rail projects, 16 percent for ports, 4 percent for bicycle and pedestrian projects and 5 percent for planning projects..."
Republican Mocks "Crazier Republicans" Who Oppose Health Care
GOP Sen. Bob Corker says backers of health care repeal are the "crazier Republicans," then backtracks. Wonk Room's Igor Volsky: "Corker’s denial aside, this isn’t the first time the senator has had to backtrack from pouring cold water on the GOP strategy of full repeal."
The individual mandate to buy health insurance was constitutional ... when Republicans proposed it. W. Post's Ezra Klein: "Here are some of the Republican senators who co-sponsored an individual mandate for health care when it was included in John Chafee's 1993 bill and are still serving in the upper chamber: Bob Bennett, Kit Bond, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar. Here are some of the Republican senators who co-sponsored an individual mandate in the Wyden-Bennett bill, and are still serving in the upper chamber: Bob Bennett, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker, Mike Crapo, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley and Judd Gregg ... For a long time, the individual mandate was perfectly acceptable among conservatives. It was their idea, in fact."
The health care law is unconstitutional, says Justice Clarence Thomas' secretly funded activist wife. LAT: "Her engagement in partisan politics through Liberty Central is unprecedented for a spouse of a Supreme Court justice, legal scholars say. Her group is funded by donors whose identities are not publicly disclosed, fueling concerns that corporate donors could secretly fund Liberty Central in order to gain favor with her husband ... she has described her work as separate from her husband's and passionately defended her right to express her opinions, a point legal ethics expert do not dispute ... [NYU ethics professor Stephen] Gillers said he was also concerned by a report that Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia were featured speakers at private meetings held by billionaires Charles and David Koch, wealthy tea party supporters." The Nation's Bruce Shapiro explores the Thomas ethics issue.
State insurance commissioners side with consumers over insurers in major vote on implementing health care reform. Politico: "State regulators unanimously approved a crucial health care reform recommendation Thursday morning, outlining what costs insurers can count as medical spending ... Consumer advocates have strongly supported the regulation while industry has come out against it." EARLIER TNR's Jonathan Cohn: "If the administration can say it's simply validating the judgment of state insurance commissioners, it will be much easier to issue strong regulations."
What About The Obama Tax Cuts?
NYT edit board reminds there are Obama tax cuts due to expire, that deserve extensions: "Voters need to hear more about where their representatives stand on extending far more equitable, and economically sound, Obama-era tax cuts. Those cuts — part of the 2009 stimulus law so reviled by the Republican Party — are targeted on low- and middle-income Americans, constituencies all politicians vow to defend until it actually comes to doing it ... the 'Making Work Pay' tax credit ... has cut taxes by as much as $800 a year for couples making up to $150,000 and $400 annually for single taxpayers making up to $75,000 ... With the economy still in tough shape, a one-year extension makes sense."
Estate tax only applied to 0.6% of households with heirs in 2008, finds new Citizens for Tax Justice reports. Wonk Room's Pat Garofalo: "'The estate tax that would exist under President Obama’s tax plan would affect even fewer estates' ... If it were permanently set at the the 2009 level [as the President proposes], 62.5 percent of estate tax revenue would come from estates worth more than $20 million..."
WH Seeks To Stem Foreclosure Panic, While Preparing To Litigate
WH seeks to reassure about scope of foreclosure fraud scandal. LAT: "A government review of botched foreclosure paperwork so far has found that the problems do not pose a 'systemic' threat to the financial system ... But Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said a comprehensive review of mortgage foreclosure procedures would not be completed until the end of the year ... promising to hold banks accountable if problems are uncovered ... Donovan said the administration was moving as quickly as possible to finish its review. But ultimately resolving the problems is not the government's responsibility, said Michael Barr, assistant Treasury secretary ... 'Fundamentally, this is up to the banks and the servicers to fix,'..."
Treasury elaborates to Huffington Post: "Treasury spokesman Steven Adamske later told The Huffington Post that Barr meant to convey that servicers can not simply hide behind an additional nine weeks of review before fixing their respective problems. Rather, Barr meant to say that servicers should act now..."
TNR's John Judis charges WH with expecting too much from banks: "Roosevelt didn’t rely on bankers’ goodwill. He understood that in a severe downturn, government has to act directly, whether in providing jobs or preventing people from losing their homes"
Federal regulators hire law firm, prepare to sue banks to take back fraudulent mortgages: "[Fannie and Freddie] have a huge advantage over other investors because the FHFA can issue subpoenas. The article mentions estimates that the banks could face put-backs ranging from $24 billion to as high as $179 billion. Quite a range and the actual amount will probably be towards the lower end of the range, and this will play out over a long period (unless there is a settlement)."
Bloomberg suggests forcing bailed out banks to take back fraudulent mortgages risks market stability: "Concern that Bank of America may be forced to buy back soured mortgages helped send its stock down almost 5 percent in the last two days, wiping out $5.92 billion of its market value. The decline runs counter to the Fed’s goal of strengthening the banking system after the worst crisis since the Great Depression."
Home-by-home legal battles taking shape. NYT: "...Frederick B. Tygart, a circuit court judge overseeing a foreclosure case in Duval County, Fla., recently ruled that agents representing Deutsche Bank relied on documents that 'must have been counterfeited.' He stopped the foreclosure ... another judge on Wednesday indicated that the courts would not simply sign off on the banks’ documentation. Jonathan Lippman, the chief judge of New York’s courts, ordered lawyers to verify the validity of all foreclosure paperwork."
Wall Street private equity companies behind law firms known as "foreclosure mills." NYT: "To maximize investment returns, private equity firms often squeeze down costs in the operations they acquire. And some legal experts suggest that could be a factor in the quality of legal documents generated by foreclosure mills ... Tom Miller, the Iowa attorney general ... said he was not aware that private equity firms had acquired some foreclosure-related operations. While there is no law against such purchases, Mr. Miller said the issue could prove significant because it expanded the possibilities of where and how the foreclosure system failed."
LAT looks into the legality of using the electronic database MERS to foreclose homes: "The high courts in at least three states have ruled that MERS, listed on about 20 million home loans as the mortgage owner, standing in for lenders and investors, is not the true owner because it only maintains the database. That has called into question the right of MERS to foreclose on homes, causing some cases to be refiled — and, in at least a few instances, thrown out ... The company's murky legal status as owner of the mortgages has led to class-action suits in California, Nevada, Arizona and Kentucky challenging its right to foreclose on delinquent loans."
W. Post profiles citizen activists that exposed foreclosure scandal: "While meeting for the first time in November at an old one-story law office in [West Palm Beach], the four strangers compared notes and began to piece together the scope of the problem: All over the United States, big financial firms might have been using fraudulent paperwork to evict struggling borrowers from their homes. Now tight-knit, the group is largely responsible for setting off the growing firestorm over foreclosures."
Currency Center Stage At G-20
NYT suggests US is threatening global stability by rebalancing currency: "Financial markets expect the Fed to announce at its meeting early next month that it will proceed with more quantitative easing, involving purchases of bonds, which reduces longer-term interest rates and puts further downward pressure on the dollar. That worries other countries. A stronger United States economy is in everyone’s interest, but they fear that investors will flee America’s low interest rates and declining dollar and instead pour capital into their markets, overheating their economies and creating the types of asset bubbles in stocks and housing that burst with such devastating effects in the 1990s."
Dean Baker rebuts: "... in standard economic theory, developing countries are supposed to be borrowers ... Capital therefore should flow from relatively to slow growing rich countries to more rapidly growing developing countries ... the decline in the value of the dollar would effectively reverse the distortions to the world economy resulting from the IMF-Rubin policy of the late 90s."
US pushes for global coordination on currency, leans on China. Bloomberg: "The U.S. is pushing for the G-20 to agree on a statement of cooperation on exchange-rate issues, either during the Oct. 22- 23 gathering in Gyeongju, South Korea, or at a summit of leaders in Seoul in November ... Geithner’s comments show the U.S. is trying to forge a united front among the Group of Seven nations in urging China and other emerging market nations to let their currencies rise..."
Arvind Subramanian at FT writes that an international currency effort is needed: "...unilateral American action against China cannot be the basis for resolving the currency wars. Effective and legitimate multilateral action to induce Chinese co-operation is necessary. Mobilising a broader coalition of the 'affected but as yet unwilling' countries before the upcoming Group of 20 summit in Seoul should be America’s priority."
