Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.
MORNING MESSAGE: After Obama Speaks, Will The Chamber Spend?
OurFuture.org's Bill Scher: "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $86 million in a failed attempt to defeat health reform from becoming law. The Chamber spent $31 million in a successful campaign to elect more Republicans to Congress. And the Chamber is planning to spend more than $50 million on congressional campaigns next year. Will the Chamber do the same to support its own position for more infrastructure?"
President To Urge Corporations To Create Jobs In Chamber Address
President to push U.S. Chamber of Commerce members to use profits to create jobs. WSJ: "President Barack Obama will ask [corporations] to back his economic agenda, including White House plans to increase federal spending for green energy, roads and bridges and other infrastructure [and he] is expected to call for business leaders to hire and invest more in the U.S. He also is expected to give Chamber members more detail about his plans to move ahead on pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama..."
Chamber still pushing President to deregulate. NYT: "'The White House does deserve credit,' [Chamber lobbyist Bruce] Josten acknowledged. But he is not yet convinced that such steps will tame what he called the 'regulatory tsunami,' among other problems, enough to stir the investment and the new hiring the administration seeks ... Mr. Josten dismissed Mr. Obama’s recently announced regulatory strategy, ostensibly intended to reduce unnecessary burdens on business. 'It’s a rehash of Clinton’s, which was a rehash of Carter’s,' Mr. Josten said."
GOP To Target Regulations
House GOP stepping up focus on regulations. W. Post: "...[Rep. Darrell] Issa will begin a series of hearings Thursday, an effort aimed at fulfilling the new GOP House majority's goal of making federal regulations friendlier to business ... The rules under scrutiny include familiar issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, health-care reform and the landmark Wall Street overhaul. But the committee also will examine more obscure regulations..."
EPA top business target for deregulation. Bloomberg: "...201 companies and industry groups ... responded to Representative Darrell Issa’s request to identify government rules his U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee should investigate. Of the 111 regulations they cited, 57 were issued by the EPA ... among the rules they complained about were pesticide permits, air-pollution standards, the Wall Street regulatory overhaul and a proposed Energy Department rule that aims to conserve water by restricting use of multihead shower fixtures."
EPA head to testify Wed. against House GOP legislation to ban work to cut carbon emissions. Politico: "[Lisa] Jackson last week blasted what she called 'draconian measures' aimed at handcuffing her agency, and insisted that the White House would veto legislation to take away its regulatory authority."
NYT's Paul Krugman ties global food crisis, and its related uprisings, to the climate crisis: "While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production ... severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate ... what we’re getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we’ll face in a warming world..."
House Floor Fight Looms On Spending Cuts
Conservatives to push for deeper cuts during next week's House floor debate on bill to keep government open. Politico: "The most conservative faction in the House, the Republican Study Committee, already is preparing amendments that would choke off funding for President Barack Obama’s new health care law, cut domestic programs by $100 billion and force the government to pay creditors before funding other priorities if the limit on the national debt is hit. The RSC proposals would cut tens of billions of dollars more than Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has proposed ... GOP sources said the leadership is encouraging such fights, arguing that the House should work its will through several tough votes on spending cuts ... the open process promises to divide Democrats, too, giving Republicans a better idea of which centrists might work with them..."
Sen. Rand Paul deems his proposal to slash $500B from the budget "modest" in WSJ oped: "...by reducing wasteful spending and shuttering departments that are beyond the constitutional role of the federal government, such as the Department of Education, we can cut nearly 40% of our projected deficit ... Many of [the Energy Department's] activities amount to nothing more than corporate handouts [including] research grants and subsidies to energy companies for the development of new, cleaner forms of energy ..."
CQ suggests Republican won't go after Social Security and Medicare unless President moves first: "Although tackling the growth of entitlement spending has been a conservative mantra, the new Republican majority in the House has largely been silent on the issue. And some Senate Republicans say that unless Obama takes ownership, starting with his fiscal 2012 budget proposal on Feb. 14, they are not interested in pursuing cuts to entitlement programs ... But the Warner-Chambliss bill could find some legs in the Senate if Durbin, Crapo, Coburn and Conrad maintain their support for the measure’s core provisions. And a presidential push could offer political cover for lawmakers who would otherwise be uncomfortable addressing entitlements."
Health Lobby Cash Shifts Right
Health industry shifts donations to GOP after reform law passage. W. Post: "While Democrats got just more than half of the industries' money before the bill was approved in spite of uniform Republican opposition, the Republican attracted 60 percent after the votes were counted ... Of the more than 60 bills introduced in the current session on health care and related insurance, most have come from Republican lawmakers..."
TNR's Jonathan Cohn explores the health care cost projects from the Medicare actuary: "...the official government projections, including the ones [Medicare actuary Rick] Foster made, suggest the health law will reduce that rate of growth, albeit modestly. But in his reports, and then again in his recent testimony, Foster suggested those projections might be unrealistic. The problem is that they include some automatic, annual reductions in what the Medicare program will pay hospitals—scheduled reductions, according to Foster, that future lawmakers are not likely to allow when they actually come due ... Is he right? Foster admits he isn’t sure ... [If he is] we’d be in the same basic fiscal place we are now, with one key difference: We would have universal health insurance and its protections."
Foreclosure Fraud Linchpin In Spotlight
AP profiles foreclosure attorney at heart of fraud scandal: "The rise and fall of [David J.] Stern, now 50, provides an inside look at how the foreclosure industry worked in the last decade — and how it fell apart. It also shows how banks, together with their law firms, built a quick-and-dirty foreclosure machine that was designed to take as many houses as fast as possible."
Naked Capitalism notes AP investigation suggests widespread crime: "One of the questions [outstanding is] who came up with the idea of robosigning? The article suggests that it was the foreclosure mills in response to servicer pressure on fees [and] depicts servicers as partners with Stern in ... a criminogenic environment."
Glimmer Of Hope For Immigration Reform
Sens. Schumer and Graham still working on bipartisan immigration reform. Politico: "...conservative evangelicals, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, business organizations and immigrant advocacy groups say they have gotten word from Schumer’s office that a renewed effort is under way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce confirmed that it is back in the mix ... Democrats believe the November elections put a bit of a scare into Republicans, who failed to capture the Senate in part because of strong Latino turnout in California, Nevada, Colorado and Washington..."
