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: An Opposition Party, Not A Center-Right Coalition
OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "Voters don't want radical austerity that supports the newly rich, and they don't want 'austerity lite' either. The President and his party should consider the fate of Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats before committing themselves to joining with the right in a 'coalition government' that's doomed to fail. Sure, they'll eventually have to compromise to keep the government running. But before they do they should offer voters a real alternative, not just a cup of weak tea whose best quality is that it's not Republican cyanide."
Speaker Threatens No Vote To Raise Debt Limit
"Boehner won't promise debt limit vote" reports Politico quotes: "If the president doesn’t get serious about the need to address our fiscal nightmare, yeah, there’s a chance it [the debt limit vote] could not happen."
Speaker Boehner suggests he might give up protecting subsidies for Big Oil. WSJ: "'It’s certainly something we should be looking at,' Mr. Boehner said in an interview with ABC World News. 'We’re in a time when the federal government’s short on revenues. They ought to be paying their fair share.' The Ohio Republican stopped short of endorsing a rollback of all oil industry tax breaks, and said he wants to consider the effect a change in the tax treatment of oil industry investments would have on job creation."
House GOP education cmte chair proposes cutting Pell Grants to cut deficit and appease S&P. Wonk Room's Pat Garofalo: "'"...it’s pretty hard to justify a program that has tripled in costs in just a couple of years," [Rep. John] Kline said.' While the Obama administration has increased the maximum amount of aid available under the Pell Grant program, about 40 percent of the program’s growth in in the last few years is due to increased demand amidst the Great Recession."
What will Sen. Conrad do? Politico: "Liberals are worried that Conrad will sell them out by pushing entitlement reforms. Republicans are attacking him for dragging his feet in releasing a fiscal 2012 plan that may raise taxes, and members of a bipartisan group of negotiators – known as the Gang of Six – don’t want him to undercut their own deficit cutting effort ... he’s quietly preparing for two possibilities: one budget based on the Gang of Six and another based on his own ideas ... 'I hope he’s listening to where people are and the core values of Americans rather than where the Beltway elites are,' said [Campaign for America's Future Co-Director] Robert Borosage..."
Conservative Dem Sen. Joe Manchin to back austere McCaskill-Corker spending cap. The Hill: "Manchin is expected to give a speech in his home state where he will endorse the 'CAP Act,' which sets a tighter spending limit than the president's budget calls for, as well as a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution ... Manchin has already indicated he won't support a debt-limit increase unless it is tied to a long-term deficit-reduction plan..."
Conservatives Fail To Fast-Track Health Reform Lawsuit
Supreme Court turns back conservative attempt to fast-track overturning of health reform law. CBS: "As a result, judicial review of President Obama's signature legislation - which [VA AG Ken] Cuccinelli said had created 'cripping and costly uncertainty' - will continue in federal appeals courts. In the meantime, the federal and state governments have begun to put in place other parts of the law..."
TNR's Jonathan Cohn notes House GOP plan to raise Medicare retirement age would cause some to lose coverage: "...Urban Institute researchers Amy J. Davidoff and Richard W. Johnson concluded that simply raising the eligibility age for Medicare 'would leave about 9 percent of [65- and 66-year-olds] uninsured, while another 11 percent would be underinsured because they could only afford limited nongroup policies.' And that's actually a best case scenario, since employer insurance has become less available since that [2003] study appeared and because the House Republicans would reduce funding to Medicaid, which is the primary safety net for the poor."
Medicare chief Donald Berwick notes the House GOP Medicare plan amounts to rationing care. Politico quotes: "It is paradoxical really that with all this talk of rationing, the proposal we hear about how to fix American health care is to take it away from people. That’s from the very people who are crying rationing. If you look at the proposed withdrawals of support to Medicare beneficiaries and Medicaid, it’s withholding care from the people who need the care. You tell me what that is."
Ezra Klein stacks up the House Republican plan to dismantle Medicare vs. the public option: "The central health-care reform in Paul Ryan’s budget, the one that’s got him so many plaudits for courage, would actually increase costs. The health-care reform that progressives have been pursuing for more than two years would cut them. And yet calling for Medicare to be privatized and voucherized is considered serious, while calling for a public option is considered tiresome."
Bank Regulator Opposes Big Fines For Foreclosure Fraud
Top bank regulator warns against big fines on fraudulent mortgage servicers, in FT interview: "John Walsh, acting comptroller of the currency, told the Financial Times that he supported financial penalties for mortgage servicers, led by Bank of America and Wells Fargo ... But the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has differed with some state attorneys-general, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which all want a more far-reaching settlement, with $20bn in fines and at least some of the money used to reduce the debt owed by struggling homeowners ... Mr Walsh said the controversial idea of a mortgage principal writedown was still 'on the table' but the OCC’s role would be to decide whether the scheme threatened the safety or soundness of the US banks."
Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith rips OCC's Walsh for protecting banks: "... what Walsh is effectively recommending in this Financial Times interview is not only letting polluters get away with doing harm, but also effectively subsidizing them."
Slate's Eliot Spitzer reviews what the Levin-Coburn report found about Goldman Sachs: "First: The banks traded for their own interests directly against the interests of their clients ... The second, undiscussed issue is the danger of a self-regulatory market ... We now know that Goldman was well aware that the market was heading for disaster ... Did they ever go to any governmental agency and suggest that the government step in to slow down a market that was running out of control? No."
"Six Questions for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke" from Mother Jones' Andy Kroll and Nick Baumann: "What more can the Fed do to put Americans back to work? ... Would you consider a higher inflation target? ... Is the Fed too close to Wall Street?"
Public Pensions On Chopping Block
Detroit may lead trend in cutting public pensions. NYT: "Conventional wisdom and the laws and constitutions of many states have long held that the pensions being earned by current government workers are untouchable ... Now the move in Detroit — made possible, lawyers said, because Michigan’s constitutional protections are weaker — could spur other places to try to follow suit."
State pensions are in bad shape ... because of Wall Street. Stateline: "The damage done by the Great Recession to state public pension systems is now clearer than ever: The most recent available figures, for fiscal year 2009, show that the gap between what states had set aside to pay for employee retirement benefits and the amount they had promised the workers had grown to $1.26 trillion ... The [Pew] report confirmed the depth of the beating suffered by public pension funds in the months following the Wall Street collapse."
Breakfast Sides
NLRB will sue states for banning unionization by petition. NYT: "The National Labor Relations Board has told state officials that it will soon file federal lawsuits against Arizona and South Dakota in seeking to invalidate those states’ constitutional amendments that prohibit private sector employees from choosing to unionize through a procedure known as card check ... it would invoke the United States Constitution’s supremacy clause in asserting that the state constitutional amendments conflict with federal laws..."
Rick Perlstein chronicles the history of conservative lying, at Mother Jones: "Today, it's not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It's just about anyone—a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera—who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale ... That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now."
