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: Labor Day Is A Day to Rest, Remember and Act - for "Entitlements" and Jobs
"The White House keeps hinting that President Obama will once again propose cuts to Medicare and Social Security—either when he presents his jobs proposal next week, or shortly afterwards. That would roll back the hard-won principle that people who work hard deserve their time of rest. If Americans return from their Labor Day celebrations to hear their President announce these cuts, it will feel like the breaking of an ancient compact. Voters should encourage him not to make that mistake, and not to break that promise. " Read more »
Call To Action: Sign the petition urging President Obama to spare Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from cuts—and to keep the focus instead on putting people back to work.
The Big Zero
No net new jobs growth in August, the Labor Department reports. "Employment growth ground to a halt in August as sagging consumer confidence discouraged already skittish U.S. businesses from hiring, keeping pressure on the Federal Reserve to provide more monetary stimulus to aid the economy. ... Nonfarm employment for June and July was revised to show 58,000 fewer jobs. ... If job growth does not accelerate, it could take more than four years to return to the pre-recession employment level."
Instant analysis from OurFuture.org: "The imperative for the president is now more clear than ever. He must present a bold, visionary plan to address today's jobs emergency, or risk delivering to the nation's unemployed ... zero."
Democrats pressuring Obama to go big, NPR reports. "The president's jobs package will almost certainly include measures for payroll tax relief, business tax credits for hiring and infrastructure projects. Bill Galston, a former aide to former President Clinton, says he thinks the president needs to go even bigger and lay out a growth agenda that includes a solution to the mortgage debt crisis and a long-term vision for fundamental tax reform. ... What his Democratic supporters desperately hope he does not do is lay out an agenda designed to win Republican support. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is one of Obama's liberal supporters who thinks the president has been too fixated on bipartisanship and finding the magic set of policies that will appeal to Republicans in Congress. ... Republicans don't even seem open to proposals they once supported, like an extension of the payroll tax cut."
Rep. John Larson plans to introduce bill to add job-creation to the mandate of the deficit-reduction "supercommittee." Ezra Klein writes: "Larson is on the right track here: the political system's hard-won insights into how to achieve deficit reduction -- or at least how to make it more likely -- should be applied to jobs, too. That the supercommittee wasn't designed this way in the first place is evidence of how misplaced Washington's priorities are."
Economists say Obama has a lot of job-creating options. Peter Goodman at HuffPo reports. "Infrastructure spending is particularly promising, say proponents, because it is likely to generate jobs in the very areas of the economy that have been hardest hit as the housing boom has gone bust -- construction and manufacturing. ... [Pavlina R.] Tcherneva, the Franklin & Marshall economist, says we need a modern version of the Works Progress Administration, one of the most ambitious undertakings of the New Deal, the federal government's response to the alarming joblessness of the Great Depression. ... A paper published last year by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College concludes that so-called social care -- meaning early childhood education and home health care for the elderly -- could generate even more jobs per federal dollar spent than infrastructure projects. ... Aaron Edlin, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and Edmund Phelps, an economist and Nobel laureate at Columbia University, delivered a paper calling for targeted tax credits for employers who hire low-wage workers."
McClatchy survey counters right-wing talking point about "job-killing taxes and regulations." "McClatchy reached out to owners of small businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operations, to find out whether they indeed were being choked by regulation, whether uncertainty over taxes affected their hiring plans and whether the health care overhaul was helping or hurting their business. Their response was surprising. None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath."
Heat Vs. Light In Solar Company Bankruptcy
House Republicans work to whip solar company bankruptcy into political attack on Obama administration. "The Republicans are probing the White House role in the 2009 federal loan guarantee to Solyndra Inc., a California solar company that announced this week it is shutting down and filing for bankruptcy. The shutdown is a bit of an embarrassment for the administration ... President Obama visited the company just more than a year ago to tout White House green energy efforts."
While conservatives try to score political points, there are lessons that we should learn from the Solyndra bankruptcy, says Stephen Lacy and Joe Romm: "Expect the Solyndra debacle to be re-hashed over and over this political season in an attempt to completely tear down the Obama Administration’s investments in clean energy. ... In today’s market, companies like Solyndra and others are forced to compete with low-cost Chinese manufacturers who benefit from significant state support and a government policy which creates markets at home and abroad for their products. ... Solyndra highlights the broader choice we face as a country: do we want to compete in the global market place – creating American jobs and selling American products in the process – or do we want to buy the technologies of tomorrow from countries like China? This isn’t about picking winners and losers. It’s about choosing to succeed, or choosing to fail."
What China does to beat the U.S. on solar manufacturing: "Loans at very low rates from state-owned banks in Beijing, cheap or free land from local and provincial governments across China, huge economies of scale and other cost advantages have transformed China from a minor player in the solar power industry just a few years ago into the main producer of an increasingly competitive source of electricity." The New York Times also reports that recent bankruptcies and closings in the U.S. solar industry "represent almost one-fifth of the solar panel manufacturing capacity in the United States, according to GTM Research. "
Unraveling The Housing Mess
The U.S. plans to sue several big banks over mortgage securitization practices that led to the economic meltdown, The New York Times reports. "The Federal Housing Finance Agency suits, which are expected to be filed in the coming days in federal court, are aimed at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, among others, according to three individuals briefed on the matter."
The U.S. is stuck with 248,000 repossessed homes. Bloomberg Businessweek: "Washington is sitting on nearly a third of the nation’s 800,000 repossessed houses, making the U.S. taxpayer the largest owner of foreclosed properties. With even more homes moving toward default, Fannie Mae (FNMA), Freddie Mac (FMCC), and the Federal Housing Administration are looking for a way to unload them without swamping the already depressed real estate market. Trouble is, they haven’t figured out how to do that. ... One idea the Administration is exploring: allowing Fannie, Freddie, and FHA to keep an ownership stake in the properties by converting them to rentals in partnership with private investors."
More Pressure On Obama To Say No To Tar Sands Pipeline
Robert Naiman lays out a stark choice for the president: "By denying the permit for the pipeline, President Obama can take a concrete action against climate chaos without securing one Republican vote, without spending one tax dollar, without getting approval from the Tea Party. If, on the other hand, President Obama were to approve the permit for the pipeline, then he would be acting to promote climate chaos"
Bill McKibben talks to Climate Progress at the site of ongoing White House protests. Joe Romm concludes: "You go to war against climate change with the president you’ve got. We need to figure out how to buck [Obama] up — figure out how to deliver a message that a significant part of his constituency are single-issue voters on the climate. And I can’t think of anybody who’s doing better work in that area than McKibben."
Al Gore weighs in: "The tar sands are the dirtiest source of fuel on the planet. As I wrote in Our Choice two years ago, gasoline made from the tar sands gives a Toyota Prius the same impact on climate as a Hummer using gasoline made from oil. This pipeline would be an enormous mistake. ... [W]e must continue to press for much more rapid development of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies and cuts in the pollution that causes global warming."
Justice Rings Up Political Controversy in Phone Deal
Justice Department move to block AT&T-T-Mobile merger draws sharp rebuke from labor. From The Hill: "The [Communications Workers of America] blasted the move as "simply wrong. ... The DOJ apparently believes that workers should be on their own instead of having a fair choice about union representation," it said. However, the union directed all of its ire directly at DOJ, and did not broaden its critique to the entire Obama administration."
Justice Department moved because AT&T didn't move fast enough to address anti-competitive concerns. "The Justice Department came to a meeting the day before looking for AT&T to lay out a game-changing national remedy to eliminate what it saw as the anticompetitive defects in the proposed merger, and that didn’t happen ... AT&T was under the impression that it would have more time to present ideas that would assuage the government’s reservations about the deal ... In the end, the Justice Department concluded the companies on the other side of the table weren’t responding to concerns that the deal would hurt competition and raise consumer prices in the wireless phone market, a person familiar with the decision said."
Breakfast Sides
Rep. Barney Frank rebukes Senate Republicans for obstructing President Obama's appointees in Washington Post op-ed: "The president has nominated Richard Cordray, an able, experienced and thoughtful former state attorney general who has a record of achievement in protecting individuals against financial abuse, to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And the Republican minority in the Senate has announced that it intends to deny any consideration of the individual whom the president has nominated pursuant to his constitutional prerogative. They will do that by blatantly distorting the Constitution, substituting a refusal to allow the constitutionally mandated nomination process for the legislative process in which they simply do not have the votes to accomplish what they want. Cordray is just the latest capable, dedicated public servant to fall victim to a Republican mugging."
Labor must make "sustainability" a hallmark of its future, argues Joe Uehlein, a former AFL-CIO leader now directing Voices for a Sustainable Future. "To have a future itself, organized labor needs to reorient itself around the objective of providing a sustainable future for all working people and the world we inhabit. That means putting millions of people to work creating a sustainable economy, society, and environment."
