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: The Real Jobs Numbers
OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "While some celebrated an unemployment rate of 'only' 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce. Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country ... Average hourly earnings for all nonfarm employees decreased last month by 1 percent. Average hourly earnings increased by only 1.8 percent over the last year, while the cost of living (measured by the Consumer Price Index) increased 3.5 percent. Once again average Americans have fallen behind in earnings and has seen their standard of living decline. Meanwhile, incomes continue to skyrocket for the wealthiest Americans. Income inequality is the worst it's been since the Great Depression. Welcome to the New Gilded Age."
Dems Plan Payroll Tax Cut Compromise
Senate Dems expected today to propose fresh compromise to offset cost of payroll tax cut reports NYT.
Using savings from war drawdowns under consideration. Politico: "Democratic sources declined to say Sunday whether the plan would use war savings to pay for extending and expanding the president’s tax cut, but it will likely run into some opposition on the GOP side if it does ... But Democrats believe they have Republicans in a trap: The House-passed budget relied on savings from the wars to reach its dramatic cuts."
Wind industry pushing hard for tax credit renewal. Politico: "The wind industry in particular has turned up the pressure. Facing strong political headwinds that made extending a tax credit for alternative energy unpopular, the American Wind Energy Association is putting everything it has into getting Congress to address the issue."
Four-day "Take Back The Capitol" protest starts today: "We can have a real impact as Congress deliberates the extension of unemployment insurance benefits for more than 5 million people and other important budget and tax measures. It’s time for the 99% to be a visible, peaceful presence on Capitol Hill. By day we’ll show up at Congressional hearings and K Street lobbyists’ offices, and by night we’ll crash in church auditoriums, union halls, and in tents and sleeping bags."
WH Makes Big Push To Confirm CFPB Head
WH steps up pressure on Senate GOP to confirm CFPB chief. W. Post: "White House officials Sunday issued a new report aimed at ramping up pressure on Senate Republicans to support President Obama’s choice to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as key GOP lawmakers renewed their vow to block any nominee unless broad changes are made to the watchdog agency ... the National Economic Council said the watchdog agency is 'hamstrung' because it can’t exercise its full authority in supervising non-bank financial institutions such as payday lenders, credit-reporting agencies and debt collectors ..."
Senate vote expected this week. Bloomberg: "The president will be 'aggressively' campaigning for Richard Cordray’s confirmation ahead of a likely Dec. 8 Senate vote, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters yesterday."
CBS' 60 Minutes explores why haven't there been many Wall St. indictments: "Why has the Justice Department failed to go after mortgage fraud inside Countrywide? There has not been a single prosecution. Even more puzzling is the Justice Department's reluctance to employ one of its most powerful legal weapons against Countrywide's top executives. It's called the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 ... Lanny Breuer says this Justice Department has been as aggressive as any in history. But a recent report on federal prosecutions from a research center at Syracuse University, says the number of cases brought against financial institutions for fraud is at a 20-year low ..."
Italy Next To Impose Austerity
Italy's new leader imposes new austerity measures. NYT: "... Prime Minister Mario Monti unveiled a radical and ambitious package of spending cuts and tax increases on Sunday, including deeply unpopular moves like raising the country’s retirement age ... so the country can eliminate its budget deficit by 2013. Mr. Monti took the steps in an emergency decree, which means they will take effect before he presents them to Parliament for formal approval."
European leaders hope to agree on plan to save the euro this week. NYT: "The new euro package ... is being negotiated along four main lines. It combines new promises of fiscal discipline that will be embedded in amendments to European treaties; a leveraging of the current bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, to perhaps two or even three times its current balance; a tranche of money from the International Monetary Fund to augment the bailout fund; and quiet political cover for the European Central Bank to keep buying Italian and Spanish bonds aggressively in the interim, to ensure that those two countries ... are not driven into default by ruinous interest rates on their debt."
But Europe is not suffering because of an excessive welfare state, argues Dean Baker: "[W. Post's Robert Samuelson] tells readers that the euro crisis is the grand reckoning of the welfare state. Now that the euro zone economies are growing slowly and have aging population, the welfare state is no longer sustainable. If the Post had fact checkers, they would ask Samuelson why, if the problem is an excessive welfare state, why the countries with the most generous welfare states appear to be doing just fine."
Carbon Emissions Spike
"The Science Is Bad on Carbon Emissions. The Politics Are Worse," argues Time's Bryan Walsh: "...emissions from burning fossil fuels jumped by a record 5.9% in 2010, hitting 10 billion tons last year ... Since 1990—the base year for the Kyoto Protocol—carbon emissions from fossil fuels have increased by 49%, making a mockery of that global treaty's ambition to cut emissions by at least 5%. And it's getting worse—on average, fossil fuel emissions have risen by 3.1% a year between 2000 and 2010, three times the rate of increase seen during the 1990s ... [But the] nearly 15-year-old Kyoto conundrum—that major nations like the U.S. won't accept carbon limits if major developing countries like China won't either—remains unsolved ..."
China floats climate deal. W. Post: "... two of China’s top climate officials suggested they might participate in talks aimed at forging a new, enforceable global warming agreement by 2020. ... The European commissioner for climate action, Connie Hedegaard, suggested in a tweet Sunday evening that it remained unclear whether China had embraced binding climate policies on a domestic level or a global one."
