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: Unemployed Confront Congress At Take Back The Capitol
OurFuture.org's Dave Johnson: "At Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy's office, a small group of citizens also sought to discuss with the congressman his votes against the jobs bills that have been sent to the Congress by the White House. They included Nancy Castaneda of Los Angeles, who used to have a job cleaning the apartments of people who were evicted. But the pay was meager and sporadic, and eventually she was told there wasn't sufficient work for her ... Jibri Range said he's having the same experience. The 19-year-old is taking courses to get a high school equivalency certificate, but in the meantime hasn't been able to find a job even in the fast-food restaurants in his Los Angeles neighborhood ... This is going on in offices of dozens of members of Congress today, with the unemployed and workers demanding that the 99% and the unemployed be heard, just as much as the corporate donors and billionaires are heard."
Foreclosed Homes And Congressional Offices, Occupied
Protesters "Take Back the Capitol." McClatchy: "Undaunted by a steady morning drizzle, hundreds of protesters emerged from their 'tent city' on the National Mall and trekked to the Capitol, where they made good on their promise to 'swarm the halls' and track down members of Congress ... In many of the office meetings with GOP lawmakers, staffers were polite but dismissive, telling protesters that the congressional representatives or senators they sought were out of the office or too busy to meet with them. At that point, most protesters decided to occupy the offices or camp out until the lawmakers showed up ... The protest activities continue Wednesday, when the group walks to K Street to protest the political influence of corporate lobbyists."
Occupy Our Homes takes on the housing crisis. Truthout's Mike Ludwig: "...the Occupy Our Homes national day of action against foreclosure saw home occupations, civil disobedience actions and community events in more than 20 cities, reflecting a shift in focus from tent cities to local neighborhoods ... Occupy activists said the movement is decentralizing and becoming more tactically diverse after police raids ended tent-city-style occupations in cities across the country in recent weeks."
GOP Deeply Split Over Payroll Tax Cut
House GOP split over including multinational corporate tax break in payroll tax cut bill. The Hill: "On one side stand Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who support approving the measure ... Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, stand on the other side of the debate, and their resistance makes it unlikely that a repatriation provision will be included in a year-end package ... All four Republican leaders broadly favor the policy behind repatriation, which would allow U.S. companies to temporarily bring profits here at a drastically reduced tax rate."
More from The Hill on GOP divisions: "Under intense pressure from President Obama, GOP leaders have decided to back one of the centerpieces of his jobs plan. But they have yet to find a combination of sweeteners and offsetting spending cuts that will persuade their rank and file to endorse an idea many of them have criticized."
Peter Dreier slams Republican resistance to extend jobless aid in LAT oped: "For more than 2 1/2 years, the number of jobless Americans has outstripped the number of available job openings by more than 4 to 1 ... Congress has never allowed unemployment insurance to expire with the jobless rate above 7.2% ... Now the Republicans aren't saying they outright oppose an extension, because that would be unpopular in hard-hit states like Ohio ... Instead, they've added a poison pill, insisting that any extension of unemployment benefits be paid for by making other cuts, which will shed even more jobs. The Democrats have proposed paying for the extension of jobless benefits and the payroll tax cut with a tax increase on those making more than $1 million a year, a plan that Republicans oppose. In other words, the Republicans are more willing to provide tax breaks for the rich than unemployment benefits for the jobless."
Corporate America is sitting on $3.6T instead of creating jobs. HuffPost: "If America's largest banks and non-financial companies would just loosen their death-grip on a chunk of the $3.6 trillion in cash they're hoarding and move it into productive investments instead, the report estimates that about 19 million jobs would be created in the next three years, lowering the unemployment rate to under 5 percent."
Transportation experts gather to solve how to secure more public investment for infrastructure. W. Post: "Already sobered by the reality that, at the very best, Congress might vote to keep funding at current levels — roughly $54 billion a year — the career transportation experts received another dose of bad news last week. Americans don’t trust their leaders — notably Congress — to spend transportation tax dollars wisely and are deaf to appeals for additional spending ... In addition to keeping the message local — referendums to spend on local transportation projects are approved overwhelmingly — advocates should focus on positive outcomes, like job growth, and emphasize the success of projects that come in on time and under budget."
President Takes Aim At Inequality
President frames fundamental debate around inequality at site of famous Theodore Roosevelt speech: "Now, this kind of inequality -- a level that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression -- hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, when people are slipping out of the middle class, it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom ... It’s also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run. Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. ... But there’s an even more fundamental issue at stake. This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try."
Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky raves: "This was Obama’s best speech in a very, very long time, and it showed that he and his political people have finally figured out how to express the new, quasi-populist mood in this country in a way that sounds utterly majoritarian and unthreatening—and that backs the GOP into the corner of defending things that most Americans find indefensible."
OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow argues the President needs to follow through: "... it's encouraging to see the President channeling the old Rough Rider in Kansas. It was good to see him taking the rhetorical fight to corporate interests and arguing for extending unemployment insurance. In the past he's also said the right things, if not always forcefully, about corporate election reform and taxing the wealthy. If he want to 'throw down the gauntlet' with this speech, as an aide suggested, than he and his team should remember that gauntlet-throwing is what people do when they're prepared to fight. It's not a good move if they're not."
Big business avoiding state taxes. NYT: "While corporate income taxes made up 9.7 percent of state revenues in 1980 ... they now make up only an estimated 5.7 percent ... the study found that the companies reported $1.33 trillion in domestic profits from 2008 to 2010, but paid states only about half of what they would have if they had paid at the average corporate income tax rate of all states — reducing their state taxes by some $42.7 billion.
Fed v. Bloomberg
Fed complains about Bloomberg coverage of secret loans, and wrongly, argues Dean Baker: "Perhaps the most important issue is the Fed's claim that it did not lend at a below market rate to banks, thereby effectively giving them a subsidy. In fact, it is almost definitional that the rate did provide a subsidy ... This lending may have been justified to stem the financial crisis, but in principle the government could have imposed conditions (e.g. real caps on executive pay, downsizing the too big to fail banks, modifying mortgages) on the banks as the price of getting access to credit at below market rates."
Calcuated Risk defends Fed: " This is the Federal Reserve doing exactly what it should during a financial crisis: lending freely at a penalty rate on good collateral ... this is the Fed acting as lender of last resort ..."
Mark Thoma retorts: "...I am not questioning the Fed's role as a lender of last resort, only how the gains from fulfilling that function are divvied up."
Filibuster expected when vote on CFPB nominee Cordray comes up. The Hill: "Senate Republicans offered a public show of unity Tuesday against former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray’s nomination, suggesting centrist Sen. Scott Brown (Mass.) might remain the lone GOP defector. It’s also unclear whether the White House can count on all of the 53 senators who caucus with Democrats ..."
Health Reform Working
"ObamaCare" already saving money. Daily Beast's Daniel Stone: "Over the past year and a half, Medicare has saved government health-care recipients an average of $569, the administration announced Tuesday, which collectively totals about $1.5 billion in savings on prescription-drug costs. A surprising number, about 24 million people covered by Medicare, also took advantage of a free annual checkup that the law provided. ... Under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act ... drug makers were required to offer all drugs in the doughnut hole—any that fell within the $2,800-to-$4,550 range—to be sold at a 50 percent discount, which has led to the savings."
States slow to expand coverage for kids of public workers under the law. Stateline: "When the national health law was enacted early last year, it contained one seemingly technical provision that few people noticed. It lifted a ban on state employees enrolling their kids in the federally subsidized Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP). In fact, that was no small move. It promised relief from a 13-year restriction resented as unfair by low-income teachers, university staff and other members of the state workforce. But states have been slow to take advantage of it. So far, only six states — Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Montana, Pennsylvania and Texas — have cleared the regulatory hurdles needed to make the federal benefit available ..."
Coal Company Pays Historic Fine
Coal mine owner to pay historic fine after unsafe working conditions led to fatal accident. W. Post: "...a record $209 million penalty and make historic changes to protect miners from harm ... more than 40 times the size of any previous fine for a coal disaster. It came 20 months after the blast at the Upper Big Branch mine, the worst U.S. mining disaster in 40 years ... The settlement requires Alpha to pay $1.5 million each to the families of 29 dead and two injured miners. It also requires the company to spend at least $80 million on measures intended to prevent another disaster ... The agreement would still allow Massey executives and managers to be charged as individuals."
Coal plants are closing ... and not because of regulations. Politico: "...there are multiple culprits: a lagging economy, the discovery of huge resources of domestic natural gas and an administration predisposed to push through more stringent environmental demands (buoyed by new technologies making cleaner coal plants a possibility). Coal won’t stop being a dominant source of American power. But many companies are shutting down many older, dirtier coal plants because it makes better economic sense."
Jon Huntsman joins Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney as climate science flip-floppers. Time: "...Jon Huntsman was supposed to be different. The former Utah governor, China ambassador and every Democrat's favorite Republican made it clear that he—unlike his opponents—believe in things like evolution and science, including the science behind global warming ... [But in] a talk on December 6 at the Heritage Foundation—a conservative think tank—Huntsman got all squishy on the issue:..."
