Dems Pledge To Keep Up Minimum Wage Fight
After GOP filibuster, Dems says minimum wage battle is not over. The Hill: "In a 54-42 tally, Democrats fell well short of the 60 votes necessary to end debate. Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) was the only Republican senator to vote with Democrats ... 'This is not the only time you will see the Senate vote on the minimum wage bill this year. We’ll be back again and again, and we’ll keep trying until we get this to the president’s desk,' said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) ... the party hopes Republicans will break down and back the wage hike, given polls showing its popularity. And if the GOP opposition holds, Democrats believe it could win them votes in November."
TNR's Brian Beutler analyzes "The Fascinating Politics of a Drawn-Out Battle Over the Minimum Wage": "The crass political calculation Republicans will have to make is whether conceding an issue to Democrats is an appropriate price for neutralizing it. Does obstructing a minimum wage increase hurt them more than facilitating it would help Democrats? And for Democrats, the crass political question (like the GOP and the Keystone Pipeline) will become whether they want the issue more than they want to pass a bill."
Are the poor better off than they were 50 years ago? NYT explores: "Americans — even many of the poorest — enjoy a level of material abundance unthinkable just a generation or two ago ... [But] despite improved living standards, the poor have fallen further behind the middle class and the affluent in both income and consumption. The same global economic trends that have helped drive down the price of most goods also have limited the well-paying industrial jobs once available to a huge swath of working Americans. And the cost of many services crucial to escaping poverty — including education, health care and child care — has soared."
California aims to "tax CEOs who don’t share the wealth" explains W. Post's Harold Meyerson: "By a 5-to-2 vote, [a state Senate committee] recommended to the full Senate a bill that would cut the state’s taxes on companies with lower ratios between their chief executives’ pay and the pay of their median workers, and raise taxes on companies with the kind of insanely high gap between chief executive and median worker pay that has become the norm in American business ... Congressional Democrats should emulate their California counterparts ..."
Fed pulling back despite weak 1Q GDP. Bloomberg: "The Federal Reserve said it will keep reducing the pace of bond purchases as the economy shakes off the winter doldrums, putting the central bank on a course to end the unprecedented stimulus program by the close of 2014. Growth 'has picked up recently,' the Federal Open Market Committee said yesterday in a statement in Washington, hours after a government report showed gross domestic product barely expanded in the first quarter."
Bill Clinton defends his economic record in 2-hr speech. NYT: "The speech reflected a strategic effort by Mr. Clinton and his advisers to reclaim the populist ground now occupied by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other ascendant left-leaning Democrats, and, potentially, to lay out an economic message that could propel his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to the White House in 2016 ..."
Bank Panic As Criminal Charges Planned
Banks freak out as prospect of criminal charges. Bloomberg: "[Justice Dept.] prosecutors are considering indictments in probes of Credit Suisse Group AG and BNP Paribas SA ... Even after talking with financial regulators about ways to mitigate damage -- such as ensuring banks keep charters -- prosecutors might not fully understand consequences for the market, according to industry lawyers and bankers ... Bank clients -- including trustees, fiduciaries and pension funds -- could be forced to cut ties with a financial institution labeled a criminal enterprise ... Counterparties also might think twice before entering into billion-dollar transactions with such firms..."
NYT explains "Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis": "During the past decade, the Justice Department suffered a series of corporate prosecutorial fiascos, which led to critical changes in how it approached white-collar crime. The department began to focus on reaching settlements rather than seeking prison sentences, which over time unintentionally deprived its ranks of the experience needed to win trials against the most formidable law firms."
Breakfast Sides
House conservatives "stepping up their efforts to thwart" Boehner on immigration. Politico: "Conservatives intend to huddle this week about immigration, according to Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), an outspoken critic of providing legal status to undocumented immigrants and encouraging more legal migration in the future. Brooks declined to disclose more details about the meeting, including how many lawmakers are involved."
Regulations are "lifesaving" not "job-crushing" argues NYT's Nick Kristof: "While G.M. says that 13 people died in connection with the faulty switches, a consumer group called the Center for Auto Safety says it has found 303 such deaths. G.M. has said it knew about this problem for a decade ... As an internal G.M. memorandum put it, there was no 'business case' for preventing crashes. And that’s why we need regulation: Company executives can’t be trusted to police themselves."
