Friday, March 5, 2010
Weekly Mulch: New Bills and Old Money (10:59 am)
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Climate legislation is returning to the Senate’s docket, and leaders on Capitol Hill are hoping that this version, a compromise bill spearheaded by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), can pass without getting caught in the morass of money and politics that has delayed action so far.
A long, long time ago…
Remember, there was a time when Congress was going to pass climate legislation before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama was going to show up with a bill in hand and lead the world towards a better climate future. After the House passed its climate bill in June 2009, the Senate began discussing climate change, and a first stab by Sen. Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) went nowhere. Now, Kerry has turned to less liberal colleagues to draft an alternative that would appeal to moderates and even Republicans.
Now the Massachusetts senator is promising that climate change isn’t dead. A new bill is coming—more information may be in the offing as early as today, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones.
Third time’s the charm
Sen. Kerry is trying a new tactic to pass climate legislation. He’s waiting to release his plan until he knows the bill has the 60 supporters it needs to circumvent a filibuster. The details have not been hammered out yet, and even the Senators who’ve been in talks with Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman don’t seem to have a clear sense of what will be in the version that will emerge.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, released an ambitious draft of the legislation, let lobbyists and members of Congress fight over it, and passed a much-changed edition months later. Sen. Kerry tried a similar plan on his side of Capitol Hill (that was the Kerry-Boxer bill), but it did not work.
With this piece of legislature, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are working out the compromises before they release the legislation. Both reporting and speculation about their bill say that... read more
posted by Sara Laskow | start the discussion
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Weekly Diaspora: Rallying the Grassroots (3:54 pm)
By Erin Rosa, Media Consortium blogger
Ed. Note: After a brief hiatus, the Diaspora is back! We’re very excited to have Erin Rosa on board for this project. Please stay tuned for a the latest developments on the immigration reform front every Thursday morning.
Fed up with Congress and frustrated with President Barack Obama’s brief mention of immigration reform in the State of the Union address, immigrant rights supporters are now organizing around the clock to push legislators to move on reform in 2010. It will not be an easy feat.
Congress is already bogged down with health care reform and a lingering economic crisis. While Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has proposed a bill in the House of Representatives to provide a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, immigration reform could be doomed for 2010 if it’s not introduced in the Senate by this Spring. Otherwise, it’s very unlikely that Congress will get around to debating the issue by the end of the year.
Aware of these bitter facts—and even more cognizant of the human rights abuses that will continue so long as the status quo is maintained—reform proponents are gearing up for a number of key battles to improve the immigration system.
La marcha
Born from dissatisfaction with Congress and Obama’s inability to deliver reform, organizers from around the country are preparing to march on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. On March 21, the first day of Spring. The objective is to draw tens of thousands of immigrant rights supporters to Capitol Hill. As New America Media reports, March for America “will be a test of immigrant advocates’ organizing capacity and their increasing use of technology to stoke a popular groundswell on immigration.”
The march, which is organized by the Reform Immigration For America coalition, will also “bring together advocates focused on different parts of the immigration policy agenda,” including supporters of agricultural labor, better immigrant detention standards, and the DREAM Act, federal legislation that provide a pathway to citizenship for certain immigrants who entered the United States before the... read more
posted by Erin Rosa, Media Consortium blogger | start the discussion
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Why Jim Bunning is a Genius (12:06 pm)
When he was pitching for the Phillies back in the back in the ‘60s, I thought Jim Bunning was a dumb-butt because he kept shaking off signs relayed from Manager Gene Mauch, arguably one of the brighter minds in baseball and the first skipper to call balls and strikes from the dugout. And I thought Kentucky Jimbo was certifiable for throwing high hard ones at batters for automatic balls when he could throw strikes almost at will. Now he’s gone and aimed a beaner at millions of unemployed American workers, and I think he’s a freakin’ genius: he’s found a way for the good field-no hit Democrats to avoid losing the Senate this fall.
Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) is a 79-year-old Hall of Fame pitcher who’s already announced he isn’t running for re-election this year, which pleased a lot of Republicans because his increasingly nutty actions and comments were making him a liability. He’s also the tree from which 40 grandchildren have sprouted, and that surely entitled him to some sort of slack. But Senators on both sides of the aisle are now furious with the old goat, the Dems for his single-handed five-day holdup of unemployment benefits for millions of displaced American workers, his GOP colleagues for handing the Dems a tried and tested issue for November.
A trip back in time. 1994. The Republican take control of the House of Representatives and use their majority to tie down newly-elected President Bill Clinton in Gulliverian knots. But nooooooo, Speaker Newt Gingrich can’t stifle himself and over-reaches in 1995 by blocking Clinton’s budget bill. On November 14, big parts of the federal government are shut down (we said, “smaller government,” not NO government). In 1996, the donkeys (were they smarter back then, or just more opportunistic?) kick the elephants in their tushes with the issue and take back the House. Gingrich catches a midnight train back to Georgia to pick up his bags, then heads for Europe to play bigshot for pointy-headed intellectuals who don’t understand English.
Here’s the narrative recommended for the Democrats this year. Bunning can shut down the... read more
posted by Ray Abernathy | start the discussion
Weekly Pulse: Obama to Push for Reconciliation (11:13 am)
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Today, President Barack Obama will deliver a speech to Congress outlining his plan to move forward on health care reform. The president is expected to advocate the use of budget reconciliation.
Art Levine of Working In These Times warns that some centrist Democrats are already getting cold feet on reconciliation. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, went on TV to declare reconciliation impossible. These guys just don’t get it. It’s reconciliation or defeat. There is no other way. Without reconciliation, the bill dies. Without a bill, the Democrats get massacred in the mid-term elections.
Health care reform to date
Quick recap: The House and the Senate have both passed health care reform bills. The original plan was to merge those two bills in a conference committee and send the final version back to both houses of Congress for a vote. However, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate when Republican Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley in the special election in Massachusetts.
Once they recovered from their shell shock, Democrats reluctantly converged around Plan B: Let the House re-pass the Senate version of the bill, thereby skipping the step where the Senate votes on the conference report. However, the Senate bill could not pass the House in its current form. So, the Senate needs to tweak the bill to make it acceptable to the House—either before or after the House re-passes the Senate bill. In order to make those changes without getting filibustered, the Senate Democrats will have to insert the modifications through budget reconciliation, where measures pass by a simple majority. Whew!
Of course, the Republicans trying to paint Democrats as tyrants for using reconciliation. Nevermind that 16 of the 22 reconciliation bills passed since reconciliation was invented in 1974 were passed by Republican majorities.
Whither the Public Option?
Reconciliation would appear to give the public health insurance option a new lease on life. The House bill has a public option, but the Senate bill doesn’t. The public option was traded away on the Senate side to forge the... read more
posted by Lindsay Beyerstein | 1 comment
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Weekly Audit: Does the GOP Hate Jobs? (10:39 am)
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Through inaction and timid legislative negotiations, Congress just keeps letting the U.S. sink deeper and deeper into the economic abyss. Last week, Congress denied relief to the jobless and is currently poised to undercut a proposal that would rein in predatory lending. With unemployment out of control and banks pillaging citizens’ pocketbooks at every turn, the economy is in dire need of serious financial reform and a major jobs package.
More than one million have lost unemployment benefits
As James Ridgeway emphasizes for Mother Jones, over a million people receiving unemployment benefits ran out of financial rope on March 1 thanks to Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-KY) self-righteousness. As a result of bizarre Senate procedural rules, Bunning’s sole “no” vote was enough to stop a bill that would have extended unemployment benefits for those who are out of work. Of course, Bunning had plenty of moral support from his fellow Republicans. Ridgeway highlights a Think Progress post on Rep. Dean Heller’s (R-NV) preposterous argument that it is time for the government to cut off unemployment benefits, since there are so many bums.
“What makes Heller’s statement really stupid, of course, is that people could become hobos if Congress doesn’t extend unemployment benefits, rather than if they do,” Ridgeway writes. “Modest as they are, these weekly benefits are what’s keeping thousands—and perhaps millions—of families out of poverty.”
As Brian Beutler notes for Talking Points Memo, Bunning’s economic insanity also triggered a 21% cut in the fees doctors receive for treating Medicare patients. That’s a big “Screw you!” to seniors.
What happens when unemployment benefits dry up?
The degree of personal crisis attached to unemployment is also important. We’re talking about access to basic necessities. As Roger Bybee notes for Working In These Times, when a family runs out of unemployment benefits, the result is an absolute personal catastrophe in which there is simply no money left to buy food, pay rent, or meet electricity bills.
Yet when a major financial institution finds itself on the verge of collapse, the government is quick to come to the rescue.... read more
posted by Zach Carter | start the discussion
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Weekly Pulse: Obama To Promote Health Plan at Summit (11:05 am)
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
On Monday, the White House released its plan for health care reform, which resembles the Senate bill with additional concessions for liberals and labor unions. Tomorrow, President Obama will hold a televised health care summit. Obama is billing the summit as a last-ditch attempt to solicit Republican ideas for health care reform. In fact, he’s hoping to give the GOP enough rope to hang itself.
It takes two…
As Katrina vanden Huevel argues in the Nation, bipartisanship takes two parties, but the Republicans have refused to negotiate unless health care reform starts over from scratch. That’s not bipartisanship, that’s showboating. President Obama is giving the Republicans one last chance to waste the entire country’s time so that he can point to the sorry spectacle and say, “Look, what they made us do.”
In other words, the White House has finally accepted what progressives have been saying for months: There’s no way to pass an acceptable health care reform without using the budget reconciliation process to circumvent the filibuster.
What’s in the White House plan?
What does the White House want for health reform? Kevin Drum of Mother Jones summarizes some highlights of the Obama plan: Increasing premium subsidies for working families; delaying the so-called “Cadillac” tax on expensive health plans and increasing the threshold at which plans are subject to tax; and empowering the Department of Health and Human Services to crack down on exploitative premium hikes, like the 39% increase recently announced by Anthem of California.
In AlterNet, Byard Duncan points to a lesser-known but important facet of the president’s plan, reviving the Indian Health Care Improvement Act—which would modernize the Indian health care system, which serves 1.9 million Native Americans and indigenous Alaskans, and not a moment too soon. American Indians are 3 times more likely to die of diabetes, 5 times more likely to die of alcoholism, and 6 times more likely to die of tuberculosis than any other ethnic group. If Obama’s plan is approved, the Indian Health Service (IHS) will get a 13% budget increase to address these and other... read more
posted by Lindsay Beyerstein | 1 comment
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Weekly Audit: The Global Economic Crisis (11:30 am)
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Over the past thirty years, Wall Street has waged a steady war against governments around the globe, convincing policymakers of various ideological stripes that whatever raises profits for bankers and traders will be good for the rest of society. It’s a very simple and appealing portrait of how the world works. Unfortunately, it’s completely wrong.
Profiting from hunger
In an interview with AlterNet’s Terrence McNally, economic luminary Raj Patel explains the connection between widespread global poverty and wild Wall Street profits. Markets are defined by a set of rules—if those rules completely disregard social welfare, then the participants in those markets will ignore them as well. When traders can make a quick buck speculating on the price of rice, they will, even if that speculation drives up the price of a basic necessity and makes people go hungry.
We’ve known this for a long time, but as Patel illustrates, governments have allowed financial bigwigs to rewrite the basic rules of the road so that Wall Street can extract profits from anything—even hunger. That process created several crises in the developing world over the past few decades, and has now ravaged the economies of the United States and Europe. As Patel notes:
By basically gaming the system with regulations — that they authored — which encouraged a certain kind of playing fast and loose with the numbers, it was possible through some creative accounting for huge amounts of systematic risk to be kicked off into the future and ignored. And of course when the catastrophic risk was realized, everyone ran for the hills and started demanding public support.
Financial turmoil in Greece
This political sleight-of-hand is demonstrated by the looming fiscal crisis in Greece. As Richard Parker explains for The Nation, Goldman Sachs colluded with prior Greek administrations to hide the nation’s fiscal situation from both its own citizens and investors (Parker is an adviser to current Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou). Goldman was not interested in fair play—it was interested in making money off of the Greek government in any way it could. If that... read more
posted by Zach Carter | start the discussion
Monday, February 22, 2010
Weekly Mulch: Green Products, Green Energy (1:43 pm)
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
Some people live off the grid, eat local food, and have an energy footprint so minuscule that even the canniest hunter couldn’t track them down. But the rest of us buy from supermarkets, get our energy from at least in part from traditional sources like coal, and occasionally forget to turn off the lights when we leave the house. For those of us who are still living with one foot in the old energy world, here are a few helpful hints about what you should buy and what the consequences of shifting to “clean energy” sources like natural gas and nuclear energy are.
Green consumption
Mother Jones’ Julia Whitty points out a useful tool for correcting any misconceptions about how green a company actually is. It’s an assessment that graphs public perception of a company’s environmentalism against its practices. Besides making sure you’ve got the right idea about Starbucks or Nike, Whitty writes, “You can also get a pretty good sense of how sectors perform in relation to other sectors: food and beverage, bad overall; technology, better overall.”
One of the biggest energy expenditures that many of us indulge in is airplane travel. Just one flight can enlarge your carbon footprint dramatically. Although flying may never be truly green, Beth Buczynski reports at Care2 that one airline is moving in the right direction. British Airways is planning the first “sustainable jet fuel” plant.
The plant will make a biofuel, which generally has plenty of drawbacks, but this one sounds pretty good. The company says it will source its raw materials from local waste management facilities and produce relatively harmless waste products.
Hot air from natural gas companies
But the hazards of many “clean energy” sources make going off the grid sound better and better. More and more information is coming out about the environmental hazards that accompany the mining of natural gas, one of Washington’s new energy fascinations. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report on natural gas late last week, and Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones that Halliburton, a major... read more
posted by Sara Laskow | start the discussion
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