Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Weekly Audit: The Unemployment Epidemic (10:50 am)

On Friday, we learned that the U.S. unemployment rate officially broke 10% for the first time since the early Reagan years. This is about as bad as it gets for a modern, developed economy. No economic force takes a heavier toll on a society than rampant joblessness, and few personal setbacks take a deeper psychological toll than being out of a job for months on end. If Congress and President Obama don’t do something to create jobs fast, both are going to pay a hefty political price when next year’s mid-term elections roll around.

So how bad is it? In October, the economy shed 190,000 jobs and the unemployment rate jumped from 9.8% to 10.2%. That percentage is the most optimistic reading of the labor market in Friday’s report. If you take people who want full-time jobs but are settling for part-time work, then add those who have simply given up on finding a job, the rate is a massive 17.5%.

The problem is not that either Obama or Congress have failed to act on the problem, but rather that they have not done enough. When Congress was moving on Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package back in February, we were shedding upwards of 700,000 jobs a month. So the stimulus package has worked—it’s probably helped keep unemployment from jumping to 12% or 13%. But this is cold comfort to the nation’s 15.7 million unemployed, 5.6 million of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

As Robert Reich notes for Salon, Obama’s economic advisers dramatically underestimated how bad things would get when they crafted the stimulus package. As a result, the package was too small and unemployment has remained high. Obama needs to go back to Congress and demand more economic relief funding. Republicans will continue to whine about government spending to excuse their obstructionism, of course, and conservative Democrats will probably start sweating, too—Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) helped cut back the original stimulus bill in February to help boost his “centrist” credentials. This of course had nothing to do with economics or policy. Government spending... read more

posted by Zach Carter | start the discussion

Friday, November 6, 2009

Weekly Mulch: The Grown Ups are Back in Charge (1:10 pm)

Senate Democrats in the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) finally squelched Republican boycotts and passed a version of the climate bill yesterday morning. Last week, Republican Senators refused to show up to committee hearings in an attempt to stall the bill. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo notes that EPW has now set “the stage for other panels to amend the legislation.”

To no one’s surprise, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) immediately complained about the legislation on Fox News. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) was the lone Democrat that did not vote, which Inhofe interpreted as a sign that the bill is “dead.”

Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) was much more upbeat and argued that the Republican boycott actually marred their credibility. “The absence of the Republicans during the Environmental Protection Agency’s presentation was a clear message that their criticism of the EPA analysis was not a substantive one,” Boxer said. “We are pleased that despite the Republican boycott, we have been able to move the bill.”

Inhofe also condemned Boxer for passing the bill through the committee unconventionally. Aaron Wiener writes for The Washington Independent that “Without a quorum that included at least two Republicans, the committee was unable to open formal debate on amendments to the bill. But passage requires just a simple majority, and Chairman Boxer and the Democratic leadership chose to forgo amendments in order to move the legislation quickly, given that the end of the GOP boycott was nowhere in sight.” Luckily, now that the bill is moving on to other committees, Inhofe and his Republican EPW colleagues will no longer have much of a say on the bill’s final outcome.

With Copenhagen just a month away, Kate Sheppard argues for Mother Jones that the odds of passing a viable climate bill before the climate summit are very grim. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will run a series of studies after each committee’s climate and energy bills are combined into a single piece of legislation. Even though the bill passed through the EPW committee, other committees, such as the... read more

posted by Raquel Brown | start the discussion

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Weekly Diaspora: Immigration Impacts Everything (10:57 am)

While many pundits and political analysts are musing about what Tuesday’s mixed bag election results mean for Obama administration, New America Media reports that “there’s another trend to watch; the surprising prominence of immigration politics.”

Even in states where other concerns “like small farms and forestry management” are far more immediate, “immigration has become a litmus test issue for the conservative movement,” and the expectation is, oddly, a “lockstep” goal toward opposing legalization. One has to wonder how the self-destructive choice to oppose immigration at any cost came about.

ColorLines’ Leticia Miranda asks “What’s next?” now that the infamous Hutto immigration detention center, notorious for myriad human rights violations such as keeping children in prison-like conditions, is closing. Detainees are simply being moved to another detention center in Pennsylvania. So how will we know that substandard conditions and alleged sexual abuse will not be repeated? The problem is not location. The problem is that a class of people have been isolated and assigned lesser worth. making it easy to exploit them. Still, the closing of Hutto is an accomplishment for the ACLU and other activists that worked so hard to make it happen. It’s also a sign that our nation will not tolerate such conditions.

Another positive sign of progress is the reversal of what the Washington Monthly dubbed “a senseless ban” that prohibited HIV-positive individuals from migrating or traveling to the US. Author Steve Benen notes that progress in overturning the ban, which was imposed by the Reagan administration 22 years ago, began with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and then-Sen. Gordon H. Smith (R-OR) in 2008.

In negative news, the anti-immigration group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) have released a bizarrely antagonistic press release calling Rep. Gutierrez (D-IL) a “traitor,” as The Washington Independent reports. The full press release is here. In it, William Gheen, President of ALIPAC, happily warns that ALIPAC is “ready to organize and channel the backlash wave of anger that is coming into peaceful civic action” and for no apparent reason, employing a Dirty Harry quote beseeching an unnamed person to “Make my day, punk!”... read more

posted by Nezua | 1 comment

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Weekly Pulse: Problems With the Public Option (11:19 am)

The House released a final version of the health reform bill. It has a public option all right, but not the robust version progressives were hoping for. The public plan would only cover 2% of Americans and premiums will cost more than anticipated.

Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) continued to threaten to join a Republican filibuster of a health care bill with a public option. A lot of people still think he’s bluffing. Realistically, the public option probably faces more serious threats from inside the Democratic caucus. It’s been whittled down at an alarming rate.

Nick Baumann of Mother Jones asks “What now for the public option?”

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that public option premiums will actually be higher than the premiums for private plans on the health insurance exchanges. That doesn’t mean it’s going to cost the government more money—the public option is paid for by premiums, not taxes; it actually cuts the deficit. But it will be more expensive than some private plans. Wasn’t part of the point of the public option to prove that a government-run program could compete successfully with privately-run plans? Well, yes, but here’s the problem: that was all based on the idea that the public option would pay health care providers at Medicare rates.

Baumann predicts that insurers will do everything they can to drive the sick people off private insurance onto the public plan, a phenomenon known as “adverse selection.” Hopefully some of the proposed insurance reforms will curb their worst excesses, like kicking people off the rolls for misspelling their preexisting conditions on their application forms.

Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports that the House health care bill would eliminate the popular and cost-effective Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and shift its low-income beneficiaries onto private health insurance exchanges.

This looks like a stealthy preemptive strike on the prospect of single-payer health care. CHIP is a single-payer program that progressive health policy types envisioned as a prototype for a future single-payer system for all kids, or even eventually for everyone.

As Lillis points out, abolishing CHIP is also a... read more

posted by Lindsay Beyerstein | start the discussion

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Weekly Audit: Too Big to Fail is Just Too Big (10:33 am)

Last week, President Barack Obama released key legislation designed to fight the banking industry’s too-big-to-fail problem. But Obama’s plan doesn’t actually address too-big-to-fail at all. It reinforces a broken system in which economically dangerous companies are bailed out whenever they drive themselves to the brink of failure.

If we want the economy to support all people, we have to break up the big banks and start treating the creation of good jobs as an economic priority on par with Wall Street rescues.

The editors of The Nation break the political debate over banking into three camps:

The first camp is composed of bank lobbyists, Republicans and conservative Democrats and wants to do nothing.

Camp two, endorsed by the White House and influential Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), would impose tougher regulations on too-big-to-fail banks to keep them from getting out of control.

The third camp wants to go even further: If a bank is too-big-to-fail, it is also too-big-to-regulate. Companies that pose a danger to the economy have to be split up into smaller firms that cannot induce economic ruin.

The Nation editors rightly see the third strategy as the most sensible. While the “break-up-the-banks” policy is being portrayed as a left-wing pipe dream by cable news networks, the policy actually relies on an age-old observation of conservative economists. Regulators make mistakes, and they often get co-opted by the very industries they are supposed to be supervising.

The practical policy is to impose structural limits on what activities banks can participate in and how big they can get. Just look at the list of high-profile supporters: former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former Citigroup Chairman John Reed, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King. I don’t remember seeing any of those guys at the Iraq War protests.

Many of the regulatory blind spots that brought down the economy were obvious to some policymakers for years. Back in 1994, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) wrote an article for The Washington Monthly warning that derivatives trading was putting the economy in grave danger. Commodities Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksley Born tried to take action on these... read more

posted by Zach Carter | start the discussion

Friday, October 30, 2009

Weekly Mulch: Throwing Tantrums Over Kerry-Boxer (10:14 am)

This week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held three hearings on the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill and, as David Roberts reports for Grist, Republican Senators had an “adolescent tantrum” about the cost of emission reductions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Energy Information Administration (EIA) and other organizations have extensively debunked this line of debate.

Aaron Wiener agrees that the committee’s hearing was a “fairly one-sided debate” in The Washington Independent. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has already threatened a Republican boycott of the Committee’s markup of the Kerry-Boxer bill, which would prevent the quorum needed to do business. And on Tuesday, every Republican cut out early while Democrats discussed energy policy details with members of the Obama administration. Considering that the bill isn’t even at the markup stage, we can expect more disruptive antics from the right in weeks to come.

Republicans won’t be the only problem. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) voiced his reservations about the bill on Tuesday. That makes his vote unlikely, as Kate Sheppard notes for Mother Jones. Baucus doesn’t want the EPA to regulate carbon emissions, and he thinks that the bill’s plan to curb emissions by 20% by 2020 is too ambitious.

Does his opinion really matter? Unfortunately, yes. Baucus is a member of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works committee, which must approve the bill before it is brought before the wider Senate. He is also the chair of the Finance Committee, meaning that he has jurisdiction over how the bill will allocate emissions permits. With a 12-7 democratic majority in the Environment and Public Works committee, legislation could move forward without Baucus, but he could still stall the bill in the Finance Committee.

“In the health care debate, Baucus delayed the bill in the Finance Committee for months, watering it down in an effort to win the support of the panel’s Republicans. In the end only one (Olympia Snowe) voted for it. Now, he’s apparently proposing a similar process for the climate bill…[and] questions whether the bill as written ‘will lead us closer to or further away’ from... read more

posted by Raquel Brown | 1 comment

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Weekly Diaspora: Legislating Hate (9:39 am)

Anti-immigration groups and pundits cling to phrases like “Illegal Alien” because they only focus on foreignness and danger. These extreme factions are all about casting immigrants as what ails our society, conjuring up demons upon which to focus national ire, and perpetuating a subhuman category of being. It’s a convenient distraction from things that are actually endangering our nation. A new web-only series from ColorLines called “Torn Apart by Deportation” is the perfect antidote to people like CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

The stories in this series are thoroughly investigated, not sensationalized, and haunting. “Torn Apart” reveals how the push against immigrants in the U.S. is, once all the pieces come together, a cultural death wish on families of color. “Torn Apart” gives faces and feelings to the results of the nation’s post-1996 immigration policies, which made it easier deport undocumented people for any criminal infraction. Two articles are currently available:

“Home in Name Only” follows Calvin James, who was deported after living in the US since the age of 12, back to Kingston, Jamaica. James is percieved as an undesirable and unwanted part of Jamaican society, which pins its crime rates on deportees. James was uprooted from a loving, productive life in the US and cast into a criminal class spanning two nations.

“Double Punishment” explores the nexus that people like James find themselves in, where they suffer under a clash of laws that target immigrants and criminals in a justice system already slanted against people of color.

Wiretap tackles the issue of the upcoming census count slated for Spring 2010. The census has become a point of political contention and moved abruptly away from its very practical purpose of counting all people in the country. Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) are trying to add an amendment to an appropriations bill that would include a question about citizenship status to the census form, disrupting the entire well-established process of the census. The move would also cement growing fear in immigrant communities that the census is not to be trusted.

Further, it’s simply too late to raise questions like this.... read more

posted by Nezua | 1 comment

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Weekly Pulse: Joe Lieberman and the Opt-Out Revolution (9:53 am)

Progressives rejoiced when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced this week that the final Senate health care bill would include a public option. The announcement was a major victory for left-wing Democrats.

Better yet, it would be a public option without a trigger. Earlier proposals called for a triggered public option which would only take effect if private insurers failed to bring down costs on their own. Under the opt-out compromise, the public option would come on line automatically (albeit not until 2013), but states would later have the option of quitting.

The jubilation was short-lived. Alex Koppelman of Salon explains:

Progressives didn’t even get 24 hours to celebrate the victory they won in getting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to include a version of the public option in his health care reform bill. The celebration was cut off Tuesday afternoon with the news that Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., will vote with Senate Republicans to filibuster the legislation.

The Democrats have 60 Senate votes. If they all vote for cloture, a procedural motion to stop debate, the Republicans can’t filibuster the bill. The Senators who vote for cloture can still vote against the bill. Reid’s strategy for passing the bill was to get all Democrats to vote for cloture and let them vote their conscience on the actual bill. Even without Lieberman, Democrats have the votes to pass the bill by majority vote if they can avoid a filibuster.

Health care is the most important domestic policy initiative of the Obama administration. Would Joe Lieberman really torpedo reform? The Senate leadership thinks Reid is bluffing, according to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly.

I understand the argument. Lieberman loves attention and power. By threatening to join the Republican filibuster, he gets both—Democrats have to scramble to make him happy, since there’s no margin for error in putting together 60 votes. Lieberman gets to feel very important for the next several weeks by making this threat less than 24 hours after Harry Reid stated his intentions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he wants to be known forever as The Senator Who Killed... read more