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by Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian
Actor Mark Ruffalo and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello have launched a new US campaign for a “Robin Hood tax”, a small levy on Wall Street transactions that organisers say could generate hundred of billions of dollars a year.
The campaign, backed by National Nurses United, the largest nursing union in the US, has already launched in 14 countries, including the UK, France and Germany.
Organisers of the campaign, which also features Coldplay singer Chris Martin, are calling for a tax of “less than half of 1%” on Wall Street transactions, which they say would not affect most Americans’ financial activity.
Adopting the 99% language of the Occupy movement, the campaign said the tax would “easy to enforce and tough to evade”.
“This is a tax on Wall Street, which created the greatest economic crisis in our nation and globally since the Great Depression,” a statement said on the movement’s website.
“The same people who have returned to record profits and bonuses while ordinary Americans, the 99%, continue to pay the price of their crisis.” [READ MORE]
by Gregory Kristof, The Huffington Post A new bill is circulating Congress that would alleviate the pressures facing students struggling to repay college loans. The Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012, introduced to the House by Representative Hansen Clarke (D-Mich.), would reduce the debt of students who have already repaid a substantial portion of their loans over the past decade. The act, which currently has over a million signatures on the petition website signon.org, aims to stimulate the economy by increasing the amount of available income students -- otherwise theoretically debt-bound -- would have to invest and spend. [MORE]
by DAN FROOMKIN, Huffington Post WASHINGTON -- Federal officials have yet to respond to two United Nations human rights envoys who formally requested that the U.S. government protect Occupy protesters against excessive force by law enforcement officials. In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the two envoys called on U.S. officials to "explain the behavior of police departments that violently disbanded some Occupy protests last fall" and expressed concern that excessive use of force "could have been related to [the protesters'] dissenting views, criticisms of economic policies, and their legitimate work in the defense of human rights and fundamental freedoms." The envoys also reminded the U.S. government of its international obligations to "take all necessary measures to guarantee that the rights and freedoms of all peaceful protesters be respected." The letter, from Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. special rapporteur for the protection of free expression, and Maina Kiai, the special rapporteur for freedom of peaceful assembly, was sent in December 2011. It was publicly released last week in connection with the 20th annual U.N. Human Rights Council meeting, which started Monday and at which both rapporteurs -- independent experts sent out to investigate human rights problems around the world -- will make their annual reports. The U.S. government has not answered the letter. [More]
by DAVE JAMIESON, Huffington Post
A janitor from Texas confronted JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon after a congressional hearing on Tuesday, asking the finance executive why she can't earn a living wage working in the JPMorgan Chase Tower in Houston.
Once lawmakers from the House Financial Services Committee wrapped up their own questioning of Dimon, Adriana Vasquez got Dimon's attention from across a table in the committee hearing room, according to C-SPAN video.
by MICHAEL McAULIFF, Huffington Post
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) mocked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday for trying to stop cuts to the nation's food stamp program, questioning the program's morality and saying that her type of thinking would bleed the treasury dry.
Gillibrand seeks to offer an amendment to restore $4.5 billion in aid for the hungry that the Senate's farm bill proposes to slash.
"The junior senator from New York proposes to increase food stamp spending even more than the current growth that we've seen, explaining, quote, food stamps are an extraordinary investment because every dollar that you put into the SNAP program, the food stamp program, you get out $1.71, close quote," Sessions said in a Senate floor speech.
He was referring to estimates touted by the Agriculture Department and Moody's economist Mark Zandi, who say that helping people feed themselves serves to stimulate a bad economy because the money goes to grocery stores, delivery companies and farmers, who in turn spend it back into the economy.
But Sessions mocked the idea, arguing that it would lead only to more spending. [MORE]
by VIRGINIA SIMSON, USuncutMN Saint Paul, Minnesota - By now, most are aware that the banks made enormous profits selling junk mortgages. Inside Job won the Best Documentary award for exposing how the citizens were “played” by the banks and how the executives involved just did not hold themselves accountable for the consequences of their massive fraud. Matt Taibbei of Rolling Stone magazine, made powerful comment at Occupy Wall Street on February 23rd in a teach-in as to why we in the United States MUST fight back and demand accountability. The crisis is far from over. This chart explains why it will take a full four years for the effects to "settle": It takes time for the entire process to finalize into homelessness! Let's prevent some trauma! Because of activist pressure, a mortgage fraud settlement was obtained. The Bank$ter$ were convicted in The Court of Public Opinion. Obama was forced to act -- because of We the People. Try to remember that. But many people are not aware that a minimal payout was made available to homeowners via the States after a lawsuit was brought. It was an egregious settlement, but it was better than nothing after waiting four long years. Where is this money? Sitting in the bankers’ accounts, collecting interest. Is this acceptable? We say NO! In Minnesota, $280 million dollars has been available for six months, but the program is not working. We want and are petitioning for an immediate foreclosure moratorium. Here's the link. Right up front: I am asking YOU to sign!! I write this in hopes you can learn from our Minnesota experience and grow a viable movement in your own communities. Only through activism, through public pressure will we get justice. With just a little work, we can get foreclosure moratoriums in all our states if we work together. Here are some ideas for your next Coffee Party ... [More on the link]
by JONAH GOLDBERG
Today, of course, the 1950s is the belle époque of reasonable conservatism. Just ask New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, or, for that matter, President Barack Obama, who insists that the GOP is in the throes of a “fever” and is displaying signs of “madness.” It’s his humble wish that the GOP will regain its senses and return to being the party of Eisenhower.
Today’s intellectual conservatives, likewise, are held against the standard of yesterday’s and found wanting. New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus wrote a book on “the death of conservatism” a few years ago (inconveniently, right before conservatism was dramatically revivified by the Tea Party, which helped the GOP win historic victories in the 2010 elections), in which he pined for the conservative intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s. [MORE]
Via Michael Charney
Back in February, comedian and activist Roseanne Barr officially announced that she was seeking the Green Party nomination for president, and since then she's pulled no punches about her thoughts on the two major parties. On her campaign site, she writes, "Americans have voted for the lesser of two evils in the past elections, it has not gotten us anywhere." She's also separately referred to both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama as empty suits. On Sunday, she took aim at another Washington target, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, saying via Twitter, "Pelosi is a criminal too-insider trader with VISA-she needs to go-vote her out!!"
Excerpt from article by Ezra Klein, The New Yorker
The irony is that the Democrats adopted it in the first place because they thought that it would help them secure conservative support. It had, after all, been at the heart of Republican health-care reforms for two decades.
The mandate made its political début in a 1989 Heritage Foundation brief titled “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” as a counterpoint to the single-payer system and the employer mandate, which were favored in Democratic circles. In the brief, Stuart Butler, the foundation’s health-care expert, argued, “Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seat-belts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement.” The mandate made its first legislative appearance in 1993, in the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act—the Republicans’ alternative to President Clinton’s health-reform bill—which was sponsored by John Chafee, of Rhode Island, and co-sponsored by eighteen Republicans, including Bob Dole, who was then the Senate Minority Leader. [Read More.]
by DAVD FRUM, The Daily Beast Bob Samuelson argues this morning that the Affordable Care Act raises unemployment by raising employer costs: "This is basic economics. If you increase the price of labor, companies will buy less of it. Requiring employers to buy health insurance for some workers makes them more expensive, at least in the short run. Particularly vulnerable are low-skilled workers, notes economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute. Because the employer mandate exempts firms with fewer than 50 workers, there’s a huge incentive for firms to stop at 49, she says." Samuelson's column was tweeted by the office of Speaker John Boehner. Yet it seems like only yesterday that House Republicans were telling me that the main effect of Obamacare would be to induce employers to dump health coverage and rely on the taxpayer instead: "[E]mployers could save, on average, $402.3 million ($4,821 per full- time and part-time U.S. employee) – on an after tax basis – in 2014 alone by eliminating their health insurance coverage and instead paying the employer mandate’s $2,000 per full-time employee fine. From 2014 through 2023, the average employer responding to the survey could save $5.9 billion if they dropped coverage in favor of paying the mandate penalty. Has anybody else noted that these complaints cannot logically both be true?" [MORE]
Via Eric Byler
Speaking of America 11 pm ET (8 pm PT) CLICK HERE to listen live Or better yet, call in: 646.929.2495
Coffee Party USA? MoveON.org? Move To Amend? Tea Party? Americans for Prosperity? Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians.... What movement, cause, or party are you aligned with and why? What's your goal? Or don't you get "involved"? Tell us why. Tune In by Calling In! Tonight @ 8pm PT/11pm ET Call: 646.929.2495
by Amanda Peterson Beadle, Think Progress
Two years after Senate Republicans defeated the bipartisan DREAM Act by claiming that Congress must “secure the borders first,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) floated the idea of introducing a GOP alternative to DREAM. Rubio spent three months talking up the concept on cable news, but failed to offer a bill before President Obama announced an administrative directive to protectDREAM Act-eligible students from deportation.
In unveiling the initiative on Friday, Obama cited Congress’ inability to “fix our broken immigration system” as a reason for issuing the Department of Homeland Security directive. What he didn’t expect, however, is that Republicans would respond to the news by reinforcing his message and abandoning their reform efforts. Republicans accused Obama of politicizing immigration and the party’s new spokesperson on the issue announced that he is closing shop on any efforts to tackle the immigration question. Rubio told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that he thinks Obama’s announcement “sets back our efforts to arrive at a balanced and responsible approach to this issue. It poisons the well. It leads to mistrust.” But the truth is that Republicans had never seriously considered comprehensive immigration reform or any new solutions for helping young people stay in the country:
1. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Refused To Hold DREAM Act Hearing: Even if Rubio had introduced a bill and if the Senate had approved it, a version of the DREAM Act would have immediately stalled in the House because of Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). The congressman chairs the Judiciary Committee and said he would not hold a hearing on the DREAM Act, which he called an “American nightmare.”
2. Original Republican Sponsor Of DREAM Act Didn’t Vote For It In 2010: In 2003, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) sponsored the DREAM Act when it was first introduced. But when the Senate voted on a more conservative version of the bill in 2010, Hatch skipped the vote and dismissed it as a “cynical exercise in political charades” by Senate Democrats.
3. Republican Claimed Democrats Used DREAM Act To Make Republicans ‘Look Bad’: After 41 mostly Republican senators stopped the DREAM Act from passing in 2010, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) claimed that Democrats had pushed the DREAM Act to hurt the GOP’s reputation among Latinos. The bill “passed without the ability to amend to try to make Republicans look bad with Hispanics,” he said. But Graham ignored the number of Republican senators from Latino-heavy states who previously supported the DREAM Act and voted against in 2010, and he failed to mention his own floor comments telling young undocumented immigrants who visited his office that they were “wasting their time.”
Republicans can claim that President Obama went around Congress to give protection to undocumented students, but it was the failure of congressional Republicans that forced him to act. [MORE]
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by CRAIG HOLMAN, Public Citizen Public Citizen is happy to have the Obama administration join the chorus of voices calling for an investigation of Crossroads Grassroots Political Strategies (GPS). Crossroads GPS is a so-called “social welfare” organization set up by Republican strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie designed to influence federal elections, and Public Citizen believes they are abusing the tax code in order to conceal their donors from the American public – in violation of campaign finance law.
Public Citizen and Protect Our Elections filed a similar complaint against Crossroads GPS in 2010, asserting that there is ample reason to believe that Crossroads GPS, which is registered as a nonprofit 501c(4) organization, is in fact a political committee and should be subject to the restrictions and disclosure rules for political committees.
America is witnessing full-scale evasion of our campaign finance and disclosure laws in the middle of this critical 2012 presidential election. Following the disastrous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations may spend unlimited corporate money to influence elections, corporate money now is flooding our state, judicial and federal campaigns. And most of this corporate money is secretly flowing into the elections through electioneering nonprofit groups, like Crossroads GPS, which do not have to disclose their donors under the tax code.
But the elections code is an entirely different story. Any group whose major purpose is to influence elections is required to register as a PAC and disclose its funding sources under the Federal Election Campaign Act. Crossroads GPS appears to serve little purpose other than buying Congress and the White House in the 2012 elections, and therefore appears to be in clear violation of the law.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) should not stop with Crossroads GPS. Hundreds of similar secretive c(4) electioneering groups have sprung up specifically for the 2012 elections, including Priorities USA, which is supporting the election of President Barack Obama. [MORE]
Should there be a quetion mark on the headline above? The print edition of Politico (6/12/12) did not have the question mark, but if you click through to the article on their website, a question mark has been added to the headline for Tim Mak's article about a surprising new study showing that massive lobbying in D.C. doesn't pay
by TIM MAK, Politico
In a surprising finding, a new study shows that massive lobbying in D.C. and campaign donations by corporations are linked with worse market performance.
The Rice University study looked at the amount of money spent on lobbying and campaigning donations by 943 S&P 1500 firms between 1998 and 2008 and found that so-called political investments lead to weaker performance in terms of stock value and return on assets.
Further, the report showed that firms that placed former public officials on their boards were worse off than those without these kinds of board members.
“The view of corporations meddling in politics to the downfall of public interests is nothing new… This study simply demonstrates that it might not be quite the return on investment that corporate America or the public at large believes it to be,” said Doug Schuler, a study co-author and professor at Rice.
The report suggested several reasons for what it called “largely unexpected results,” including that businesspeople who support corporate political giving may generally take more risky business decisions; that corporate political giving is a poor investment; that this kind of spending is difficult for shareholders to monitor; and that ideological beliefs and other such pressures may influence corporate political activity. [MORE]
Required reading for anyone interested in the corrupting influence of money on politics
Excerpts from article by ANDY KROLL, Mother Jones
In the age of the super-PAC, Americans commonly say there's too much money in politics, that lobbyists have too much power, and that the system is stacked against the average citizen. "Our government," as one Occupy DC protester put it, "has allowed policy, laws, and justice to be for sale to the highest bidder."
For many political observers, it feels like a return to the pre-Watergate years. Rich bankrollers—W. Clement Stone then, Sheldon Adelson now—cut jaw-dropping checks backing their favorite candidates. Political operatives devise ways to hide tens of millions in campaign donations. And protesters have taken to the streets over what they see as a broken system. "We're back to the Nixon era," says Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, "the era of undisclosed money, of big cash amounts and huge interests that are small in number dominating American politics." This is the story of how we got here....
Watergate aside, the issue of campaign finance historically has not resonated with Americans. Those few reporters who do concentrate on it—Mother Jones has made it a focus since our post-Watergate inception—struggle to breathe life into stories based on government documents and obscure regulations. But the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision—freeing corporations and unions to spend unlimited outside money on elections—jolted the public, prompting hundreds of protests and inspiring a nationwide grassroots campaign to, as the group Public Citizen puts it, "reclaim our democracy."
We've been here before. The basic pattern emerging from the last century of campaign finance can be summarized as: scandal, then reform. The Tillman Act's ban on corporate donations to candidates passed after Teddy Roosevelt was caught shaking down big New York City businesses. Watergate spurred the historic 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act. And the 1996 Democratic fundraising abuses paved the way for the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, better known as McCain-Feingold. "Congress," says Democratic election lawyer Joseph Sandler, "is always fighting the last war." And whenever new reforms take effect, Washington's brightest minds turn to finding clever new ways to circumvent them. [MORE]
by Kay Steiger, The Raw Story
New York’s dynamic state attorney general reminded progressives at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C. that the right’s efforts to fight financial regulation is far from divinely inspired.
“You don’t build a movement with short-term tactics. You build a movement by understanding and change the way people think,” Eric Schneiderman said. “The day everyone says in America, ‘You know what? There’s no missing page of Genesis that says there are separate tax rates for capital gains. There is nothing in Leviticus that says you may not regulate derivatives. This is not stuff that has to be.’”
“This is just a bunch of people who decided our public policy should be to redistribute all of the wealth in our society to a very small number of our people,” Schneiderman said. “It’s public policy. It’s not ancient. It’s not God, and we have the power to change it. That’s what will enable us to break through the log jams to re-regulate the Dodd-Frank process. That’s what will break through.” [MORE]
Bill Moyers invited us to come on his show this week to chat about dark money, the undisclosed, often untraceable political spending made possible by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. In a wide-ranging (and incredibly gracious) interview, he asked us about everything from the latest super-PAC machinations to the nexus between political money and income inequality. [WATCH]
Can you imagine going through something like this when you were in high school?
[WATCH VIDEO by John X. Carey]
by MICHAEL BARONE, Real Clear Politics
There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth as, in the spring, it appeared that forces supporting Mitt Romney would be able to raise about as much money as those supporting Barack Obama. There's even more now that it seems likely that the pro-Romney side will raise and spend more money than the pro-Obama side.
Four years ago, the Obama forces heavily outspent those supporting John McCain. The Obama campaign had enough money to target -- and carry -- heretofore Republican states like North Carolina and Indiana.... [MORE]
Via Michael Charney
Now that Mitt Romney is their likely nominee, and running an extremely close race against President Obama, Republicans are demonstrating fresh enthusiasm. by Philip Rucker, Washington Post
NEWARK, Ohio — Mitt Romney is still awkward sometimes, a bit robotic and stilted at the lectern. But a turnabout seems to be happening: Voters say they are seeing him through a new prism. “He’s not stiff. He’s letting his own human nature through, talking like you and I are talking now, not guarded and watching what he’d say,” Marge Sowa, 69, said of the Republican presidential candidate after sizing him up at a pancake breakfast in Brunswick, Ohio, during his tour of potential battleground states. “He showed personality — oh, big time. He was one of the guys.” One of the guys. That’s a far cry from how voters described Romney during the tumultuous GOP primaries. Now that he is their likely nominee and running an extremely close race against President Obama, Republicans are demonstrating fresh enthusiasm. [MORE]
As Justices are increasingly seen as making decisions along partisan lines, the American public’s approval of the Supreme Court wanes.
By Dan Froomkin, The Huffington Post
Federal officials have yet to respond to two United Nations human rights envoys who formally requested that the U.S. government protect Occupy protesters against excessive force by law enforcement officials. In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the two envoys called on U.S. officials to "explain the behavior of police departments that violently disbanded some Occupy protests last fall" and expressed concern that excessive use of force "could have been related to [the protesters'] dissenting views, criticisms of economic policies, and their legitimate work in the defense of human rights and fundamental freedoms." The envoys also reminded the U.S. government of its international obligations to "take all necessary measures to guarantee that the rights and freedoms of all peaceful protesters be respected."
By Judd Legum, Think Progress
After two female legislators were banned from the Michigan House floor last week after saying “vagina” during a debate about an anti-abortion measure, a massive crowd has gathered at the state capitol for a reading of “The Vagina Monologues.” There are an estimated 5,000 people in attendance.
Drug and insurance firms dictated the terms of reform. A reversal should stoke a social movement for real change.
by David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler
David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler are internists and professors of public health at the City University of New York. They are co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program.
A single-payer reform -- a public, national health insurance plan that pays virtually all medical bills -- would fix the health care mess; and, like Medicare, it’s clearly constitutional. Single-payer would save $400 billion wasted each year on insurers’ overhead and the paperwork burden they impose on doctors and hospitals. It could redirect this money to cover the uninsured and upgrade coverage for the rest of the 99 percent. As nations with single-payer systems have found, cutting out the insurance middlemen and driving a hard bargain with drug firms makes universal coverage affordable and lowers death rates. And single-payer would restore Americans’ right to choose any doctor and any hospital.
[Read more of this opinion piece and other debate pieces in "Life After the Health Care Ruling."]
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