• House Begins Reconciliation Process, Aims For Final Vote This Week
• Dodd Bill To Be Released Today
• China Digs In On Manipulating Currency

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Republicans in Congress have introduced a breathtaking new budget plan that would essentially put America's plutocracy on steroids.

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There's a lot of buzz in health care circles about an editorial in today's Washington Post entitled "If Democrats ignore health-care polls, midterms will be costly." That could be dangerous: the author's conclusions are contradicted, not supported, by the available facts.

The editorial's written by Patrick Caddell, described as a "political commentator and former pollster," and Douglas E. Schoen. Caddell and Schoen play the "pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents" card prominently, but here's what they don't tell you: Schoen's been on a third-party kick since he wrote a paean to centrism called Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System. And Caddell's a "commentator," all right: he's now a right-leaning Fox News regular. There's plenty of YouTube video of Caddell clucking tongues with Glenn Beck over Van Jones' "violent past," or whatever the right-wing outrage of the day happens to be.

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President Obama spoke yesterday at the annual conference of the Export-Import Bank, where he discussed the creation of the Export Promotion Cabinet and last year's efforts by the Export-Import Bank to directly extend financing for the purchase of American exports.

It remains to be seen what the initiative will come to, but Obama hit the nail on the head regarding public sentiment on trade:

... And meanwhile, if you ask the average American what trade has offered them, they won’t say that their televisions are cheaper, or productivity is higher. They’d say they’ve seen the plant across town shut down, jobs dry up, communities deteriorate. And you can’t blame them for feeling that way. The fact is other countries haven’t always played by the same set of rules. America hasn’t always enforced our trade rights, or made sure that the benefits of trade are broadly shared. And we haven’t always done enough to help our workers adapt to a changing world. ...

Scott Paul, Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, responded to Obama's remarks:

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A Center for American Progress report this week chronicles just how obstructionist conservatives in the Senate continue to be as they use the filibuster to block reform efforts in the Senate.

Scott Lilly elaborates on a trend that we began chronicling more than two years ago as conservatives announced that routine use of the filibuster would become their political strategy. They would flip-flop from being the party that insisted on "the up-or-down vote" to the party sometimes willing to block votes at all costs.

Lilly chronicles a steadily rising occurrence of filibusters in the Senate, from an average of 20 a year in the 1970s and 1980s to an average of 36 a year up to the 2006 elections. But that dramatically changed when the Democrats took control of the Senate in 2006.

To borrow a term from “Star Wars,” filibustering has gone from overdrive to “hyperspace.” Filibusters are now commonly used to block not only legislation the minority opposes, but to block legislation the minority does not necessarily have strong feelings on but will use to place a stick in the spokes of the legislative wheel anytime an opportunity presents itself.

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Pat Buchanan has a column today on manufacturing, The Disemboweling of America, that hits the nail on the head. In fact, if I fairly excerpt enough of the column and send you over to read it, my work here is done. For today.

Buchanan begins by outlining just how much our country has lost by allowing others, particularly China, to take over manufacturing.

Though Bush 41 and Bush 43 often disagreed, one issue did unite them both with Bill Clinton: protectionism.

Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America's industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers.

. . . From 2000 to 2009, industrial production declined here for the first time since the 1930s. Gross domestic product also fell, and we actually lost jobs.

In traded goods alone, we ran up $6.2 trillion in deficits — $3.8 trillion of that in manufactured goods.

And what are the implication of this loss of manufacturing?

. . . for every dollar we send abroad for oil or gas, we send $4.20 abroad for manufactured goods. Why is a dependency on the Persian Gulf for a fraction of the oil we consume more of a danger than a huge growing dependency on China for the necessities of our national life?

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The Washington Post today published an op-ed by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, who defined themselves as "pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton" who are heroically telling the current President that the polls say "Comprehensive health care has been lost," so they should give up on it.

For political advice to President Obama, this is about as sincere and honest as what he's getting from Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Caddell and Schoen may have once been Democratic presidential pollsters, but they are no longer. They are now, among other things, contributors to Fox News (which, by the way, is throwing away any pretense of being a "news" organization and literally asking it's predominantly conservative audience to lobby their congresspeople on health care.)

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• March 18 Still The Goal To Pass Health Care In The House
• Dodd Moves Without GOP On Financial Reform. (But What's In His Bill?)
• Yellin May Be Next Fed Vice-Chair
• Momentum Returns To Pass Student Loan Reform With Simple Majority
• 300,000 New Jobs In March?
• Bipartisan Immigration Proposal In The Works

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______________________

With word that Six Senators were expressing opposition to putting direct lending in the budget bill reconciliation -- which only requires sixty votes to pass the Senate -- Rep George Miller, Chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, and Tom Harkin, Chair of the Senate Education Committe, got to work. Miller pointed out that adding direct lending in the bill made reconciliation more, not less likely to pass in the House -- where every vote is needed to get the health care fix done.

The House pledged to adjust its measure to insure that direct lending would save money, even after increasing funding for Pell grants and guaranteeing that Pell grants would be adjusted annually for inflation.

If this holds, it is a terrific victory for students.

New York Times Story here http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/politics/12loans.html?hp

Miller's press release on the program below.
__________________
EDUCATION & LABOR COMMITTEE
Congressman George Miller, Chairman
________________________________________
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Press Office, 202-226-0853

Chairman Miller: Student Loan Reform Boosts Support for Health Reform Bill
Members of Black and Hispanic Caucuses Also Show Strong Support

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Senators Webb and Sanders have signed letter urging President Obama to fill empty seats on Federal Reserve Board with nominees who will help balance the Institution. Notably they urge the Pres to find nominees who would break up the big banks, ban usurious interest rates, enforce consumer protections, allow an audit of the fed's bailout operations, put a lid on executive compenstaion. A sensible idea after the crash which has cost Americans trillions.

Here's the report from Ryan Grim of HuffingtonPost with letter attached.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/webb-sanders-pressure-oba_n_495...

Webb, Sanders Pressure Obama On Fed

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The world's super-duper rich, in the new Forbes magazine count, total just over 1,000 — and hold more wealth than half of humanity.

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Something so simple, so easy: end tens of billions of dollars in bank subsidies to the private lending industry and return much of the savings back into the hand of students, with the Department of Education providing loans to students directly. A no-brainer right? Well reform may be a no-go, if six Senate Democrats have their way.

Senators Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Jim Webb (D-Va.) all have expressed concerns about student loan reform (known as the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act) and urge for alternative proposals in order to protect lenders and jobs in their states. Fair enough, job losses –especially now –are never a good thing. However, even with reform, private lenders (that employ only around 30,000) will still play a big role in servicing loans –so job losses will be minimal or even increase with greater loan volume looking down the road. Click here for more common myths about student loan reform.

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After more than a year of closed-door negotiations, the President and other Democrats have finally appropriated a Republican phrase by calling for "an up or down vote" on the resulting health reform legislation. Great idea - so great, in fact, that we should do even better on financial reform.

This time, let's have an up-or-down vote on each of the vital policy planks that constitute meaningful reform. Instead of having politicians do their horsetrading in private and leaving the public vote until the end, let's have a public show of hands on the vital economic issues of our time..

So far the Senate's financial reform has been anything but an open-book process. Sen. Chris Dodd is becoming the Max Baucus of financial reform. Baucus used his powerful position to trade away one popular policy on health reform after another, allegedly in search of "bipartisan" support. Yet when that support didn't appear, none of those compromises were withdrawn. Funny how that happens.

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Remember the Texas wind project that got this whole discussion started about where the stimulus money was going? The Chinese company involved in the project is now scoping out sites in Nevada for a 1,000 person manufacturing and assembly plant, like they said they would.

The final wind installation in Texas, while it would be completed before this plant could open, will also source 70% of its parts from the US and from US-made steel. I'd pointed out previously that because a wind turbine is a big pole with an engine on top, that wouldn't necessarily mean that many of the more complicated parts were being made here. However, as I've gathered since first looking into it, a couple years ago it would barely have been possible to source so much domestically and the high end production is indeed ramping up.

It is, therefore and as far as I can tell, good progress and in keeping with the creation of long term demand that a robust US wind industry could grow up to meet. If China's A-Power follows through with the factory, then we'll have a Chinese company hiring more Americans, which is all to the good and more than some American companies have been doing lately.

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There is a great deal of pressure on the Obama administration to declare China as a currency manipulator, and with very good reason: they are manipulating their currency. This manipulation gives goods made in China a huge price advantage over goods made in other countries, and is a large part of the reason so many of our companies move manufacturing and jobs from here to there. This is, of course, not "free trade" it is a stacked deck.

In What Chinese Currency Manipulation Looks Like, Eric Lotke shows how China gains this trade advantage,

The dollar exchange with China “defies the laws of monetary physics.” During this U.S.-led global recession, dollars aren’t worth as much as they once were. The natural physics of exchange makes U.S. goods relatively less expensive for others to buy, but makes foreign goods more expensive for Americans to buy. In a free market for currency, that would help bring accounts back into balance.

[. . .] In the American heartland the issue isn’t exchange rates, of course. The issue is jobs. American workers can compete dollar for dollar against Chinese workers. They can’t compete dollars against manipulated Yuans.

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