unemployment insurance

Political Corruption: GOP Embraces the Ken Lay Way

Leo Gerard — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:40:30 -0500

The GOP has adopted the Ken Lay principles – that is obfuscation, false statements and feigned innocence. Republicans are obfuscating about the real reason for their opposition to extending unemployment benefits, the way Enron CEO Ken Lay concealed the truth about billions in losses his corporation racked up.

Lay assured Enron workers the corporation was strong – five weeks before it failed. When the nation’s 7^th largest corporation collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001, Lay walked away, by his own estimate, with $20 million. By contrast, Enron’s 4,000 workers and creditors left with debts. The employees lost their jobs and pensions, and the creditors lost $65 billion.

Lay cooked the books. A jury, and a judge in a separate case, convicted him of it in 2006 – finding him guilty of fraud, conspiracy and false statements. He obscured Enron’s massive losses with accounting hocus-pocus then lied about it so pervasively and persuasively that in February of 2001, ten months before the bankruptcy, Fortune magazine awarded Enron first place for innovation and second for management quality.

Republican acolytes of the Ken Lay way contend that the federal budget deficit prohibits spending $65 billion to extend emergency unemployment insurance for a year. But, at the same time, they insist the deficit doesn’t constrain extending tax cuts to the richest 1 percent at a cost of $61 billion for the year 2011. It’s masterful. And as corrupt as Ken Lay.

In the past 60 years, Congress has never terminated emergency unemployment benefits when joblessness was this severe. The highest point at which Congress ended the program previously was 7.2 percent, and that rate was declining. Now, unemployment is stuck at a rate significantly higher -- 9.6 percent. There are 14.8 million unemployed workers, five jostling for every single job opening. They subsist on unemployment checks averaging less than $290 a week, which for too many is insufficient to forestall foreclosure because it’s half of what an average family spends for necessities.

Despite that six-decade precedent, Republicans blocked extension of unemployment benefits on Tuesday, then on Wednesday announced they’d vote on no measure until they got renewal of the Bush tax cuts and a resolution continuing funding for the federal government. As a result, 800,000 jobless Americans lost those small, family-preserving checks. Republicans are holding them hostage, with a ransom demand of tax cuts for the nation’s richest 1 percent. If the GOP doesn't get what it wants, 2 million will lose unemployment insurance by year's end.

Like Ken Lay, Republicans mouth right-sounding words. They claim they care about creating jobs and improving the economy. All the while, just the way Lay covertly defiled accounts, the GOP kicks the economy in the stomach.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) ranked unemployment insurance as among the best economic boosters and job creators. CBO determined it generates as much as $1.90 in economic activity for every government dollar. Similarly, a study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that extending the benefits for a year would create as many as 488,000 jobs, which, ultimately, would reduce the cost of benefits because those workers would pay taxes rather than seek food stamps.

Republicans swear that the way to create jobs is to extend the Bush tax breaks for the nation’s richest – people earning more than a quarter million dollars a year. The GOP slyly says those words over and over, hoping repetition will spin them into truth. Like Ken Lay’s assertion that Enron was strong as it disintegrated, the GOP tax cut talking point defies truth.

The CBO concluded that extending tax cuts for the rich was among the least effective economic stimulators. It calculated that extending unemployment insurance would revive the economy up to 19 times as much as extending tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest 1 percent. In addition, those tax breaks didn’t achieve promised job creation during the Bush administration. Since Harry Truman, no president but George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, both one-termers, generated fewer jobs than the 3 million George W. Bush did over his eight years. Even one-term “stagflation” President Jimmy Carter produced more than three times as many jobs as George W. Bush.

Again, aping Ken Lay, Republicans are engaging in accounting fraud. Professing deep concern over the budget deficit, Republicans say they’d extend unemployment insurance for a year if Democrats would cut federal spending by $65 billion to pay for it. They don’t acknowledge any parallel requirement to cut federal spending by $61 billion to pay for extending tax cuts for the rich for a year.

Just like Enron furloughing 4,000 while Ken Lay and fellow executives stole away with millions, Republicans would take food from the mouths of the unemployed while bulking up the deficit to appease the rich who feast on Almas caviar and White Alba truffles.

That’s corrupt accounting.

And it makes sense. It comes from the party of Ken Lay, who flew George H. W. and Barbara Bush on an Enron plane to George W’s inauguration. You can betcha Republicans won’t take responsibility for the personal and economic devastation caused by their decision to continue moving wealth from the middle class to the rich, just like Ken Lay denied responsibility for Enron’s bankruptcy – right up to his death -- which occurred at a Colorado resort as he awaited sentencing.

Vote for Hope

Leo Gerard — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 09:30:27 -0400

The electorate is bitter and angry. It’s no wonder. Foreclosures rise while Wall Street bankers, whose recklessness caused this grave recession, grab million dollar bonuses. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent, but corporations continue to ship jobs overseas.

The level of acrimony showed itself Monday in Lexington, Ky., when a group of men supporting Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul threw a woman backing Democrat Jack Conway to the ground and stomped on her head.

This is not the hope America voted for in the fall of 2008. Now another election is upon us. On Tuesday, voters can choose candidates capitalizing on bitterness, or they can return to hope and provide time for change to play out. Voters can stay the course with the President whose basic philosophy is a Biblical one – that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Or Americans can empower Republicans who believe it’s every man for himself, who espouse the view that a man’s success is his own, and, equally, each man is solely responsible for all of his setbacks.

This midterm election is about how those disparate Republican and Democratic values will play out in legislation. Do Americans want to live in a Republican country that blames individuals for their unemployment in an economy creating only one position for every five jobless workers? Or do Americans want a country that lives by the Democratic philosophy that government must aid, not blame, the unemployed, that it must give a hand up, not a slap in the face, to the suffering?

Hard as it is during troubled times, as difficult as it may feel after some legislative efforts have fallen short of important idealistic goals, let’s build a country of hope, one in which we help our fellow Americans.

That virtuous aim, of course, is the subject of ridicule. Here’s Sarah Palin mocking optimistic Americans at a Tea Bagger event in February, “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

But come out to vote for hope Tuesday anyway; stand up to the malevolent bullies.

What the bullies want is a country where workers are on their own: for health insurance, for income security in their old age, for surviving another Wall Street collapse. For everything.

Unemployment insurance is a good example. Over the past year, the GOP has scorned the jobless, calling them lazy freeloaders. Republicans repeatedly voted against extending unemployment benefits. From the GOP point of view, Wall Street’s crash didn’t cause the economic collapse and high unemployment. No, according to Republicans, each unemployed worker is responsible for his situation, and it’s not the role of government to intervene to help. That philosophy is behind Republican South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s comment that the unemployed, like stray animals, should not be fed: “You are facilitating the problem if you give an animal or person ample food supply.”

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to aid the unemployed.

Wall Street reform is another example of Republican “on your own” philosophy. Before the stock market crash of 1929, the unregulated American financial system whipped the economy in wild boom and bust cycles. The frequent crashes and runs on banks were called panics. In Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress imposed rules on Wall Street and the banking industry. For the next sixty years the economy largely avoided panics. Then Congress lifted the regulations, and the crash of 2008 wrecked the economy. Former President Bush responded by proposing and orchestrating the Wall Street bailout. But his party vigorously opposed re-regulation to avoid another economic disaster. The GOP voted against the legislation restoring protections for the economy, investors and consumers. Republicans believe government has no business policing the free market or interceding for investors and consumers because individuals are solely to blame for everything that happens to them.

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to protect hardworking Americans against financial fraud and the machinations of powerful, multi-national financial firms.

Health insurance reform provides one of the clearest examples of Republican “on your own” philosophy. The GOP proposed that “reform” consist of granting individuals small tax breaks, about a quarter the cost of health insurance, while revoking breaks given companies that provide health coverage to workers. This, Republicans said, would “free” companies from providing insurance and “free” individuals to choose their own plans. It would have liberated individuals to negotiate coverage and claims payment with giant, sophisticated, lawyer-laden insurance corporations. If an individual got a bad deal, one that enabled the insurer to drop coverage when he got sick, deny coverage to his sick child or raise rates continuously, well, then, that would be the fault of the individual purchaser. Republicans have promised that if empowered, they will repeal the Democrats’ Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to support the health insurance reform law that uses the power of government regulation to shield policy holders from insurer abuses, that lowers costs and that enables nearly all Americans to obtain insurance.

Retirees should be “on their own” as well, Republicans believe. Some in the GOP even contend Social Security is unconstitutional. Others want to cut it or privatize it. What privatizing means is getting the government out of the business of collecting Social Security taxes to ensure that all workers receive benefits after retiring. Instead, Republicans want workers to be on their own to invest for their retirement. If there’s another market “panic” – which could happen if Republicans repeal Wall Street reform – and workers lose their “privatized” retirement savings in the crash, the GOP’s response would be that individuals must take responsibility – their loss is their fault.

Come out Tuesday and vote to keep America’s promise to provide basic income security to all elderly citizens. Vote to be your brothers’ and sisters’ keeper and for them to be yours. Vote for hope.

Senators, The Unemployed Have A Job For You

Isaiah J. Poole — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 06:30:48 -0400

LISTEN

Three unemployed people — Ed Zibrida of Indiana, Jyl Forsyth of Michigan and Jeff Sumner of Kentucky — discuss the effect of the Senate conservative filibuster against unemployment benefits on their lives and their demand for urgent congressional action.

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, what will you say to Jeff Sumner of Louisville when the lights go out in his house at the end of this week? How proud will you be of your votes against extending unemployment insurance to him and millions of other workers?

Sumner is one of the more than 2 million people who have lost their unemployment benefits because of a weeks-old Senate filibuster against their extension led by McConnell, the chamber's minority leader. If the Senate does not break that filibuster this week, Sumner, who lost his extended unemployment benefits when Republicans blocked their continued authorization in early June, loses the utilities in his house. Shortly after that, he told me Friday for this audio report, he will lose his house. He will be homeless.

Sumner is also one of the 6.75 million people who have been unemployed for more than six months. These are the people, according to some Republican leaders, who believe that the extension of unemployment benefits is responsible for so many unemployed people being out of work (as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle said, the unemployed are "spoiled" by those benefits), not the fact that there were only 3 million job openings (in April 2010) for nearly 15 million unemployed workers.

But even the least crass of the conservative justifications for this obstruction—that continued federal spending on unemployment benefits should be "paid for" by cuts elsewhere in the budget—is a cruel fiction for the people, like the ones featured in our audio report, who have applied for hundreds of jobs, have shown themselves willing to do almost anything for a paycheck, and yet are not being given a chance to grasp even the bottom rung of the economic ladder. As Jyl Foster, a former radio announcer who has been out of work for over a year, told me in reaction to the conservative's oft-used line about not passing today's debt to their grandchildren, "There are so many people right now who are hurting, and they're worried about their kid's grandkids? That just makes my blood boil. It hurts my heart."

Not to mention that devastating the lives of today's unemployed workers is a helluva way of showing how much you care for future generations.

Yet conservative leaders believe that today's high unemployment is the right vehicle to continue their assault on government. How else to explain the resurrection of Arthur Laffer in the Wall Street Journal last week, he of the now-discredited "Laffer curve." This time, he was not only asserting, with no obvious basis in fact, that extending unemployment benefits makes "being unemployed either more attractive or less unattractive, and thereby lead to higher unemployment," but he was suggesting that the government should instead "declare a federal tax holiday for 18 months," which he says would cut federal revenues by $2.4 trillion annually. The entire federal budget in 2010 was $3.5 trillion. You see what he's up to. (The Seminal, like me, found it "hard to know where to begin in tackling the various strawman and out right fallacious arguments Laffer uses in this opinion piece.")

Laffer may be on the edge of conservative thought on his tax holiday idea, but basically Laffer and conservatives holding up unemployment extension and job-creation legislation in the Senate are on the same twisted wavelength. Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, a member of the unemployment-checks-make-you-lazy coalition, on Sunday said that while extended unemployment benefits should not be allowed to add to the federal deficit, tax cuts should. He said this in response to a question about continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which if Congress opts to cancel their planned expiration would add $678 billion to the deficit.

There you have it. Benefits totaling $35 billion to keep unemployed people from being evicted from their homes for facing some other financial calamity is an expense we can't afford. But we can afford to let wealthy people and corporations continue to escape paying $678 billion in taxes. Or we can afford to eliminate the estate tax, another conservative obsession. Or we can afford to continue to tax billionaire hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street gamblers at a lower rate than the five-figure secretaries in their offices.

The unemployed do not ask for much. They want conservatives in Congress to stop caricaturing them and using them to score ideological points. They want Congress to act with the same urgency with which they acted in 2008 and 2009 when the banking system was melting down. This week, it is time to break the filibuster against unemployment benefits. Next, authorize aid to the states to cover the mandatory Medicaid and children's health care costs that are forcing therm to cut vital programs elsewhere in the budget. Then, pass the Local Jobs for America Act, which would pour $100 billion into states and localities to support public service jobs in both government and the private sector.

The choice is clear: Address the needs of the unemployed for immediate aid and an eventual job, or watch the economy continue to fester as conservatives succeed in dragging the nation backwards.

Greed Explains the Disasters and the Lying Afterwards

Leo Gerard — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:22:16 -0400

(This post is by Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers and by Cecil Roberts, international president of the United Mine Workers of America)

As oil mucked the Gulf of Mexico and families mourned 11 dead rig workers, BP officials proclaimed that the corporation’s priority always was safety.

This tracked the tack taken by Massey Energy, whose officials also declared safety was paramount after an explosion in the corporation’s Upper Big Branch mine killed 29 workers.

CEOs commonly make such incongruous assertions to protect profits after corporate-caused disasters. They’re driven by the same factor that is fundamental to the catastrophes – greed.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Not in a society that has converted greed from a vice to a virtue. Not in the place that inspired the book, “Greed is Good: The Capitalist Pig Guide to Investing.” Surely it’s no problem in the land where “Greed” has its own game show on Fox and where Ayn Rand, the “money-is-the-root-of-all-good” philosopher, reigns as Republican queen long after her death.

Americans worship God on the Sabbath and the rich every other day. Billionaire Warren Buffett’s word is investment gospel. Americans gave Wall Street banksters hundreds of billions in bailout money -- protecting their multi-million dollar bonuses. But in the midst of the Great Recession caused by Wall Street recklessness, America has repeatedly delayed renewal of unemployment benefits and now is terminating federal health insurance support for the furloughed middle class.

Middle class workers are the ones who die in coal mines and on oil rigs.

Afterwards, CEOs say anything to save the bottom line – the one that will determine their bonuses.

Discussing the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, Massey CEO Don Blankenship told stock analysts in a conference call late in April:

“Some of the implications have been that we don’t focus on safety or we put dollars in front of safety and nothing could be further from the truth.”

Though the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued 1,342 safety violation notices to Upper Big Branch over the past five years, Blankenship explained that’s just life in the coal business:

“Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process.”

In addition, Blankenship said the titles of two Massey programs proved safety was supreme:

“The naming of those two programs speaks for itself: S1 – safety is job one; P2 – production is job 2. That’s been the case for my entire tenure.”

Still, 29 miners are dead. And dozens died at Massey mines in the past decade. Three died at Upper Big Branch between 1998 and 2010. The Massey dead include two workers who suffocated in a mine run by Massey subsidiary Aracoma Coal Co. on Jan. 19, 2006, just three months after Blankenship issued a memo ordering underlings to produce coal to the exclusion of other activities, such as building ventilation systems called overcasts. Aracoma officials pleaded guilty in December, 2008, to removing and failing to replace ventilation devices, the lack of which contributed to the suffocation deaths.

And Massey workers aren’t as sure as Don Blanekship that safety is job one. Several spoke to NPR about it. Teddy Cole, who worked a dozen years at Upper Big Branch, said Blankenship prioritizes production:

“It’s supposed to be safety first, but to me, it was production first.”

Former co-worker Brian Jerral agreed:

“A lot of times, it’s production first and safety third.”

Adam Vance, who worked at two Massey mines, described a culture of greed:

“They cover [themselves] with their safety meetings, but the main thing Massey’s out for is to get that all-mighty dollar. If the coal ain’t running, they ain’t making no money.”

And it’s a lot of money for Massey -- $1.02 million a day in 2008.

Massey miner Ricky Lee Campbell 24, of Beckley, W.Va., told reporters about his safety concerns on April 7. Massey suspended him a week later, then fired him. He has filed a federal whistle-blower complaint.

Similar to Massey, BP officials claim safety is job one.

Shortly after BP named Tony Hayward CEO in 2007, he told the Houston Chronicle:

"I think we have the opportunity to set a new benchmark in industrial safety. . .We have to have a work environment where people don't get injured or killed, period."

That was significant since an explosion two years earlier had killed 15 workers and injured another 170 at BP’s Texas City, Texas oil refinery, and federal regulators blamed the catastrophe in part on cost cuts initiated by Hayward’s predecessor. The following year, BP admitted oil leaks into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay were caused partly by cost cutting.

Despite Hayward’s safety assertions, another 11 workers are dead. And survivors told CNN that PB routinely cut corners and pushed production despite potential safety problems. They also told CNN co-workers had been fired for raising concerns about dangerous practices that could delay drilling if remedied and that BP had insisted on an unsual process shortcut on the day of the blast.

Immediately after the rig explosion, BP contended its under-Gulf pipe was spewing only 1,000 barrels of oil a day. Fairly quickly, it revised that estimate to 5,000 barrels, but continued to refuse to make public its live video of the oil-churning pipe.

After a freedom of information request and Congressional pressure forced BP to release the video, federal officials estimated as much as 40,000 barrels are being discharged daily.

Still, BP’s Hayward flatly denied the existence of underwater oil plumes, saying:

“The oil is on the surface. There aren’t any plumes.”

And he discounted the effect of the unleashed oil on the environment:

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Hayward had a good (greed-based) reason to deny access to the video, discount the amount of oil spewing into the sea and defy the assessment of government and university researchers who confirmed the plumes of dispersed oil stretching for miles beneath the ocean surface. BP will be fined based on the number of barrels of oil its well disgorges into the gulf – somewhere between $1,100 and $4,300 a barrel -- depending on whether the government can prove gross negligence.

David Leonhardt, an economics columnist for the New York Times, described BP’s Texas City, Gulf of Mexico and Alaska crises this way:

“Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may.”

Greed.

It’s one of the seven deadly sins. When it afflicts corporate CEOs, it’s deadly to workers.

Honest profit is fine. But it’s perverse to celebrate greed, to elevate it over human life.

Conservative Unemployment Roadblock Will Cost States Millions

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:17:03 -0500

The latest bit of obstruction being staged by a Senate conservative, done in the name of limiting federal spending, is going to end up costing cash-strapped states millions of dollars as well as potentially causing millions of workers to lose their unemployment benefits.

Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., earlier today continued his blockage of an extension of federal unemployment insurance benefits that are due to expire this weekend. Meanwhile, the Senate has adjourned until Monday, with no votes scheduled until Tuesday.

That means that states will now start cutting off payments to people receiving federally funded extended unemployment benefits, paid to people who have exhausted their standard 26 weeks of unemployment benefits. A total of about 5 million people depend on those benefits today. They won't all be cut off at once, but several hundred thousand stand to lose benefits effective this weekend, according to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies—the trade group for state unemployment offices—and that number will grow each week that Bunning and his conservative allies in the Senate succeed in blocking action on a benefit extension.

Unemployed people will also lose a $25-a-week add-on to their unemployment checks that was authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus bill.

The human cost is obvious: People who have been searching for work unsuccessfully for six months or more are suddenly going to lose their only means of income. And that's going to be a lot of people in a state like Bunning's Kentucky, where the unemployment rate is 10.7 percent, compared to 9.7 percent nationally. Nationally, 6.3 million people have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But there are significant costs to cash-strapped states, which are going to have to start sending out notices Monday to many of the people who will lose eligibility under these programs. The National Association of State Workforce Agencies doesn't have a solid estimate on those administrative costs, but "it's certainly millions," said spokesman Ben Fendler, and "the magnitude of the problem will increase significantly if the programs are not reenacted immediately," because new people will lose their eligibility for extended benefits at the rate of 150,000 a week.

There is an ignominious bit of history here, according to Judy Conti at the National Employment Law Project:

For the first time since the enactment of the unemployment insurance system during the Great Depression, there will be no federal extensions when the unemployment rate was above 8 percent. This is a catastrophe and tragedy of epic proportion. While a debate and discussion about the deficit may be an appropriate exercise for the Senate, it should not be done at the expense of 1.2 million unemployed workers, especially when, as Mr. Bunning admitted on the floor, he knows he will lose the debate and he knows that these benefits are likely to be extended sooner rather than later. His misguided and cruel stunt on the floor last night will end up having NO impact at all on the federal deficit, whereas it may push unemployed workers all over the country over a financial ledge from which they cannot recover. And the cost to state governments, which will have to expend considerable overtime taking down their programs, and even more to put them back in place, will be staggering at a time when they can least afford it. So Mr. Bunning accomplished nothing for the federal deficit, but certainly added to the deficit of his own state’s coffers as well as its unemployed workers.

Bunning's complaint is that the $10 billion cost of the benefit extension should be paid out of federal stimulus funds. Bunning and other Senate conservatives opposed the Recovery Act from the very beginning, so they are looking for any opening to shut it down. To do so would be self-defeating; every Recovery Act dollar Congress appropriated last year that is not already being drained away in tax relief needs to be deployed in job-creating projects. The more money spent on job creation, the less of a problem unemployment insurance becomes. Plus, that would never fly in the House, where progressives and members of the Congressional Black Caucus are bristling at the Senate-passed $15 billion tax and spending package, arguing it is not a "jobs bill" as the Senate leadership is characterizing it. The House has already passed a far more robust, $154 billion bill.

The real shame is that in the face of what is certainly an emergency for people who are about to lose their ability to pay their housing bill or buy groceries, the Senate leadership decided to adjourn for the weekend rather than force a showdown on this issue. David Waldman at Daily Kos was justifiably furious:

A one-man filibuster is the kind a concerted effort to "make them filibuster" is most likely to break. But instead, no one's even trying anymore. ... the Senate appears to have adjourned for the weekend. Bunning has won for the day, and [Sen. Richard] Durbin's threat [to force regular votes on a motion to break the filibuster] has shockingly failed to materialize at all. The extent of Bunning's punishment: he missed prime time TeeVee last night.

TAKE ACTION
TrueMajority has launched an email campaign to press the Senate to act on an unemployment insurance extension. Use this link to participate in the TrueMajority campaign.

What a way to reinforce the narrative that Washington can't get anything done and is tone deaf to the needs of working people. But let's not lose sight of the fundamental issue: Senate conservatives would rather see Bunning grandstand over federal spending, even if that grandstanding results in more taxpayer spending and more human suffering, than casting a simple vote in favor of a measure even Bunning says he does not oppose.

It's obstruction for the sake of obstruction, and the rage that will build among unemployed people whose lifelines will begin to be cut this weekend should be directed first at Bunning and the Party of No.

Kyl Does The Despicable: Holds Unemployment Benefits Hostage For Estate Tax Cut

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:45:33 -0500

McJoan at DailyKos says it best: "How despicable can these guys get?"

This is how despicable: Starting Monday, 1.1 million people will lose their unemployment benefits because right-wing Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., thinks its more important to give tax breaks to millionaires than to ensure that nearly broke people won't get thrown out of their homes or go hungry.

In Kyl's own words, in the context of Senate action on an extension of unemployment insurance benefits (h/t to Pat Garofolo at the Wonk Room): "I will insist on an agreement on how to proceed [on the estate tax], if we’re going to have unanimous consent on how to proceed with any of these subsequent bills.”

Conservatives have dragged us down this low road before. Last year, they tried to eliminate the estate tax—a tax that affects only about 5,800 estates, those in excess of $3.5 million for single people or $7 million for couples—for estates worth less than $10 million and lowers it from 45 percent to 35 percent to those above $10 million. Ten Democrats, in fact, had joined Republicans in supporting an estate-tax-cut amendment to the 2010 budget resolution. (This 2008 fact sheet has background on the estate tax and other tax issues.)

The Campaign for America's Future joined with other organizations in demanding that the vote be reversed, and it was.

It is, of course, hypocritical for Kyl to feign concern about the federal debt on the one hand and push a move that will cost the federal government $300 billion over the next 10 years—at a time when even deficit hawk extraordinaire David M. Walker partners with the Economic Policy Institute's Lawrence Mishel with the message that the top short-term priority for the federal government must be job creation, not reducing the deficit. Of course, cutting the estate tax, unlike other tax cuts for investment or hiring, does not create one single job.

But, most importantly, are conservatives that sold out to the wealthy that they are prepared to see unemployed person evicted from their homes because they can't make a rent or mortgage payment—so that the children of the wealthy live more luxuriously?

This can be blocked. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon indicated that he will work to get the unemployment extension moved through the Senate, even if it means holding the Senate in session through the weekend.

Tell Sen. Kyl and the senator in your state that holding up unemployment benefit hostage to an estate-tax cut crosses the line. Kyl's office numbers are: (202) 224-4521, (602) 840-1891, and (520) 575-8633. You can e-mail his office using this form.

Kyl's not the only obstructionist on this issue. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., is also blocking the unemployment insurance extension, arguing—according to correspondence I've received from a Hill activist working on the issue—that funding for the extension should come from unspent stimulus funds—funds expressly appropriated to pay salaries, not unemployment checks. Never mind that 14,000 people in Kentucky stand to lose their benefits as a result of Bunning's grandstanding. The phone number for Bunning's office is (202) 224-4343, and you can e-mail his office using this form.

Danger: Falling Middle Class

Tula Connell — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:06:52 -0500

Jack Cafferty at CNN this week asked viewers one of his seemingly routine questions. But the responses to: "How has definition of 'middle-class American' changed?" reveal a cataclysmic shift in our nation's economic identity.

Gary from El Centro, Calif., summed up the vast majority of the nearly 200 responses when he replied:

You should ask this question of the three or four people in the country still remaining in the middle class.

The comments reflect more than the run-of-the-mill griping about taxes or middle-aged discontent. They demonstrate a visceral understanding of the deep forces underlying the dramatic change that in recent decades has eroded the solid financial footing of America's working families—America's middle class.

In short, the American public knows what most lawmakers in Washington and policymakers around the country have yet to figure out: The nation is losing its middle-class backbone and bifurcating into a have/have not country.

As Karen from Idaho Falls writes on Cafferty's site:

In my world, there is no middle class–only the very rich, the rich, the poor, and the very poor. Most of us are hanging on to being "poor" by our fingernails and hoping that we won't join the ever growing "very poor" class. Somewhere along the line, "middle class" disappeared.

The not-so-Great Recession is just the latest and loudest part of the long decline of the middle class. From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, wages grew along with productivity. But since then, wages have been stagnant or declining—while productivity skyrocketed. The decline in a family's earning power was offset by the entrance of vast numbers of women in the labor market—and then by wage-earners holding multiple jobs. By the late 1990s, debt—from second mortgages or credit cards—kept the middle class afloat. And now what is revealed is a middle class held together by nothing more than string.

One of the most consequential but least recognized aspects of the current economic disaster is the growing length of time workers are without jobs. In December, the average jobless worker had been unemployed for 29.1 weeks. In contrast, when the recession began in 2007, the average unemployed person had been out of work for 16.5 weeks.

At Economix blog, Catherine Rampell points out in an tellingly titled post, "A Growing Underclass," that the longer unemployed workers stay out of work, the less likely they may be to find work.

First, their skills may deteriorate or become obsolete—especially if they are in a dynamically changing industry like high technology.

Second, the stigma—both internal and external—of their unemployment grows. Studies have linked job loss to declines in self-worth and self-esteem, meaning these people will probably make less compelling job candidates.

So, even if there were jobs available—there are now more than six unemployed workers for every one job—getting one becomes harder and harder the longer you're out of work. Jobs are so few, in fact, even a weekly columnist at Forbes had this to say:

For many, many Americans there are no jobs and few prospects. For them the Great Recession is not a cute aphorism but a major cataclysm.

Long-term joblessness is one more nail in the middle class coffin. As Working-Class Perspectives describes it:

Unlike in past business cycles, the middle class has not been able to recover so far, despite increases in productivity and stock prices. In “America Without a Middle Class,” Elizabeth Warren documents how the de facto unemployment rate, credit debt, “underwater” mortgages, increased use of food stamps, personal bankruptcies, and the loss of pensions and health care have all dramatically increased. Middle-class households have depleted their savings and are increasingly accruing debt to pay for college, health care, and other expenses.

Some experts believe that the decline in jobs will only continue. For example, Alexandra Levit predicts significant losses in a number of key industries between 2008 and 2018: semiconductor manufacturing (33.7 percent), apparel manufacturing (57 percent), newspaper publishers (24.8 percent)….Corporations are moving many of these jobs offshore or replacing them with technology rather than paying middle-class wages and benefits. The economists are right that new jobs are being created in place of these. But as Jack Metzgar discussed last week, most of the new jobs offer even lower wages and benefits and require less education.

Jobs are offshored while the jobs that remain in the United States are low-wage, with little affordable health care or retirement options. Meanwhile, the smooth of face and soft of hand financial wizards who turn their noses up at the industrial manufacturing sector fail to realize that when the United States loses its ability to make things, it also loses the research and development power that fueled the nation to greatness. And it loses something a lot more. Louis Uchitelle interviews Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) about the humiliation of building a new World Trade Center with no glass made in the United States:

“Imagine China,” he said in an interview, “building a huge structure intended to be an important national symbol and importing glass from the United States to build it. There is no way the Chinese would do that.”

And a low-wage job nation fuels income inequality. This from a stunning report by economist John Schmit at the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

From a peak just before the 1929 stock market crash through the early 1950s, wage and income inequality, broadly measured, were declining. From the early 1950s through the late 1970s, inequality was flat, or even falling slightly. Since the late 1970s, however, inequality has skyrocketed, climbing back to levels last seen in the 1920s. In 1979, for example, the top one percent of all U.S. taxpayers received about 8 percent of national income; by 2007, the top one percent received over 18 percent. If we include income from capital gains in the calculation, the increase in inequality is even sharper, with the top one percent capturing 10 percent of all income in 1979, but over 23 percent in 2007.

Back at Cafferty's site, Chad from Los Angeles knows why:

The middle class has turned into the "peasant class." We have been taken over by a few wealthy people who control our politicians and government. We have become an Aristocracy. Except the ones in control are not royalty, they are businessmen hiding behind a cloak of deception that is Corporate America.

In the short term, critical steps must be taken for immediate relief. The first is getting the Senate to extend unemployment insurance (UI) for the long-term unemployed. As usual, the House already has acted, extending UI in December, while senators dither. (Click here to tell your lawmakers it’s time to act.) Extending UI is part of the jobs initiative the AFL-CIO is pushing for immediate relief for jobless workers.

But before the current crisis fades, the nation must begin to reverse the more than 40-year trend in which the gap widens between rich and poor and the middle class falls out of the bottom.

Silas from Boston—a city not unfamiliar with fomenting revolutions—offers an intriguing insight:

We've allowed the "upper" class to become too big to fail. As a result, the middle class is an endangered species which has to bail out the class that got us into this mess to begin with. This is how the French Revolution started.

This is a cross-post from the Firedoglake blog.

Young Workers--Hit Hard, Hitting Back

Liz Shuler — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:16:52 -0500

As the newly elected secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, I traveled the country this fall, talking with workers and hearing their concerns. The economic crisis is causing a lot of pain. So many people have no jobs, no health care—and many are losing their homes. And as I looked into the faces of young workers, the reality hit home that these young people are part of the first generation in recent history likely to be worse off than their parents.

This is a tragedy.

The AFL-CIO and our community affiliate, Working America, recently surveyed young workers—and I'm not talking about 17- and 18-year-olds. I'm talking about 18- to 34-year-olds. In the past 10 years, young workers have suffered disproportionately from the downturn in the economy:

One in three young workers is worried about being able to find a job—let alone a full-time job with benefits.
Only 31 percent make enough money to cover their bills and put some aside—that is 22 percentage points worse than it was 10 years ago.
Nearly half worry about having more debt than they can handle.
One in three still lives at home with parents.

Young workers are living the effects of a 30-year campaign to create a low-wage workforce. It has succeeded.

For decades, the far right led an anti-government, anti-investment, feed-the-rich-and-starve-the-poor drive that gave us an era of deregulation, privatization and job exporting.

At the same time, corporations and government attacked unions and workers' freedom to form unions and bargain for decent wages and benefits. When unions are strong, paychecks grow and workers have benefits like health care and pensions.

When unions are under attack, paychecks shrink. Pensions vanish. Health care becomes the emergency room.

What's left is not working for young people—or for any of us. It will take a broadly shared sense of wartime urgency to replace today's low-wage economy with a high-wage, high-skills economy. The first step must be immediate action to address the nation's jobs crisis, with five essential steps:

Extend the lifeline for jobless workers.
Rebuild America's schools, roads and energy systems and invest in green technology and green jobs.
Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services.
Fund jobs in our communities.
Put TARP funds to work for Main Street with job-creating loans to small businesses.

We took these initiatives to the White House Summit on Jobs on Dec. 3 and are pushing Congress to take action now. The first reports from the Jobs Summit are encouraging, and we look forward to working with the Obama administration and Congress to carry on this momentum.

It's time to rebuild an economy that works—an economy based on prosperity, an economy we can be proud to pass on to our children and their children. And we need young people to lead the way. That survey I mentioned earlier shows they are ready.

Young workers have a whole new level of civic engagement, with the surge of new voters in the 2008 election.
They are well-informed and following government and policy news.
They believe in collective action and understand the power of having a union.
They have hope for the future and the vision of a savvy, diverse movement to bring about progressive change.

We're planning a major summit for young workers after the first of the year to bring all our ideas and voices together. When crises hit, it's young people who drive change.

Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 when he led the Montgomery bus boycott. At 25, César Chávez was registering Mexican Americans to vote. Walter Reuther headed strikes demanding GM recognize its workers' rights starting when he was 30. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was 33 when she drafted the declaration of women's rights.

Young people are being hard in this jobs crisis. But I believe they provide much of the fuel we need to get out of it.

This is cross-posted from the Huffington Post.

Puleeze! Washington Post, Would You Stop Blaming ME For The Recession?

Chris Collins — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:21:30 -0400

It was Saturday morning and I had just returned from yoga class and a few minutes shopping at the local farmers market. I poured myself a cup of coffee, picked up the newspaper and went to sit on my back porch to enjoy a few more minutes of relaxation before I started in on the day’s chores.

I took a sip of coffee, opened the Washington Post, and totally lost my hard earned karma! The headline read: “Economy Turning Out of Steep Dive: Slow to Spend Again, Consumers Could Be Holding up the Recovery” (emphasis added).

Excuse me? I thought consumer spending WAS the problem! For months, we’ve been told that we were the ones who overextended ourselves, failed to read the fine print in our mortgage documents and home equity loans, bought LCD TV’s when we should have saved, etc….

And just when we’ve started to learn our lesson and cut back on our spending, we’re supposed to spend more and take on more debt?

And even if that was a good idea, exactly how are we supposed to spend more? Clearly, Neil Irwin and Ylan Q. Mui, the authors of this article, failed to talk to Michelle Singletary, who only the next day in the business section of that very same newspaper, exhorted the unemployed to “take charge” of finding a new job, and listed out the “very sobering and very real” jobless numbers:

-- 584,000 people filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits in the week ended July 25. That was an increase of 25,000 from the previous week.

-- 6.2 million people collecting unemployment checks.

-- 6.5 million jobs slashed from the labor market.

This is the only recession since the Great Depression that has wiped out all job growth from the previous business cycle, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Further, with less than one job opening for every five job seekers, unemployed workers are getting stuck in unemployment for long periods. Twenty-nine percent have been jobless for more than half a year.

And, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the total number of unemployed people in June was actually 14.7 million people -- in other words, another 8.5 million people are unemployed and don’t even have unemployment insurance checks to help them out.

So, with almost 1 in 10 people out of a job, and the rest of us taking furloughs, pay cuts, and looking at 401Ks that are worth only 2/3 of what they were 18 months ago, you have to wonder what world Irwin and Mui are living in to write that headline.

And then I remembered Bush’s solution to the 9/11 crisis: "Get down to Disney World in Florida," he said two weeks after the attack. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed."

So much for change…...

What About Our Sinking Economy?

Hillary Hampton — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:49:17 -0400