President Barack Obama invited leading economic thinkers to a job creation summit on Thursday to help combat the worst unemployment crisis in decades. The stakes couldn’t be higher: If Obama can’t build momentum for robust legislation that will create jobs, the unemployment rate could remain in double-digits all the way through 2011.

In Salon, Andrew Leonard highlights some positive comments Obama made at the jobs summit. In an exchange with The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, Obama said that the long-term budget deficit is an issue, but that the best way to reduce that deficit is to spur economic growth. When the economy is growing, the same tax rates reap greater returns for the government.

If the U.S. dramatically slashes economic support programs to clamp down on the deficit in the short-term, the economy is going to shrink. About two-thirds of the economic growth in the third-quarter of 2009 came from intiatives related to Obama’s economic stimulus plan. If we cut back on stimulus, we lose more jobs and make the long-term deficit worse by hampering growth.

We’ve faced this kind of dilemma before and seen what happens when you focus too much on the deficit, as Katrina vanden Heuvel emphasizes in a column for The Nation. “In 1937, just as there was some recovery from the Depression, the debt hawks swooped in and there was a return to the deficit reduction model,” vanden Heuvel writes. “Things went south again. We don’t need a repeat of that.”

So Obama doesn’t want to attack the deficit at the expense of jobs, which is good. But it’s problematic that the President is still at the summit stage on the most politically pressing issue for Democrats, as Terence Samuel explains for The American Prospect. If the labor market doesn’t start getting better soon, voter dissatisfaction with Obama’s economic platform will impact other critical policy initiatives, from health care to climate change.

“The president is up against an unpredictable clock,” Samuel writes. “With his approval rating hovering around 50%, he can’t be sure how long Democrats in Congress will stick with him on anything if there is not some noticeable improvement in the jobs picture soon. The urgency on the job situation is not lost on Democrats in the House and Senate who must defend the seats of 18 Democrats in 2010.”

Most of the pressure Obama now faces is to create jobs, not just save them. That’s because his stimulus helped get the unemployment rate under control—we’re still losing jobs, but not as fast as we were in January. But as Aaron Glantz notes for New America Media, the risk of heavier job loss is still present.

State governments are up against very difficult budget constraints, thanks to tax losses related to widespread layoffs and foreclosures. If they don’t get help from the federal government, states will be forced to cut expenses, which means shedding more jobs. Glantz highlights a recent conference call with AFL-CIO leaders who warned that state and local governments could be forced to cut up to one million jobs in 2010 if Congress and President Obama fail to enact a major jobs bill.

David Moberg envisions an ideal jobs bill for Working In These Times. We need a major aid package to state governments, modernizing our schools and transportation network, a public-sector job program to fund important work in our communities, and a tax credit for companies that hire workers. The whole thing would only cost $400 billion and would create 4.6 million jobs. That could be enough money to move unemployment out of crisis-mode. Right now, about 15.4 million workers are out of a job. Half those workers have been put out of work over the course of the recession. Creating 4.6 million jobs would make an enormous difference.

And while the $400 billion price tag may sound like a big number, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to our $9 trillion fiscal deficit. Going back to The Nation: As vanden Heuvel notes, the whole package could be paid for with a modest tax on risky Wall Street securities trading.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

The Senate is scheduled to begin voting on proposed amendments to the health care reform bill today. It takes 60 votes to pass an amendment and most of the proposed measures for the health care bill will never pass. It’s a great opportunity to grandstand over pet issues, however.

For example, Sen. John McCain wants to eliminate about $500 million in Medicare cost savings, which he’s trying to portray as Medicare cuts. In fact, these savings will not result in cuts to benefits. McCain is getting hammered by Democrats for reversing on the Medicare issue. As Nick Baumann reports for Mother Jones, McCain promised to fund health care reform with Medicare savings when he ran for president in 2008. Much of the proposed savings would come from eliminating over-payments to private insurers. As Harry Reid’s spokesman told Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo, protecting this revenue stream amounts to “a big fat wet kiss” to McCain’s friends in the insurance industry.

Alex Koppelman of Salon reports that conservative Democrat Ben Nelson (D-NE) will try to get a mirror image of the Stupak Amendment added to the Senate bill. As Koppelman observes, it’s unlikely that Nelson has the votes.

Even if the controversial, anti-abortion Stupak language stays out of the Senate bill, legislators will have to revisit the issue of federal funding for abortion coverage when the House and the Senate put their respective bills together to form the final legislation.

Roger Bybee of Working In These times reports that the Stupak Amendment has become a major headache for organized labor. Many union leaders see the Stupak Amendment as a wedge issue that is dividing advocates of health care reform within the labor movement. For example, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-MI), one of labor’s staunchest allies in the House, voted for the Stupak Amendment.

The Stupak wars have been an opportunity for religious groups like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to flex their lobbying muscle. If a secular organization wanted to send its staffers to practically camp out in legislators’ offices during key floor votes, they’d have to register as lobbyists and disclose how they spend their money. Carol Joffe of RH Reality Check wonders whatever happened to the separation of church and state in the era of lobbying. She makes an important point. Why should lobbyists get special treatment because their fees are paid from collection plates?

Progressives are clamoring for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to use budget reconciliation to thwart a filibuster and pass a health reform bill by majority vote. Alex Koppelman of Salon takes an in-depth look at the procedural obstacles of such a strategy. One of the major sticking points is that budget reconciliation can only be used to pass legislation that has to do with the budget. In order to qualify, the final bill would have to be contorted in various ways that progressives might not like. Koppelman argues that the public option could be a casualty of reconciliation.

In other health-related news, Lincoln University has embraced fat-shaming as a tool for behavioral change. In an effort to curb high rates of obesity among its students, the school has ordered students with a body mass index over 30 to attend 3 hours of gym class per week. If they don’t, they can’t graduate. Samhita Mukhopadhyay of Feministing characterizes the plan as a form of fat hate. She argues that, like many dieters, Lincoln has lost sight of health in its pursuit of sveltness.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Two key lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Ron Paul (R-TX), are pushing to authorize a full, comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. The plan has sparked fury from both the Fed and the corporate banking industry, but the proposal is so appealing that the controversy is almost laughable.

The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful economic institutions in the world, but most of its operations are conducted in total secrecy. The Fed’s rescue activities have dwarfed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, but without any public accounting. Some of these efforts may have been entirely appropriate, but we don’t even know who the Fed is helping. That fact is a major barrier to establishing effective and fair economic policy.

As Glenn Greenwald observes for Salon:

“The Fed is a typical Washington institution that operates un-democratically and in virtually total secrecy, and a Congressionally-mandated audit that they (and much of the DC establishment) desperately oppose would be a serious step towards changing the dynamic of how things function. At the very least, it would provide an important template for defeating the interests which, in Washington, almost never lose.”

Under the Grayson-Paul plan, which is offered as an amendment to the Financial Stability Improvement Act of 2009, the Government Accountability Office would be given the authority to audit all of the Federal Reserve’s activities, just as it can audit other public programs and institutions.

Last week, the House Financial Services Committee approved the audit-the-fed bill, despite opposition from panel Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), who tried to gut the plan. Even on the Financial Services Committee, where the banks concentrate their campaign contributions, Grayson was able to convince 14 other Democrats to stand up to the financial establishment.

The vote of approval scarcely registered on mainstream media’s radar, and even then, the Grayson-Paul legislation was portrayed as an assault on the Fed’s “political independence.” As Dean Baker notes for Talking Points Memo, it’s hard to see how a simple, public accounting can be construed as a political hit on the Fed’s policy-making.

By setting interest rates, the Fed has enormous power to do almost anything under the economic sun, from fueling quick growth to destroying jobs. All of these powers have useful functions under the right circumstances, and we really don’t want Congress to make decisions about the economy based on the interests of powerful lobby groups. The Grayson-Paul bill wouldn’t do anything of the sort. As John Nichols explains for The Nation, audits of sensitive economic policy decisions would be subject to a six-month lag before they could be publicly released. If the Fed needs to act fast, Congress won’t be able to get in its way. The public will eventually know how its own money is being spent, however, and learn how a public institution is conducting itself.

“In other words, this is about simple transparency, which everyone should favor,” Nichols writes.

The White House and the Congressional Democratic leadership need to support a full and comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. It’s an issue of basic democratic accountability. There is no good reason why economic policy should be conducted in secret.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Unemployment figures in the U.S. are staggering: The official rate stands at 10.2%, the highest in 26 years. A broader measure that includes people who are involuntarily working part-time or who have given up looking for work is at 17.5%. That’s a full-blown economic emergency.

But, as Joshua Holland explains for AlterNet, President Barack Obama’s response to the unemployment crisis has not matched the urgency of his response to the crisis on Wall Street. This isn’t just unfair, it’s bad economics.

“It’s important to understand that the economic crisis in which we find ourselves is not just a function of a shaky financial system but of a crash in consumption that’s come along with the evaporation of $14 trillion worth of the wealth of American families,” Holland writes.

Widespread joblessness can be every bit as damaging to the economic structure as a financial crisis. When people are out of work, they buckle down on household expenses. When several million people cut back at the same time, the economic machine grinds to a halt. If people are not buying and selling stuff, the economy isn’t working.

As Mary Kane explains for The Washington Independent, about 40% of families don’t have enough money to cover expenses through a three-month stretch of unemployment—even if one member of the household is receiving unemployment benefits. Kane highlights a Brandeis University study that reveals the haggard state of the American household and the unfair distribution of wealth along racial lines. A full 66% of African-American and Latino families can’t afford three months without work. At a time when 5.6 million workers have been jobless for at least six months, the study highlights just how dire finances have become for many households.

GRITtv’s Laura Flanders discusses potential labor market remedies with economist Dean Baker and The Nation’s John Nichols. Baker suggests a work-share arrangement, in which employers cut back on their workers’ hours to allow more people to work. To prevent losses for households, the government would step in and pay for the shortfall in hours. Employers would have more part-time jobs available, but the government would make sure everyone was paid as if they were working full-time. Baker also endorses a public jobs program, which he says could be especially useful in cities like Detroit and Cleveland that have been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn.

Nichols highlights the political consequences of failing to fix the unemployment mess. Unemployment directly affects the lives of voters. If widespread joblessness persists through November 2010, Democrats will net huge Congressional losses. If Obama thinks it’s hard to garner bipartisan support for his legislative priorities now, imagine a few dozen more Republican obstructionists.

It’s not that Obama failed to respond to the unemployment crisis. He did. That’s what the stimulus package was all about. Today’s 10.2% unemployment is a catastrophe, but it would be more like 12% without the stimulus package. But, given the seriousness of the issue, Obama is not giving unemployment enough attention.

In fact, Obama’s economic priorities are a mirror-image of his campaign promises, as Robert Scheer argues in both a column for TruthDig and an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! After talking tough about reining in recklessness on Wall Street and making the financial system more accountable, Obama has hired many of the very policy makers who pushed through the deregulatory agenda back in the 1990s. Top Obama administration officials like Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Gary Gensler and Neal Wolin helped make this mess in the first place.

“This is not a minor criticism,” Scheer says. “I think the guy is betraying his own presidency.”

Obama’s timid efforts to rein in Wall Street and heal the ailing job market are setting the stage for a political disaster. If Obama and Congressional Democrats can’t take strong action to fix the economy, they will find themselves with much narrower majorities next November. The economy, and the public institutions that support it, are supposed to work for everyone, not just the financial elite.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

By proposing financial reforms that won’t curb Wall Street excess, U.S. policymakers have offered an unacceptably weak response to our enormous financial crisis. If voters don’t demand that their elected representatives help workers and consumers instead of simply boosting corporate profits, the economic downturn will last for several more years and leave the economy vulnerable to another bank-induced meltdown.

The banks have unbelievable lobbying clout. In an interview with Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks, Heather Booth,  executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, describes how one-sided the Wall Street reform fight has been. Despite broad public support for a fundamental financial overhaul, going up against the bank lobby is, as Booth describes, “a David and Goliath fight.” It’s basically Americans for Financial Reform against every major corporation in the U.S.

Booth notes that the Chamber of Commerce has vowed to spend $100 million on a campaign to defend the “so-called free enterprise system”—you know, the “free market”—in which corporate lobbyists spend millions of dollars to write the rules of the economic game. Just seven financial lobby groups have spent a massive $147 million peddling influence over the past two years.

In fact, as Janine Wedel observes for Salon, the U.S. economic system is starting to look an awful lot like the clannish systems of government that looted Eastern European countries in the early 1990s. Today, the public good takes a backseat to the narrow interests of powerful corporations.

With the Obama administration working with advisers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, we’re not just watching Wall Street write its own regulations. We’re watching the financial sector re-write the official role of the government in the economy. In this new role, the government’s top priority is securing profits for corporate America.

“The intertwined coterie of financial and policy deciders in the United States is creating not only the financial architecture of the future, backed by the power and billions of the state, but, more generally, new relationships between the bureaucracy and the market,” Wedel writes.

GRITtv’s Laura Flanders echoes this theme in an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and journalist Russ Baker. Lobbyists have so thoroughly hijacked the U.S. economy, Perkins argues, that the nation’s government now resembles those of Latin American nations he worked with in the 1980s and 1990s.

“I don’t think the U.S. president has much power these days, to be honest with you. . . . It’s the big corporate executives who call the shots today, and let’s face it, they financed Obama’s campaign,” Perkins says.

The very efforts the government deployed to save the financial system are being perverted to create another disaster. In a five-part interview with Paul Jay of The Real News, Jane D’Arista, an influential economist and author of The Evolution of U.S. Finance, explains how Wall Street destroyed itself over the past decade. By borrowing massive amounts of money, Wall Street was able to place bigger bets in the capital markets casino, resulting in huge profits when those bets paid off. But when the bets backfired, the losses were just as massive. Companies couldn’t pay them off, so the government stepped in to support them.

One of those support mechanisms came from the Federal Reserve, which began making incredibly cheap loans to firms that engaged predominantly in speculative trading. The Fed used to lend exclusively to commercial banks, which used the money to make loans that helped grow the real economy. But now those loans are being used to support risky securities trading, so we’re seeing big profits in the financial sector, without much help for workers and consumers. This is a major long-term problem—if the economy can’t keep pace with the Wall Street casino, those speculative trades are going to backfire and we’ll be right back to the chaos of September 2008, only with an even weaker economy.

All hope is not lost. As Perkins and Baker emphasize in their interview with Flanders, citizens have to demand corporate accountability and a government that actually serves the public good. For much of the past decade in Latin America, governments have been elected that stood up to major corporations and demanded that they stop pillaging their nation’s resources at the people’s expense.

In addition to demanding much stronger reforms for the financial sector, we have to demand that the government respond seriously to problems facing workers. With the unemployment rate at 10.2% and expected to go still higher, we need jobs. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama’s economic stimulus package helped stave off total economic devastation. What we need now is another stimulus to get people back to work, not just slow the pace of job losses.

“A bold, ambitious jobs bill can make a huge difference—the stimulus got us out of the ditch, a new effort can get us going in the right direction again,” Benen writes.

And the only argument against this plan is that we “can’t afford it.” That is—the government’s fiscal deficit is too high, and we just can’t spend money to help people in real economic trouble.

But as Christopher Hayes writes for The Nation, the deficit excuse is pretty pathetic. Economic stimulus bolsters economic growth, thus improving tax returns for the government in the future. And any spending on any project can be taken out of the budget from other measures. Hayes notes that our massive military spending is almost never included in discussions about “fiscal responsibility.” If we were really worried about how much it would cost to fix the economy, we could stop spending so much money killing people.

“Fiscal conservatism and deficit concern is nearly always code speak in Washington for something else,” Hayes writes. “Most often, when someone in Washington says they’re concerned about the deficit, what they’re really saying is, ‘I would like to make sure we have a government that focuses maximally on blowing people up.’”

The government has to start saying ‘no’ to corporate America. Corporate profits are not the same thing as a strong economy. We need to demand an economic policy that answers to workers, not just bank balance sheets.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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 is what saves the economy in a recession. In a downturn as severe as this one, it takes a lot of spending to turn things around.

But as Reich notes, Nelson and his cohorts will have a lot more to worry about in the 2010 elections if the economy doesn’t actually improve over the next year. And few economists think it will. The Congressional Budget Office, which is run by a conservative economist named Douglas Elmendorf, projects an average unemployment rate of over 10% in 2010. That’s worse than this year. Democrats from swing districts need to support economic relief packages. Continued economic malaise will severely hurt them at the polls.

Congress finally took some action on joblessness on Thursday, voting to extend unemployment benefits for an additional 14 weeks. If we want the economy to recover, we need people to spend money, but if people aren’t working, they don’t have any money to spend. So the government cuts people checks to help them get by and stimulate a demand for goods and services. Even most conservative economists thinks this is a good idea.

But as Kevin Drum notes for Mother Jones, the soundness of the policy did nothing to prevent Republicans from fighting the effort to extend benefits tooth-and-nail. The bill had to overcome three—that’s right, three—filibusters in the Senate from Republicans, who held up the bill for weeks for no apparent reason. In a blog post for The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen explains the economic cost of this obstructionism: In the weeks of delay, 200,000 people looking for work stopped receiving benefits.

But extending unemployment benefits will not solve our economic woes. The total program is just $2.4 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars the government put up to salvage Wall Street. $2.4 billion is not enough to reverse the unemployment trend. Cutting the checks certainly helps, but as Matthew Rothschild emphasizes for The Progressive, we need an economic policy that actually puts people back to work. We’ve known for months that the stimulus was too small and watched the labor market continue to deteriorate. We need more than tweaks at the economic margins, we need a robust job creation plan.

As Stephen Franklin notes for Working In These Times, we already know that the recession has created a significant jump in the nation’s poverty rate. According to official government statistics, the rate climbed from 12.5% to 13.2% in 2008, the largest increase since 1991. But the National Academy of Science thinks the government statistics are misleading, as they account for rising costs associated with medical care, transportation, child care and different regional living standards, as Franklin notes. Taking these factors into account, the National Academy of Sciences calculates the actual poverty rate to be 15.8%. That’s an additional 7 million people living in poverty, for a total of over 47 million. That’s more than the entire population of the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas combined. What’s worse, we don’t have poverty statistics for this year, when the most severe economic damage was been dealt.

Workers are facing tough economic prospects around the world. Writing for The Nation, Kristina Rizga details Latvia’s economic turmoil. Just like the US, overexcited bankers in Latvia inflated a massive real estate bubble that took down the entire economy when it burst. But with the bubble burst, much of the country is now out of a job and stuck with a mortgage worth far less than what they paid for it. It’s almost exactly the same story we’ve seen at home.

No domestic economic problem is more pressing than our epic levels of unemployment. We need another round of stimulus to get people working again. If not, we’ll see the same public unrest here as in Eastern Europe.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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 Health Care Reform.

I find it very easy to believe, however, that Lieberman is capable of doing just that. He left himself some wiggle room, but not when it comes to the public option—he’s against it, no matter what, even with all of the compromises thrown in.

In other words, if this is all a ploy for leverage, why would Lieberman open by swearing that he won’t support a bill with a public option? You’d think he’d just say he was keeping his options open and force Reid to make him a counter-offer. Reid has already decided that the public option is politically non-negotiable. He’s afraid that the base won’t come out for the 2012 elections if they don’t get what they want. Benen speculates that Lieberman wants to be the Senator Who Killed Health Care because he wants to drum up massive Republican support for his 2012 reelection bid. On this theory, Lieberman is joining Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson (R-SC) and Balloon Dad in the quest to make bank on ridiculous publicity stunts.

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) says that she will side with the Republicans to filibuster the bill “if she has to,” as Evan McMorris-Santoro reports for TPM. Snowe was the only Republican to vote for the Finance Committee’s health care bill.

Reid must walk a fine line. The administration really can’t afford to alienate organized labor before the 2012 elections. Newly elected AFL-CIO President Ricahrd Trumka continues to push for his three core demands for health care reform: a public option, a mechanism to make employers pay their fair share, and no taxes on health care benefits. Last week, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee said that his union would oppose legislation that taxed benefits, but Trumka hasn’t gone that far, as David Moberg reports at Working In These Times.

Finally, in other health-related news, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the division of the Labor Department that oversees workplace safety, has issued a sweeping new report condemning Nevada’s state-level OSHA program. As I report for Working In These Times, the investigators found that NOSHA inspectors were being pressured by their superiors to write up employers on lesser charges, even when their repeat offenses killed workers.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

For the most part, it’s been a good week for immigration reform. The Senate approved a measure that will end the “Widow Penalty,” which rescinded applications for U.S. residency if one’s spouse of two years or less years dies, and on Tuesday, as RaceWire reports, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed legislation that restores the right of due process to immigrant youth.

Now for the not-so good news: The U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has decided to modify, not cancel, its many 287(g) agreements, as the Colorado Independent reports. Cause for celebration on this change may not yet be warranted. The proposed modification does not address the problems inherent to the provision.

According to ICE data, 55 jurisdictions have signed “new standardized agreements” with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 12 others are pending agreement. ICE now requires police officers who turn in undocumented immigrants to follow through on “All criminal charges that originally caused the offender to be taken into custody.” But what measures has ICE taken to eradicate the racial profiling that has tainted the reputation of the 287(g) provision? The ACLU does not feel the modification is enough. And it’s hard to see how it could be. Under the modifications, the police would still be perceived by the immigrant community as prosecutors and potential border guards, not protectors to work with for the good of a neighborhood.

Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a perfect example of why the White House needs to cease all 287(g) agreements. Reporting for AlterNet, Isabel Macdonald chronicles the bizarre antics and mindset of the rogue lawman. Arpaio’s 287(g) agreement with the Federal government was recently downgraded. He can no longer perform his “over broad” sweeps, but Macdonald makes clear that this change is mostly symbolic. Arpaio is simply “An official who has come to expect total impunity.”

Another small, but meaningful step happened recently Milwaukee, as Leticia Miranda reports for RaceWire. Matt Nelson, a Milwaukee small business owner and spokesman for the Milwaukee Police Accountability Coalition, was harassed by police and threatened when he refused to reveal his Social Security Number (SSN) to an officer. Incensed, Nelson “pursued litigation of the officer filing a formal complaint against him,” appealing to the Milwaukee Fire and Commission, who oversees the Milwaukee Police Department.

The commission ruled that the officer was acting without any legal authority and issued guidelines for departments to clarify the issue [PDF memo]. While the Milwaukee ruling is definitely a victory, we must look closer at the many police departments that operate under the 287(g) provision to monitor any “less formal ‘agreements’ to find and arrest people who ‘look’ undocumented.”

Going back to San Francisco’s fight to adopt a measure restoring due process to undocumented youth: Mayor Gavin Newsom passed a law last summer that directs police who arrest undocumented youth to report them to ICE before any trial, leading to the deportation of undocumented youth for any perceived offense that leads them into police custody. The measure to restore due process was passed, and with enough margin to override a possible veto by the Mayor. Mayor Newsom has proclaimed he will disregard the ruling entirely, much like a certain Sheriff.

Writing for Salon, Joe Conason makes a good case for reframing the health care discussion as it pertains to immigrants. He points to the perverse “moral perspective of the nativists and politicians” that leap up to assure everyone that the undocumented will most certainly not be allowed to buy into health insurance. But what about families with undocumented parents and citizen children? It should never be “permissible to let the ‘illegals’ and their children suffer from illness and even die prematurely, so long as their condition poses no threat to the rest of us,” as Conason writes.

Finally, “a new joint U.S.-Mexico” study on children of Mexican parents finds that this demographic is already “one of the most vulnerable sectors in America’s health care system,” as New America Media reports. 86 percent of those studied were U.S. citizens. New America Media’s Odette Keeley questions Yurina Rico, public health editor for La Opinion, as to why these children are so often uninsured. According to Rico, these communities are often isolated from proper information on health care. Rico goes on to say that unfortunately, these disparities in health care are not being factored into health care policy discussions.

The U.S. has long way to go before it acts on the premise that—as lofty as it might sound—we really are one large human family. As Sojourner’s reminds us, even Americans of European origin have immigrant roots.

The sooner our laws and health care and safety reflect the importance of all members of this large human family, the healthier this nation will be.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

A plan to reform health care that includes a robust public option would actually cut the deficit, according to preliminary estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). For the purposes of this analysis, a robust public option was defined as one that reimburses doctors at Medicare rates plus five percent. The latest CBO estimate is critical for Democrats because President Barack Obama said he wouldn’t sign a health care bill that adds to the deficit. (There’s a double standard at work. Health care has to pay for itself or save money. But as Jo Comerford notes for Democracy Now!, the president has no compunction about bloating the budget with defense spending.)

As health care reform moves into the closed-door, intra-party negotiation phase, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi is emerging as a champion of a public option. Pelosi has always said that she can’t pass a bill without some kind of public plan, though she has wavered about how tough that plan should be on payouts to providers. But according to Brian Beutler of TPMDC, yesterday’s “favorable CBO report seems to have settled all that, and Pelosi’s decided to go all in for a public option.”

And why not? A clear majority of Americans now favor a public option, as John Byrne reports in Raw Story. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on Tuesday, 57 percent of respondents favor a public health insurance option to compete with private insurers. That’s an increase of five percentage points in two months.

Two bills made it out of committee in the Senate, one with a public option (the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee’s effort) and one without (the Senate Finance bill). So, proponents of the public option are putting pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to include one in the final bill. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is running ads in Reid’s district that ask if he’s strong enough to back a public option. Reid might be more susceptible than usual to progressive pressure because he’s up for reelection and facing dismal poll numbers, according to Alex Koppelman in Salon.

The public option has come back from the abyss several times, thanks to a combination of popular appeal, political courage and determined progressive activism. But Mike Lillis of the Colorado Independent argues that Democrats shot themselves in the foot by taking single payer off the table early on. Single payer health care would abolish private health insurance and cover everyone through a Medicare-like system. It would be an easier and cheaper way to achieve universal coverage than any of the options Congress is considering now, but it’s an anathema to the insurance industry.

As Lillis observes, a basic principle of negotiation is to ask for more than you think you’re going to get and negotiate down from there. But the White House made a point of shooting down single payer in May and Congressional Democrats held but one hearing on the prospect. Talk about lousy business skills.

By choosing the public option — not single payer — as the left-most negotiating point, Democrats left themselves with few places to go but toward more conservative proposals for insurance reform, experts say, including the co-op model and a system of triggering public plans only if private insurers fail to meet certain cost and coverage targets. In the blood sport of congressional negotiating — which dictates that you over-ask, and then move toward your goal during the subsequent bartering — Democrats were asking merely for the public plan they wanted in the final bill.

While we’re on the subject of preemptive concessions to unreasonable political parties, Amanda Marcotte of RH Reality Check describes how Democrats have bent over backwards to accommodate the anti-choice lobby on funding abortions under a public plan. Democrats have proposed elaborate bureaucratic workarounds to make sure that abortions are only covered by private money. Still, anti-choice militants like Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) are accusing them of backing abortion fieldtrips for school kids. Speaking of starting high and negotiating downward, Democrats should threaten to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for most abortions. Let’s see what the anti-choicers are prepared to give up in exchange.

In a sense, it’s reassuring that legislators are taking the public option seriously enough to argue about how it might pay for abortions. If they didn’t think we were going to get a public option, it would be a moot point.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

The U.S. economy has diverged: Wall Street is living high on the hog while everyone else is struggling. The Dow Jones Industrial Average eclipsed 10,000 for the first time since last October this week, even as unemployment continues to spiral out of control. And while President Barack Obama has taken some very real steps to help ordinary people, his administration’s efforts to save Wall Street have far outstripped their support of workers.

Matthew Rothschild details these disparities for The Progressive. Regulatory reforms are moving through Congress at a snail’s pace and the wreckage from the mortgage bubble is increasing. Wage cuts are more widespread today than in any era since the Great Depression, even as bankers capitalize on taxpayer bailouts to score epic profits and outsized bonuses.

“One economy is for the rich and the upper middle class,” Rothschild writes. “The other economy is for everybody else.”

So how can a few big banks make so much money while the rest of the economy suffers? As Kevin Drum explains for Mother Jones, the kind of banking that helps the economy is a pretty simple business of taking deposits and making loans. But a lot of what we now call “banking” really just consists of making bets on just about anything you can dream up.

“Banks aren’t using all this cheap money to increase lending. They’re using it to fund bigger and bigger bets in the fixed-income sector — the same sector that brought us junk bonds, credit default swaps, subprime loan securitization, interest rate carries, collateralized debt obligations, and all the rest of Warren Buffett’s ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.’”

The banks, in other words, are gambling with taxpayer money. A host of big finance companies have reported earnings in the past week, and the numbers are ugly: JPMorgan Chase reaped $3.59 billion in third-quarter profits and Goldman Sachs is planning to payout $23 billion in bonuses from speculative trading, while Bank of America and Citigroup are hemorraging money on mortgages and credit cards. The Wall Street casino is alive and well, but anything that is actually tied to the real economy is a disaster.

According to a new report from the U.S. Treasury, lending among the largest recipients of the Troubled Asset Relief Program fell by 17% from July to August. Small businesses can’t cope with the cutoff in financing. A lot of businesses stay profitable over the long-term by borrowing money to meet short-term expenses. A baker can borrow money to buy flour and pay the bank back when she sells her bread. With bank lending on ice and consumers cutting back on spending, many small businesses are failing. Thousands more will be at risk in the next couple of years while unemployment remains elevated.

Writing for Salon, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich notes that these economic struggles are not reflected in major stock indices. Stock are soaring as big corporations who don’t need bank loans score short-term profits from cost-cutting, i.e., mass layoffs. Obviously, this strategy can’t work for very long. When millions of Americans are out of work, they can’t afford to buy the things companies make.

There’s an important lesson in our current economic state-of-affairs, as Katrina vanden Heuvel emphasizes for The Nation. The bailout has not done what Henry Paulson told us it would do. To be sure, it saved the banks– even the strongest banks would have failed last fall without extraordinary government support. But it has not increased lending and kept the economy from disaster. The Obama administration, which has extended the Bush administration’s support for bank balance sheets and bonus checks, is facing a political nightmare if it doesn’t show produce some stronger economic results for ordinary citizens.

“Heading into 2010, the Obama administration must put itself back on the side of working people,” vanden Heuvel writes.

The administration must address two critical problems in order to restore the nation’s economic credibility. Putting the unemployed back to work is at the top of the list. Anything that saves jobs will help, including aid to states to keep teachers and cops on government payrolls and tax credits for companies that hire new full-time workers.

Something must also be done about the foreclosure epidemic. Nothing underscores our economic disparity like continuing housing mess, which has been in full-blown crisis mode since 2006. Despite a multi-trillion-dollar bank bailout, foreclosures are surging to all-time highs. Writing for The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz details the prolonged problems with the Obama administration’s current foreclosure relief program.

While millions of troubled borrowers are eligible for the plan, which reduces monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels, foreclosures are still outpacing loan relief efforts by more than two-to-one.

Banks are dragging their feet and the administration has imposed no penalties on lenders who don’t live up to the program’s standards. Instead, the Treasury Department is offering banks cash incentives to keep people in their homes. Bank of America, which has received $45 billion in direct government bailout funds, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees and other perks, has modified merely 11% of the mortgages it controls that are eligible for the plan.

Fernholz offers several potential improvements to Obama’s foreclosure relief plan, including more aggressive government policing of the current plan and allowing foreclosed homeowners to continue to live in their homes as renters. With up to 12 million foreclosures projected by the end of 2012, just about anything the administration does will help.

The economy is a measure of social well-being, not a stock market index or a corporate earnings statement. Policymakers need to prove they can respond to the very real needs of all their citizens, not just those with financial clout.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.