Posts tagged with 'The Progressive'
Weekly Pulse: Massa Backs Off Health Care Conspiracy, Glenn Beck Apologizes to the Entire Country
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Former Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) punked conservative talk show host Glenn Beck yesterday by recanting his earlier allegations that House Democrats forced him out of office because he refused to vote for health care reform. Massa resigned on Monday amidst allegations that he sexually harassed one or more male staffers.
Adele Stan has a nice recap of the implosion of Massa’s political career at AlterNet. Massa initially said he was stepping down because he had cancer. Then the news broke that the House Ethics Committee was probing allegations that Massa sexually harassed a male staffer. (more…)
Weekly Audit: Just Who is Obama fighting for?
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Progressives have waited a year for President Barack Obama to roll up his sleeves and fight for serious financial reform. Last week, he finally jumped in the ring, telling weak-kneed Senators to stand up to Wall Street and endorsing a critical ban on risky securities trading.
But while it was good to see Obama start throwing financial punches against the banks, this week he also started throwing them at workers. His recent rhetoric on implementing a spending freeze to reduce the deficit is an economic catastrophe in the making. It indicates that Obama is willing to sacrifice jobs to try and win over Republicans. (more…)
Weekly Diaspora: Working Together for Reform
By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
As we usher the last decade into the realm of memory, it’s time to stop viewing immigration reform as an Us vs. Them issue. The metaphors and language we use are key to framing a debate because they can communicate broader truths via association. For example, a scientist might mention the porous nature of all membranes and boundaries found in nature to describe the ineffectiveness of the militarized U.S.-Mexico border.
Reporting for New America Media, Marcelo Ballvé defines two emerging policy terms—“complementarity” and “circularity”—that are being used to describe the seasonal ebb and flow of migrant labor and argue for progressive reform. The terms effectively render concepts impenetrable borders and zero sum supply of resources, which are key fighting points for those who oppose progressive immigration reform, rigid and backward in contrast. (more…)
Weekly Audit: Stop Wall Street’s Economic Rampage
By Zach Carter, TMC Blogger
Over the past year, Wall Street’s excess has helped push the unemployment rate to epic levels and created millions of foreclosures. Yet the rules of the financial road remain unchanged. As 2009 draws to a close, it’s astonishing that so little progress towards financial reform has been made.
President Obama, Congress and federal regulators have not been tough enough on the nation’s financial elite. As Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery emphasize for Mother Jones, the government has committed about $14 trillion in bailout funds to save the banking system without demanding much of anything in return. Goldman Sachs and other big banks are now planning to pay giant bonuses that come straight from taxpayer giveaways rather than invest that money in socially constructive banking.
“Bankers aren’t being rewarded for pulling the economy out of the doldrums,” Bauerlein and Jeffery write. “Nope, they’re simply skimming from the trillions we’ve shoveled at them.”
The major banks are even spending our bailout money to lobby against reform. When President Obama called a meeting for leaders of the nation’s largest banks to scold them for their lobbying, the heads of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup didn’t even bother to show up, as Matthew Rothschild describes in a podcast for The Progressive.
It’s easy to see why the bank execs are so indifferent, Rothschild argues, even to the president. Now that almost all of these banks have repaid the loans they received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Obama has no negotiating leverage and the bankers know it. Even though it represents just a tiny fraction of the $14 trillion bailout, TARP was the only program that attached any strings to that money. Prior to those TARP repayments, Obama could have demanded that banks do more lending to help the economy, work harder to keep troubled borrowers in their homes—or face executive compensation restrictions or other penalties.
And many of the same regulators who helped bring about today’s economic disaster are still in power. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) explains for Brave New Films (video below), Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke blew just about every major policy decision he faced in the years leading up to the crisis. Bernanke, who was recently named person of the year by Time magazine, failed to rein in reckless mortgage speculation, predatory lending or excessive compensation packages. Nevertheless, President Obama has appointed him to another term.
“This recession was precipitated by the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street,” Sanders says. “One of the key responsibilities of the Fed is to maintain the safety and soundness of our financial institutions … The Fed was asleep at the wheel, Bernanke did not do the job.”
Sanders notes that even Bernanke’s financial clean-up operations have been deeply flawed. Bernanke has helped make today’s too-big-to-fail banks even bigger. If we want to stop the lobbying and policy deference that politicians grant to Wall Street, we have to break up the biggest banks into smaller firms that do not endanger the economy if they fail.
Bernanke is not the only holdover from the Bush administration that wields significant economic power under Obama. As I note in a piece for The Nation, John Dugan, the top bank regulator appointed by President George W. Bush, remains in office today, despite failing to ensure the financial health of our largest banks and actively working to undermine consumer protection.
Campaign contributions from the bank lobby will not be enough to counter the voter outrage that President Obama and members of Congress are facing, nor should they. If our leaders want a serious shot at re-election, they need to recognize the need for significant change on Wall Street. That means breaking up the big banks and setting economic policy that helps all of our citizens, not just financiers.
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.
Weekly Audit: House Bank Bill Fatally Flawed
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Last week, the House of Representatives finally approved a financial regulatory overhaul and President Barack Obama announced a new initiative to address the unemployment crisis. Both are a step in the right direction, but neither offer effective solutions to problems that still plague the U.S. economy.
The House bill doesn’t do away with too-big-to-fail banks and that’s a big problem. As John Nichols explains for The Nation, “the big banks aren’t going to get sidelined—let alone broken up—anytime soon.” Instead of splitting large, risky banks into smaller firms that could fail without wreaking economic havoc, the House bill gives regulators more power, including the ability to bail out a faltering bank with billions of taxpayer dollars. When push comes to shove, regulators are not going to risk letting a major bank fail. They’ll just bail the company out. We all saw what happened when Lehman Brothers collapsed last year.
By imposing a tougher set of rules on banks, it’s conceivable that regulators could prevent some future failures. But as Mary Kane notes for The Washington Independent, Congress carved so many loopholes in the new laws that banks will have little trouble skirting them.
Obama had hoped to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) to crack down on predatory lending, but a coalition of bank-friendly Democrats pushed through amendments that significantly weaken it. Obama wanted states to have the power to enforce stronger rules on predatory lending. Under a loophole that Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) pressed into the House bill, states are prevented from writing or enforcing rules that limit interest rates charged by credit card companies and payday lenders. That’s a really destructive move, Kane notes, since it was state regulators, not federal regulators, who cracked down on abusive lending over the past decade.
Obama also hoped to require that risky derivatives transactions would be conducted via exchange like ordinary stock trades. Derivatives are the type of trades that brought down AIG. But the House bill exempts a huge portion of transactions from this requirement and changes the definition of “exchange” to include private, unregulated derivatives trades, as Nick Baumann explains for Mother Jones. This is a fatal flaw in the regulatory overhaul. Derivatives are the primary technique that banks use to make themselves too-big-to-fail. Over 95% of the $290 trillion derivatives market is housed at just five banks. These derivatives tie the bank to other financial firms in a complicated web of risk that is impossible for regulators to navigate. If one of those five banks goes down, there’s no way a regulator can predict the consequences.
The only hope for meaningful reform right now rests in the Senate, which is considering a much tougher bill than what the House approved. But the Senate has yet to even conduct mark-up hearings on its legislation and the pressure from the banking lobby is going to be enormous. Progressives have to keep pushing for a better bill if we want to protect our economy from the abuses that brought on the current recession.
And while huge federal bailouts for banking giants like Citigroup and Bank of America have helped the financial sector recover, the broader economy is battling the highest unemployment levels since the early Reagan era. Things are poised to get a lot worse. As Daniela Perdomo emphasizes for AlterNet, a full 3.2 million workers will lose their unemployment benefits by the end of March 2010. Even if the unemployment rate stays where it is—and Perdomo notes that a vast majority of experts think its going to go higher—the impact on ordinary people is going to be even more severe than today’s nightmare.
In a blog post for Working In These Times, Roger Bybee highlights a piece by Harvard University Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, who emphasizes the hardships faced by ordinary families. The statistics are grim—one-eighth of Americans are on food stamps, one-eighth cannot pay their mortgages and 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month.
We need to take serious steps to get people back to work. Mass unemployment means that consumers don’t spend money, which means that companies don’t sell as much, which makes companies lay off more workers to cut costs. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. The market can’t fix unemployment without help.
So Obama’s Dec. 8 speech announcing a new job-creation plan was a welcome event. But the concrete aspects of Obama’s plan are not effective. All the tax cuts in the world won’t necessarily put people back to work. Obama did endorse a public jobs plan which involved the government hiring people to improve the nation’s infrastructure and clean up communities ravaged by the economic crisis, but he shied away from any specific numbers.
As David Roberts explains for Grist, Obama’s willingness to sign off on a $23 billion program for environmentally friendly home renovations is a step in the right direction. The plan is being referred to as “cash-for-caulkers” and is modeled on the very successful cash-for-clunkers program. The government will pay people to increase the energy efficiency of their homes, helping people cut down on utility bills and increasing the demand for construction labor and products like new windows and doors. It’s a good idea. But if all we get are tax cuts and $23 billion for greener homes, the jobs bill is not going to assuage the unemployment crisis.
There is no reason to be concerned about the cost of a thorough jobs program. Taxpayers committed trillions of dollars to help the financial sector weather the economic storm. Anybody who is worked up about the prospect of spending money on jobs should read Amitabh Pal’s piece for The Progressive. A modest tax on speculative trades of stock and derivatives could easily raise $150 billion a year to finance a robust jobs program.
At this point in the economic downturn, the government needs to take much stronger steps to rein in Wall Street and create jobs. We know what needs to be done to protect the economy from risky banking and we can afford to fix the unemployment crisis. All we need is the political will.
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.
Weekly Diaspora: Autumn Holiday Edition
By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
Ed. Note: This week’s Diaspora is short because of the holidays. We’ll be back to full-length next week.
Last Tuesday, Amy Traub dismantled a few harmful myths about immigrants for The Nation. Traub takes on the old ‘immigrants steal our jobs’ myth, saying it “holds no water.” Immigrants of both documented and undocumented status help the economy, and their energy and efforts create jobs that would not exist without their participation. Traub makes a crucial connection clear: Immigrants are a boon to the economy, and “U.S. natives gain $37 billion a year from immigrants’ participation” in the U.S. workforce.
In AlterNet, Timothy Noah outlines the cost of denying immigrants health insurance, dubbing the overall effect a “Nativist Tax.” If we begin restricting the access immigrants have to health care, why not bar them from other parts of society? Why not bar them from the hospital altogether? Why not prevent them from buying milk at the corner store? It’s the beginning of what could be a bad chain reaction. (more…)
Weekly Diaspora: Fort Hood, Pundits and Immigration Reform
By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
First it was immigrants from Mexico, now Muslims in the armed services. After the tragic shootings at Fort Hood, conservative pundits are verbally attacking Muslims and Arab-Americans, much like they have vilified the immigrant community. The complexities of Islamic faith are being glossed over and “Muslim Terrorist” is stamped upon any act of violence involving their community. As a result, nuanced voices are buried in favor of suspicion and violence. (more…)
Weekly Audit: The Unemployment Epidemic
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
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. (more…)
Weekly Audit: Too Big to Fail is Just Too Big
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Last week, President Barack Obama released key legislation designed to fight the banking industry’s too-big-to-fail problem. But Obama’s plan doesn’t actually address too-big-to-fail at all. It reinforces a broken system in which economically dangerous companies are bailed out whenever they drive themselves to the brink of failure.
If we want the economy to support all people, we have to break up the big banks and start treating the creation of good jobs as an economic priority on par with Wall Street rescues. (more…)
Weekly Audit: A Tale of Two Economies
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
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. (more…)