Online ads have popped up lately, telling readers that they can win a $150 Amex Gift Card for use at Hooters, if they complete a survey about other offers. One of those urges them to sign up for “free emails” from the Chamber of Commerce, which will explain “how to protect your family’s future and bring common sense solutions to the health-care debate.” In other words, getting involved with the Chamber’s campaign against reform. These “incentivized ads” appear to be the favored new tactic of lobbying groups looking to generate the appearance of grassroots support for their positions.
Flying anywhere during the holidays? I’m glad I’m not you (even though last year I got stuck driving through a snowstorm). More helpfully, the New York Times has some travel tips.
Santa Claus is starting early at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Jimmy Fund Clinic as children receiving treatment for cancer are enjoying a Winter-Wonderland celebration. The party includes visits from Santa, gifts, arts & crafts and lunch, all thanks in part to a large donation by union trades people and contractors. The Winter Wonderland is taking place from now until Friday, December 18th, 2009.
Donations began pouring in after a Pipefitter with Local 537, Mike Morgan, posted a flyer asking men and women on the job at Dana-Farber Yawkey Center for Cancer Care to donate one hour of their salary to the children at the Dana Farber-Cancer Institute. Many of the union craftspeople are closing out their work at the project and some knew they were losing their job, but wanted to help anyway.
“It was amazing how much money we raised, when we presented the check they expected about $500 , but we raised more than $27,000 and the money keeps pouring in,” says Morgan. “ We are so happy to be able to help in any way and it is just a small way to help these children.”
Lawmakers expect to extend the deadline to file for jobless benefits and the COBRA health coverage subsidy by two months. As it stands now, the deadline to apply for federally paid unemployment benefits and for the 65% insurance subsidy is Dec. 31. It would also maintain the stimulus-funded $25 boost in unemployment benefits through February.
An extension buys time for the million workers who otherwise would lose their benefits in January. But two months?
That’s not as much as this editorial from a Florida newspaper calls for:
The White House rightly wants to extend the COBRA aid at least six months.
Congress should do so quickly, possibly by adding funds for the longer health insurance lifeline to job-growth legislation in the works, and make it retroactive to cover the gap.
Finding the money to prolong COBRA subsidies won’t be easy but should be done to help the increasing numbers of unemployed — including many in Florida — in the jobless recovery.
Legislation has been introduced in the House and Senate to extend benefits. A bill from Rep. Joe Sestak, D-PA, would increase the subsidy six months for a maximum of 15 months and allow people who lose their jobs in the first six months of 2010 to receive the break — ending the aid at the end of that year. That’s reasonable in this economy. What’s not is expecting families scrambling to pay utilities, car payments and mortgages to pay full health-insurance premiums.
These workers in Illinois don’t get to write editorials, but, having lost their jobs when the plant they worked at shut down, here’s what they say:
Former workers hope that a hearing on Thursday in Chicago might grant them 60 days of severance pay.
There are worries now about the cost of health care getting even higher. That’s as a 65% tax subsidy for COBRA benefits is beginning to run out without an extension.
“Trying to stay healthy,” she said. “So that you don’t get sick and have to go to the doctor. No insurance? It’s scary — very, very scary.”
Outside the vacant plant, paychecks have vanished along with the health care. Displaced workers just can’t afford the cost.
Two months of extended COBRA benefits will be an actual lifesaver for a few people who otherwise wouldn’t get the care they needed during those two months. But it won’t last until the unemployment rate drops to a manageable level. Two months just means that in two months, we’ll have to have this fight again.
Don’t forget – from 4-5pm EST today, so in just a few minutes, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will be answering the most popular questions submitted on the jobs crisis.
Go here to watch, and keep an ear out for the question submitted by Working America’s David Wehde, which has been a leading vote-getter from day one.
In his speech on the jobs crisis last week, President Obama called the mass unemployment caused by the Great Recession “a continuing human tragedy.” Today’s front page of The New York Times reports on a Times/CBS News poll of unemployed Americans in a story headlined “Poll Reveals Depth and Trauma of Joblessness in U.S.”
After giving the heads of some of the biggest U.S. banks a talking to designed to press them to help spur recovery through more lending, President Obama today plans to bring the entire Senate Democratic caucus to the White House to address the need for health care reform.
John Walker at Firedoglake looks at the drug importation issue and what he calls the “Double-Double-Cross”.
Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) thinks it may be high time to scrap the whole 60-vote thing in the Senate and put an end to the filibuster, noting with some irony that his last attempt to do so, in 1995, was co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Looks like I’m in good company with my sadness and frustration these days. Paul Krugman writes:
When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.
Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley has some ideas about how to make a cash for caulkers program work by making it more accessible to more people:
I strongly believe that to achieve these [energy saving and job creating] goals, the program must include financing assistance for residential and commercial building owners who cannot afford the upfront cost of a home renovation but who could pay for it out of the savings they will see on their energy bill. Financing assistance can allow federal dollars to be leveraged substantially farther than a rebate program. For example, appropriating $2 billion for loan guarantees could allow $20-$40 billion in financing.
The US Conference of Mayors has released their 2009 survey on Hunger and Homelessness. The report is based on a survey of 27 mayors from around the country who are members of the Conference of Mayors task force on Homelessness and Hunger.
The study shows about a 26% increase in requests for emergency food assistance. The numbers of homeless families have also risen sharply:
76 % of the cities reported an increase in family homelessness, while homelessness among individuals decreased or stayed the same for 16 of the 23 cities. The report notes that most of the cities that experienced drops in individual homelessness attributed the decline to a policy strategy by federal, state and local governments of adopting 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness among single adults. The recession and a lack of affordable housing were cited as the top causes of family homelessness in the surveyed cities.
HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan,
who chairs the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, said that one of the most tragic consequences of our housing and economic crisis are those who fall into homelessness as a result – whether through foreclosures, evictions, layoffs, or other financial problems. The Secretary noted that with increases in rural and suburban family homelessness, the issue is not an urban problem, but one every community struggles with. He said, “As diverse as our homeless population is, there is one thing that everyone who is homeless shares: a lack of housing they can afford. And as this study finds, high housing costs often lead families to cut back on necessities like food.”
Homeless shelters all over the country are full, and in some cases, turning people away. The Denver Post ran a story earlier in the week that showed an absence of beds for homeless women in Denver:
On Monday night, when the temperature dropped to 5 degrees in metro Denver, as many as 35 solo homeless women were turned away from city shelters.
Although the number of unaccompanied homeless women in the metro area has tripled since 2007 — to 1,606 from 552, according to the 2009 Metro Denver Homeless Initiative’s point-in-time survey — there are only 241 shelter beds for solo women available in Denver.
Emergency-shelter beds “are extremely limited for women,” said Geoff Bennett, director of the Samaritan House. “There are many more men’s beds than there are beds for women.”
When the beds fill up, some of the women may receive motel vouchers, but they must meet certain criteria. And if they don’t, they must fend for themselves.
And while we’re on the subject, clean energy creates more jobs than oil and gas:
Investment In Clean Energy Technology Creates FOUR TIMES As Many Jobs As An Investment In Oil & Gas. According to the Center for American Progress, “spending $1 million on energy efficiency and renewable energy produces a much larger expansion of employment than spending the same amount on fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Among fossil fuels, job creation in coal is about 32 percent greater than that for oil and natural gas. The employment creation for energy efficiency-retrofitting and mass transit-is 2.5 times to four times larger than that for oil and natural gas. With renewable energy, the job creation ranges between 2.5 times to three times more than that for oil and gas.” [Center for American Progress, The Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy, 6/17/09]
Another hole in the Chamber of Commerce’s pose as a voice for small business:
A Media Matters Action Network analysis of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2008 tax return shows that the powerful business group, which purports to represent the interest of American businesses, is almost entirely funded by a small number of contributors. Our work expands on a November 23 article in the New York Times, which examined the Chamber’s deep-pocketed contributors. The Times‘ analysis of the Chamber’s 990 filed with Internal Revenue
Service revealed that 19 contributors provided the group with a third of its total revenue.
Our analysis went one step further. A total of 1,439 contributed more than 90% of the $139,924,246 that the group received in contributions and grants in 2008.
–snip–
For example, one contributor gave the Chamber $15.3 million, a sum representing nearly 11% of its total contributions. It is unclear whether the contribution comes from one company or a trade group, such as the American Petroleum Institute, which itself represents many companies.
More on Tom Brady’s participation in his union. (I’m a Patriots fan, ok?)
The government should spend money to benefit the real economy, the one composed of working people, and should pay for it by taxing the very wealthy.
Let’s think about who in the traditional media would say that. There are a few columnists and pundits who’ll say it every so often, and they get routinely derided as impossibly left-wing, definitely way out of step with The American People.
Americans want their government to create jobs through spending on public works, investments in alternative energy or skills training for the jobless.
They also want the deficit to come down. And most are ready to hand the bill to the wealthy.
A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Dec. 3-7 shows two- thirds of Americans favor taxing the rich to reduce the deficit.
That included about half of Republicans wanting to tax the rich, by the way.
To recap: Voters elected President Obama, who ran “promising to roll back the Bush administration’s tax cuts for families that earn more than $250,000.” Two-thirds of the people polled want to do it. But somehow, this is an idea that rarely gets aired in the media, and then gets treated as partisan and maybe a little outlandish.
These days, it’s hard not to have questions about jobs. For altogether too many people, it’s “why don’t I have one?” But even people who love the jobs they have know that we need to solve the jobs crisis, not just for jobless workers but for the health of the country itself. And how we do that is a huge question—really a lot of huge questions.
One person who’s spent a lot of time thinking about those questions is AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, and he’s going to be answering some of them on Tuesday afternoon. You can submit questions, or vote on questions other people have submitted, and President Trumka will answer the top vote-getters in a live online video session Tuesday, December 15, from 4:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon.
• Sign in here to participate if you have a Google account.
• If you don’t have a Google account, create one here.
And while you’re there, vote for the question from Working America’s own David Wehde, who asked:
“‘We can’t just flip burgers for one another’ (comment from a worker’s round table at the Minnesota office of Working America): What are we going to do to create well-paying jobs that can support a family and won’t be outsourced?”
