It’s not the bill many of us hoped and fought for, but nonetheless we may soon reach the end of years of inaction and a massive struggle for change.
The bill is compromised, yes, but it’s still worth it. Though important parts of reform won’t go into effect for a couple years, there are significant changes that will happen this year, from beginning to close the donut hole to requiring free preventive care in new plans to funding community health centers.
And in the longer term, it will extend coverage to 30 million more people.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka fought hard to make the bill better; now he explains why he thinks it’s time to fight to pass this bill.
The Senate passed a revised version (to match the House’s bill) of the jobs bill they already passed once.
Two things stand out. One, as every report tells you right up front, this was a bipartisan vote. It passed with 68 votes to 29, 11 Republicans for it and one Democrat against. That is, as BarbinMD notes, fewer Republicans than voted for “corporate sponsorship of rape.”
(Remember this one?)
Two, this is a really small bill. It’s a start, don’t get me wrong. And it’s good to see any kind of action on jobs. But…it’s a small fraction of what’s needed.
The centerpiece of the bill is a new program giving companies a break from paying Social Security taxes for the remainder of 2010 on any new workers they hire who had been unemployed for at least 60 days. Employers would also get a $1,000 tax credit for each of those workers who stays on the payroll for at least one year.
Aside from that program, the measure includes a one-year extension of the law governing federal transportation funding, and would transfer $20 billion into the highway trust fund. The bill also extends a tax break allowing companies to write off equipment purchases, and expands the Build America Bonds program, which helps state and local governments secure financing for infrastructure projects.
We should feel good about it, but not even think about letting up on the pressure we’re putting on Congress to do more.
Admittedly we haven’t been all over this one to date, but this is interesting. Lehman Brothers appears to have actually broken the law:
[A] blockbuster 2,200 page report on Lehman Brothers by a court-appointed examiner shows Lehman Brothers executives moving $50 billion in toxic assets off-balance-sheet to deceive investors about its financial health.
Say, we just learned about a $50 billion fraud on Thursday. Think there might be some newsworthy follow-ups here? Actually there are, and both The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have them, but they stuff them inside.
–snip–
Somehow the Times thought more people would care about Sorkin’s scoop on a $3 billion deal for Tommy Hilfiger or that it was more important than an auditor approving accounting fraud. They don’t and it’s not.
Look, I know that Lehman collapsed a year and a half ago, but this is a major story—one that finally gets awfully close to putting the crimes in the crisis. I’ll go ahead and say it: If you’ve wanted to know about the Valukas report and its implications, you’ve been better served by reading Zero Hedge and Naked Capitalism than you have The Wall Street Journal or New York Times. This on the biggest financial news story of the week—and one of the biggest of the year. These papers have hundreds of journalists at their disposal. The blogs have one non-professional writer and a handful of sometime non-pro-journalist contributors.
When they’re confronted with things like this, the traditional media tends to explain that it just so happened that people weren’t interested in Wall Street crime, they were interested in the latest celebrity break-up. But when they don’t make the news about Wall Street available to begin with, it’s really not a fair test. “People weren’t interested in the thing we didn’t bring to their attention” isn’t an adequate defense for burying a story.
When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 — at least in the Hollywood telling — they didn’t count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster.
Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.
Which foods have gotten cheaper over the past 30 years? Which foods have gotten more expensive?
It’s amazing what happens when it looks like you have the votes to pass a bill. Suddenly your enemies are your best friends!
Republicans of all stripes are coming out of the woodwork to give Democrats free advice on how to vote on health reform. Most of that advice says vote no, of course.
John Nichols at The Nation makes a similar point: That advice is not exactly well-intentioned.
Real-life circumstances are yet again making the point: Public services are not free. One way or another, they have to be paid for.
Now it’s water, not just in one state but in cities and towns across the country. You’d think people would want the water they drink to be clean and safe, but apparently too many of us have gotten used to paying next to nothing for the water we drink and cook with, shower in and flush down the toilet. Our water systems are crumbling and overflowing, sometimes with raw sewage, and it still hasn’t fully sunk in that fixing this will take real money—but it’s worth doing right.
Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.
In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend’s intense rains overwhelmed the city’s system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.
State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.
For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.
As the head of the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority is quoted pointing out, “People pay more for their cellphones and cable television than for water…You can go a day without a phone or TV. You can’t go a day without water.”
I’ve long chafed at those who suggested “shovel ready projects” were hard to find as fixing water/sewer systems is both an obvious need and in many places fairly simple. Dig up road, replace pipe, fix road, repeat. There are places with more complex engineering issues, of course.
This is the choice: Either we pay—whether in water bills or taxes—for significant repairs to the nation’s crumbling water and sewer systems, or we have more and more pipe breaks and contaminated water. There’s a whole political industry dedicated to obscuring that fact, but in the end it really is that simple.
As health care reform finally comes to its final votes (we hope), AFSCME and Americans United for Change are running an ad reminding viewers why this issue is so important:
Working people have plenty to be angry with Wall Street about. A $700 billion bailout. Toxic assets and loan guarantees to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. A financial crisis and credit crunch. Billions of dollars in six- and seven-figure bonuses to the Wall Street executives who got us into this mess.
Unemployment reaching 10 percent. A mortgage crisis extending far beyond subprime loans. Abusive credit and debit card fees. More than five job-seekers for every one job.
Wall Street has treated Main Street as a giant ATM—gambling with the economy, then coming back with their hands out for help. But somehow, no matter how much help the banks need to survive, they always have the resources to fight proposals to regulate them or get them to pay their fair share.
That’s why Working America has launched the ”I am not your ATM” campaign. Already, people in Albuquerque, N.M.; Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Ore.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Little Rock, Ark.; and Minneapolis have been photographed with “I am not your ATM” signs at major banks to let Wall Street know they’ve had enough. Wall Street’s biggest banks need to be held accountable, with a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Rather than asking taxpayers for more money, Big Banks need to start repaying us for the damage they’ve done.
In the coming week, we at Working America will hold more events in cities across the country, but you can participate online. Submit a photo to NotYourATM.com and send Wall Street the message that you’re done being Big Banks’ ATM. It’s time for them to clean up the mess they made, instead of expecting working people to do it for them.
Amanda Marcotte is even more cynical than I am about Bank of America’s motivations in dropping overdraft fees on debit cards. And, as a former bank branch manager, she is far more specific in her cynicism:
I was immediately instructed to put most of my time and effort into converting paycheck cashers into account holders. I resisted. As I saw it, these people weren’t f**king stupid. If they wanted a free checking account, they could have one. There were signs everywhere helpfully explaining that it was free if you had $100 to open it with. If they wanted to cash their checks and live off cash only, then they had their reasons. And they were good reasons! The worst parts of my job were 75% due to people who kept average account balances below $500. Those were the people who overdrew their checking accounts all the time, and then came in sobbing and begging for relief from what was often hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees. To make it worse, the bank’s official policy (this is standard) was to clear debits from highest to lowest amount. In other words, if processing had a rent check of $400 and then fifteen debit card transactions of $5-$10, they took the $400 first, and then the rest. So if the $400 overdrew the account, then every single transaction after was an overdraft fee.
I may not seem like it, but I’m a human being and having someone suffering from this injustice in front of me—a regular part of my job—was enough to suck the life out of me, over and over again. There’s some things you can do to help, but you have to be careful to fly under the radar, or your own job will be on the line.
So when my managers wanted me to recruit all these paycheck cashers as account holders, I went into shut down mode. It was straight up exploitation of the working poor, an attempt to get people who don’t have a lot of experience with banks to create accounts they’ll immediately overdraw. From the bank’s perspective, it’s pure profit.
–snip–
I think/hope this goes a long way to explaining how deeply cynical I am that the financial industry has an ethical bone in its collective body. The minimum wage service employees of the world may seem like human beings trying to get by the best they can to you or me, but to them, they’re marks. Banks are vampires, and they see the working poor—and increasingly the middle class—as nothing but sacks of blood to be drained dry and thrown aside.
No question it’s good news that Bank of America will no longer charge overdraft fees on debit card purchases, instead just declining the card if there isn’t enough money in the account.
But of course, they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
As of July 1, the Federal Reserve will require that banks obtain a customer’s consent before they can charge them overdraft fees for A.T.M. transactions and debit purchases; many banks now automatically enroll customers.
In anticipation of the new Fed rule, some banks have begun marketing campaigns to encourage their customers to opt in to overdraft protection to keep the dollars flowing.
Several bills have been introduced in Congress that would go beyond the Fed’s rules on overdraft fees.
Bank of America, by deciding to scrap overdraft charges on debit card purchases instead, is hoping to bolster its reputation with consumers at a time when anger at banks for their role in the financial crisis remains high.
So noble of them: They charge every fee they can think of, they fight attempts to regulate them, then as soon as a new regulation actually gets passed, they’re so concerned about what their customers want that butter couldn’t melt in their mouths.
We’re hearing a lot about Congress using reconciliation to get the Senate and House health care reform bills to match. And a lot of what we’re hearing is claims that this would be an unprecedented use of reconciliation. So what is the history of reconciliation? What’s it been used for?
Senate candidate Sue Lowden (R-NV) is running on a message that Matthew Yglesias summarizes as “government-run health care is wrong but she’s going to keep Medicare strong.”
What responsibility do doctors have for cost-cutting in the health care system?
Union Plus, which supplies Working America member benefits, has a quiz on energy use in the home. Did you know how much of the energy used by a washing machine goes to heating the water?
