“The GOP’s Sad Scrooge Agenda”: A Real Anti-Poverty Agenda Involves Raising The Minimum Wage
It’s the most wonderful time of the year … unless your unemployment benefits are set to run out three days after Christmas. But there’s a little bit of holiday cheer for the long-term unemployed: Democrats are showing some new spine in fighting to help them.
For decades Democrats have had, at best, a stealth agenda when it comes to fighting poverty. After backing GOP-inspired welfare reform in 1996, most favored work-support programs taxpayers couldn’t necessarily see, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, and borrowed Republican rhetoric dividing the deserving from the undeserving poor. Expanding eligibility for food stamps and Medicaid was mainly defended in terms of an agenda to support the working — i.e. “deserving” — poor, and even for someone as ostensibly liberal as President Obama, deficit reduction has been a higher-profile priority than fighting income inequality throughout most of his five years in office, and the word “poverty” rarely crosses his lips at all.
That’s slowly been changing, for Obama and his party. Increasingly Democrats seem to believe poverty and income inequality are not only important issues morally, but politically. Now comes the liberal group Americans United for Change with polling, advertising and a political campaign designed to make sure Republicans suffer for their Scrooge agenda in 2014.
Polling by PPP finds that in four swing House districts currently held by Republicans, at least two-thirds of voters support continuing the expanded unemployment benefits that are set to expire Dec. 28, just three days after Christmas. Even in Speaker John Boehner’s district, 63 percent of voters want benefits extended, including 52 percent of Republicans.
But it’s not just PPP polling. A new Pew poll finds the public supports maintaining programs for the poor over deficit reduction 59-33; among independents it’s 53-38.
Of course, one of the tough things about being a progressive is that you can often find poll data supporting your policy agenda. And yet when push comes to shove in the only polls that matter, the ones that open on Election Day, economic fairness issues haven’t driven liberal voters quite the way social issues have turned out conservatives. Of course that’s because conservatives have had a head start organizing on issues like abortion and gun rights while liberals too often assume the obvious correctness of their world view will prevail over time.
But the fight over unemployment looks different. Americans United for Change, along with labor groups, plans an advertising and media push focused on vulnerable Republicans. Already, an effort to publicize the cost of cutting unemployment in those members’ home districts has paid off in remarkable local media coverage, as Greg Sargent laid out two weeks ago.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has already announced that extending unemployment is at the top of his agenda when the Senate reconvenes in January. He’ll of course face pushback from the Tea Party caucus — Sen. Rand Paul continues to insist that extending unemployment is a “disservice” to the unemployed, as if he has any interest in policies that would actually be of “service” to them. Sen. Ted Cruz insists unemployment benefits “exacerbate” joblessness. But vulnerable and moderate Republicans in the House and Senate could conceivably surprise Paul and Cruz — they don’t want to find themselves in the unemployment line come 2015.
Still, it’s not time to celebrate just yet. Democrats weren’t tough enough to insist that an unemployment extension become part of the budget compromise. And there’s been little comparable innovative organizing around restoring food stamp cuts. Of course, a real anti-poverty agenda involves not just improving the safety net but raising the minimum wage, strengthening union rights, increasing spending on both preschool and higher education and restoring fairness and progressivity to the tax code. None of those things is going to happen with the current Congress.
But the Democrats’ new strength and political savvy on unemployment insurance is just more evidence that the party is no longer exclusively playing defense when it comes to an economic populist agenda. If progressives can demonstrate real political benefits to that agenda, expect cowardly Blue Dog Dems and even some Republicans to see the light.
Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 23, 2013
“The Duck And Jackass Dynasty”: Has It Become Acceptable Again For An American Politician To Embrace Unashamed Bigotry?
I got the gist of the “Duck Dynasty” thing after my first and only viewing: bunch of rural jackasses who somehow struck it rich get brought into our living rooms to be laughed at by the rest of us aristocrats.
Well, all right. When the archetype first appeared on television via the “Beverly Hillbillies” it was also enormously popular, but also taken as an illustration of how TV was living down to its condemnation by FCC Chairman Newton Minow as a “vast wasteland.”
In any event, A&E knew what it was doing when it put these people on the air, so its show of indignation in “suspending” one of them for speaking out against gays and the aspirations of African Americans falls a little flat.
What’s truly ghastly, however, is the reaction of a couple of political figures. Sarah Palin‘s opinion isn’t worth the eleven words I’ve just written to dismiss it. But Bobby Jindal still holds down office as the governor of Louisiana. That raises the question: Has it become acceptable again for an American politician to embrace unashamed bigotry?
In the old days, news that public funds (via the Louisiana state film and television incentive program) had helped finance racism and gay-bashing of the variety espoused by Phil Robertson, the outspoken duck dynast, would have presented a moral dilemma and created a political embarrassment for a governor. Most self-respecting political leaders would have run away from association with such views; that’s the essence, after all, of the “leadership” part of the equation.
Not for Jindal. His only public statement on the matter thus far has praised Robertson as a member of a family of “great citizens of the State of Louisiana.” He defends Robertson’s views on the “it’s a free country” principle, which as a debating point generally gets dropped by most people before the fourth grade. “Everyone is entitled to express their views,” he says.
In Jindal’s seven-sentence statement, not a word of defense for gay people so crudely mocked by Robertson. Not a word to remind us that the life of black sharecroppers in Louisiana’s Jim Crow era was not “godly” or “happy.”
In January of this year, Jindal lectured his fellow Republicans on the need to “stop being the stupid party.” Remember? He talked about how the Republican brand had been damaged by its candidates’ “offensive and bizarre comments.” That was supposed to represent the launch of a new GOP outreach to communities that had been excluded by Republican doctrine, including the gay and minority communities.
But that was eleven months ago. Now, according to Jindal, Republicans are supposed to embrace offensive and bizarre comments. The party’s transformation into a marginal and regional movement thus continues. Jindal has made himself the biggest jackass in the story, and his career as a national political figure the thing to be laughed at.
By: Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2013
“Millions And Millions”: How Many People Has Obamacare Helped?
As the deadline to sign up for an insurance policy that takes effect in 2014 passes on December 23, the next crucial step in the debate about the future of the Affordable Care Act begins.
On January 1, Republicans will make the case that because of the estimated five million cancelation notices that went out last year, more people are uninsured under the president’s signature legislative accomplishment than newly insured.
The White House is preparing to rebut that argument aggressively. Last week, an administration official asserted that only about 10 percent of those who received those notices had not found a replacement plan, as most were offered another option by their current insurer. The remaining 500,000 or so have been offered a special exemption from the individual mandate.
But it will be almost impossible to know right away if the number of net insured went up in January, The Washington Post‘s Sarah Kliff explained on Friday.
“It’s the exact opposite of weather forecasting,” Stan Dorn, a senior expert at the Urban Institute, told Kliff. “There, you can be pretty confident of what will happen tomorrow but no idea about the future. Here it’s the reverse: Over time there will be significant gains, but that will take years, not months.”
All we have now is estimates, as some states are reporting signups and some are announcing actual enrollment numbers. As of Friday, 3.3 million people had signed up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act, with at least 970,000 of them having enrolled in private insurance plans, according to ACAsignups.net.
But these numbers don’t tell the whole story, Campaign for America’s Future’s Dave Johnson points out:
—71 million Americans on private insurance have gained coverage for at least one free preventive health care service such as a mammogram, birth control, or an immunization in 2011 and 2012. In the first 11 months of 2013 alone, an additional 25 million people with traditional Medicare have received at least one preventive service at no out-of-pocket cost.
—Up to 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions—including up to 17 million children —will no longer have to worry about being denied health coverage or charged higher premiums because of their health status.
—Approximately 60 million Americans have gained expanded mental health and substance use disorder benefits and/or federal parity protections.
—41 million uninsured Americans will have new health insurance options through Medicaid or private health plans in the Marketplace. Nearly 6 in 10 of these individuals could pay less than $100 per month for coverage.
—Consumers have saved $5 billion over the past two years due to a new requirement that insurance companies have to spend at least 80 percent of premium dollars on care for patients (at least 85 percent for large group insurers). If they don’t, they must send consumers a rebate. In 2013, 8.5 million enrollees will receive rebates averaging $100 per family.
—Insurance companies must submit premium increases of 10 percent or more for review by experts. In 2012, 6.8 million Americans saved an estimated $1.2 billion on health insurance premiums after their insurers cut back on planned increases as a result of this process.
—Since the health care law was enacted, more than 7 million seniors and people with disabilities have saved an average of $1,200 per person on prescription drugs as the health care law closes Medicare’s “donut hole.”
—Over three million young adults have gained health insurance because they can now stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.
—Individuals no longer have to worry about having their health benefits cut off after they reach a lifetime limit on benefits. Starting in January, 105 million Americans will no longer have to worry about annual limits, either.
—Using funds available through the Affordable Care Act, health centers are expanding access to care by building new sites and renovating existing sites. Health centers served approximately 21 million patients in 2012.
The millions and millions of people who’ve been helped by the law won’t be counted as the press tries to game out if Obamacare will reach the seven million private insurance signups the Congressional Budget Office predicted for its first year. But they’re definitely out there, and they’d be among the millions who would be affected if the GOP is ever successful in repealing the law.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 22, 2013
“Merry Christmas From The GOP”: On December 28th Unemployment Benefits End For 1.3 Million Families
Three days after Christmas, unemployment benefits end for 1.3 million people who have exhausted their state unemployment benefits, but still can’t find a job.
To be eligible for unemployment benefits, you have to be actively looking for a job. Virtually all of these people would rather work, but can’t find a job in today’s economy where there are three applicants for every job available.
But when the budget deal was negotiated in Congress over the last several weeks, Republican negotiators refused to agree to continue those unemployment benefits. And at the same time, they demanded the continuation of tax breaks for big oil companies and loopholes for Wall Street billionaires who get their income from hedge funds.
Merry Christmas from the GOP.
Of course this kind of Christmas cheer comes from the same gang that routinely drags out the well-worn charge that progressives and Democrats are engaging in a “war on Christmas”. Maybe someone should force Republican Members of Congress to sit through a showing of “A Christmas Carol” and then explain why they think Ebenezer Scrooge is the hero.
Over the last decade the far right, that now dominates the GOP, has conducted a real war on the values that we celebrate at Christmas.
In case they missed it, Christmas is about giving, and sharing and loving your neighbor. It’s about family. Christmas has nothing to do with greed or selfishness or paying people poverty level wages so you can maximize your bottom line.
The Christmas spirit is not about cutting off an economic lifeline for over a million people so the wealthiest in the land can continue to prosper beyond imagining. And remember many of those same wealthy people who are doing so well are personally responsible for the recklessness that caused the Great Recession and cost the jobs of those whose unemployment benefits they now believe we can “no longer afford”.
You hear a lot from the right wing about having to make “tough choices” because some things “we just can’t afford”. Ironically those “things we cannot afford” never include the things that benefit the very wealthy.
In fact, as surprising as it may seem to many Americans, there is more bounty in the land this Christmas, than at any time in our nation’s history. Our income per capita – and our productivity per person – has increased by 80% over the last 30 years. But over those same 30 years, average incomes for most Americans were stagnant – and virtually all of that increased income and wealth went to the top 1%.
That is bad enough. But then to insist that our country “can’t afford” to continue paying unemployment benefits to people who can’t find a job – and by the way – cut off their benefits three days after Christmas – that is an outrage.
Many on the right are so out of touch with ordinary Americans that they argue that providing unemployment benefits makes people “dependent”. This of course completely ignores the fact that to qualify you have to have been working and lost your job for no fault of your own; you have to be actively looking for work; and the maximum benefits in many states are very low.
Ask the Koch brothers to support a family on the $258 per week maximum benefit in Louisiana, or the $275 per week maximum benefit in Florida – or even the $524 per week maximum benefit in Ohio.
People don’t want to stay on unemployment benefits. They want to find a job that provides them with income and benefits that allow them to give a better life to their families and their kids. They want to make a contribution and feel that they do worthwhile work. Most Americans want to be proud of what they do for a living – they don’t want to be “dependent” on anyone.
You have to be from another planet to believe that most people will become “dependent” on a total income of $275 per week.
Unemployment benefits provide workers and their families with an economic shot in the arm to get them through being laid off in an economy when jobs are still hard to come by.
And let’s be real clear why jobs are so hard to come by. Jobs are still hard to come by because of the policies of those very same right wing politicians who refused to reign in the orgy of reckless speculation on Wall Street that resulted in a ruinous financial collapse from which the economy is still recovering.
Jobs would be a lot easier to come by if the GOP did not do everything it could to block President Obama’s American’s Jobs Act that would create millions of jobs in both the public and private sectors by investing in teachers, and infrastructure.
Jobs would be a lot easier to come by if the GOP were not fixated on cutting government investment at a time when virtually all economists – including the Federal Reserve Chairman – believe we need more fiscal stimulus and that the policy’s of the Republicans in Congress continue to be a major drag on economic growth.
In fact the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that failing to continue federal unemployment benefits will cost the economy 240,000 jobs and slow the growth of the overall economy by .2%.
Those who receive unemployment benefits spend virtually every dime on the goods and services they need to live. That spending provides jobs to thousands of other Americans. So cutting federal unemployment benefits will actually create a quarter million more people who are unemployed. Great work GOP.
So here is the bottom line. It turns out that a society that reflects the spirit of Christmas – one where we have each other’s back – where we care about each other and not just ourselves – a society like that is better for everyone.
In fact, it turns out that the “moral” thing to do – the “right” thing to do – is also the “smart” thing to do.
It turns out that progressive values like loving your neighbor as your self – are the most precious possessions of humanity because they are the values that will allow us and our children to prosper and survive.
And that’s why the spirit of Christmas doesn’t just belong to Christians – or Catholics or Baptists or Episcopalians – or anyone. The Christmas spirit belongs to everyone on our small fragile planet. And that spirit embodies exactly the set of values that we must use to chart our course not just on Christmas Day but 365 days each year – including December 28th when over a million families will lose the economic lifeline that provides them a bridge to a better life.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, December 23, 2013
“America’s Greediest”: Sheldon Adelson, Who Hates Gambling, Unless He’s Profiting From It
Among the most venerable Yuletide traditions is the annual appeal on behalf of the “neediest cases,” which has spread nationwide since it first appeared in the New York Times so long ago.
More than a century later we still have the poor with us, of course, and the rich, not to mention the unspeakably super-duper-rich – many of whom comport themselves in ways that likewise provoke public concern, especially in an era of growing inequality and impoverishment.
National Memo editor-in-chief Joe Conason believes the time has come to revive a somewhat less charitable tradition that he and his late colleague, the great progressive journalist Jack Newfield, established at The Village Voice during an earlier era of avarice: “The Greediest Cases.”
This holiday season we will feature a series of profiles of America’s Greediest Cases, and we encourage readers to nominate deserving public figures in the worlds of business, government, media, entertainment, and sports who exemplify the grasping materialism and rank hypocrisy of our time.
No list of America’s greediest would be complete without the nation’s 11th richest man, casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Adelson, who serves as chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands, is worth an estimated $28.5 billion. While he has profited quite handsomely from gambling, however, he is not eager to share the wealth that the industry has bestowed upon him. That’s why a man who made more than $25 billion from casinos in the past three years alone has become the public face and the checkbook of the anti-online gaming lobby.
According to Adelson, gambling online — currently legal in Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey, and being debated in at least a half-dozen other states — is “a societal train wreck waiting to happen.” That’s how the 80-year-old casino mogul described it in a June column for Forbes, in which he declared that “as a father, grandfather, citizen and patriot of this great country, I am adamantly opposed to the legalization and proliferation of online casino gaming.”
In that overwrought essay, Adelson lays out his moral opposition to the industry, terming it “a toxin which all good people ought to resist,” and warning that it could bring a “plague” to American society by allowing “underage children” or “people betting under the influence of drugs” to pick up gambling and ruin their financial futures. Of course, if this sounds like something that could also happen at one of Adelson’s brick-and-mortar casinos, that’s because it is.
Adelson insists that he could make even more money from online gambling — boasting that his popular brands “would be very effective competitors in this market place” — but it is simply not worth the moral cost.
This may be a good time to mention that Adelson earned the vast majority of his wealth through his casinos in Macau –where he allegedly gained licenses for those establishments with help from organized crime, and by using his vast political connections to kill congressional legislation that would have punished China for human rights abuses. It will always be difficult for Sheldon Adelson to claim the moral high ground, but on questions of gambling it is basically impossible. Instead, common sense suggests that Adelson is less concerned with protecting the poor addict who could “click [his] mouse and lose [his] house,” as he put it in his Forbes op-ed, and more concerned with exerting his influence on any reform that affects the gambling industry.
Even if Adelson’s motivations in his crusade against online gambling are pure, it’s not hard to find other reasons to include him among the “greediest cases.” After all, this is a man once sued by his own children, who alleged that he defrauded them by convincing them to sell him their shares in his company for just half of their true value (the younger Adelsons lost that case, although Adelson also lost a motion attempting to saddle his sons with deposition costs).
Adelson’s extensive involvement in the 2012 election may represent the clearest example of his greed. Although he spent over $100 million supporting various Republican candidates last year, he was once a Democrat. In fact, even as he was spending the GDP of a small country in an effort to elect Republicans, Adelson confided to the Wall Street Journal that he is “basically a social liberal,” who supports stem-cell research, a woman’s right to choose, comprehensive immigration reform, and even “socialized-like health care.”
Why then is he so committed to electing politicians who would wage war against his deeply held beliefs? According to Adelson, it’s because of the Republican Party’s stronger commitment to charity and to the state of Israel. But others aren’t so sure; former Adelson employee (and U.S. Representative) Shelly Berkley (D-NV) claims Adelson once told her that “old Democrats were with the union and he wanted to break the back of the union, consequently he had to break the back of the Democrats.”
Moreover, the billionaire has a strong personal financial incentive to support Republicans. According to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund, Adelson could have received a $2 billion tax cut had Mitt Romney been elected president and enacted his tax plan. That’s apparently more than enough to buy his silence on reproductive rights or health care reform (not to mention a great return on his $100 million investment).
And although Romney lost, there’s no need to pity Adelson. Even without his chosen candidate in the White House, he has managed to dodge about $2.8 billion in gift taxes since 2010 by aggressively exploiting the little-known GRAT loophole. Indeed, no matter who wins the presidency — or the battle over online gambling, for that matter — Sheldon Adelson is going to do just fine.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, December 19, 2013
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