No stimulation for the great unwashed

Acting on the will of their president, the GOP has blocked the Stimulus Bill … it’s just too full of “pork” spending to suit them [read that as extension of unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc., which is just about the only actual assistance that's being offered, here, given the magnitude of a one time check in the mail [which the majority will either use to pay down debt, or put aside for the next available rainy day ... coming to a neighborhood near you ... and NOT to finance big ticket items or trips to Disney World!]

The political cartoons have done a good job of poking the ‘too little, too late’ message of Dubby’s big plan and many of the editorials have been ruthless. One pundit likened it to borrowing money from China to throw out of a helicopter, and another said it would be just enough for someone to make a payment on the car they’re living in.

Dubby’s sure not living in OUR world!

Here’s three articles, spelling it all out. The third, on the Edwards message, contained an interesting blog post, indicating that John Nichols over at the Nation reported Edwards as receiving over 450,000 votes on Super Tuesday. Yesterday I read a pundit piece that indicated votes like this represented a public uninformed that their candidate had dropped, that the system needs to do a better job getting the word out — what a dolt! Perhaps in elections prior but NOT in this campaign, for sure. I’d bet that fewer than 1% of those votes were “uninformed.” They were most assuredly ON PURPOSE and sending a message missed by the witless.

John was right about that, as well — we DO live in two America’s. The one looking in and pissed … the one looking out and clueless.

First link is a gift for all you Baby Boomers out there — see, learning can be fun!

Note: Romney pulled out of the race today — MadDog Mac will be the Red contender. He’s already acting as if he’s accepted the scepter; one Lefty wryly suggested that his campaign slogan be “Four More Years!”

Jude

Schoolhouse Rock- How a Bill Becomes a Law
Youtube

Senate G.O.P. Blocks Additions to Stimulus Bill
DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, New York Times
February 7, 2008

WASHINGTON — By a single vote, Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked an expansive fiscal stimulus package championed by Democrats, as partisan rancor engulfed the effort to inject a quick burst of spending into the slowing economy.

The package needed 60 votes under Senate rules to move forward but failed 58 to 41, with 8 Republicans joining 48 Democrats and 2 independents in support of it. The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, switched his vote to no from yes at the last second, a parliamentary move that lets him control the next steps on the bill.

The political brinkmanship in the Senate stood in marked contrast to the House, where Republicans and Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi took just a week to reach a deal on an economic stimulus package with President Bush, and just four more days to pass the bill.

But eight days after that House vote, the Senate remained bitterly divided along party lines with just a few Republicans, some in tough battles for re-election, willing to cross over and support the Democrats.

The measure was opposed by Republican leaders who said the Democrats added too many costly provisions, including an extension of unemployment benefits, tax credits for the coal industry and increased subsidies for home energy costs.

The total cost of the Senate plan came to about $204 billion over two years, or about $40 billion more than the House version.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, the leading Republican presidential candidate, returned to Washington fresh off his string of victories in Tuesday’s voting, but he did not appear in the Senate chamber and did not vote. Adding to the partisan rancor, Democrats immediately questioned his whereabouts and seemed poised to blame him personally, and Republicans generally, for stalling the bill.

Aides to Mr. McCain said that he would have sided with the Republican leaders and that his vote was not needed.

The two Democratic senators running for the presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, flew in to cast their votes in favor of the Democratic bill.

After the vote, Mr. Reid said he needed time to decide how to proceed, but aides said he was working the phones to see if he could round up one additional Republican vote.
The White House again urged the Senate to act quickly.

“It is crucial that the Senate now move quickly to pass a bill that will deliver relief to our economy,” the press secretary, Dana M. Perino, said.

The partisan feuding in the Senate hardly stemmed from presidential politics alone. Mr. Reid maneuvered aggressively in recent days to strong-arm Republicans into voting for the plan. He added $1 billion in home heating subsidies for low-income families to pressure Republicans from cold-weather states. And he enlisted AARP and an array of other interests groups to lobby for the Senate plan.

But some of those Republicans, like Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, voted against the plan anyway.

The Senate infighting is in contrast to the swift resolution of an economic package in the House. That display of quick cooperation cast aside, at least for a moment, a year of partisan acrimony on Capitol Hill.

Both the House and Senate proposals contain a combination of tax rebates or payments for individuals and families and tax incentives for businesses all intended to spur spending and jump-start the economy. But under the House plan, more than 20 million Americans living on Social Security and more than 250,000 disabled veterans would not be eligible for the payments.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, had called for the Senate simply to adopt the House package with two changes: payments for Social Security recipients and disabled veterans, and a stipulation that illegal immigrant workers not receive payments. Mr. McConnell renewed that demand on the Senate floor just before the vote and chided the Democrats.

Praising House Democrats and Republicans for their stimulus deal, Mr. McConnell said, “Then, in an apparent jolt of nostalgia for last year, Senate Democrats decided to co-opt a bipartisan proposal produced by the House to put together a carefully crafted political document.”

He added: “The point here was to try to do a targeted, temporary jolt to our economy and to try to astonish the American people by doing it on a bipartisan basis rapidly. This package will not achieve that result.”

Mr. McConnell said that he and Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, one of the Republicans whose support Mr. Reid had sought, would offer an amendment to add payments for Social Security recipients and disabled veterans to the House stimulus plan.

And in a dig at the Democrats and their presidential candidates, Mr. McConnell said he would be happy to rename his proposal. “We can call it the Reid-Clinton-Obama bill as far as I am concerned,” he said.

Mr. Reid and other Democrats said the Senate stimulus package would be better for the economy than the House version. They said that the direct payments would go to people more likely to spend them, and that the tax breaks would go to businesses that needed them the most.

“We have an obligation to do what we think is best to stimulate the economy and we have done that,” Mr. Reid said.

The Boom Was a Bust for Ordinary People
Barbara Ehrenreich, WaPo via CommonDreams
Tuesday, February 5, 2008

It begins to sound a bit naughty — all this talk about the need to “stimulate” the economy, as if we were discussing how to make a porn film. I don’t mean to trivialize our economic difficulties or the need for effective government intervention, but we have to face a disconcerting fact: For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans.

The economy, for example, has been expanding, at least until now, and growth is supposed to guarantee general well-being. As long as the gross domestic product grows, World Money Watch’s Web site assures us, “so will business, jobs and personal income.”

But hellooo, we’ve had brisk growth for the past few years, as the president has tirelessly reminded us, only without those promised increases in personal income, at least not for the poor and the middle class. According to a study just released by the Economic Policy Institute, real wages actually fell last year. Growth, some of the economists are conceding in perplexity, has been “decoupled” from widely shared prosperity.

I first began to sense this in the boom years of the late 1990s, when I was working in entry-level jobs for my book “Nickel and Dimed.” While the stock market soared and fortunes were being made in the time it takes to say “IPO,” my $6-to-$8-an-hour co-workers lunched on hot dog buns because that was all they could afford and, in some cases, fretted about whether they could find a safe place to sleep.

Growth is not the only economic indicator that has let us down. In the past five years, America’s briskly rising productivity has been the envy of much of the world. But again, there’s been no corresponding increase in most people’s wages. It’s not supposed to be this way, of course. Economists have long believed that some sort of occult process would intervene and adjust wages upward as people worked harder and more efficiently.

We like to attribute our high productivity to technological advances and better education. But a revealing 2001 study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. also credited America’s productivity growth to “managerial . . . innovations” and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that our productivity also relies on fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads and cutting back on breaks. That may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom, it can feel a lot like pain.

And what about the unemployment rate? The old liberal certainty was that “full employment” would create a workers’ paradise, with higher wages and enhanced bargaining power for the little guy and gal. But we’ve had nearly full employment, or at least an official unemployment rate of under 5 percent, for years now, without the predicted gains. What the old liberals weren’t counting on was a depressed minimum wage, weak unions and a witch’s brew of management strategies to hold wages and salaries down.

So thoroughly is the economy decoupled from ordinary experience that according to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical definition of a recession, which specifies at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. And — far removed from whatever happens on Wall Street, the Nikkei, Dax, or the curiously named FTSE — most Americans have been living in their own personal recession for years.

I could see this when I was doing research for a book on white-collar unemployment in 2004. Although the economy was officially on an upturn, I met laid-off people who’d been searching for a job for more than a year and often ended up — after selling their homes and borrowing from relatives — taking low-wage work as big-box sales clerks or even janitors.

In the months ahead, we can expect the hard times to spread. Citigroup has announced plans to eliminate 21,000 jobs; investment banks in general will shed 40,000. The mortgage industry is in a meltdown; Business Wire predicts a 37 percent increase in the number of companies planning layoffs this year. This is what a stimulus package needs to address: the persistent and growing struggles of the middle class and the working class, which is increasingly conterminous with the working poor.

There are reasons for doing so other than compassion. The chronically poor and the battered middle class have become a tripwire in the American economy — generating defaults on debts, depressed consumption and global market turmoil.

Consider how we got into the current credit crisis in the first place, through defaults on subprime mortgages. These went to plenty of affluent folks and have wreaked havoc in gated communities. But overall, subprime loans were designed for, and snapped up by, the poor. According to a recent study from United for a Fair Economy, 55 percent of subprime loans went to African Americans and 17 percent to whites. Among whites, they went far more frequently to low-income people than to the wealthy — 39 percent compared with 24 percent. Hence the subprime industry’s noble boasts about providing the opportunity for home ownership to people who might otherwise have been excluded from it.

And why were so many Americans poor enough to turn to subprime mortgages and other dodgy credit schemes? The chief reasons are low wages and job insecurity. Chronically low wages afflict about 25 to 30 percent of the population — more than twice the 12 percent the federal government counts as “poor.” And even earnings in the six-figure range can be canceled overnight when an employer downsizes or outsources, leaving a family without income or health insurance.

For years now, we’ve had a solution, or at least a substitute, for low wages and unreliable jobs: easy credit. Payday loans, rent-to-buy furniture and exorbitant credit card interest rates for the poor were just the beginning. In its May cover story on “The Poverty Business,” BusinessWeek documented the stampede to lend money to the people who could least afford to pay the interest on it: Buy your dream home! Refinance your house! Financiamos a todos! It wasn’t just the bottom-feeders that joined the unseemly frenzy to lend to the poor; big companies, such as Wells Fargo and Countrywide Financial, plunged right in. But somehow, no one bothered to figure out where the poor were going to get the money to pay for all the money they were borrowing.

When personal finances are squeezed hard enough, you have the possibility of a genuine recession. People buy less, so growth declines to the point where even the economic overclass has to sit up and take notice. We saw the beginnings of that in the last Christmas season, which even Wal-Mart survived only through perilously deep discounting.

Not that we hadn’t been warned. A century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. But, like Wal-Mart, too many of our employers today haven’t figured out that their cruelly low wages would eventually curtail their own growth and profits.

Government intervention, whether short-term or long-term, needs to get to the heart of this problem by offering a hand to the poor and the unemployed. Until the House capitulated to Bush two weeks ago, Democrats seemed to be standing solidly behind a stimulus package that would include an increase in food-stamp allotments and an extension of unemployment benefits, both of which are screamingly obvious measures. Current unemployment benefits last just 26 weeks in most states and end up covering only a third of people who are laid off. Food stamps are in even shabbier shape, with an allotment amounting to about $1 per meal. Nothing could be more stimulating than putting money in the hands of those who will spend it quickly.

But you can’t jump-start a car that lacks a working battery. We need less titillating talk about “stimulus” and more commitment to some fundamental repairs — higher wages, a real safety net and a return to progressive taxation among them. The challenge isn’t just to prop up stock prices but to rebuild an economy in which everyone shares the good times — and no one is consigned to a permanent recession.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed (Owl), is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize.

Winning the Edwards Vote
Ron Blackwell and Thomas Palley, CommonDreams
Thursday, February 7, 2008

John Edwards’ exit from the presidential race puts his supporters up for grabs. Both Senators Clinton and Obama want those votes. Here’s how to win them.

The central plank of the Edwards’ campaign was restoring a prosperous and secure middle class, which requires ending wage stagnation and having wages again grow with productivity. This must be the central economic policy goal of any candidate wanting the Edwards vote.

The generation long rupture of the wage - productivity link reflects deep structural failings in the economy that must be corrected. Helping hand social policies, such as trade adjustment assistance and the earned income tax credit, are welcome but they are not adequate to the scale of the problem.

Having government try to remedy wage stagnation through after-tax income redistribution does not address the core problem of unfair before-tax incomes. A progressive tax system is critical for fairness, but it cannot ensure a prosperous middle class. That requires decent wages paid in return for a decent day’s work.

The starting point for shared prosperity must be full employment, since only then do workers everywhere have the power to bargain increased wages that equal productivity growth. Monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate policy must work in coordinated fashion to this end. The best measure of full employment is when wages steadily rise with productivity.

Restoring the balance of power in labor markets is critical for wage bargaining. This requires labor law reform that ends employer intimidation preventing workers from joining unions and bargaining fair contracts, and government must vigorously enforce the law. The minimum wage must be reformed and tied to average wages so that it provides a true floor that rises as the economy grows. Unemployment insurance must also be reformed so that its duration is extended and coverage broadened.

Modernizing financial regulation is another needed measure. The housing bubble and sub-prime mortgage crisis show the financial system is broken. Today, the only instrument of control is the blunderbuss of Federal Reserve interest rate changes that inflict unemployment or inflation. New ideas exist and should be given space through a national financial markets reform commission that airs all views, and not just those of Wall Street.

The debate over fiscal responsibility must be redefined. That debate should be about containing healthcare inflation that threatens to bust the budget and funding needed public investment. It is time to break with conservatives’ definition of fiscal responsibility that attacks government and seeks to cut essential programs like Social Security.

Public investment is critical. The economy sits on the edge of a recession and fiscal stimulus is needed to combat that danger. But beyond that, the country must invest in its future and fill the enormous investment gap resulting from a generation of neglect of public onfrastructure. Public investment in schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and public transportation is enormously productive. It creates jobs and raises private sector productivity, the key to growth and an essential condition for a prosperous middle class.

Global warming presents new challenges that also call for public sector investment. Those challenges are an opportunity to create a 21st century green economy. To that end there is need for an Apollo-scale commitment promoting energy efficiency through new technologies, incentives for energy saving investments, and improved and subsidized public transportation.

Globalization means international economic policy is more important than ever. The trade deficit has hollowed manufacturing and must be reduced. Policy must put a stop to unfair international competition based on undervalued exchange rates, export subsidies, and unfair trade restrictions. America must also lead in the creation of a new international financial architecture that promotes fair and balanced trade, and only countries that truly join in this endeavor can be allowed full access to the America’s markets.

Finally, there is need to tackle the problem of corporate governance and regulation. Corporations have been the major force rupturing the link between wages and productivity growth, and they have also been the major force driving globalization. That calls for a corporate reform agenda that addresses excessive CEO pay, restores shareholder control, and realigns business incentives so that corporations again serve the national interest as well their private interests.

John Edwards’ campaign recognized the imminent challenge of recession and advocated fiscal stimulus. Both the Obama and Clinton campaigns have done likewise. However, it is not enough to just change the economic policy dial settings. The Edwards campaign also spoke to the need to change the long-term direction of the economy by restoring full employment, leveling the playing field between workers and corporations, and fixing unfair competition unleashed by globalization. That’s the message that will win the Edwards vote.

Thomas Palley is founder of Economics for Democratic & Open Societies Project. Ron Blackwell is Chief Economist at the AFL-CIO.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. sounds engine free f1 ringtones7 final ringtones fantasy freeg50 ringtone panasonic freefree ringtones high musical school 2ringtone free iphone creatorringtones free deluna katrock ringtones free kidkyocera phantom free ringtone Map

Add comment February 7th, 2008