Today at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other leaders joined together to call for urgent action to create jobs and rebuild the economy.
In a live webcast panel discussion, the consensus was clear: Without quick action, an entire generation could be mired in economic turmoil. The nation can, and must, put people back to work-while addressing critical needs for the future of our communities.
The scale of the jobs crisis is obvious: Since the beginning of the recession, more than 8 million jobs have been lost. The official unemployment rate is at 10.2 percent, with more than 26 million unemployed or underemployed. These figures are even more severe among African American and Latino communities. Young people are at risk of permanently stunted opportunity, and the jobs crisis is rebounding throughout the country with increased hunger and poverty, massive numbers of home foreclosures and diminished access to health care.
Trumka will be part of a noted panel in "Spotlight on the Jobs Crisis" at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
With unemployment at its highest rate in more than 20 years, Trumka says America needs bold, quick action to put people back to work, in addition to longer term, structural fixes for our economy. The AFL-CIO initiative he announces will include calls to extend help for the unemployed, rebuild the nation's infrastructure, provide aid to struggling states and communities, create federally funded community-based jobs and increase lending to small and medium-sized businesses to spur job creation.
New jobless numbers out today: the official number for October is 10.2 percent. I decided to see how closely related President Obama's approval numbers are with unemployment. I used these data points for unemployment:
Feb: 8.1 percent
Apr: 8.9
Jun: 9.5
Aug: 9.7
Oct. 10.2
I got average disapproval numbers from Pollster.com:
Feb: 24 percent
Apr: 32
Jun: 35
Aug: 40
Oct: 44
When you run a simple correlation you get 0.987544 or about 99 percent. Now, correlation is not causation. These trends could be entirely independent. Lots of other things have probably trended upward over the same period. But: 1) there is a logical connection between these two and 2) the trends are not just similar but are almost perfectly correlated.
Conservatives would say the correlation is really between Obama's disapproval and the national debt. But consider this: are people more concerned about their ability to feed and clothe their families or about the abstract debt? And if people worried about debt are offered the choice of lowering the debt by ending wars or by eliminating job creation plans, which will they choose?
We need a stronger focus on job creation regardless of who bears the most blame for job destruction.
Americans are still pessimistic about employment and the economy, according to several recent polls. A majority agree that young people will not achieve the same standard of living as the previous generation or that it is more likely that families will suffer "economic reversals" in the next 5 to 10 years. Support for the stimulus bill has dropped and opinion is now deadlocked on the bill, though some aspects, such as spending on infrastructure and public works, remain popular among a majority. A majority of Americans think that some of the recent federal measures should be lasting, while fewer Americans – although still a majority – feel that President Obama's policies will help in these tough economic times.
Jobs A nationwide poll conducted in October by Gallup, consisting of 1,013 telephone interviews with adults age 18 and older, found that a small share of Americans believe now is a good time to find a quality job (10%). This percentage has been wavering between 9% and 11% since February 2009, and has dropped dramatically since January 2008 (33%). Findings from an October nationwide Pew Research Center survey of 1,500 adults are consistent with this trend: 84% of Americans say that today good jobs were difficult to find, up from 73% in July 2008 acording to another Pew survey.
Albuquerque, a fairly Democratic town, just elected a Republican mayor because of low Democratic voter turnout. Democrats are in danger in both of the big gubernatorial races coming up in New Jersey and Virginia. The generic congressional polling numbers are in a statistical dead heat, and Democratic base voter enthusiasm is trending down.
There is no reason for Democrats to panic, as demographics are still trending in our favor and the Republican brand is still in tatters, but the warning signs for my party are out there and should not be ignored. What Democrats need to be extremely well focused on is short term deliverables for real people. On health care, on jobs, on banking legislation, on immigration reform, on climate legislation - on all of these major initiatives and more, they of course should be thinking about what's best in the long term, but better damn well be focused on delivering real and tangible benefits to voters before the next election, or Democrats will suffer a bruising defeat in November 2010.
Let's start with health care. When you are working to re-structure 17% of the American economy - and probably the most byzantinely-structured 17% there is - there are a lot of complications, and it is obviously going to take some time. Some of the features of the plan will need time to phase in, which is understandable. But some of the benefits need to be apparent to Americans right away too. If we spend a year and a trillion dollars passing health care reform, and no one sees any benefits to them by November 2010, we Democrats have a really big problem in the next election.
Another key point on this issue: if a public option doesn't go into effect for a while, say until 2013, insurance companies better not be free to raise their rates at will until they finally have competition, when the public option enters the scene. There is nothing that will guarantee voters turning away quickly from health reform, and the politicians who voted for it, more than letting insurance companies hike up their insurance costs over the next four years, and we know they would have because they already promised to do it.
Health care reform needs to have immediate benefits - no pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps, all of those insurance regulations we've been hearing about need to kick in immediately. But even more importantly, if a public option gets delayed, there has to be a short term way to keep insurance company greed and power in check. To leave the public utterly at the mercy of the arrogant insurers who have already promised they would raise their rates after this is passed - like consumers were left at the mercy of credit card companies for many months after the consumer protection bill passed - is not only unfair to people but is truly terrible politics. If you think these insurers won't jack rates through the roof, and then blame the rate increases on reform, you are truly naïve. Don't make voters feel like it was a bad idea to pass health reform because they are seeing only the downside in the short term.
On the economy, the macro-economists in the administration like Larry Summers love to say that, "jobs are a lagging indicator", that eventually in the long run, that jobs will start getting created. Even if they are right (and I tend to be skeptical when economists tell me that in the long run, things will eventually trickle down to working people), neither the economy nor the Democratic Party can afford for there to be another year where no jobs are being produced. To have that many people in trouble exacerbates the foreclosure crisis, weakens the housing market, forces more cuts in the state and local budgets, and a higher federal deficit: and it is a complete political disaster for Democrats. Jobs need to be created ASAP, lots of jobs, not a few here and there, and should not be seen as the lagging indicator that will take care of itself someday. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes liked to say, we are all dead, but the Democrats will be dead in the short term unless we start producing lots of jobs quickly. The stimulus is certainly helping, and Obama deserves credit for that, but it is not enough. Democrats need to think bigger on creating jobs.
On financial reform, as with health care, much of what needs to be reformed will take a long time to kick in, and in fact much of the goal will be to keep disaster from happening in the future - a harder thing to get credit for. (Which by the way, is the main thing the Obama White House is claiming about the economy - that we would have had a disaster if not for the US. It's a hard thing to win votes on.) But a strong policy of consumer safety in financial products will be noticed by people who went through the outrages of being ripped off over the last few years, and there are other things that could be done that voters would notice and cheer. How about a tax on financial transactions, structure to cost the most for the biggest traders, where the proceeds would go to new job creation? Based on private polling I was shown recently, that would get about 85% support. How about anti-trust actions against the biggest banks? How about throwing some of the worst violators of the financial system in jail, and returning their ill-gotten gains to the people they ripped off? There are plenty of things to do in the financial sector that would get voter attention and would be seen as an immediate benefit.
On climate change, the first item of business should be dramatically expanding green jobs. On immigration, families ought to be reunited right away. On issue after issue, we need to get things done, and make sure that what we get done has immediate benefits to regular people.
George W. Bush was a disastrous President, rated by many historians as the worst President of all time, and he handed Democrats a terrible mess that we will be digging our way out of for years. But blaming the other guys for bad times doesn't cut it in American politics, and it shouldn't: we need to deliver real things to real people. Trying to convince voters that it would have been so much worse if it wasn't for us, and that our policies will help them someday in the long run, is not a winning strategy. We need to deliver things that make a difference in voters' lives now.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics published a new map this week. Using color codes of black and dark purple, it paints a grim picture of average annual unemployment at the county level all across the United States. It is a frightening picture of the gravest recession since the Great Depression.
If full employment is defined as four percent, then only nine counties east of the Mississippi River that fit that definition. Two counties west of the Rocky Mountains qualify; one in eastern Washington State and the other covers the North Slope of Alaska.
The bright spots of full employment can be found in the agricultural counties of the Great Plains. Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas seem immune to the wave of persistent joblessness, at least for now.
Counties in the middle, the red zone - 5.0 to 5.9 percent average annual unemployment according the BLS map - are hard to find on this map. Wisconsin and Florida have three such counties; Mississippi, Alabama and Pennsylvania have two; New York, Illinois, Maine and North Carolina have one each; Oregon, California, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina have none.
As scary and depressing as this map is, it is not the full picture. The heaviest lay-offs came after the presidential election last year. So this map almost certainly will turn even darker over the next three months.
And yet, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly unemployment rate which now stands at 9.8 percent does not capture the depths of America's jobs crisis. Other BLS statistics do.
When that 9.8 percent unemployment rate was announced last Friday, the BLS press release contained three tables that told the rest of the story. Table A-1 indicated that 15.14 million Americans were unemployed. Table A-5 reported that 9.18 million Americans were working part-time involuntarily - employers had cut their hours or had furloughed them. Table A-13 noted that 5.65 million Americans had looked for a job in the last year but could not find one. What Table A-13 did not explain was that 998,000 Americans had vanished from that category since May, 2009. That adds up to 30.96 million Americans either unemployed or underemployed right now, or almost a fifth of our workforce (a note: unemployment peaked at 25% in the Great Depression).
How does our economy recover with that many people out of work or with considerably less disposable income than they are used to? How does the foreclosure crisis, and therefore housing prices, get better? I know the banks are doing great, and that will eventually trickle down to the rest of us, but in that long a run, we will definitely all be dead.
And since I'm a Democratic political consultant, I also need to point out there are a few political implications to all this. I am thrilled that my beloved home state of Nebraska, and the beautiful states of Kansas, North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana are still doing fairly well. But just to point out to my friends in Congress and the White House: not much in the way of swing or Democratic states or congressional districts in that grouping of states. The darkest states on that map are states like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Indiana, North Carolina, Missouri, Wisconsin. If those states sound familiar to you political junkies, it's because those were some of the closest states in the country in last year's election.
We need to an all-out, big, bold jobs program coming from the President and Democrats in Congress. The little ideas being mentioned right now in articles like these- extending unemployment, tinkering with some business tax incentives- will not create jobs on anywhere the scale that is needed. We need a big bold jobs bill, and we need it to come immediately after we get done with health care.
The economy is still getting worse. Foreclosures are surging above last year's epic highs and the unemployment rate marches upwards every month. As the misery grinds on, Wall Street lobbyists and their allies in Congress are pushing hard to distract the public from the real causes of the current global economic crisis. Corporate America is trying to pin the blame for our empty pocketbooks on President Barack Obama and the phantom socialist menace, and cable news pundits are taking the bait.
As David Korten explains in a blog post for Yes!, this surge of distractions is a conscious political strategy designed to sabotage reform. "Wall Street's greatest fear is that the public might demand Congress and the president shut down the casino," Korten writes. "Any issue that shifts attention away from Wall Street and pins the blame for job loss and mortgage foreclosures on President Obama works in its favor."
The banking lobby is kicking and screaming over President Obama's plan to overhaul consumer protection in finance. As a result, the battle over the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) has become the most heated economic controversy in the nation's capital, even though the issue isn't controversial where ordinary citizens are concerned.
The existing hodgepodge of bank regulators completely failed to stand up for consumers as the housing bubble grew and burst. Our current bank regulators are charged not only with consumer protection, but safety and soundness regulation, which basically means making sure that banks don't fail. Preventing bank failures often means protecting bank profits, even when those profits come at the expense of communities. Instead of relying on the same inept and conflicted agencies, consumer regulation of credit cards, mortgages, student loans, payday loans should be funneled into a single, new agency with no other priorities: The CFPA.
As Greg Kaufmann details for The Nation, recent economic history isn't stopping Wall Street's favorite lawmakers from pushing against the CFPA. Kaufmann highlights some of the most outrageous comments from a hearing on the CFPA last week. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) claimed that if the CFPA had existed a few years ago, there would be no ATMs or frequent flyer miles. David John, a researcher from the Heritage Foundation, said that employees of the new agency would spend too much time trying to find their new desks to actually do any regulating. Bank lobbyist Ed Yingling tried to erase the last ten years with his claim that "no real case has been made" for better enforcement of consumer protection in banking.
These are not serious arguments. They are intentional distractions designed to kill an obviously productive policy. Kaufmann's headline says it all: "Do They Take us for Schmucks?"
But loudmouth Republicans like Hensarling aren't the only politicians we need to keep tabs on. Plenty of lawmakers on the Financial Services Committee won't stand up and make crazy speeches about ATMs, but will still go to bat for Wall Street behind the scenes. As I emphasize in a piece for AlterNet, with outsized Democratic majorities in both chambers of commerce, conservative, pro-Wall Street Democrats pose just as great a threat to our economic security as loony Republicans.
If you think that sounds pessimistic, consider Ralph Nader, who Matthew Rothschild profiles in The Progressive. Nader knows corporate America has its hands on nearly every lever in the U.S. political system. Lobbyists don't just hurl money at lawmakers, they spend tremendous sums on misleading advertisements to sway public opinion. Rothschild quotes from a recent speech Nader gave on his current book tour. He argues that progressives don't just need concerned citizens on our side. They need concerned citizens with money to counter the flood of corporate cash in the political system.
"There is a poignance in listening to Ralph Nader these days," Rothschild writes. "Here is a man who, for the last 45 years, has hurled his body at the engine of corporate power. He's dented it more than anyone else in America. But he knows it's still chugging, even more strongly than ever."
Even when lawmakers talk tough about Wall Street, it's not obvious what's really going on. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) recently rolled out an extremely ambitious plan to overhaul the bank regulatory system. It has very little common ground with Obama's plan, and in some respects would be an improvement. Obama's plan is very strong on consumer protection and not much else. But Dodd's plan is so ambitious, it seems like a politically impossible waste of time, one that could easily delay reforms into next year. Dodd wants to consolidate all four bank regulators into a single agency to prevent a race to the bottom and strip the Federal Reserve of all of its regulatory responsibilities. They aren't bad ideas, but they have absolutely no political momentum. Dodd has been holding hearings on the financial crisis since 2007-- he could have started pushing for this plan a long time ago. By introducing it so late in the process, major legislative delays seem inevitable. The longer it takes to pass a regulatory bill, the more time the bank lobby has to water it down. Writing for Mother Jones, Nick Baumann suggests this may be exactly what Dodd intends.
"Maybe getting it done by 2010 isn't the point. Dodd is up for reelection that November. If he manages to win by talking populist while raising money from Wall Street, he'll have plenty of time afterward to figure out what to do next."
For now, the economy is still absolutely horrible. Writing for In These Times, David Moberg translates the statistics from the government's most recent unemployment report and deciphers some recent polling on the economy. Things are bad, and people know it. Many economists believe the recession may have technically already ended. The Gross Domestic Product, a statistical measure of the country's economic output, may no longer be declining. But the unemployment rate keeps going up. It was 9.8% at the end of September.
Moberg notes that if the rate counted the long-term unemployed who have given up looking and people who want full-time jobs but settled for part-time work, the unemployment rate is a staggering 17%. Over one-third of the 15.1 million would-be workers encompassed by the 9.8% unemployment rate have been out of a job for at least six months. Voters overwhelmingly believe that government policies have helped Wall Street, while just 13% think the government has given a lot of help to the average working person.
Economics and politics are inextricably linked. To strengthen our economic foundation, we need policymakers who are willing to stand up to corporate America and corporate media and serve the citizens who elect them.
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Last week, the Labor Department reported that youth unemployment stands at 18.2%, nearly twice the national average of 9.8%. The percentage of young people without a job is a staggering 53.4 percent, the highest figure since World War II. Looking deeper, the statistics for youth of color are terrible and telling.
According to the most recent data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40.7% of black youth between 16-19 are unemployed, almost double the amount of whites teenagers (23%). For Latinos the same age, the rate is nearly 30%. Get a little older and the gap grows wider. Unemployment for black Americans aged 20-24 is 27.1%, over twice that faced by white youth (13.1%) in the same age range.
The glaring differences indicate that unemployment is not only decidedly raced, but also that the current economic condition is wholly unforgiving for young people of color. Only a massive, well-funded set of green jobs programs explicitly designed to close those racial gaps can create a truly vital, full-employment economy.
On Wall Street today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is calling for tough new regulations on the financial industry and a new approach to making the U.S. economy work for working people.
Trumka spoke today at the New York Stock Exchange as part of the new AFL-CIO leadership team's national tour to set out a jobs-focused, progressive vision for the economy-and to fight back against the corporate agenda that left workers behind.
We've let wealth concentrate for too long, Trumka said. The past decade has shown us the folly of building an unfair and unequal economy that only works for a few, while working people pile up debt to get by. We need to be able to protect consumers from abuses by mortgage lenders and credit card companies and hold accountable those whose greed and irresponsibility have undermined the economy, Trumka said:
Banks and other financial institutions must be held accountable for making this mess that required trillions of dollars of our money to clean up. For the pain they've inflicted on families who face financial ruin-unemployment, wiped out pensions, foreclosures and bankruptcy.
Something bad happened in the past 10 years to young workers in this country: Since 1999, more of them now have lower-paying jobs, if they can get a job at all; health care is a rare luxury and retirement security is something for their parents, not them. In fact, many-younger than 35-still live at home with their parents because they can't afford to be on their own.
These are the findings of a new report, "Young Workers: A Lost Decade." Conducted in July 2009 by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO and our community affiliate Working America, the nationwide survey of 1,156 people follows up on a similar survey the AFL-CIO conducted in 1999. The deterioration of young workers' economic situation in those 10 years is alarming.
There's an economic variable that doesn't get discussed much as some others: the state of the economy as experienced by the average citizen. The Real Economy.
We can find out the state of the Real Economy just by asking. The answers reflect what people are going through in their day-to-day lives, in a way that does not give more weight to the wealthiest or those whose income is based on dividends and capital gains. It also reflects the political reality - economic factors are important in how people make political decisions - personal, local economic factors - and while there are certainly disparities in rates of voting, ballot access, and ballot spoilage between the wealthiest and the poorest, each vote still counts as one vote.
Here's 17 years of data from the NYT/CBS poll:
Click to enlarge.
But how does this relate to the economic variables we hear reported on the news?
I am happy to announce that beginning today I will be working as a Fellow and blogger with Campaign for America's Future. This post introduces the areas I will be pursuing.
The economy is terrible. There aren't enough jobs. Most of the jobs that are still there are not paying enough for people to keep up, and people are afraid they could lose them tomorrow. So we all have too much debt. We have too little health care. We have too much stress. And in the bigger picture we have too little power to do anything about it.
They say we're reaching a "bottom" and that there are "green shoots." But I am afraid that this isn't your father's recession. I'm afraid this economy isn't a pendulum that has swing too far in one direction, ready to be pulled by natural forces back to the other side. I am afraid that this isn't a "business cycle" pattern with a fall, then a bottom, then a recovery where all the shoppers return to the stores, all the jobs come back and growth picks up where it left off. Even "green shoot" optimists admit there will be few new jobs if there is any recovery.
It may be that we are not in a period of waiting for things to "get back to normal." Many people think that this economic collapse IS the return to normal.
There is a Senate Banking Subcommittee hearing today on the US as a global competitor, and my old friend Leo Hindery is giving testimony that you can read in the extended entry. I don't agree with every single point in it, but taken as a whole it is a powerful argument for a fundamentally different kind of jobs and manufacturing strategy than we are pursuing right now. Leo accurately drives home the point that every other industrialized country, including China, has an industrial policy, a manufacturing strategy, and their own version of a buy domestic policy. With an effective unemployment rate of 19% (the officially unemployed, plus those too discouraged to work and the under-employed), and manufacturing jobs continuing to be decimated, we are not going to climb out of this deep recession without getting people working again in good jobs.
A couple of especially scary things from Leo's testimony:
-a quarter of the nation's remaining manufacturing companies are now deemed severely at risk. That means that manufacturing jobs, which traditionally are not only better paying but have a bigger multiplier effect in the economy and reduce our critically important balance of payments deficit with foreign countries, could shrink far lower from it's current abysmally low 8.7% of American jobs.
-a high level Obama administration economic adviser is quoted as saying that America's export future resides in exporting "consulting and legal services, software, movies, and medicine." If that's the view of how we are going to get out of our balance of payments mess, we really are in deep trouble.
The last time our economy faced this kind of deep and enduring economic challenge, in the Great Depression, FDR understood that the only way to climb out of the pit we were in was to fundamentally re-align the way the federal government's economic policies worked, to invest in a truly bottom-up economic strategy that involved the government creating jobs and putting income into the hands of the poor, so that they would spend that money and make the economy grow again. That is what it is going to take this time. We need jobs. And then we need more jobs. And then we need more jobs. Oh, and I think we'll need more than just consultant jobs and lawyers- we will need construction jobs and road building jobs and green energy jobs and factory jobs.
The trickle down strategy of making sure the big banks are healthy so that they will lend money to everyone else? Guess what, it is not working. What we need to try now is investing in good jobs for regular people.
This seems like Framing and Political Strategy 101 to me, but since few other people are talking in this way, let me just lay out a basic idea: all this talk about doing a stimulus package versus not doing a stimulus package is fundamentally besides the point. What we need is a comprehensive policy package that is very simply focused on one thing and one thing only: jobs.
I know the policy wonks on Capitol Hill may be confused by that paragraph because, they would say, well, a stimulus program would create jobs. Well, yeah, that is the idea of stimulus. But my point is this: the politics of a second stimulus package are a dead end. The politics of having a debate about a policy package that will create jobs is a helpful thing. Announcing a second stimulus package gets Democrats into a defensive crouch about why the first one failed, and gets us into that same "can we get to 60" dance with Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins that caused the first stimulus bill to be pared back and rendered less effective.
Voters don't know what it means to say you are going to stimulate the economy, but they do know what a job is. And right now, what we need is jobs sooner rather than later. My point here is not to just rename the stimulus bill the jobs bill. In fact, there are quite a few things the White House and Congress can do to focus on jobs that don't involve just spending more, although more money will certainly need to be spent. Here is what I would include in a comprehensive package:
1. Fighting for Economic Justice and Security in the U.S. and Global Economies
To uphold the right to universal access to affordable, high quality health care for all.
To preserve guaranteed Social Security benefits for all Americans, protect private pensions, and require corporate accountability.
To invest in America and create new jobs in the U.S. by building more affordable housing, re-building America's schools and physical infrastructure, cleaning up our environment, and improving homeland security.
To export more American products and not more American jobs and demand fair trade.
To reaffirm freedom of association and enforce the right to organize.
To ensure working families can live above the poverty line and with dignity by raising and indexing the minimum wage.
2. Protecting and Preserving Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
To sunset expiring provisions of the Patriot Act and bring remaining provisions into line with the U. S. Constitution.
To protect the personal privacy of all Americans from unbridled police powers and unchecked government intrusion.
To extend the Voting Rights Act and reform our electoral processes.
To fight corporate consolidation of the media and ensure opportunity for all voices to be heard.
To ensure enforcement of all legal rights in the workplace.
To eliminate all forms of discrimination based upon color, race, religion, gender, creed, disability, or sexual orientation.
3. Electoral Reform
Eliminate or reform the Electoral College so that a handful of states cannot game the system to override the will of the electorate;
Introduce Instant Runoff Voting so that a wider variety of political parties may compete in elections;
Eliminate private money in elections by creating a national, mandatory, publicly-funded election pot from which all federal candidates must draw; and
Pass laws, up to and including further amendment(s) to the Constitution, protecting the right of every citizen over the age of eighteen to vote.
4. Promoting Global Peace and Security
To honor and help our overburdened international public servants - both military and civilian.
To bring U. S. troops home from Iraq as soon as possible.
To re-build U.S. alliances around the world, restore international respect for American power and influence, and reaffirm our nation's constructive engagement in the United Nations and other multilateral organizations.
To enhance international cooperation to reduce the threats posed by nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction.
To increase efforts to combat hunger and the scourge of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other infectious diseases.
To encourage debt relief for poor countries and support efforts to reach the UN's Millennium Goals for Developing Countries.
5. Environmental Protection & Energy Independence
To free ourselves and our economy from dependence upon imported oil and shift to growing reliance upon renewable energy supplies and technologies, thus creating at least three million new jobs, cleansing our environment, and enhancing our nation's security.
To free ourselves and our economy from dependence upon imported oil and shift to growing reliance upon renewable energy supplies and technologies, thus creating at least three million new jobs, cleansing our environment, and enhancing our nation's security.
To change incentives in federal tax, procurement, and appropriation policies to:
(A.) Speed commercialization of solar, biomass, and wind power generation, while encouraging state and local policy innovation to link clean energy and job creation;
(B.) Convert domestic assembly lines to manufacture highly efficient vehicles, enhance global competitiveness of U.S. auto industry, and expand consumer choice;
(C.) Increase investment in construction of "green buildings" and more energy-efficient homes and workplaces;
(D.) Link higher energy efficiency standards in appliances to consumer and manufacturing incentives that increase demand for new durable goods and increase investment in U.S. factories;
To eliminate environmental threat posed by global warming and ensuring that America does our part to advance an effective global problem-solving approach.
To expand energy-efficient transportation choices by increasing investment in synthesized networks, including bicycle, local bus and rail transit, regional high-speed rail and magnetic levitation rail projects.
To preserve prudent public interest regulations that encourage sustainable growth and investment, ensure energy diversity and system reliability, protect workers and the environment, reward consumer conservation, and support an expanding marketplace that rewards the commercialization of energy-efficient technologies.
To protect, preserve, restore, and where reasonably possible expand wild lands and animal and plant populations endangered by human activity, reasonably compensating businesses and homeowners for damages or losses incurred by such.
Pass legislation and encourage community leadership to, among other acts: Increase funding to child placement services (foster care agencies); increase funding for comprehensive sex education programs that are proven to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies; increase awareness of the protective benefits of proper use of contraceptives, and increase access to them; increase funding for educational programs to spread awareness of sexually transmitted pathogens including viruses and bacteria, and their effects upon the human body; increase funding for prenatal care for unwed and low-income mothers; and expand daycare and nanny services to assist low-income families and single parents who choose to keep their children after birth.
7. Gun Control and State Militias
Adopt reasonable gun control laws that keep guns out of the hands of criminals, while preserving the 2nd Amendment right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.
Restore full control of the National Guard units to their respective states, maintaining both a federal standing military and the individual state-controlled and regulated Militias.
8. Legalizing Marijuana
Legalize marijuana, and regulate it like tobacco and alcohol.
Increase funds to existing education and rehabilitation programs; create new programs and expand existing ones where necessary, to reduce addiction; pass common sense drug laws that focus on rehabilitation for non-violent offenders; and engage parents and community leaders to educate their children on the dangers of drugs.
As the country considers how we might reform our health care system, it is important to note that good health requires not just health insurance, but also the flexibility to care for oneself or one's family when sick, and to help prevent the spread of contagious diseases through the workplace. Today, Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative Rosa DeLauro introduced a bill, dubbed the Healthy Families Act, that would guarantee American workers up to 7 paid sick days each year, and allow workers to take these paid sick days to care for ill family members.
The bill, the Healthy Families Act, would be binding on employers that had 15 or more workers. It would guarantee employees one paid hour off for each 30 hours worked, enabling them to earn up to seven paid sick days a year. They would be entitled to claim their days when they or a child, a parent, a spouse or someone else close to them became ill. [...]
The legislation’s preamble notes that nearly half of private-sector workers and three-fourths of low-wage workers do not receive paid sick days. Far too often, advocates say, such employees feel compelled to go to work even when ill, because they fear being fired or at the least losing the day’s pay.
The bill is perhaps mislabeled, and might be instead called the Healthy Workplace Act. As one small business owner who has provided paid sick days since 2006 noted, having contagious workers come in can lower productivity as they spread the illness to others in the workplace. “'A person is not coming in sick, and then two days later there are two employees not coming in, and then three days later three employees not coming in,' [Madison, WI coffee shop-owner Lindsey] Lee said. 'It has helped in the long run.'”
The United States is currently the only industrialized nation that guarantees no paid sick leave.
Today on Capitol Hill, labor law experts and a California worker exposed the ugly truth about corporate abuses of workers trying to exercise their freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.
Bronfenbrenner has studied these issues for decades as the director of labor education research at Cornell University's School of Industrial Relations. This is her fourth survey over 20 years, enabling her to put into historical perspective the obstacles workers face today.
The grim job losses are a little less grim this month:
Click to enlarge. On the left, monthly job losses for post-war recessions; on the right, cumulative job losses.
The rate of job losses has stopped accelerating, but this still means massive job losses every month. We're headed towards the largest post-war loss of jobs ever, as the graph on the right makes clear.
As the Dow Jones Industrial Average inches upward, there will be a strong temptation—especially from financial news outlets—to equate recovery by shareholders with the recovery of economic security in our country. When the Dow returns to, say, 10,000, we're likely to see "Mission Accomplished" signs going up in a number of media and financial quarters. Undoubtedly some in the administration, too, will begin patting themselves on the back.
That would be a mistake. New research from The Opportunity Agenda shows why the Dow—and even average unemployment rates—cannot be the primary measures of our national economic health. The State of Opportunity in America analyzes government data across a range of sectors—from jobs to education to housing to poverty and beyond—to measure our national progress in fulfilling the promise of Opportunity.
Opportunity is the profoundly American idea that everyone deserves a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential, and that affording that fair chance to everyone is key to our common national prosperity. Opportunity is about national conditions, but viewed in the context of national values like equal treatment, economic security and mobility, a voice in decisions that affect us, and a chance to start over after misfortune or missteps.
This year's State of Opportunity report is particularly revealing, because it looks primarily at economic and social conditions from 2006 to 2007—the year before the current economic recession, which economists say began in December 2007. The report makes clear that our national infrastructure of opportunity was fractured and unequal before the current crisis took hold, and that a meaningful national recovery will require attending to structural reforms as well as short-term job creation. Simply restoring the economy to its 2007 conditions will fall far short of the change we need.
The Dow topped 14,000 in 2007. Yet, in 2007, 11% of full-time, year-round workers lived in poverty. Eighteen percent of U.S children (over 13 million kids) shared that condition, despite a still-humming stock market. Almost as many American kids (17%) experienced "food insecurity," meaning that their eating was disrupted because their families could not afford adequate food. Over 45 million Americans—15 out of every 100—lacked health insurance.
Last week, the Obama administration announced its plan to start the immigration reform debate this year. The President plans to speak publicly about the issue next month and convene immigration working groups over the summer.
The news caught great attention from mainstream media, but this wasn't news for Spanish language media and Latinos. In February, following a pattern of only addressing immigration with Spanish language media, President Obama went on the most popular Spanish-language radio show "Piolín por la Mañana" to reveal his plan to add immigration reform to this year's agenda. Not surprisingly, his statement didn't get much attention from the mainstream media.
Opponents of immigration reform claim that reforming our dysfunctional immigration system and providing a path to citizenship for undocumented workers should not be considered at a time when American workers are losing their jobs. Iowa Republican, Steve King (who in 2008 voted for the middle-class less than 40 percent of the time) stated:
In our current economic crisis, Americans cannot afford to lose more jobs to illegal workers.
King's argument is flawed.
Our economy is not a zero-sum game in which undocumented workers steal jobs from Americans. As DMI has argued before, it is not the presence of undocumented workers that threatens native-born workers. It's their vulnerability to exploitation that puts downward pressure on all wages in certain industries-hurting all workers.
The current recession is further exposing undocumented workers to exploitation, giving employers more room to drag down wages and standards for all workers. The country's two major labor unions understand this dynamic and have just announced their support for immigration reform.
Providing undocumented workers a path to citizenship, especially in these hard economic times, will help ensure that all workers, regardless of immigration status, are guaranteed equal labor rights and fair wages.
