News Release Archive - Electoral Issues

Mommy Wars or Moms Against War: Bread and Butter and the Radical History of Mother’s Day

May 11, 2012

ELLEN BRAVO, bravo at uwm.edu
Bravo is director of Family Values @ Work Consortium, a network of state coalitions working for paid sick days and paid family leave. She just wrote the piece “The Gifts Mothers Really Want,” which states: “My favorite Mother’s day gifts from my sons were their original stories, songs and poems. But what I needed when they were infants and toddlers was something children can’t deliver: affordable time off when they were born and when they were sick.

“So for all those candidates and elected officials interested in the women’s vote and eager to prove their support for motherhood and families, here’s a sampling of what mothers want and need, not just one day a year but every day:

“The right to care for a sick child or personal illness without losing our paychecks or our jobs. Moms need leaders to actively support the right for workers to earn paid sick days and champion local, state and federal policies that would guarantee this protection. Make sure no one has to choose between being a good parent and being a good employee — and that no one has to serve you flu with your soup. …”

TERRY O’NEILL, via Latoya Veal, press at now.org
O’Neill is president of the National Organization for Women Foundation. The group today released the report “Breaking the Social Security Glass Ceiling: A Proposal to Modernize Women’s Benefits” with the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare Foundation and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. She said today: “If implemented, the recommendations we make in ‘Breaking the Social Security Glass Ceiling’ will go a long way toward creating a retirement and disability insurance program that recognizes the new reality of working women and men, and values women’s role in society as both breadwinners and primary caregivers. Crediting women’s years out of the paid labor force is a long overdue feature that NOW strongly supports and urges lawmakers to support as well.”

LAURA KACERE, laura.kacere at gmail.com
Kacere is a feminist activist working with Occupy D.C. who recently wrote the piece “The Radical History of Mother’s Day,” which states: “There’s a good number of us who question holidays like Mother’s Day in which you spend more time feeding money into a system that exploits our love for our mothers than actually celebrating them. It’s not unlike any other holiday in America in that its complete commercialization has stripped away so much of its genuine meaning, as well its history. Mother’s Day is unique in its completely radical and feminist history, as much as it has been forgotten.

“Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.”

Howe wrote:

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

“Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’

“From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: ‘Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’ Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.

“In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed …to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

JPMorgan “Shock Disclosure” a “Wake-Up Call We Dare Not Ignore”

May 11, 2012

The Financial Times reports today: “JPMorgan Chase announced a surprise $2 billion trading loss on credit derivatives trading, which chief executive Jamie Dimon blamed on ‘errors, sloppiness and bad judgement’ and warned ‘could get worse.’

“The shock disclosure, made after the market closed on Thursday in a regulatory filing, prompted renewed calls for tougher regulation. Investors reacted by sending the bank’s shares down by more than 9 percent when Wall Street opened on Friday. Other U.S. banking stocks also suffered sharp falls.”

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu
Stephany Griffith-Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University.

WILLIAM K. BLACK, blackw at umkc.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Black is now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.” He was the deputy staff director of the national commission that investigated the cause of the savings and loan debacle. He said today: “JPMorgan has announced that it has suffered large losses, and remains exposed to far greater losses, because purported ‘economic hedges’ did not perform as ‘expected’ because they were poorly designed. These purported hedges are not real. JPMorgan was speculating wildly and its panicky releases reveal that it is afraid that the positions it took exposed it to grave risks. The experience demonstrates the importance of the Volcker rule, the largest banks’ efforts to gut and evade the rule, and the continuing refusal of bank regulators to say ‘no’ to practices of the systemically dangerous institutions or SDIs (the roughly 20 ‘too big to fail’ banks) that are unsafe and unsound. As long as we permit the SDIs to remain so large that regulators fear that their failure will produce a global crisis we are rolling the dice 20 times a day wondering when (not ‘if’) the next SDI failure will occur and blow up the economy. JPMorgan’s losses on its faux hedges are the wake-up call we dare not ignore.”

Also see: “‘JOBS Act’ a ‘Recipe for Fraud’ Creating a ‘Race to the Bottom’.”

Is Inequality Good?

May 4, 2012

A new book by one of Mitt Romney’s former business partners at Bain Capital, scheduled to be the featured New York Times Magazine cover story on Sunday,argues that inequality is good.

CHUCK COLLINS, Bob Keener, bob at wealthforcommongood.org
http://99to1book.org
Collins, a long-time inequality activist was certainly born into the 1%. He went to the same high school as Mitt Romney — and is the great-grandson of Oscar Mayer. His brand new book is called, “99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It.”

Collins said today: “Inequality is destroying everything you care about. Whether you care about public health, education, civic society, sports, business — inequality is making things worse. And unless we interrupt the process, this destruction will keep increasing. We’re in an inequality death spiral, where concentration of wealth and power is enabling the wealthy and powerful to rig the rules to make themselves more wealthy and powerful — at the expense of everyone else. This is why the 1% versus 99% lens is so
meaningful to people. It reflects their lived reality.”

Collins was recently on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/305321-4

Background:
Paul Krugman “Rich Guy Says We Should Be Grateful For His Wealth”

Dean Baker recently wrote the piece “Mitt Romney’s Partner in Crime: Ed Conard’s Unintended Consequences,” which states: “Did Conard really miss the story of Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. ‘Fabulous Fab’) the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who put together collaterized debt obligations that were designed to fail and then hawked them off on unsuspecting clients? Does he not know about the flash traders who make fortunes by designing sophisticated programs that allow them to front-run major trades? (This means that they can detect major trades and jump in ahead, thereby capturing some of the profit.) …

“How much has the pharmaceutical industry profited from using its political power to get Congress to give it ever longer and stronger patent monopolies? We now spend almost $300 billion a year on prescription drugs that would cost us around $30 billion in a free market. …

“Conard and Romney’s own industry provides an excellent example of using political power to promote private wealth. One of the major ways that private equity companies make money is by taking advantage of the tax deductibility of interest. Private equity companies typically load the firms they buy with as much debt as possible. This is because the interest payments on debt are tax deductible and they don’t really care if the company ends up going bankrupt. They expect a substantial portion of their firms to go into bankruptcy.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, The U.S. Economy Tagged With: 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It, Chuck Collins, corporations, economy,

Arizona Immigration Case and “Reverse-Commandeering”

April 25, 2012

Protesters in front of the Supreme Court

MARGARET HU, mhu at law.duke.edu
Hu is an assistant professor at Duke Law School and is the author of a forthcoming article in the U.C. Davis Law Review titled “Reverse-Commandeering.” She just wrote on the American Constitution Society blog: “As the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Arizona v. U.S., one of the main legal questions it considered is this: Whether Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) is preempted by federal immigration law under the Supremacy Clause. This is a statutory-driven inquiry that misses the constitutional mark. The more relevant question is this: Whether SB 1070 poses a threat to the vertical separation of powers. …

“The recent tidal wave of thousands of immigration control efforts proposed by state and local governments can best be characterized as ‘reverse-commandeering’ laws. Setting migration policy at the national level, like establishing a national currency, falls within the sole power of the federal government. Reverse-commandeering by the states is an effort to usurp the federal government’s sole prerogative. This growing movement represents an attempt to control the terms of what federal resources and officers must be appropriated to accommodate a myriad of state immigration enforcement programs. It is a deliberate attempt to skew the immigration enforcement power in favor of the states. …

“Given the impact of immigration policy on foreign and interstate commerce, international treaties, and foreign relations, the Court has concluded that controlling migration patterns is strictly the prerogative of the federal government. Consequently, the growing proliferation of thousands of proposed state and local immigration laws should be examined doctrinally within a commandeering jurisprudential frame. To fail to do so — to continue to accept mirror image theory carte blanche as a favored method of statutory interpretation under the existing preemption doctrine — threatens federal sovereignty. Put another way, it eviscerates the federal government’s ability to develop and implement a coherent, efficacious, and uniform immigration policy at the national level.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues Tagged With: civil rights, constitution, immigration, Margaret Hu,

Principals Against State of Testing

April 24, 2012

Throughout the U.S., children are taking tests this week so that local jurisdictions can get federal “Race to the Top” funds.

CAROL BURRIS, cburris at rvcschools.org
Burris has served as principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in New York since 2000. She is author of “Detracking for Equity and Excellence.” She was just featured in a report “Teachers, parents push back against high stakes testing,” part of a series on education by The Real News.

Late last year she co-wrote a letter about how testing is being conducted in New York State. As of last week, 1432 New York State principals have become signatories to the letter, which states: “In May 2010, the New York State Legislature — in an effort to secure federal Race to the Top funds — approved an amendment to Educational Law 3012-c regarding the Annual Professional Performance Review of teachers and principals. The new law states that beginning September 2011, all teachers and principals will receive a number from 0-100 to rate their performance. Part of that number (ranging from 20 percent to 40 percent) will be derived from how well students perform on standardized tests. At first glance, using test scores might seem like a reasonable approach to accountability. As designed, however, these regulations carry unintended negative consequences for our schools and students that simply cannot be ignored. Below we explain both the flaws and the consequences.

“Educational research and researchers strongly caution against teacher evaluation approaches like New York Stateʼs APPR Legislation. A few days before the Regents approved the APPR regulations, ten prominent researchers of assessment, teaching and learning wrote an open letter that included some of the following concerns about using student test scores to evaluate educators. Value-added models of teacher effectiveness do not produce stable ratings of teachers. …

“The Regents examinations and Grades 3-8 Assessments are designed to evaluate student learning, not teacher effectiveness, nor student learning growth. Using them to measure the latter is akin to using a meter stick to weigh a person: you might be able to develop a formula that links height and weight, but there will be plenty of error in your calculations. …

“Students will be adversely affected by New York Stateʼs APPR. When a teacherʼs livelihood is directly impacted by his or her studentsʼ scores on an end-of-year examination, test scores take front and center. The nurturing relationship between teacher and student changes for the worse. …

“With a focus on the end of year testing, there inevitably will be a narrowing of the curriculum as teachers focus more on test preparation and skill and drill teaching. Enrichment activities in the arts, music, civics and other non-tested areas will diminish. …

“Teachers will subtly but surely be incentivized to avoid students with health issues, students with disabilities, English Language Learners or students suffering from emotional issues. Research has shown that no model yet developed can adequately account for all of these ongoing factors. …

“Collaboration among teachers will be replaced by competition. With a ‘value added’ system, a 5th grade teacher has little incentive to make sure that her incoming students score well on the 4th grade exams, for incoming students with high scores would make her job more challenging. When competition replaces collaboration, every student loses. …

“Tax dollars are being redirected from schools to testing companies, trainers and outside vendors…”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues Tagged With: Carol Burris, education,

Sen. Conrad Proposal “Would Dismantle Social Security”

April 18, 2012

NANCY ALTMAN, ERIC KINGSON, via Sarah Shive sshive at socialsecurity-works.org
Altman and Kingson are co-chairs of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign. The group released a statement today, which said that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent “Conrad’s budget mark, the Fiscal Commission Budget Plan, incorporates the Social Security cuts contained in the Bowles-Simpson proposal. Unfortunately, some seem to have forgotten what the Bowles-Simpson proposal would entail for Social Security. The proposal would cut the benefits of all current beneficiaries, drastically cut the benefits of future generations, and worse, effectively end Social Security as we know it.

“Senator Kent Conrad’s Fiscal Commission Budget Plan incorporates the Social Security proposals of the Bowles-Simpson plan. Members should know that this plan would cut benefits for today’s and tomorrow’s beneficiaries. Of even greater concern, it would dismantle Social Security. Specifically, the Conrad/Bowles-Simpson plan would:

* Drastically cut the benefits of middle-class families: The Bowles-Simpson proposal cuts Social Security’s retirement, survivors, and disability benefits by between 19 percent and 42 percent for young people entering the workforce today.

* Reduce the annual Cost of Living Adjustment for current and future Social Security beneficiaries: The Bowles-Simpson proposal would cut the COLA for current and future Social Security beneficiaries, reducing benefits more with every passing year. This would prevent benefits from keeping up with increases in the cost of living over time. Under these plans, retirees claiming benefits at 65 would see their benefits decline by 3.7 percent at age 75, by 6.5 percent at age 85, and 9.2 percent at age 95.2.

* Raise the full retirement age to 69, and the earliest eligibility age to 64: Because of the way that Social Security benefits are calculated, raising the retirement age, as the Bowles-Simpson proposal recommends, is indistinguishable from an across-the-board benefit cut, no matter how long workers continue to work — even when they work to age 70 and beyond. Raising the full retirement age by two full years amounts to a 13 percent benefit cut, on top of the 13 percent cut already made when the retirement age was increased from 65 to 67.3. The cuts are hardest for workers in physically demanding jobs, poor health, or otherwise unable to continue to work.

* Radically restructure the program: The Bowles-Simpson proposal would destroy Social Security by stealth. It would eliminate a fundamental and carefully-crafted feature that has been part of the program since the beginning. As figure 1 shows, over time, everyone would receive nearly the same subsistence level benefit unrelated to wages.

* Cut benefits for the most vulnerable: More than half of all workers with an annual income of about $11,000 would see their benefits cut by about 16 percent under the Bowles-Simpson proposal.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues Tagged With: budget, Eric Kingson, Kent Conrad, Nancy Altman, social security,

Where Did Your Taxes Go?

April 10, 2012

National Priorities Project recently released Tax Day 2012 with the numbers on how federal income taxes were spent in fiscal 2011 — down to the penny, giving people a “Tax Receipt” for how their money is spent.

The group found “Federal income tax revenues totaled around $1.13 trillion in fiscal 2011. … Twenty-seven cents of every federal income tax dollar went to the military; 21.4 cents went to Medicare and other health programs; 14.5 cents paid for interest on the federal debt…”

In addition, “individuals can enter the amount of federal income taxes they paid in 2011, and find out exactly how much money they contributed to space flight research, disaster relief, food stamps, and more.” NPP found, for example, an individual earning $50,000 and paying approximately $6,000 in federal income taxes in 2011 contributed 64 cents toward high speed rail and $40.97 for nuclear weapons.

MATTEA KRAMER, mattea at nationalpriorities.org
Kramer, a senior research analyst at NPP, said today: “Individuals are our nation’s major bill payers, responsible for 86 percent of all federal revenue in fiscal 2011. That includes our income taxes, as well as payroll taxes, estate and gift taxes, and excise taxes on goods like gasoline.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, The U.S. Economy Tagged With: economy, Mattea Kramer, National Priorities Project, taxes,

“JOBS Act” a “Recipe for Fraud” Creating a “Race to the Bottom”

April 5, 2012

President Obama is scheduled to sign the “JOBS Act” this afternoon.

Black recently wrote an open letter signed by several noted analysts: “The JOBS Act is so Criminogenic that it Guarantees Full-Time Jobs for Criminologists,” which states: “As white-collar criminologists (and a former financial regulator and enforcement head) and experts in ferreting out sophisticated financial frauds, our careers and research focus on financial fraud by the world’s most elite private sector criminals and their political cronies. Therefore, we write to thank Congress and the President for preparing to adopt a JOBS Act that will provide us with job security for life. We will be the personal beneficiaries of Congress’ decision to adopt the law without the pesky hearings that would allow critics to launch devastating attacks on the proposed bill based on a brutally unfair tactic — the presentation of facts. Unfortunately, in our professional capacities, we must oppose the bill. This bill is an atrocity.

“The ‘Jumpstart Our Business Startups’ Act, the comically forced effort to create a catchy acronym, is the most cynical bill to emerge from a cynical Congress and Administration. It is an exemplar of why Congressional approval ratings are well below those of used car dealers. The JOBS Act is something only a financial scavenger could love. It will create a fraud-friendly and fraud-enhancing environment. It will add to the unprecedented level of financial fraud by our most elite CEOS that has devastated the U.S. and European economies and cost over 20 million people their jobs. Financial fraud is a prime jobs killer. …

“Among the many fraud-friendly policies that led to the deregulation that prompts our recurrent, intensifying financial crises, the undisputed most destructive aspect is the recurrent, intensifying embrace of the ‘regulatory race to the bottom.’ The ‘logic’ of the argument in the securities law context is that (1) dishonest issuers like bad regulation because it allows them to defraud with impunity, (2) our ‘competitor’ nations (typically described as the City of London) offer weaker regulation to induce the fraudulent issuers to locate abroad, and (3) we must not allow this to happen; we must make sure that fraudulent issuers are based in America. Of course, they never phrase honestly their ‘logic’ about dishonesty. Four national commissions investigated the causes of financial crises — the S&L debacle, the ongoing U.S. crisis, the Irish crisis, and the Icelandic crisis. Each of the commissions has decried the idiocy of the ‘race to the bottom’ dynamic and warned that it must end. The arguments advanced by industry in support of the JOBS Act reflect and worship at the altar of ‘the race to the bottom.’” http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/03/the-jobs-act-is-so-criminogenic-that-it-guarantees-full-time-jobs-for-criminologists.html

Background: The New York Times piece this week, “JOBS Act Jeopardizes Safety Net for Investors,” states: “Maybe President Obama should have bought shares in Groupon’s I.P.O. If he had, he would understand what some Groupon investors may be feeling as he prepares this week to sign a new piece of legislation to help start-ups get financing. Had he purchased $10,000 worth of shares on the open market on the first day of public trading for Groupon, the online coupon company based in his hometown Chicago, he would have lost a good chunk of his investment, putting him in the red by almost $4,100 today.”

Also see: “Obama JOBS Act Leaves Labor Fuming In Democratic Feud.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, The U.S. Economy Tagged With: Barack Obama, economy, job, JOBS Act, William K. Black,

Welcome to the Energy Third-World: the United States

April 2, 2012

MICHAEL T. KLARE, via Leslie Brandon, leslie.brandon at hholt.com
Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of the new book The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. He just wrote the piece “A New Energy Third World in North America? How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State,” which states: “The ‘curse’ of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century ‘new Saudi Arabia’ for ‘tough energy’ — deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

“Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America — the Third World — where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

“Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

“The formula for making Canada and the U.S. the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way. Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified.

“How we characterize our energy predicament in the coming decades and what path we ultimately select will in large measure determine the fate of this nation.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, Resources: Trade, World Bank, IMF Tagged With: corporations, energy, environment, Michael T. Klare,

Judges Not Debating Their Own Health Care

March 28, 2012

KAREN HIGGINS via Charles Idelson, cidelson at nationalnursesunited.org, or Carl Ginsburg, press at calnurses.org
With nearly half the Supreme Court justices who will pass judgment on the 2010 healthcare law beyond the age where they have to worry about their access to basic care, a leading voice for nurses said today that “all Americans should have the same level of security about their health.”

Higgins is a registered nurse and co-president of National Nurses United. Today she said: “For these judges, that means no concerns about being bankrupted by medical bills, denied needed treatment because some insurance agent deemed it ‘experimental’ or ‘not medically necessary,’ barred from choosing the provider of their choice because they were ‘out of network’ or forced to keep an unwanted job to maintain their present employer-paid coverage.”

“That guarantee could be achieved by extending Medicare, for which four of the nine judges already qualify, to everyone, without raising constitutional questions posed by the individual mandate that forces everyone without coverage to buy private, commercial health insurance” said the 170,000-member National Nurses United in a statement today.

Higgins added: “The Obama administration and Congress could have pre-empted the legal fight over their law by instead just expanding Medicare, a more humane, cost effective system which has no constitutional questions, to everyone under 65.

“Even now, Congress and the President could pre-empt an adverse court ruling by passing Medicare-for-all legislation currently in Congress, S 915 and HR 1200, and end our healthcare nightmare once and for all.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues Tagged With: healthcare, Karen Higgins, medicare,

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