Puget Sound Liberals Weekly Newsletter #228
Enhancing Freedom, Opportunity and Cooperation in
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Contents * Featured Articles Opportunities Petitions Communication to Our Members* Commentaries from Our Members Dave Heywood: Better If Independent Candidate Could Win Amelia Kroeger: Obama’s Reforms Make a Difference Liberals and Democrats Links to the Beef Creating Jobs with Fair Earnings Eliminating ‘Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell’ Prospects for Electing Democrats this
Fall State and Local Links
to the Beef What’s the Difference between I-1077 and I-1098? Andrew Villeneuve: Help Income Tax Initiative Qualify** Larry Kalb Receives Endorsement for Congress Jack Smith: Patty Murray Is Poor Choice Nation and World Links to the Beef Featured Advocacy Group: Voter Action Our Liberal Spirit Optimism Expands Freedoms and Opportunities* Recommended Books Our
Political Priorities ·
Fair Clean
Elections and Open Government ·
Fair Taxes and
Competent Spending ·
Investment for
Productivity ·
Quality
Health, Education, Jobs, Income ·
Environmental
Protection and Energy Independence ·
Security and
Equal Rights ·
Justice and
Peace Everywhere ·
International
Cooperation and Leadership Conservatives oppose all of these Let’s
End Our National Nightmare
Let’s
Restore Our American Dream More on Conservative opposition to our
American Dream Washington State’s 5 Major Needs · Federal Funding for Health and Education · Substituting
a Progressive Income Tax · Replacing
Conservative Legislators Quote of the Week A pessimist is one who
makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes
opportunities of his difficulties. Harry Truman
Calendar of Events
Wednesday, June 9 at 6:30 PM at the
Mercer Island Community Center (8236 Southeast 24th Street,
Mercer Island) - Northwest Progressive
Fundraising Gala. $45 Individual,
$75 household. For more.
June 28 at 6:30PM at
Sharon and Will Creeden’s home (1661 Harbor Ave SW, #202, Seattle) - InspireSeattle
Potluck and Discussion. For more.
Opportunities
Commentaries
that have addressed major issues
Obtain
a free ‘Corporations Are Not People’ bumper sticker.
Petitions
Tell your senator to
vote for eliminating ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’.
Tell
congress to televise on C-Span the financial reform house-senate reconciliation
conference.
Communication
To Our Members
I Am an Optimist
I am an optimist and seek to justify my
optimism below as helpful to expanding our freedoms and
opportunities. My hopeful optimism
invariably leads to frustration, but I believe I would be more frustrated to be
a pessimist without hope. Dave Thomas
Commentaries
From Our Members
Dave Heywood: Better
If Independent Candidate Could Win
A day or two ago Richard Curtis withdrew his candidacy for U.S. Senate
as an independent candidate. It would be nice if an independent candidate
had half a chance to run for position and win.
Dave Heywood
Even if an independent candidate doesn’t win, it sends a message
to inconsistent Liberals like Patty Murray who practice the Old Politics of
placing their political career ahead of serving people. Dave Thomas
Amelia Kroeger: Obama’s Reforms Make a Difference
Amelia Kroeger sent me the following commentary on Obama’s
Reforms:
With the Senate’s
passage of financial
regulation, Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of
activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition. Like the
Reagan Revolution or Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society, the new progressive period has the makings of a
generational shift in how Washington operates.
First came a stimulus bill that, while aimed mainly at ending
a deep recession, also set out to remake the nation’s educational system
and vastly expand scientific research. Then President
Obama signed a health care bill that was the biggest expansion of the
safety net in 40 years. And now Congress is in the final stages of a bill that
would tighten Wall Street’s rules and probably shrink its profit margins.
If there is a theme to all this, it has been to try to lift economic growth
while also reducing income
inequality. Growth in the decade that just ended was the slowest
in the post-World War II era, while inequality has been rising for most of the
last 35 years. It is far too early to
know if these efforts will work. Their success depends enormously on execution
and, in the case of financial regulation, specifically on the Federal
Reserve, which did
not distinguish itself during the housing bubble.
Already, though,
one downside to the legislative spurt does seem clear. By focusing on long-term
problems, Mr. Obama and the Democrats have given less than their full attention
to the economy’s current weakness and turned
off a good number of voters.
After months of
discussion, and with the unemployment rate hovering near a 27-year high,
Democratic leaders said Thursday they had finally reached agreement on a bill
that would send aid to states and take other steps to increase job growth.
Congress plans to vote on the bill next week. But some of the money will not be
spent for months and may not be enough to affect voters’ attitudes before
November’s midterm elections.
Still, the
turnabout since Jan. 20 — the first anniversary of Mr. Obama’s inauguration and
the day after Scott
Brown, a Republican, won a Senate seat in liberal Massachusetts — has been
remarkable. Then, commentators pronounced the Obama presidency nearly dead.
Today, he looks more like a liberal answer to Ronald
Reagan. “If you’d asked me about
this administration after Scott Brown was elected, I’d have told you it was
going to fizzle into virtually nothing,” said
Theda Skocpol, the Harvard political scientist. “Now it could easily be one
of the pivotal periods in domestic policy.” But, Ms. Skocpol added, “It will
depend on what happens in the next two elections.”
The recent period
surely will not match the impact of the New Deal. Nothing is likely to, notes David
Kennedy,a Pulitzer
Prize-winning historian, because the New Deal created much of the modern
American government. “These are not as dramatic as the foundational moments,”
Mr. Kennedy said, “but they’re significant changes.” Alan
Brinkley, a historian of the Depression, added: “This is not the New Deal,
but it’s a significant series of achievements. And given the difficulty of
getting anything done under the gridlock of Congress, it’s pretty surprising.”
The last 16 months seem most similar in scope to three other periods in the
last 80 years. After World War II, the federal government helped build the
modern middle class with the G.I. Bill, housing subsidies, the highway system and
incentives for employers to offer health insurance. The 1960s — mostly under
Mr. Johnson, but also Richard
Nixon — brought civil rights legislation, Medicare,
Medicaid
and environmental laws.
Then Mr. Reagan
ushered in a period that continued, more or less, until 2008: tax cuts, less
regulation and other attempts to unleash the competitive forces of the market. Mr. Obama has been trying to reverse
the Reagan thrust in some important ways. Although the Reagan
administration did
not shrink the size of the federal government, it changed the ways that
Washington collected and spent its money, by reducing taxes on the affluent,
cutting some social programs and increasing military spending. These policies ended up magnifying income
inequality, which was already rising for other reasons. Since 1980, median
household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while
average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled.
Every major piece
of the Obama agenda is meant, in part, to push back against
inequality. Government may grow, but the bigger change will be how the
government is spending its money. The
health bill expanded insurance coverage largely for middle-class and poor
families and paid some of the bill by taxing households making more than
$250,000 a year. Attached to the final health bill were also education
provisions that cut subsidies to banks making student
loans, and used much of the money for college financial aid instead. The financial regulation bill, meanwhile,
would take several steps likely to reduce Wall Street’s profits — and Wall
Street has created more multimillionaires in recent decades than any other
industry. To take one example, certain trades would be forced onto open
exchanges. This would hurt financial firms’ ability to act as a middleman, much
as Expedia
and other travel Web sites have hurt travel agents.
For all these differences, though, there are also ways that Mr. Obama and
today’s Democrats have accepted, and are even furthering, the Reagan project.
They are not trying to raise tax rates on the affluent to anywhere near their
pre-1981 levels. Their health bill tried created new private insurance markets,
not expand Medicare.
Most striking,
the administration is trying to improve public education by introducing more
market competition. To win stimulus funds, about 20 states have changed
their rules to allow more charter
schools or to evaluate teachers in new ways. On Thursday, Gov. Bill Ritter
Jr. of Colorado signed a bill
that would reward teachers who received strong evaluations and deny tenure to
some who did poorly.
These education
changes — combined with increased spending on science research — are meant to
lift economic growth. Economists have long considered education and technology
to be the main ingredients in growth. In Mr. Obama’s phrasing, the goal is to
create a “new foundation,” more solid than the bubbles of recent years.
Even with those bubbles, the nation’s economic output expanded only 20 percent
from 2000 through 2009. In the 1980s, it grew 35 percent, and in the 1990s, it
grew 37 percent. Will this new
progressive project succeed? There are any number of uncertainties: whether
enough charter schools will succeed, whether the new health insurance markets
will function well, whether the Fed will learn to become an effective regulator
of Wall Street.
Some of those questions won’t be resolved for years. But one issue should
become clear much sooner. Mr. Reagan, Mr. Johnson and Franklin
D. Roosevelt cemented their changes by retaining enough allies in Congress
and serving more than four years in the White House. Mr. Obama has yet to do
so.
Liberals
and Democrats
This
week is much like last week, as our Senate continues to consider amendments to
financial regulation reform bill. So
much of the following commentary is a repeat of last week’s commentary with a
few changes and additions.
Creating Jobs with Fair Earnings
In
spite of limited credit and demand for credit, more jobs are being created,
enough to provide jobs for people who are newly entering the job market and
some more, such that people who have quit looking for jobs are now looking
again. President Obama
defends his actions to assist job creation. Even more jobs could be created if state and
local governments would adopt best practices of those state and local
governments which are stimulating job creation by encouraging successful entrepreneurs
to serve as advisors to would be entrepreneurs.
And if people would transfer their savings from stocks offered by Wall
Street speculators to smaller local banks and credit unions. They could also be enabled use their
retirement savings to purchase additional Social Security payments. In addition, the Obama Administration could
increase penalties for companies which use illegal means to oppose
unionization. And it could provide jobs
for young people through a program similar to the WPA program instituted by
President Roosevelt.
Regulating Wall Street
The senate
will pass financial regulatory reform which must then be reconciled with
the house version. Unfortunately (due in
large part to Senator Chris Dodd and the acquiescence of President Obama), major
reforms that are needed to prevent continued Walls Street speculation are not
included:
· Breaking up ‘too big to fail’ banks
· Eliminating
naked derivatives
· Reinstating the separation of commercial banks and
investment banks
Read
a summary of the 7 amendments that have passed, the three that have failed, and
others to be considered. Majority
Leader Harry Reid intends to complete consideration of amendments next week,
allowing the financial regulatory bill to be passed before Memorial Day. For
more.
It
is unlikely that Wall Street speculators will again be bailed out. But in the meantime, they are continuing to
drain money that could be used to create Main Street jobs. Senate
picks financial regulation bill conferees, including mostly consistent
Liberals.
It's mission accomplished for financial reform. By Arianna Huffington
Unfortunately, it's more of a Bush 43
"mission accomplished" than an Apollo 13 "mission
accomplished." That's because the financial reform bill passed by the
Senate last week, like Bush's ship deck ceremony, is more notable for what it
has left to still be done. The Restoring
American Financial Stability Act of 2010 will do no such thing. First, it
doesn't do enough to rein in Wall Street. It doesn't end "too big to
fail" banks, doesn't create a Glass-Steagall style firewall between
commercial and investment banking, keeps taxpayers on the hook for future
bailouts, and leaves open dangerous loopholes in the regulation of derivatives.
And we can expect more loopholes to be inserted as the bill heads to conference
committee. In D.C., crafting a bill without them would be like baking bread
without yeast. Though you can't see them, they're what makes a Washington bill
rise. There's a reason a longtime
investment banker, speaking
to the New York Times, said of his colleagues' reaction to the new
bill, "If you talk to anyone privately, there's a sigh of relief."
Don't expect a similar reaction on Main Street.
Despite its name, this bill will not be restoring financial stability to the
tens of millions of hardworking Americans whose lives have been turned upside
down by the economic crisis. On nearly
every front in the real economy -- from jobs to consumer spending to
foreclosures -- we've made virtually no progress at all. While Washington and
the media have been consumed with the titanic debate over this reform bill,
talk of the actual suffering by actual people in the actual economy is
virtually a taboo subject, at least judging by how rarely it makes the front
pages or leads the TV news.
But the data points are all around us. In a speech
last week, Sandra Pianalto, president of the Cleveland Fed, surveyed the
landscape and did not see a lot of financial stability, partly because
of the huge loss of skills that is being suffered by the long-term unemployed.
"Research... tells us that workers lose valuable skills during long spells
of unemployment, and that some jobs simply don't return," she said.
"Multiply this effect millions of times over, and it has the potential to dampen
overall economic productivity for years."
Her conclusion: "Many people are now just aiming for 'financial
security' as their American dream." In other words, the core idea of the
American Dream -- work hard and advance up the ladder -- has been gutted. Now
the American Dream is to try to not fall, or do all you can to slow your rate
of decline.
And forget about having enough in the bank to give
your kids a leg up on doing better than you've done. It's hard enough just to
keep a job until you retire -- if that's even going to be an option. At a D.C.
jobs fair for older workers this month, more than 3,000 job seekers showed up
for the event, entitled "Promoting Yourself at 50+." Not surprising,
given that the average jobless stint for those unemployed who are 55 and
over was around 43 weeks, as of last month. (Quick note to struggling
politicians out there: want a huge crowd at your campaign rally? Call it a
"jobs fair," and you'll have lines of people around the corner.) Their children and grandchildren who are just
graduating from college aren't faring any better. According to Business Week, the 1.6 million about to hit the
job market with their expensive degrees will be confronting a youth
unemployment rate of almost 20 percent -- the highest rate since the Labor
Department started tracking youth unemployment in 1948.
And, as Laura Bassett reported on HuffPost, many workers who have managed to
hold onto their jobs are increasingly doing so only by accepting less pay and
taking on a higher share of their health care costs. "My company didn't
eliminate my job, they just eliminated my salary," wrote marketing
director Mike Cheaure in an email. "I was back at work as a freelancer the
next day working at 1/4 the pay and no benefits." The experience has made
him very familiar with the new reality. "For us, the American Dream is
gone," he said. "Now it's just getting by."
Adding insult to injury, a growing number of
working mothers are having to give up their jobs and rely on welfare because
states are cutting back on child care services that allowed them to keep working. And
kids across the country are scrambling to find something to do this summer as a
number of states make deep cuts to summer school programs.
And what about that recent surge in consumer
spending that spawned talk of "green shoots" and
"recovery?" Turns out, there was a surge in spending -- but almost
exclusively by the rich. As the LA Times' Don Lee put it, the "little-noticed reality" behind the
"encouraging numbers" was that "much of the new spending has
come not from America's broad middle class but from a small slice of affluent
people at the top." In fact, according to the Labor Department, the
richest 20 percent of American households accounted for 40 percent of all
spending. As the Washington Post
reported last week, "lavish fringe benefits" are
back at the top end of corporate America, including "country club dues,
chauffeured drivers, personal financial planning services, home security
systems and parking." Of the 29 biggest public companies that took
taxpayer money, around one in three decided to funnel some of it to its chief
executive. As the Post's Tomoeh Murakami Tse dryly put it: "Those
raises contrast with the belt-tightening that many Americans have experienced
during the recession." Nell Minow, co-founder of the Corporate Library, put it more directly: "Marie Antoinette could fit
into this crowd without missing a beat."
The latest news in consumer lending is similarly
dismal -- especially among the banks that got the most help from taxpayers.
According to the Treasury Department, from February to March, the largest banks
cut lending by $9 billion -- yet more evidence of the
schism between the two economies. Of course, the two economies aren't entirely
separate -- the Wall Street economy is happy to accept massive transfusions of
cash from the fading middle class.
This isn't to say that there were no provisions
that would help Main Street considered as part of the Restoring American
Financial Stability Act of 2010. There were plenty -- it's just that almost all
of them were either voted down or taken out and never even put up for a vote.
Even something as simple and sensible as putting a cap on credit card interest
rates. Sheldon Whitehouse's amendment to do just that was voted down 60 to 35. So much for "financial
stability." Though I suppose it depends on whose financial stability you
care about -- the banks' or the taxpayers'.
Or how about payday lending -- the largely unregulated advances on a
paycheck that can carry rates in the triple digits? In Missouri, for example,
rates can top 600 percent. Yes, you read that right. Not exactly
a recipe for "financial stability." North Carolina's Kay Hagan offered
an amendment that would have clamped down on the $40 billion industry. It was
killed without a vote because of Republican objections.
Objections that were, no doubt, the end product of
the mother of all lobbying campaigns by every sector of the financial industry.
Of course, the line between Senator, staffer and lobbyist is pretty blurry
these days. A joint report released by SEIU, the Campaign for America's
Future, and the Public Accountability Initiative found that the finance
industry has 70 former members of Congress and 940 former federal employees on
its lobbying payroll. This includes 33 chiefs of staff, 54 staffers of the
House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee (or of a
current member of those committees), and 28 legislative directors. Five of
Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd's former staffers are now working as
banking lobbyists, as are eight former staffers for Banking Committee
powerhouses Richard Shelby and Chuck Schumer.
And the revolving door spins both ways. As Arthur Delaney reported on HuffPost, 18 percent of current House
Financial Services committee staffers used to work on K Street. All told, the
financial industry has spent nearly $600 million on lobbying since the collapse
of Bear Stearns in March of 2008 -- almost a million dollars a day.
A lot of money, sure, but if what you care about
is the financial stability of the banks, it was money well spent. Take, for
instance, the Merkley-Levin amendment that would have forced big banks to get
rid of their speculative proprietary trading activities, a version of the
Volcker rule. And you can take it, because the Senate won't be using it -- the
amendment never even made it to a vote. This wasn't because it wouldn't have
passed. On the contrary, since debate began on this issue, anger from those
mired in the real economy has reached enough lawmakers that the amendment had a
real shot. Which is why, as Simon Johnson put it, "the big banks were forced into overdrive to
stop it."
Another reform completely left out of the bill was
any reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This despite the fact that in just
the last quarter Freddie -- one half of what the New York Times'
Gretchen Morgenson calls
"the elephant in the bailout" -- reported a loss of $6.7 billion. Serious delinquencies on Freddie's
single-family conventional loan portfolio are at 4.13
percent, up from 2.41 percent for the same period last year. And the number
of foreclosed units Freddie controls stands at nearly 54,000, up from 29,145 at
the end of March 2009. "I don't
understand why people are not talking about it," says Dean Baker, of the
Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It seems to me the most
fundamental question is, have they on an ongoing basis been paying too much for
loans even since they went into conservatorship?" And why would they do that? It's part of what
Baker calls
a "backdoor bailout" of the banks. In other words, an under-the-radar
way to continue shoveling money from struggling taxpayers over to the richest
Americans.
We've been told time and time again over the last
two years that right after Washington deals with what's on its plate,
"jobs is next." Well, it's been "next" for quite some time
now, but it never seems to come to the floor. And now that a financial reform
bill has passed, the talk on the Hill is that climate control or immigration
will be tackled next. Or that members will just go off for the summer and
campaign, flush with all the donations many of them just pocketed from the
banks in this latest effort.
I often have a nightmare -- a common sort -- in
which I'm stuck in a forest and I can't find my way out. I have a friend whose
version is that her feet are stuck to the ground and she can't move. Not a bad
description of our leaders' approach to the massive suffering that's going on
across America.
A recent study by Duha Tore Altindag and Naci H.
Mocan for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the
effects of unemployment can have troubling implications for a political system.
The authors studied data from 130,000 people in 69 countries. Their conclusion:
"We find that personal joblessness experience translates into negative opinions
about the effectiveness of democracy."
No shock there. But it should frighten anyone
genuinely concerned about our stability, financial and otherwise.
Fiscal Responsibility
The
Obama Administration still shows no sign of increasing taxes on Wall Street and
other high income earners in order to reduce the federal deficit, thus
continuing to be vulnerable to concerns by Tea Bag Conservatives and others
about the high deficits. For more. For
more. Without raising taxes to
reduce deficits, the emphasis is upon reducing Social Security benefits. For
more. For
more. For
more. For
more.
I
believe that fiscal responsibility requires
increasing taxes on Wall Street and other high income earners. Dave Thomas
Defense
Secretary Robert Gates promotes eliminating wasteful Defense Department
spending. For
more. I believe many more reductions
should be made. We could greatly reduce
the number of troops that we have in Europe, South Korea and Japan and
eliminate perhaps 90% of our foreign military bases which exist more to further
American influence over other countries than to counter terrorism. We could also eliminate much other military
spending which is not useful with respect to any realistic assessment of
present and future enemies. However,
many Democrats are supporting military waste if it will create jobs in their
districts. Dave Thomas
Health Care Reform
Having
emphasized the benefits of health care reform immediately following its
passage, attention has shifted to regulating Wall Street speculation. But the Obama Administration will continue to
describe the benefits of health care reform before the fall elections.
Citizens in 18 states
are promoting state level single payer health care.
Immigration Reform
Passage of immigration reform appears impossible, due to Republican
opposition. If passed, it would motivate
Hispanics to vote for Democrats this fall.
But simply knowing that Republicans are blocking its passage may be
enough to motivate them.
By a two-to-one margin Hispanics are more
strongly opposed than Americans overall to the recent immigration measure
signed in to law in Arizona that would make it a state crime to reside there
illegally. Seven in 10, 70%, of Hispanic
respondents said they are somewhat or strongly opposed to the law, compared
with 34% of all respondents in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC
News poll set for release later today. Among
Hispanics, 27% are somewhat or strongly supportive of Arizona’s law; that
compares with 64%of respondents overall.
That sounds bad, but it’s long term
problem for the right. I sure hope they keep this up. After California Republican Governor Pete
Wilson ran an ad in 1994 to strongly sanction undocumented immigrants, the
The Republicans also have to be worrying
just a little bit about the fact that this issue falls way down the list of the
country’s biggest concerns. So, while a majority of Americans may think it’s appropriate
to racially profile and even treat legal immigrants (or people who just look
like them) like second class citizens, most
of them are unlikely to vote on that issue. On the other hand, young Hispanic Americans are unlikely to ever forget it. For
more. For
more.
Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell
Our congress and President Obama are posed to pass legislation
to eliminate ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ which would take effect in December after
completion of military review. What
isn’t clear is what will happen if the military reject elimination of ‘Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell”. If ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell’ would be eliminated anyway, then why wait. If ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ wouldn’t be
eliminated, the congressional and presidential action is meaningless. Perhaps the hope is that the military will
accept elimination of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, so that it can be eliminated
without controversy. For
more.
Prospects for Electing
Democrats this Fall
Liberals have learned from Conservatives the value of putting Tea
Party Conservatives on the defensive by smearing their candidates. They have applied this successfully in
Colorado. Now they are applying it to
Rand Paul. For example, Rand Paul’s
rejection of Civil Rights application to private businesses, his
rejection of government regulation of coal mining and his rejection of
government regulation of deep see oil wells.
For
more. Republican
Chairman Michael Steel criticizes Rand Paul’s position on Civil Rights, but
tries to indicate it doesn’t matter. Voters may disagree with Rand Paul’s
positions, such that they vote instead for Rand Paul’s Democratic
opponent. For
more. For
more.
Republican
fundraising is much less than occurred in previous elections.
Here’s the Beef
State and
Local
What’s the Difference between I-1077 and
I-1098?
It was deja vu all over again yesterday as
supporters of Initiative 1098 heard a
pep talk from Bill Gates, Sr. and picked up the very first petitions for the
campaign — just like the Initiative
1077 kickoff that took place almost exactly one month ago. So what’s the
difference between the two measures? And why was I-1077 refiled as I-1098?
In virtually every respect, the two measures are
the same. If approved by voters, I-1098 will:
·
Exempt every small business in Washington from the
B&O tax with a $4,800 business tax credit;
·
Reduce the state portion of the property tax by 20
percent;
·
Create a modest income tax on income over $400,000 per
year (for couples) or $200,000 per year (for individuals); and
·
Invest the net revenue — estimated at over $1 billion per
year — in education and health care.
The difference between the two measures is simply
this: I-1098 adds language that ensures domestic partners are treated the same
as married couples when it comes to filing a single or joint return for the new
state income tax. And since adding language to a ballot measure effectively
makes it a new initiative, Washington State requires the initiative to be
refiled and assigned a new number by the state attorney general’s office. Looking for more information about I-1098?
Check out our I-1098
fact sheet and I-1098
policy brief.
Andrew Villeneuve: Help Income Tax Initiative
Qualify
Real progressive tax reform in
Washington State is finally taking flight this evening with the launch of
Initiative 1098, the official reincarnation of Initiative 1077, which
was announced last month by William Gates Sr. and the Main Street Alliance.
The Initiative 1098 coalition had a kickoff party this evening on the north
shores of Lake Union, in the building where the campaign will be run from, to
celebrate the availability of petitions and affirm that the measure is going
forward.
I attended the party, and was impressed by the energy and enthusiasm I saw.
Rarely have I seen progressives so eager to collect signatures for ballot
measure. Must be the pent-up frustration many progressives feel after years and
years of inaction and dithering in Olympia, which has left us with a horribly
regressive and utterly broken tax structure.
The limited batch of petitions that was printed before the party was seemingly
gone in a flash; many activists left with fewer petitions than they hoped to
pick up. (More are being printed, and will be available in the coming days).
For those not familiar with the initiative, I-1098 would establish a
high-earners income tax on individuals who make more than $200,000 a year
($400,000 for couples). Business and occupation taxes would be eliminated for
eighty percent of small businesses, and the state property tax levy would be
lowered by twenty percent.
The estimated one billion dollars left over after these offsets would be
dedicated to public schools and healthcare coverage.
The genius of I-1098 is that it isn't a hodgepodge of half-measures. It's a
carefully drafted, thoughtfully construed proposal to strengthen our common
wealth and attack the regressivity of our tax structure. It lowers taxes for
small businesses and homeowners while increasing funding for our most important
public services.
It's real progressive tax reform.
NPI is proud to support and endorse Initiative 1098. We strongly and
emphatically encourage readers to not only sign I-1098, but help gather
signatures for it. The Constitution only gives us until July 2nd, 2010 to
gather 241,153 valid signatures. Time is short... we have six weeks to make
this happen.
To obtain petitions, please
contact the campaign. Andrew Villeneuve
Larry Kalb Receives Endorsement for Congress
Jack Smith: Patty Murray Is Poor Choice
Patty Murray will probably get my compromising and
dishonest vote. I am very dissatisfied with her performance and
that of the entire Senate. This email shows that I continue to let people
know how I feel. What about you? The Democrats need good candidates and
not the lesser of two failures. The Democratic leadership knows Senator
Murray must be replaced but the Party doesn't have the courage to take the
risk. Either a failed U.S. Senate with virtually no action or remotely
possible, a GOP Majority, remains our destiny with this election. Patty could
take her campaign money and run for a very successful retirement but
ego gets in her way. I urge her to do so. Harry Reid is another example of
overstaying your value.
There are other potential remedial problems that
Democrats don't face.
Ironically, we may keep Patty and lose
Barbara Boxer because of discontent with Democratic
voters. Leadership that doesn't lead is corrosive. That is at
least one of my major problems with Patty. How long can we the voters
continue to accept inadequate candidates that lead us to an inactive Senate.
When we complain bout the Senate, who do you think is fooling who. You may not
accept this concept, but electing Rossi once, may lead our Democratic
leadership to stop avoiding our vote to include the quality Senator we deserve.
The jury is out, but please consider what happened in Massachusetts. Scott
Brown has many of the same attributes of Dino Rossi. Jack
Smith
Here’s the Beef
Nation
and World
If
BP Were a Human Being
What if BP were a
person, not a corporation? This person would have been married several
times (thanks to corporate mergers) and would have several aliases. The person
would be considered "a career criminal, a pathological liar and an
international serial killer with a rap sheet several times the size of the
Chicago Yellow Pages." Oh, the person also would be a flight risk. For
more.
As often occurs among businesses, BP saved a few dollars in its deep
water drilling in spite of the risk of a rare but catastrophic result. While the Obama Administration has been
regulating many firms much better than occurred under the Bush Administration, it
failed to eliminate the mixed motives in the Interior Department Agency
which was charged with regulating deep water drilling, thus allowing BP to take
risks with catastrophic results.
Featured Advocacy Group
-------------------------------------- Voter Action -------------------------------------
Voter Action is a national non-profit
organization that seeks to ensure election integrity in the United
States through legal advocacy, research, and public education. It
aims to protect an open and transparent election process, one in which our
elections at the federal, state, and local level are accessible and
verifiable. It supports the basic civil and political rights of all
voters to cast their ballots in an independent manner and to have to their
votes accurately recorded and counted. It seeks to reclaim our
elections for the public domain, controlled by the voters and not by private
interests.
Since
our inception, it has provided citizens with recourse when equipment fails;
protected jurisdictions from the acquisition and use of privatized, electronic
voting systems; provided a centralized legal resource regarding election
integrity and election privatization issues; empowered ordinary citizens to
become involved in the election processes; educated election officials, the
citizenry, the media, civil rights and civic participation organizations about
the problems associated with DRE voting machines and other outsourced
electronic processes; and developed a skilled legal network working in defense
of election integrity across the country.
The
United States faces today a serious threat to the integrity of our electoral
process. A core basis of that threat comes from the increasing
privatization of our public elections. Election officials across the
country are outsourcing to private vendors critical aspects of our election
process – the recording and counting of our votes via electronic voting
machines and central tabulators; the maintenance of voter registration
databases by private corporations; the control of who accesses the ballot via
electronic poll books; and the determination of how we audit and recount our
elections when proprietary software is involved. Since 2000, the nation
has witnessed a dramatic rise in the influence and control which private
companies wage in the way we conduct our elections. Voter Action is at the
forefront of challenging this threat to our democracy posed by the growing
private control of our elections.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here’s the Beef
Various
local communities are creating jobs.
Our
Liberal Spirit
Optimism Expands
Freedoms and Opportunities
All of my life, I have
usually been an optimist. I suspect that
whether one is an optimist or pessimist is rooted in early childhood
experience. Nevertheless, I attempt to
justify my optimism. In any situation, I
tend to create a vision of the ideal situation that I would like to realize and
strategies for realizing this vision.
This is easier to do if I have hope that this vision can be
realized. Even though I know that this
realization will be flawed. That the
realization of my vision will be only partially achieved. That I will end up being partially
frustrated.
For forty years following
World War II, my vision was for an end to the cold war. I believed then and still believe that our
participation in the cold war was unnecessary and immoral. I believe that the Soviet Union’s occupation
of Eastern Europe was defensive. The
Soviet Union never had any ambition to militarily invade Western Europe. We could have maintained a minimum military
presence in Western Europe, devoting our resources instead to meeting domestic
infrastructure and safety net needs.
Unfortunately, our American
public’s paranoia concern foreign threats, the vested military and military
industrial suppliers were catered to by our presidents and congress members. Enormous resources were wasted unnecessarily.
I hoped that President Carter
would scale back the cold war, but he was unable to. When finally in 1989 the Soviet Union
collapsed, I was overjoyed. The world
could now divert attention from cold war violence to meeting other needs. I hoped that President Clinton would scale
back our military, but he did not. Our
United States continued to maintain our military strength, even to the present
day by assuming wrongly that this was necessary to countering terrorist
threats, not from other countries, but from small bands of criminal
terrorists. Even under President Obama,
our military industrial congressional interests continue to maintain an
unnecessary military technology and configuration oriented toward non-existent
and non-projected military threats.
Adding to our federal deficits, the result is fiscal irresponsibility.
When President Obama ran an
impressive and successful campaign to provide change we can believe in, I
expected that he would be able to reverse our devastating Borrow, Consume and Speculate mindset and practices to Earn, Conserve and Invest mindset and
practices. During the campaign, he
teased that he had not been in the Senate long enough for them to convince him
that the conventional wisdom that speculation was important. But he was wrong. Whereas President Roosevelt included no
defenders of speculation in his cabinet, filling the cabinet instead with people
who sought to eliminate such speculation, President Obama picked cabinet members
who had participated in such speculation.
Listening to them, he avoided providing financial regulatory reform when
it would have been easily possible due to the collapse of large financial
companies and strong public opinion opposing bailouts. Financial regulatory reform could have
occurred quickly without delaying health care reform.
Instead of simply bailing out
large financial companies without conditions, he should have taken control of
them as we did with the Savings and Loan companies during the collapse of a
previous bubble. He could then have
eliminated their stock holders and divided the six major financial companies
into about 30 companies that weren’t too big to fail. He could have fired their top managers,
speculators and lobbyists. He could have
forced negotiation to protect appropriate house mortgage holders from
foreclosure and to allow others being foreclosed to continue to rent their
houses. He could have encouraged local
governments to identify needs for affordable housing near jobs and purchased
foreclosed homes to provide them as affordable housing.
But due to the influence of
the advisors he chose, Obama didn’t do these things, with the result that the
six ‘too big to fail’ financial companies are larger than ever, are still
speculating and benefiting from their speculation at the expense of Main Street
entrepreneurs and are lobbying successfully against needed financial
reforms. While they may not be bailed
out if they again create a bubble which collapses, these mega-banks are
wrecking havoc in the meantime.
Instead of listening
primarily to former Wall Street speculators, President Obama had listened, as
President Roosevelt did, to those who had identified the bubble and coming
collapse, he would have made changes we can believe in, instead of not making
them. Not having made these changes
early on, and not realizing that we must change our economic mindset and
practices, the financial regulation that is occurring now with President
Obama’s acquiescence is still not making the changes most necessary to
deterring speculation. The result lets
Republicans continue to hypocritically indicate that they support Main Street
instead of Wall Street.
President Obama has also
failed to increase taxes on Wall Street speculators and other high income
earners to greatly reduce our federal deficit, while still spending more money
to stimulate jobs.
President Obama’s health care
reform is similarly flawed. He should
have insisted the Senator Max Baucus set an early time limit on attempts to woo
some Republicans to support health care reform, then given up and passed the
best health care reform he could before Senator Kennedy or Senator Byrd might
die and be replaced by a Republican, as due to the delay occurred with Senator
Kennedy.
President Obama also failed
to adopt a WPA type program that employed young single people to perform
infrastructure improvements, as President Roosevelt did.
So my optimism has been
partially unfounded. While President
Obama has clearly done many things right, he could have done much better. While the Democrats have achieved some flawed
reforms and may not lose many congressional seats this fall, they will lose
more than they would have if President Obama had acted as I have suggested he
should have.
When freedoms and
opportunities are limited, optimism that they can be increased leads to actions
that increase them, even if they are not increased as much as we would
desire. Optimism is a useful response to
limited freedoms and opportunities.
Recommended Books – See our list of books for liberals
Richard Bookstaber, 2007, A Demon of Our Own Design. Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of
Financial Innovation
As a hedge fund manager who
previously served as risk manager, Richard Bookstaber comments that markets are
vulnerable to bubbles and collapse due to liquidity that creates greater
leverage, innovation that creates greater complexity and incentives to make
rapid decisions that require an impossible rationality based upon inadequate
information. Before our present
housing-credit bubble and crash, he commented that our derivatives and hedging
system must be changed.