Pacific Progressive

What Bernie Said, Part 1

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

At the time of this writing, legislation to formalize the tax deal between President Obama and congressional Republicans cleared cloture by a large margin, and looked ready to sail through the Senate. Polls indicate a large margin of Americans approve of the deal, and newspapers like the Washington Post are hailing the process as "the most significant bipartisan vote since President Obama took office."

Not everyone agrees.

Last week, a battery of congressional Democrats rose up in outrage over the deal, specifically protesting not only the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for rich people, but for the attack on the payroll tax, which many see as the beginning of the end of Social Security.

Leading the charge was Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who took to the well of the Senate on Friday to deliver a marathon eight-and-a-half hour denunciation of the deal. As his speech rose and grew, bloggers and "mainstream" media reporters, and then the networks, focused on the fact that it was happening. Articles debated whether this was a "true" filibuster, or merely a very long speech, and a few snippets of what Sanders said were disseminated.

The thing was, if you were not watching C-SPAN, or if you didn't have eight hours to spare, you probably missed the vast majority of what he had to say. No articles I could find repeated his more salient points at any length, and by the end of the weekend, it was as if the event had not taken place.

Not on my watch, folks.

Tax Breaks Need Scrutiny: Missing Provision in Senate Tax Bill Should Be Reinserted

By Seth Hanlon

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

A small but important item is missing from the tax framework bill negotiated by the Obama administration and congressional leaders and introduced in the Senate. The provision, which has already been passed by the House of Representatives in separate legislation, would require Congress to evaluate for effectiveness special business tax breaks that Congress renews on a year-to-year basis. The reviews would provide basic information to Congress about whether each of these tax breaks serves its intended purpose.

The provision was included in legislation introduced by Sen. Max Baucus last week and has already passed the House as part of a separate bill. It’s unclear why it was not included in the latest version of tax legislation. The Senate and House should make sure it is added back in before the legislation is finalized.

This study is long overdue. About 50 tax provisions are regularly scheduled to expire every year. Many of these breaks benefit targeted industries such as ethanol producers, filmmakers, and financial services companies operating abroad. Congress typically waits until the waning days of the legislative session to take up the tax breaks, then bundles them together in a “tax extenders” bill.

Nigeria Files Charges Against Cheney in Halliburton Bribery Scheme

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report

Dick Cheney is officially a wanted man.

The former vice president was indicted Tuesday by Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crime Commission along with eight other current and former company executives, alleging that while he was chief executive of Halliburton he played a role in a scheme to bribe Nigerian government officials so the company could obtain a lucrative contract to build a liquefied natural gas facility in the country.

Halliburton and its one-time subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), were also charged. KBR, which also has handled lucrative US government support contracts for US troops in Iraq and elsewhere, was spun off from Halliburton in 2007 into a separate company.

The charges revolve around $180 million in bribes allegedly paid to Nigerian government officials between 1994 and 2004 to win $6 billion in construction contracts for the Bonny Island natural gas liquefaction plant. The bribes allegedly went to the notoriously corrupt Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and some of his subordinates.

"It includes Dick Cheney," said Nigerian prosecutor Godwin Obla, about the 16-count indictment filed in a high-court in Abuja, Nigeria's capital. "There are conspiracy charges and giving gratification to public officers. There is also a charge for obstruction of justice...It is important to stress that the filing of this charge today is just one out of many steps that would be taken by the prosecution."

Facts vs. Fiction: Conservative Claims About Small Business Taxes Are Bogus

By Pat Garofalo

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

The Bechtel Corporation. PriceWaterhouseCooper. The Tribune Company. These are not the sort of companies that immediately jump to mind when one hears the phrase “small business.” Nor is the prominent buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts or every partner in big-city law firms. But if conservatives in Congress have their way, the owners of these behemoths of U.S. business are going to receive a tax cut next year—under the guise of tax relief for small businesses.

When Congress convenes for a lame-duck session this month, one of the most prominent issues it will tackle is how to deal is the pending expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Due to a Bush-era budgeting gimmick, income tax rates are scheduled to reset on January 1, 2011 to where they were in 2000.

President Obama and many congressional Democrats propose that we permanently extend tax rates for the lower and middle classes—those households making less than $250,000 per year—while allowing the rates for the richest 2 percent of Americans to expire. Conservatives, however, insist on extending all of the tax cuts. And when President Obama suggests “decoupling” the tax rates, or permanently extending those for the lower and middle classes while temporarily extending those for the rich, incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) bluntly replied: “No.”

Correcting Myths About Federal Pay: Conservatives Compare Apples to Oranges

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Lauren Smith

More than half of Americans mistakenly believe that federal workers are overpaid, and a third also wrongly think they are underqualified, according to a recent Washington Postpoll. The truth is federal workers earn 22 percent less than their counterparts in the private sector, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

The public’s misperception of federal employees as overfed bureaucrats underscores the recent success of conservative commentators at perpetuating false stereotypes about public servants, co-opting even USA Today, America’s second-largest newspaper, which recently published a misleading analysis of public and private sector pay levels. These myths fuel antigovernment resentment and buttress right-wing talking points on this topic on the campaign trail.

One of many cases in point: House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) says that taxpayers are subsidizing "fattened salaries and pensions of federal bureaucrats who are out there right now making it harder to create private sector jobs." In fact, the federal workforce today as a proportion of the total U.S. workforce is about half what it was in 1970. This downsizing has come as the government’s responsibilities have increased in size and complexity.

Let's Get Our Priorities Straight: Focus on Helping the Middle Class, Not Tax Cuts for the Rich

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Michael Linden, Heather Boushey

Perhaps in some parallel universe there’s a world where it makes sense for the country’s main economic policy debate over the next two months to be the tax cuts for the rich. After all, they’ve been the ones least hurt by the recession and the only ones that benefited from the economic growth in the years prior to the Great Recession. I suppose it’s possible that there’s an alternate universe where giving them even more tax cuts is sanity. But in our reality it’s absolutely absurd.

The economic challenges we face are myriad and daunting. The unemployment rate is hovering near 10 percent. Our energy policy is stuck in the 20th century. We’ve got crumbling infrastructure all over the place. The budget is projected to remain badly out of balance. And perhaps most troubling, the middle class is barely keeping its head above water. Tax cuts for rich people address precisely none of these pressing issues. They would actually make matters worse in some cases.

Why, then, are we even discussing the possibility of cutting taxes for rich people? Is it because they’ve been hit particularly hard by the recession? Hardly. When the National Bureau of Economic Research announced recently that the Great Recession came to an end in June of last year that news must have come as quite a shock to the millions of Americans who are still out of work, working fewer hours for less pay, and struggling to make ends meet. But it probably didn’t surprise people at the top of the income ladder. They’ve been recovering quite nicely.

Recently released Census data confirm that the wealthy are back on track after suffering only minor setbacks. Incomes fell across the board from 2007, before the recession began, to 2008. Everyone took a hit, from the poorest quintile to the richest. But that’s where the shared pain ends. From 2008 to 2009 almost everyone’s income continued to fall except the rich. The richest 5 percent of Americans saw their average income rise last year by $1,800.

Minority Rules: Ten Ways to Bring the Senate to Its Knees

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Ian Millhiser

See also: The Tyranny of the Timepiece: Senate Rules Obstruct Voting to a Degree that Wounds Our Government by Ian Millhiser

Download this memo (pdf)

When you consider its big ticket achievements, the current 111th Congress is one of the most successful in American history. Two Supreme Court justices, longoverdue financial reform, a stimulus package that pulled the economy from the brink of disaster, and a landmark law bringing affordable health care to all Americans are nothing to sneeze at.

Yet beneath these most visible achievements is a far different story. The Senate can confirm two highly visible Supreme Court justices, but it can’t confirm more than a handful of President Obama’s lower court nominees. The Senate can overcome virulent objections to its most high profile bills, but it has yet to even take a vote on 372 bills that already passed the House—many of them unanimously.

There’s a simple reason for this disparity. It may only take 60 votes to get something accomplished in the Senate, but it takes 100 votes to do so quickly. Senators who want to block progress can force hours of irrelevant debate. Or they can gum up the works with extraneous amendments. Or they can force lengthy amendments to be read aloud. Or they can demand time-consuming roll call votes on frivolous procedural objections. And with each minute wasted, the clock ticks closer and closer to the end of the 111th Congress in January.

Let’s be clear—the level of obstruction in today’s Senate is unprecedented. But obstruction and delay is cooked deep into the Senate’s meat. Indeed, there are so many ways to shut down business in the Senate—many of which can be implemented by one lone senator—that the real surprise is that the Senate has ever accomplished anything. There are many more ways to block progress in the Senate than this brief paper can detail, but here is a short list of ten ways to bring the Senate to its knees.

Obstruction tactic No. 1—endless debate

The word “debate” does not mean much in the United States Senate. Rather than being a free exchange of ideas intended to convince other senators of one position or another, most Senate debate time is occupied by senators giving closely vetted speeches to an almost-entirely empty chamber. Nevertheless, the Senate rules make it very difficult to stop the serial speeches and actually hold a vote. Unless at least 60 senators agree to hold a vote, the speeches go on forever. A “filibuster” is nothing more than a senator’s decision to prevent the Senate from holding a vote on a particular issue until 60 of their colleagues finally tell them “no.”

The Tyranny of the Timepiece: Senate Rules Obstruct Voting to a Degree that Wounds Our Government

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

See also: Minority Rules: Ten Ways to Bring the Senate to Its Knees by Ian Millhiser

Download this memo (pdf)

The most valuable commodity in the U.S. Senate is not votes, it is time.

Judgeships, ambassadorships, and other key federal jobs go unfilled—not because the nominees lack the 60 votes necessary to move nominations forward—but because the Senate simply doesn’t have enough time to vote on confirmation. Meanwhile, entire cabinet departments function without congressional authority and agencies operate for months at a time without knowing how much money is in their budget.

Yet the Senate simply cannot find the time to solve these problems.

This logjam is not the result of laziness—the Senate in the current 111th Congress has worked more days than any other Senate in recent memory. Nor is it entirely the result of ideological sparring, although the Senate would not be the mess it is today if a minority of its members were not engaged in unprecedented obstructionism. Rather, it is a monster born from the Senate’s increasingly tight schedule alongside each senator’s sweeping power to run out the clock before anything gets accomplished. 

Here’s a look at different aspects of this tyranny of the timepiece.

Blocking progress 30 hours at a time

Limitless “debate” is the hallmark of the United States Senate. Typically, before senators can vote on a bill or nomination, at least 60 members of the Senate must agree to cease debating the matter and allow a vote to proceed. Thus, a filibuster is nothing more than a refusal to provide the sixtieth vote and allow the endless cycle of debate to be broken.

A Thousand Cuts: What Reducing the Federal Budget Deficit Through Large Spending Cuts Could Really Look LIke

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Michael Ettlinger, Michael Linden

Read the full report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Download the report to mobile devices and e-readers from Scribd

There are hard budget decisions coming for our country and we need to get serious about them. Whether you agree with us that any deficit reduction should take place only after the economic recovery is firmly in place, or agree with those who believe deficits should be reduced immediately—halting projects and jobs mid-stream—there is little argument that the budget deficits projected for the years ahead are unsustainable. Everyone knows that tax increases, spending cuts, or both, are in our future. What few have been willing to do, however, is say what those tax increases and spending cuts might look like.

That failure has rendered the debate on this subject close to worthless—people talking past each other saying either “no” to meaningful tax increases or “no” to meaningful spending cuts, offering as evidence of their fiscal virtue only trivial or vague measures that serve primarily to mislead their audiences about the true scope of the problem. They scrupulously avoid detailing what meaningful action might look like. This does the country a grave disservice.

Hiding how difficult grappling with federal budget deficits is going to be, leading the public to believe that there are relatively easy ways out, raises the political liability of taking action and postpones the day when we step up to the challenge. That isn’t to say that no one has acknowledged how difficult this really is or offered specific ideas and gotten attention for their work—but they have been largely drowned out by the disingenuous cacophony.

Infographic: Running Out the Clock

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Ian Millhiser 

Policy Lessons from Canada's Deficit Slashing Days Are Limited: Country's Experience Shows Austerity Measures Didn't Generate Growth

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Jordan Eizenga

Recent claims that 1990s Canadian fiscal policy should serve as a model for other countries trying to achieve stronger economic growth show a misunderstanding of what actually happened in Canada’s economy during that decade. The bottom line is that Canada’s budget cutting was appropriate under a unique set of circumstances, and in fact had little to do with the growth that ensued.

In 1993, following a prolonged economic recession, Canada’s Liberal Party took over a federal government that had incurred historically high debt and deficit levels. Government debt was over 60 percent of gross domestic product, and deficits were running at 8 percent of GDP, more than twice the OECD average. Under Finance Minister Paul Martin’s helm the Liberal Party made large spending cuts in an effort to reduce the deficit and bring down the debt. Martin’s 1995 budget slashed departmental spending by 20 percent to cut the deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 1998. By 2000, government debt levels had dropped, the deficit was eliminated, and economic growth had increased.

Public Opinion Snapshot: Tax Cuts for the Middle Class are Good; Tax Cuts for the Rich Are Bad

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Ruy Teixeira

The Obama administration has proposed letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those making over $250,000 but extending them for those making under that amount. Conservatives in Congress are up in arms about this since keeping the tax cuts for the rich is practically a sacred cause in their eyes.

A sacred cause it may be, but a popular cause it is not. New data from a CBS News/New York Times poll clearly show that the public views tax cuts for the rich and tax cuts for the middle class very differently and no one should be fooled by conservatives’ attempts to conflate them.

Start with letting the tax cuts expire for the rich. The poll simply asked whether such a move is a good idea or a bad idea. By 53-38, the public said this is a good idea.

In vivid contrast the public said letting the tax cuts expire for the middle class was a bad idea by an overwhelming 74-19 margin.

The public’s view is therefore clear, simple, and diametrically opposed to the conservatives. Tax cuts for the rich are bad. Tax cuts for the middle class are good. Time for our policymakers to listen up and move forward.

Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. To learn more about his public opinion analysis go to the Media and Progressive Values page and theProgressive Studies program page of our website.

 

Doomed to Repeat History: The Right Re-Embraces Lunatic Legal Arguments from the Past

By Ian Millhiser

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

Download this memo (pdf)

Spend a week listening to the right, and you’ll think the founders were all modern-day Tea Partiers. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) thinks the Constitution forbids Congress to spend federal money on programs he personally disapproves of. Justice Clarence Thomas thinks that the minimum wage, child labor laws, and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters all violate the Constitution. And of course, everyone on the right thinks that health reform is unconstitutional.

It’s enough to make you think they’re just making it up as they go along. It clearly can’t be the case that every single law cherished by progressives just happens to be unconstitutional.

the reality is even worse. When the right’s view of the Constitution was ascendant 75 years ago, basic protections such as a restriction on child labor were declared unconstitutional; laws banning discrimination were unthinkable; and Social Security was widely viewed as next in line for the Supreme Court’s chopping block.

America’s right now wants nothing more than to revive this discredited theory of the Constitution. These conservatives are over-reading the Tenth Amendment, a provision of the Constitution that provides Congress’s power is not unlimited. So-called “tenther” conservatives are determined to use their twisted reinterpretation to shrink national leaders’ power to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. They must not be allowed to succeed for three reasons:

• Tentherism is dangerous. Monopolists seized control of entire industries during tentherism’s last period of ascendance. Workers were denied the most basic protections, while management happily invoked the long arm of the law when a labor dispute arose. Worst of all, Congress was powerless against this effort. And the Court swiftly declared congressional action unconstitutional when elected officials took even the most modest steps to protect workers or limit corporate power.
• Tentherism has no basis in constitutional text or history. Nothing in the Constitution supports tenther arguments. And tenther claims are nothing new. Each of them was raised as early as the Washington administration, and each was rejected by George Washington himself.
• Tentherism is authoritarian. Health reform, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all exist because the people’s representatives said they should exist. The tenthers express goal is to make the Supreme Court strip these elected representatives of power and impose a conservative agenda upon the nation.

The right’s quizzical lawsuits challenging health reform are just the tip of the tenther iceberg. If these lawsuits succeed, much of America’s most cherished laws could be next against the wall.

Fixing Wall Street, Protecting Main Street

By Pat Garofalo

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

See also: Ask the Expert: Pat Garofalo on Financial Regulatory Reform

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate will soon vote on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a financial regulatory reform bill aimed at correcting the deficiencies in our nation’s financial regulatory system that led to the financial meltdown of 2008. If enacted, the bill will put in place the most significant improvements to the nation’s regulatory framework since the New Deal.

There were many reasons for the economic collapse of 2008, the effects of which are still being felt by families across the country, but chief among them was a financial system that worked in the interests of Wall Street and too-big-to-fail financial institutions, and against the interests of consumers, especially homeowners, but including all kinds of Americans in need of consumer finance. Adequate safeguards were not in place to protect consumers from predatory financial products and Wall Street excess, and these products were then securitized and sold around the world, amplifying risk while minimizing the responsibility of the culpable lender.

Huge markets in complex financial instruments were allowed to grow exponentially, out of the watchful eye of regulators. Those regulators that did speak up about the growth of this “shadow banking system” were drowned out by others who believed in the conservative regulatory philosophy that the market would self-correct all ills. Companies that had previously confined their activities to traditional financial products, such as the global financial insurance giant American International Group, were allowed to mix those with riskier products and to balloon in size, as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said, “without any adult supervision.” AIG, of course, had to be rescued by the U.S. government after the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers amid the crisis of 2008.

Show Us the Money: Investors Deserve Clear and Comprehensible Pay Disclosures

by Sima J. Gandhi 

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

Read the full report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Download the report to mobile devices and e-readers from Scribd

Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez signed the biggest contract in baseball history in 2007—a 10-year contract worth potentially more than $300 million. Rodriguez receives an average $27 million annual salary, plus a $6 million bonus every time he matches the career home run totals of Willie Mays (660), Babe Ruth (714), Hank Aaron (755), and Barry Bonds (762). He pockets another $6 million if he breaks Bonds’s record.

That same year, Goldman Sachs’s CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein earned a record-breaking $70 million. Like Rodriguez, he earned two types of compensation—a $600,000 fixed salary and performance-based bonuses. But there’s one key difference: We know precisely the standards and metrics that measure Rodriguez’s performance. We don’t know Blankfein’s.

Congress requires publicly traded companies like Goldman Sachs to disclose information—including total pay and performance targets—about their executive compensation contracts. The requirement assumes shareholders will use this information to hold companies accountable for executive performance. The government does not require the disclosures to be comprehensible, however. Mandatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency charged with protecting investor interests, are often hard to understand. They are long and dense, and filled with financial jargon that even experts can have difficulty deciphering. This is a problem for shareholders as well as the broader economy. Regulators, policymakers, and the public at large have a stake in knowing whether corporate pay practices create incentives that are conducive to real and sustainable economic growth.