Posts Tagged ‘Economy’
House GOP Advances Fake Pro-Working-Mother Bill
Tuesday, 07 May 2013 11:44
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In February, in the wake of their bruising loss at the polls in the 2012 presidential election, Republicans in Congress decided to launch a concerted effort to change their image and lure back a critical group of voters who abandoned the party in droves last year: women. To that end, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) gave a high-profile speech about how the party intended to “make life work” for working families. He emphasized women-friendly ideas like improving education, reducing the cost of college, and other key work/life balance issues. Among those he touched on was the idea of flex time. Cantor said:

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If you’re a working parent, you know there’s hardly ever enough time at home to be with the kids. Too many parents have to weigh whether they can afford to miss work even for half a day to see their child off on the first day of school or attend a parent-teacher conference.

Federal laws dating back to the 1930s make it harder for parents who hold hourly jobs to balance the demands of work and home. An hourly employee cannot convert previous overtime into future comp-time or flex-time. In 1985, Congress passed a law that gave state and municipal employees this flexibility, but today still denies that same privilege to the entire private sector. That’s not right…

Imagine if we simply chose to give all employees and employers this option. A working mom could work overtime this month and use it as time off next month without having to worry about whether she’ll be able to take home enough money to pay the rent. This is the kind of common sense legislation that should be non-controversial and moves us in the right direction to help make life work for families.

Flex-time as Cantor described it sounds great on paper—every working parent’s dream even! But of course, the devil is in the details. Those details come in the form of the Working Families Flexibility Act, a bill Cantor introduced in April. Far from helping working families, the proposed legislation would instead deprive them of the longstanding right to be paid time-and-a-half for overtime. The bill would allow companies to give hourly workers comp time in lieu of overtime if the workers agree to it. That might not be such a terrible thing, except that the bill doesn’t give workers any power to decide when to use the comp time. The employer gets to decide that. If the employer fails to let the worker use a bunch of accrued comp time, the bill would allow the worker to demand the overtime compensation in cash, but it gives the company 30 days to make good on the payment. And if the company stiffs the worker on the overtime compensation, the bill prevents workers from complaining to the US Department of Labor, as they can now, and instead forces them to try to find a lawyer who will take up their cause to collect a few hundred dollars worth of back pay, a fairly toothless enforcement measure. The bill, supported by the US Chamber of Commerce, is a backdoor attempt to shield big companies like Wal-Mart from costly lawsuits they’ve seen stemming from their systematic refusal to pay low-wage workers the overtime to which they’re legally entitled.

All of this is why women’s groups aren’t signing on to the bill. The legislation “only pretends to give people the time they need to manage the dual demands of work and family,” Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership on Women and Families, said this week as the bill moved forward in the House. “It is insulting that the House is wasting time with a bill that would make things so much worse.”

Republicans’ track record of helping working families is truly dismal, and one speech from Cantor isn’t going to change that. Republicans fought the Family and Medical Leave Act tooth and nail (the first President Bush vetoed the bill twice before Bill Clinton finally signed it in to law) and have refused to expand it to include more people or paid leave so families could actually use it. This is the same party that rabidly opposes the Healthy Families Act, which would provide paid sick leave for more workers, a measure public health officials say is critical not just to family sanity but to the nation’s health. Perhaps what’s most depressing about the GOP’s new working families bill is that Republican leaders thought women were dumb enough not to notice that it was just a cynical attempt to win women’s votes while still catering to the GOP’s big corporate backers.

 
Lew Slams Wall Street Deregulation Bills
Tuesday, 07 May 2013 11:02
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The House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) plans to vote on nine separate bills this week that have been presented as technical fixes to the sweeping 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. But these measures have the potential to dramatically weaken the legislation, which was designed to prevent another financial crisis a la 2007. Now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has weighed in, condemning the measures in a letter to HFSC chair Rep. Jep Hensarling (R-Texas).

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“The derivatives provisions in the Wall Street Reform Act constitute an important part of the reforms being put into place to strengthen our financial system by improving transparency and reducing risk for market participants,” Lew wrote in the letter. (Derivatives are financial products that have values based on underlying numbers, like crop prices or interest rates; some economists believe these products helped cause the 2007 financial collapse.) “These reforms should not be weekend or repealed.”

Lew had, up until now, been silent on this set of bills. As I reported last month, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner slammed a series of nearly identical bills last year, but Lew had so far declined to address the latest proposed changes. After our story ran, a Treasury spokeswoman reached out to clarify that, “Of course the Treasury secretary would oppose any effort to weaken Wall Street reform,” and pointed to Lew’s previous public statements opposing efforts to undermine Dodd-Frank or delay its implementation.

Monday’s letter put that promise into action. “I urge Members to oppose these bills and others like it that would weaken the important regulatory changes that Wall Street Reform has made to the derivatives market,” he wrote. He added that only some of the rules governing the derivatives market have been finalized, so these bills are “premature”:

Regulators are already addressing many of the issues presented in these bills through their rule makings. In many instances, legislation is premature and aspects would be disruptive and harmful to the implementation of key reforms. We should allow the regulators to complete their ongoing rule makings, and then determine what changes, if any, might be necessary in certain areas to improve the effectiveness of these reforms.

One of the bills before the committee this week would allow certain derivatives that are traded within a corporation to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. Financial reform advocates say these kinds of trades can still pose a risk to the wider financial system. Another measure would expand the type of trading risks that banks can take on. A third bill would allow big, multinational US-based banks to escape US regulations by operating through international arms.

While some Democrats in the committee share Lew’s concerns about the measures, the bills do have bipartisan support. It is unclear whether the bills will pass. House Financial Services Committee members received some $14.8 million in contributions from the financial services and banking sectors during the last election cycle. This week, we will see where members’ loyalties lie.

 
Inside the Democracy Alliance, the Liberal Answer to the Koch Donor Network
Monday, 06 May 2013 14:46
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Once or twice a year, Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist and one-half of the “Koch brothers” duo, invites several hundred donors, big-name politicians, and conservative thinkers to a posh resort somewhere classy like Palm Springs or Aspen or Vail. The Kochs and their allies discuss how best to elect their favored politicians and spread their free-market ideas, and they hear pitches from conservative activists trying to carry out that strategy on the ground. Then the attendees make a pledge to fund the groups fighting for their causes. The Koch donor retreats are, by now, well known in political circles, and a magnet for reporters and protesters.

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What’s often left unmentioned in coverage of the Kochs’ gatherings is that Democrats and progressives do the same thing. The Democracy Alliance is an exclusive group of about 100 funders, founded in 2005 by Democratic strategist Rob Stein. Members include billionaire financier George Soros and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, who owns the New Republic magazine. Matea Gold of the Los Angeles Times was recently given a rare glimpse inside the Alliance’s operations, and she came away with a useful, fascinating story.

Since 2005, the Alliance has directed roughly $500 million to left-leaning organizations, including the Center for American Progress think tank, the watchdog Media Matters for America, and the political data firm Catalist. The Democracy Alliance, as an organization, does not make donations; instead, leaders of left-leaning organizations pitch the group’s members, and the Alliance recommends which causes its wealthy members should support. Members must give at least $200,000 annually to Alliance-backed organizations, on top of a $30,000-a-year membership fee.

The Alliance recently met over five days at a hotel in Laguna Beach, Calif., not far from the Koch donor meeting at the Renaissance Esmeralda golf resort in Palm Springs. At the Laguna Beach retreat, Gold reports, Alliance members pledged $50 million to an array of organizations.

Two story lines emerged out of the latest Alliance event. One was an intense focus on immigration reform among Alliance members as Congress considers bipartisan legislation to overhaul the country’s immigration system. The other big news was the Alliance’s endorsement of Organizing for Action, the nonprofit devoted to enacting President Obama’s second-term agenda. OFA has said it wants to raise $50 million this year, but it raked in less than $5 million in the first three months of 2013. The Alliance’s decision to back OFA, then, couldn’t have come at a better time:

Among those on hand to pitch to the donors was Jon Carson, executive director of Organizing for Action, who stressed the ways in which his group is partnering with other liberal advocacy organizations.

“One thing we’ve made very clear to everyone is we’re going to work very collaboratively with everyone out there in the progressive infrastructure,” Carson said. “We’re going to focus on the pieces we bring to the table and not duplicate things.”

[Alliance chairman (and former Mother Jones board member) Rob] McKay said Carson assuaged worries that Organizing for Action, run by former Obama campaign officials, would compete with other groups. “The biggest concern would be if OFA was just going to try to re-create the wheel in a bunch of areas where we felt significant investments have been made,” he said.

The pro-Obama group, which had already received some donations from Democracy Alliance members, was recommended for funding for one year. It will be reconsidered next year but was not included in the three-year portfolio.

The hottest topic of the conference was immigration reform, as leaders of the Service Employees International Union and other advocates emphasized that comprehensive legislation could pass this year.

“The partners were really impressed with how close we are on this, and yet how tenuous it is, even at this stage,” McKay said. “We’ve got to get this done.”

The full story is one of the better detailed accounts I’ve seen of the Democracy Alliance, which will continue to play a crucial role on immigration, gun control, and other pressing issues on Congress’ to-do list.