MemphisIt’s interesting to watch the Washington two-step ignited by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s pushback against outside groups trying to mobilize against her progressive advocacy and the by catch of other fish squirming in her net.To refresh your memory when the Third Way, a group of more conservative sometime Democrats, pushed against her more populist proposals to expand Social Security, she not only bucked back, but demanded disclosures from banks about where their corporate contributions were going, including to such outfits.In some collateral damage others in turn then cast aspersions at President Obama’s naming of John Podesta, a former Clinton chief-of-staff and liberal DC playmaker, insinuating that his work with the progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress, and his large cardex of corporate donors might influence his work in the White House.Now, the current President of CAP, Neera Tanden, has released the list of their corporate donors for the first time, saying none of them impact their work.
The Center for American Progress has done some good work, and did so under Podesta, and for my part, I liked him and his work in all the dealings I have ever had with him.He is a calm and battletested operator who doesn’t wilt, and that’s good for the President, the White House, and it has had value, whether his advice was taken or not, to ACORN in our day and no doubt to others.No shrinking violet, he had never released his list of donors and probably never lost a moment’s sleep about it, no matter what anyone might have thought about it, one way or another.I’m good with that.He let the chips fall where they may when he ran CAP, and played the hand well and according to his own lights.
I don’t know Neera Tanden.She just released their donor list which has few surprises amongbig banks, tech, education, and health companies, but does have some when it comes to foreign governments like Taiwan and Japan showing up in the roster, though it’s good to see they are interested in “American progress.”Tanden of course says,
“… the donations have no impact on its work. ‘This is an institution that tries to find the right answers,’ she said in an interview on Thursday. ‘It does not answer to the agenda of any of its individual supporters or corporations.’”
As far as the two-step goes, she’s probably right.All of their donors are too smart and shrewd to try and directly “impact” their reports or impose their “agenda,” but so what, that’s not why they are giving anyway.Their donations are about the coin of the lobbying realm:influence and access.To the degree CAP and the hundreds of others smaller, lefter, righter, or whatevers are operating in the space in DC that is trying to make public policy, then access and influence, even if on others or in general, rather than any specific reports, is the coin of the realm.Anyone would be naïve to think otherwise, no matter how the points are parsed and the story is spun.
The donors, especially the big corporations, have their own experts and outside consultants to crank out reports for them.They don’t need these outfits to do that work, though sometimes it is advantageous if the work is done by others with more legitimacy and aligns with your interests of course.
But, more than that, the influence and access coming from the corporations is always an A/E card without a limit in the politics of Washington.Information is useful and so is knowing people.Being at the table as policy alternatives are debated and offering your “perspective” becomes part of the calculus.Meeting and “exploring” positions becomes part of the shaping that produces the final position.Is this corrupt?Of course not.Is this normal and human?Of course.Is it pristine, pure, independent, and objective?No not that either, but it is part of how the sausage is made.
These outfits and their relationships and so-called partnerships are about their corporate and private interests and not the public interest though, and in the transactional world of DC politics and policy, this is part of the grist for the mill.The biggest bank account in DC may be the “favors” bank, and the “ask” always comes, and the fact that it doesn’t hurt to say “yes,” doesn’t mean that it had no value, impact, or influence.
That’s just the reality.No shaming or finger pointing involved.Senator Warren is right to want to know.Even the Third Way is right to want to know all of the donors.The rest of us need to know that somewhere all of their fingerprints are on the final reports and policy, no matter how light to the touch, not because it’s good or bad at this point, but simply because that’s the way it is in Washington, and to think otherwise is simply naïve or with all due respect to Ms. Tanden, simply beside the point.
Memphis The ACORN Canada organizing staff held its Year End/Year Begin staff meeting in Memphis with a side trip to Little Rock this year.Among the highlights of the meetings in Memphis were visits at the University of Memphis with ex-Texas and South Dakota ACORN organizer, Steve Soifer, now head of the Social Work Department there along with his associate, Professor Elena de la Vega, an expert in public policy impacting poverty, and the planner par excellence, Ken Reardon, who heads the regional and local planning department at the University, and led the planning effort for ACORN in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina while he was at Cornell.
Both gave fascinating and brilliant expositions of the current situation in Memphis, but the questions that kept coming back from the organizers repeatedly revolved around “what” and “why” and “how” did Memphis find itself in such a mess of a situation.The Canadians had gotten a deal from the Sheraton so were housed right across from the Convention Center at the tip of what used to be called when it opened the Mid-America Mall but was now a virtually deserted, specter-of-Detroit type of wasteland running the bit over a mile from the Sheraton to Beale Street and its two or three blocks of faux blues-for-tourist spots.There was nothing around.When the organizers walked from the hotel to Beale Street they ran into four cops and two community watch people during the entire more than a mile trek and that meant a one-to-one ratio with the other passersby on the strip.
It was all painful to see.I remember 35 years ago almost exactly in 1978 when ACORN held its first national convention in Memphis at the end of the first week of December that year it was also icy and freezing cold, but we had a 1000 people there and were demanding full political representation from the Democratic Party at their mid-term convention which they were holding almost exactly where we were staying.We marched from around Beale Street and the famous landmarks of civil rights history the entire length of the Mid-America Mall and it was packed with people even in the chill with the police then scurrying to deal with pedestrians, traffic, and of course the Democrats themselves.Now what was a lively testament to the future of the city was a deserted space ribboned with tracks and hardly filled trolley cars.
Steve Soifer
Soifer commented that there are no city operated homeless shelters and the nonprofit shelters charge $7 per night for those unfortunate enough to be on the streets.Reardon said surveys had found 2500 homeless in the downtown area and this had been part of the inspiration in his working with the activist St. Patrick’s Catholic Church downtown to create the Vance Avenue Collaborative, which has been waging a very effective, if longshot, campaign to save the last public housing project, the 500-unit Foote Homes, and try to get a commitment for equitable development in the near downtown, African-American communities.
The “why” and “how” for the disaster of Memphis has to lie squarely with the business community and their political vassals.The mortgaging of their future with one ill begotten tax incremental finance district after another and one bond issue fueled development adding nothing to the job market or tax base while encumbering 20 or more years of all sales tax revenues putting all of the eggs in an empty basket.Add to that the sprawling county, the we’re-here-from-Mars-hospital-district, and the constant tensions of an almost 70% black city with its huge white flight suburbs and it’s now a mess in Memphis where a great city is facing a Detroit future thanks to an abysmal failure of civic leadership and resistance to popular will and democracy.
MemphisIt was only a matter of time before some of the paradoxes embedded in the Affordable Care Act began to make too many employers, both good and bad, wonder if they couldn’t do better when they pay for health insurance.We’ve talked about some of the problems before, especially the incongruities around the loopholes within the definition of affordable and therefore qualified health plans.
The big issue for us with lower income workers has been that a low premium, exorbitantly high deductible plan offering essentially NO coverage past the minimum guarantees could be classified as affordable and qualified solely based on the fact that the monthly premium was under 9.5% of gross wages, regardless of the embedded barriers to actually using the health plan within your income if the deductibles were $3000, $4000, or $5000, all of which aren’t considered when it comes to affordability.And, yes, that’s crazy!
The same thing is true for spouses and dependents.If your employer provides you with qualified health insurance, then unless your children are eligible for Medicaid because of your lower income, they and your spouse are dependents on your policy. There are no reasonable limits on the cost of dependent coverage.They are not barred from purchasing separate insurance with the state or federal marketplace, but they are barred from receiving premium tax credits or cost sharing, which is what makes getting insurance attractive for millions.I’ve heard conversations about separations and whether or not filing taxes separately would allow spouses to access the marketplace in such situations, but none of these schemes are allowable.
Interestingly some smaller employers with less than 50 workers are starting to look at this in the way we knew would be inevitable.There are no fines for them not offering coverage and indeed surveys indicate that such smaller enterprises are now only providing employee health coverage in 38% of such outfits compared to 47% only a decade ago.With a blend of lower waged workers, they are realizing that they may be able to spend the same amount of money and actually help their workers and their workers family by adding their expenditure to pay envelopes or separate health purchase funds so that their employees can get better insurance for the whole family by purchasing on the exchange and benefiting from the subsidies and tax credits.
Are these loopholes or broken pieces that need to be fixed?My view is these are things that should be fixed.Unfortunately, as long as Congress is divided and the Republicans see Obamacare as something between the Alamo for the President or their own Waterloo, everyone is just pushing this thing down the road and hoping it will get there rather than trying to see how to make it work better for everyone.Employers are critical to the success of the Affordable Care Act but there are too many bells and whistles they are hearing that are encouraging them to game the system rather than making it work.Help!
Little RockIt seems straightforward.If you are going to ask for and, if fortunate, receive government money, then you are going to have to follow the law.Some Senators though had their staff undertake a study of federal contractors only to find that many of these big business were delighted to get the dollars, but somehow believed that they only had to follow whatever laws they felt like, especially when it came to their workers’ wages and health and safety:
“The report found that 32 federal contractors were among the leading companies in the amount of back pay assessed for wage violations between 2007 and 2012.‘Overall, the 49 federal contractors responsible for large violations of federal labor laws were cited for 1776 separate violations of these laws and paid $196 million in penalties and assessments.In fiscal year 2012, these same companies were awarded $81 billion in taxpayer dollars.”
You know, that’s just plain wrong, but equally appalling is the obvious conclusion that when the federal government is giving out these contracts it really doesn’t care whether or not the laws are being followed, especially when it comes to the tens of thousands of workers involved.I would almost bet money that this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to real violations, especially on wage issues, since the work of really monitoring whether or not something like the Service Contract Act was being followed to the nickel on assuring that workers were receiving proper amounts under area wage determinations would have been exhausting and difficult.
The whole point of prevailing wage statutes like SCA or Davis-Bacon or the McCarran shipbuilding act is to make sure that the federal government sets the standard as a fair and safe employer.An Obama administration plan to give preference to bidders that provided what they determined to be “good wages and benefits” was shelved, according to Times’ labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, so perhaps this is another pipe dream, but it shouldn’t be, should it?Frankly, I think they should establish themselves and their contractors as “model” employers and provide the benchmarks in these areas, but even if not that, the least we should expect is fairness and attention to the letter, if not the spirit, of laws that are meant to protect worker-citizens.
Bad actors like Tyson Food, Imperial Sugar, and British Petroleum are legendary in these reports, yet it seems the feds don’t even keep a database up to date on compliance and infractions.Maybe we need to ask the NSA with its vast computing and database capacity to take this on to keep them out of mischief and provide real worker protections as part of the package on the $307 billion in federal contracts awarded.
In the meantime it’s all about the money for these folks while the workers take the risks and we all get the hindmost.
Little RockOne of the interesting claims by the conservative right, most recently directed at the Affordable Care Act and the myriad website enrollment snafus, has been essentially that the federal government is the gang that can’t shot straight.Among the claims has been that states and certainly private businesses can do a wonderfully better job.
In light of that it was interesting to see a couple of buried tidbits in the news by way of very important, but widely neglected, follow-up.
Take the hugely controversial federal bailout in the great recession of banks, automakers and others, started by Bush and continued by Obama.It seems that in the soaring stock market and the revived profitability of the car companies, the government off loaded the last of its stock in General Motors.What was good for GM might not have been a great investment for the government in pure terms since they lost about $10 billion of the almost $50 billion they put up for the stock, though obviously that doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands of jobs saved, therefore taxes paid, and communities stabilized.For the whole bailout though the government seems to have been a winner.Of the $422 billion invested the federal government can report pure profits on the investment now of $433 billion, clearing $11 billion.Yes, they might have done better in the stock market, but $11 billion is real money and, once again, doesn’t count the impact of jobs retained and therefore income taxes collected, which is the government’s real revenue stream.
How about the states?On the same day the government was reporting profits, the states were still raking in money from tobacco sales taxes and other revenues including the billions they got from the legal settlement from the tobacco companies several years ago.
The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and four other organizations estimated that states would earn about $25 billion next year in revenue that is linked to tobacco, including $7 billion from settlements between states and leading tobacco companies. But the groups said that states were expected to spend only $481 million on programs intended to prevent or curb tobacco use, well below the $3.7 billion recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is also a marked decrease from 2002, when the states devoted $750 million to those efforts.
So, $7 billion from the tobacco settlement alone and only $481 million to actually use the settlement money for its intended purpose, saving lives of smokers and doing the education and field work to stop the increase of smokers.Only Alaska and North Dakota spent the level of money recommended by the federal government on prevention.
The rest of the states reallocated the money to balance their budgets, essentially on the back of the lives of their citizens.It goes without saying that many of these same states are also the ones that are yelling about not want to expand Medicaid in their jurisdictions because of the supposed additional healthcare costs involved and therefore essentially taking almost $7 billion that should have been used for better healthcare and transferring the costs over to the federal government at the same time they piss on the program.
The buck has to stop somewhere, but clearly the governors don’t want it to stop at the statehouse no matter what the conservatives claim, it’s still all about the facts, Jack.
DallasFigures released by the Federal Reserve indicate that citizen wealth by some indices is recovering almost to pre-recession levels.According to the Wall Street Journal:
The net worth of U.S. households and nonprofit organizations—the values of homes, stocks and other assets minus debts and other liabilities—rose 2.6%, or about $1.9 trillion, in the third quarter of 2013 to $77.3 trillion, the highest on record, according to the Federal Reserve.
The Fed’s figures aren’t adjusted for inflation, but even after accounting for rising costs—using the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge—Americans’ net worth is at record levels. The figures also aren’t adjusted for population growth, and the nation’s wealth is roughly 1% short of its peak according to another commonly used gauge, the consumer-price index.
So, that’s the good news.
The bad news is that these record setting levels are masking the fact that the same upward sweep is increasing inequality, the gap between the richer and the poor, since these good times are being disproportionately enjoyed by those folks with money in the stock market, and that’s not the poor, and equity has risen for homeowners, who were able to hang on, but that’s also no longer a tide rising lots of boats.With homeownership gains for African-American and Latino families having been rolled back to levels of thirty years ago obliterating the advances, and wiping out all of their equity, these are gains being felt by the more well off survivors of the housing crash or those lucky enough to have the resources to hang on.
Unemployment numbers continue to be high and underlying these numbers are significant levels of structurally permanent unemployment with four million workers unemployed more than six months and increasingly dropping out of the job market entirely.Since these gains in citizen wealth are coming from ownership rather than employment, it also masks wage stagnation for the vast majority of working families, even as high end, big rollers have regained pay levels at the top.
Even when there’s some good news, it’s impossible to be happy about Federal Reserve statistics that essentially establish that American citizen wealth is increasing to record levels but only for some people, not for everyone.
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Memphis It’s interesting to watch the Washington two-step ignited by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s pushback against outside groups trying to mobilize against her progressive advocacy and the by catch of other fish squirming in her net. To refresh your memory when the Third Way, a group of more conservative sometime Democrats, pushed against her more populist proposals to expand Social Security, she not only bucked back, but demanded disclosures from banks about where their corporate contributions were going, including to such outfits. In some collateral damage others in turn then cast aspersions at President Obama’s naming of John Podesta, a former Clinton chief-of-staff and liberal DC playmaker, insinuating that his work with the progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress, and his large cardex of corporate donors might influence his work in the White House. Now, the current President of CAP, Neera Tanden, has released the list of their corporate donors for the first time, saying none of them impact their work.
