Republican unite against the unemployed!

Before recessing for the July 4th weekend, the United States Senate failed to extend unemployment benefits for the nation's long term unemployed. As a result, 1.4 million unemployed workers have lost their only source of income.

Every single Republican Senator and a handful of Democrats voted against the extension!

This is the worse recession since the Great Depression. 15 million people are out of work. Almost half of the unemployed have been jobless for six months or more, the standard measure for long-term unemployment. Millions more are not even counted, having dropped out of the labor market entirely, 650,000 last month alone. Yet the Republican Party is united in opposing an extension of unemployment benefits because they fear that it will increase the deficit or even more insanely they believe that unemployment benefits undermine the unemployeds' incentive to work.

This position is cruel particularly in light of the Republicans united opposition to legislation requiring billionaire hedge fund and private equity firm operators to pay federal income taxes at the same rates as other Americans.

It is also bad economics since unemployment benefits are among the most effective forms of economic stimulus, something the slumping economy sorely needs.

Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, refutes the Republicans harmful and uninformed position writing:

When the economy is booming, and lack of sufficient willing workers is limiting growth, generous unemployment benefits may keep employment lower than it would have been otherwise. But as you may have noticed, right now the economy isn’t booming — again, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening. Cutting off benefits to the unemployed will make them even more desperate for work — but they can’t take jobs that aren’t there.

Wait: there’s more. One main reason there aren’t enough jobs right now is weak consumer demand. Helping the unemployed, by putting money in the pockets of people who badly need it, helps support consumer spending. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office rates aid to the unemployed as a highly cost-effective form of economic stimulus. And unlike, say, large infrastructure projects, aid to the unemployed creates jobs quickly — while allowing that aid to lapse, which is what is happening right now, is a recipe for even weaker job growth, not in the distant future but over the next few months.

But won’t extending unemployment benefits worsen the budget deficit? Yes, slightly — but as I and others have been arguing at length, penny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems. And penny-pinching at the expense of the unemployed is cruel as well as misguided.

So, is there any chance that these arguments will get through? Not, I fear, to Republicans: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, in this case, his hope of retaking Congress — “depends upon his not understanding it.” But there are also centrist Democrats who have bought into the arguments against helping the unemployed. It’s up to them to step back, realize that they have been misled — and do the right thing by passing extended benefits.

The entire column is linked.

Wisconsin's unemployed need jobs

If you lost your job last year, you're not alone. There are now 15.3 million Americans who are officially unemployed, up from 7.5 million in December 2007. A record 40% have been unemployed for more than six months.

Wisconsin's unemployment rate surged to 8.7% in December from 8.2% in November.

The state lost a total of 163,000 jobs in 2009, more than 26,000 in December alone.

The four-county metro Milwaukee area has been particularly hard hit losing 48,200 jobs (5.7% of total employment), the third-deepest percentage loss in the nation. Only Las Vegas, where employment levels fell 7.4% and Detroit, which fell 6.2%, lost a greater percentage of their jobs .

The employment picture is even worse than the official data suggests.

In the past year 82,840 workers dropped out of the Wisconsin labor market, 13,400 in December alone.

If discouraged workers are counted, Wisconsin's unemployment rate jumps to 11.4%. And if you include people who are working part-time only because they cannot find full-time employment the rate jumps 13.2%.

Wisconsin's working people are hurting. Job loss is undermining families and communities across the state.

Bankruptcies have soared, 30% last year, following a 35% increase the year before contributing to a record number foreclosure filings as job cuts make it difficult for homeowners to keep up with their monthly mortgage payments.

Preliminary figures show there were 30,624 foreclosure filings in the state last year, up almost 20% from a record 25,541 in 2008, Madison-based ForeclosureAlarm.com, which tracks foreclosures through court documents, reported. Milwaukee leads the way with more than 5,800 foreclosure filings.

The Wisconsin Senate Republican response to these alarming numbers is to propose more of the very same policies-reducing regulations and taxes - that caused the Great Recession.

Their press release says nothing they haven't said for the past thirty years. No matter what ails the economy and despite all the evidence, including massive job loss and declining real wages, Wisconsin's Republican leadership prescribes the same failed medicine.

Their tax cut proposals, like eliminating capital gains, corporate taxes and combined reporting, are the least effective form of economic stimulus. Upper income, capital gains and dividend tax cuts were the centerpiece of the Bush administration's economic agenda. The result-anemic growth, no net job creation, the most unequal distribution of income since 1929 and soaring deficits.

Republican insistence that tax cuts be one third of the $787 billion stimulus package and President Obama's acquiescence significantly undermined its effectiveness according to a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report .

The report notes that the February 2009 economic stimulus package included $286 billion in tax cuts, many directed towards business. It concludes that "the evidence ... suggests that a business tax subsidy may not necessarily be the best choice for fiscal stimulus" because "product demand appears to be the primary determinant of hiring."

When firms are saddled with excess capacity which is currently a low 72%, investment tax credits will not stimulate investment.

Businesses and their advocacy organizations like the MMAC and WMC will always seek taxpayer subsidies, and apparently the Wisconsin's Republican Party will always help them, because profit margins increase when taxes are reduced. But these taxpayer funded subsidies do not create jobs.

Unfortunately, the state's Democratic leadership hasn't offered much help to the Wisconsin's workers either. It recently passed legislation that includes a post secondary education tax credit for businesses, higher annual limits on angel investment tax credits and other provisions, but nothing that will help put the Wisconsin's 251,000 unemployed workers back to work.

The Obama administration's failure to enact a stimulus package large enough and targeted to create jobs led to the Democrats stunning defeat in Massachusetts.

Wisconsin workers need work. Is anybody listening?

On November 4th remember which political party is been better for your wallet?

Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants

By TOMMY McCALL

Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index* would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

(reprinted from the New York Times, October 14, 2008)

Michael Moore's "Sicko" Opens Soon, Frames Upcoming Elections!

Michael Moore's latest film, "Sicko," is a scathing indictment of the costly and ineffective American healthcare system. It is also, by most accounts, his best, most sophisticated film.

Just as Fahrenheit 9/11 used humor and pathos to raise critical questions about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, "Sicko" promises to do the same for the U.S. system of private medical insurance.



In the film Moore asks how can the richest country in the world allow 45 million of its citizens to go without healthcare? And why does our healthcare system perform so poorly (it is ranked 37th just ahead of Slovenia) when we spend more money (16% of our total GDP) on healthcare than any nation on earth?

The film critic, A O Scott, writes in a very favorable review in the New York Times (May 22, 2007) that "Sicko:”

"...contends that the American system of private medical insurance is a disaster, and that a state-run system, such as exists nearly everywhere else in the industrialized world, would be better. This argument is illustrated with anecdotes and statistics — terrible stories about Americans denied medical care or forced into bankruptcy to pay for it; grim actuarial data about life expectancy and infant mortality; damning tallies of dollars donated to political campaigns — but it is grounded in a basic philosophical assumption about the proper relationship between a government and its citizens.

Mr. Moore has ...never before made a film that stated his bedrock ideological principles so clearly and accessibly. His earlier films have been morality tales, populated by victims and villains, with himself as the dogged go-between, nodding in sympathy with the downtrodden and then marching off to beard the bad guys in their dens of power and privilege. This method can pay off in prankish comedy or emotional intensity — like any showman, Mr. Moore wants you to laugh and cry — but it can also feel manipulative and simplistic.

In “Sicko,” however, he refrains from hunting down the C.E.O.’s of insurance companies, or from hinting at dark conspiracies against the sick. Concentrating on Americans who have insurance (after a witty, troubling acknowledgment of the millions who don’t), Mr. Moore talks to people who have been ensnared, sometimes fatally, in a for-profit bureaucracy and also to people who have made their livings within the system. The testimony is poignant and also infuriating, and none of it is likely to be surprising to anyone, Republican or Democrat, who has tried to see an out-of-plan specialist or dispute a payment.

If you listen to what the leaders of both political parties are saying, it seems unlikely that the diagnosis offered by “Sicko” will be contested. I haven’t heard many speeches lately boasting about how well our health care system works. In this sense “Sicko” is the least controversial and most broadly appealing of Mr. Moore’s movies. (It is also, perhaps improbably, the funniest and the most tightly edited.) The argument it inspires will mainly be about the nature of the cure, and it is here that Mr. Moore’s contribution will be most provocative and also, therefore, most useful.

“Sicko” is not a fine-grained analysis of policy alternatives... This film presents, instead, a simple compare-and-contrast exercise. Here is our way, and here is another way, variously applied in Canada, France, Britain and yes, Cuba. The salient difference is that, in those countries, where much of the second half of “Sicko” takes place, the state provides free medical care.

With evident glee (and a bit of theatrical faux-naïveté) Mr. Moore sets out to challenge some widely held American notions about socialized medicine. He finds that British doctors are happy and well paid, that Canadians don’t have to wait very long in emergency rooms, and that the French are not taxed into penury...

Yes, the utopian picture of France in “Sicko” may be overstated, but show me the filmmaker — especially a two-time Cannes prizewinner — who isn’t a Francophile of one kind or another. Mr. Moore’s funny valentine to a country where the government will send someone to a new mother’s house to do laundry and make carrot soup turns out to be as central to his purpose as his chat with Tony Benn, an old lion of Old Labor in Britain. Mr. Benn reads from a pamphlet announcing the creation of the British National Health Service in 1948, and explains it not as an instance of state paternalism but as a triumph of democracy.

More precisely, of social democracy, a phrase that has long seemed foreign to the American political lexicon... Mr. Moore is less interested in tracing the history of American exceptionalism than in opposing it. He wants us to be more like everybody else. When he plaintively asks, “Who are we?,” he is not really wondering why our traditions of neighborliness and generosity have not found political expression in an expansive system of social welfare. He is insisting that such a system should exist, and also, rather ingeniously, daring his critics to explain why it shouldn’t.

Helathcare reform has emerged as a key political issue in Wisconsin. Robert Kraig, communications and program director for Wisconsin Citizen Action noted: "In the 2006 elections the people of Wisconsin sent the Legislature an overwhelming mandate for genuine health care reform. Local advisory referendums throughout the state asking the Legislature to guarantee health care coverage and reduce costs passed by an astounding average of 83 to 17 percent. Last year's controversial defeat of a bill that would have given the Legislature a deadline to enact real health care reform became the top issue in pivotal state Senate and state Assembly races. It led to progressives gaining control of the Senate, and helped to elect to the State Assembly the largest progressive freshman class in over three decades elections."

It is widely anticipate that in the next few weeks the Senate Democrats led by Senate Majority leader, Judy Robson, a nurse, will add universal healthcare to this year's state budget, expanding on Governor Doyle's initiative, Badgercare Plus, that would provide healthcare coverage to all of the state's children.

"Sicko" is more than an entertaining film. It is a major political event that will help shape the 2008 elections.

The film opens in New York City tomorrow and nationally on June 29. It opens in Milwaukee on the 29th at the Oriental Theatre.

Olbermann: The Government Has Failed US

In November the American people overwhelmingly registered their opposition to the War in Iraq by throwing out Republican Congressmen who led us to war and returning the United States' Congress to Democratic control.

Support for the War has fallen to its lowest level ever. President Bush's approval rating is approaching an all-time low.

Still, our young soldiers and Marines, not to mention innocent Iraqi citziens, continue to die, sacrificed on the alter of President Bush's delusions and vanity.

This week, many of the very Democrats who rode the anti-war wave to victory caved in to the Bush administration and voted to continue to fund the war with no timetable for withdrawal. Watch and listen to Keith Olbermann's response: "The Government has failed us."