The state of Colorado is not waiting for Congress to act on gun reform. This week, the Colorado House approved four different gun reform bills that would enact a variety of measures: universal background checks, magazine limits, banning guns on college campuses and public buildings, and require gun purchases to pay for background checks.

Colorado forged ahead despite explicit threats from gun manufacturers themselves. Two different gun manufacturers, Magpul Industries and Alfred Manufacturing, threatened to leave the state if the reforms were signed into law — even though Democrats wrote exemptions for the two companies into the bill.

“Enough is enough. I’m sick and tired of bloodshed,” said Democratic Rep. Rhonda Shields before the bill was passed. Shields represents the district where the Aurora shootings occurred last summer. Her son was fatally shot in 2005.

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A satellite image of Hurricane Sandy

As part of his push to stop gun reforms, NRA president Wayne LaPierre wrote last week that looters “ran wild in South Brooklyn” after Hurricane Sandy and that people needed guns to defend themselves. “And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all,” he warned.

But there was a problem with LaPierre’s scare-mongering: it wasn’t based in reality. As figures from the New York Police Department showed, crime actually fell by 25 percent after Sandy struck. There was a small spike in burglaries — meaning home invasions with home owners present — but rapes, murders, robberies, assaults, and all other deadly crimes fell after the storm.

In an interview with the local media, freshman congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who represents a district in Brooklyn, scolded LaPierre for his inaccurate remarks:

JEFFRIES: Comments made by are not constructive, they’re destructive. They’re factually inaccurate, they demean the entire community of South Brooklyn. And we need to get back to a constructive conversation about how to turn things around as they relate to the gun issue in America.

Watch it:

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State senator Kelly Hancock (R-TX)

All states have certain regulators that have oversight of the practices of insurance companies (in some states this involves rate review, a power insurance companies have fought for years).

In Texas, this is called theAi??Office of Public Insurance Counsel (OPIC). OPIC made news recently when it blocked a 20 percent increase in homeowners insurance rates by State Farm. Shortly after OPIC moved to do this, Republican State senator Kelly Hancock last week filed a bill to eliminate the agency.

Texans for Public Justice pulled the numbers and found that insurers made up 8 percent of Kelly’s donors in 2012, with State Farm’s political action committee being the second-largest donor — giving $10,000.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) great performance at the Senate Banking Committee — where she asked if “too big to fail has become too big for trial” — has gone viral, with nearly 750,000 views. Watch it:

Fox News contributor and right-wing activist Erick Erickson has a truly bizarre response to Warren’s video. In an op-ed titled “If Elizabeth Warren wants to lay blame for the financial mess, she can look in the mirror,” heAi??claims that Warren is an advocate of regulations that caused the financial crisis and that she wants to prevent lawsuits against Wall Street banks:

The rich irony of Elizabeth Warren asking her question to these regulators, whose ranks she would have joined but for a Republican effort to block her nomination prior to her Senate run, is that she is an advocate of increasing the very regulations that contributed to the financial meltdown and that prevent suits against Wall Street banks. After all, Wall Street was just complying with Washingtonai??i??s orders. […] If she wants a scalp, she should look in the mirror.

Erickson’s critique is strange given the fact that the financial crisis occurred in 2008, long before Warren became charged with setting of the consumer protection bureau or was elected to the Senate. In the meantime, she has been a long-time advocate of breaking up the banks by calling for a return to Glass-Steagall. She petitioned for this in May of 2012.Ai??Erickson, on the other hand, did write about how it would be good to break up the Big Banks — but that was three months after Warren petitioned her supporters to back such an effort.

Sign our petition to the SEC calling on it to listen to Warren and end “too big for trial.”

On Sunday, the liberal advocacy group the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which was a major supporter of Warren’s Senate campaign, launched an online petition urging the SEC to try banks.

“Taking Wall Street banks to trial is necessary for real accountability,” the group wrote. “As Elizabeth Warren says, trials allow the public to learn the truth and allow regulators to better do their job of protecting the public. We call on you to end your practice of ‘too big for trial.’”

President Obama has proposed a universal background check system that would close loopholes and require criminal background checks for all gun purchases.

This proposal is very popular, with 92 percent of Americans supporting it. But how well would it actually work?

Virginia provides a test case. Here’s a report from the local media about how many guns have been stopped from going into the wrong hands thanks to background checks:

Virginia’s background check system has prevented more than 16,000 felons from buying guns since it began in 1989, according to state police records.

The records show a total 54,260 transactions have been denied during the past 24 years. The total also includes drug abusers, the mentally ill and domestic assault offenders.

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Ai??

Image courtesy of Eastern Iowa’s The Gazette

One of the right-wing myths about the minimum wage is that we don’t need to raise it because it mostly benefits teenagers who work part-time and live at home with their parents.

But the data does not bear this out. Every year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles data on the workforce. Their most recent demographics report is from year 2011. That year, 50.5 percent of Americans who earned minimum wage or less were 25 years or older. Ai??The year before, in 2010, it was 51 percent.

Read our earlier post about how progressives could use ballot initiatives to force congressional Republicans to stop blocking increases in the minimum wage.

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Congressional Republicans have already vowed to obstruct President Obama’s popular call to raise the minimum wage.

But if Republicans in Congress stop a wage hike at the federal level, they may be welcoming a barrage of minimum wage ballot initiatives that not only would allow states to forge ahead on their own, but also would increase voter turnout that could prove politically disastrous for the Republican Party.

Here’s a few examples showing why. In 1998, the state of Washington had a minimum wage ballot initiative that overwhelmingly passed. It received more votes than any other initiative or candidate on the ballot, outpacing even the vote total of Sen. Patty Murray (D). Ai??Polling showed that “when people found out that the minimum wage initiative was on the ballot, the turnout of voters increased by 4%. This was even more pronounced among voters with poor voting histories, who accounted for 52% of the drop-off voters who were moved by this issue.” Many attributed the fact that Democrats won 50 percent of the House contests and narrowly won the Senate back to the minimum wage ballot initiative.

In Missouri, Lake Research Partners found that a 2006 ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage made Democratic voters “twice as likely” to vote for Democrat Claire McCaskill over Republican Jim Talent.

TheAi??Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, whichAi??mobilizes for progressive ballot initiatives, provided us a summary of research that they’ve done on the turnout effects related to wage initiatives. In addition to the statistic on Washington state, here are their major findings:

Turnout is consistently higher in initiativeAi??than non-initiative states, 7-9% higher in mid-term elections.
In 2004 in Nevada, 24% of all voters wereAi??motivated by the minimum wage ballot question,Ai??including 34% of DemocraticAi??voters, 35% of independents, 35% of low income voters, 33%Ai??of …

Defense contractors continue to bilk taxpayers with little oversight.

In 2010, the federal government has enacted a two year freeze on cost of living adjustments for federal employees, an austerity measure championed by President Obama. Now, the Democrats have lifted that freeze and sought small increases for federal workers.

Today, House Republicans voted to extend the pay freeze for another nine months. In doing so, they argue that federal workers should not get pay increases while many Americas in the private sector are not getting them.

But while both Congress and the President have championed pay freezes for federal employees at some point over the past two years, one group has gotten away with earning enormous salaries at taxpayer expense: defense contractors.

Defense contractor pay is currently capped at $763,000, which is almost twice what President Obama’s salary is. Last December, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) inserted a measure into the defense authorization bill that would’ve capped these salaries to $230,700 — the salary of the Vice President of the United States.

Unfortunately, this measure did not make it into the final bill, which simply promised to study the contractor pay cap.

Essentially, the House Republicans are saying that hard-working employees at the Environmental Protection Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation should have their salaries frozen, but if you work for Lockheed Martin or Halliburton, you can continue to fleece American taxpayers.

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The threat of climate change and the lack of quality energy infrastructure are both major problems that face Americans. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have introduced a pollution tax bill to tackle both.

Their bill would tax carbon and methaneAi??emissions and ask polluters to pay $20 per ton of each substance they emit. The tax would then increase by 5.6 percent each year for the next ten years.

60 percent of the revenue generated by this new tax would Ai??go to monthly rebates to Americans for their energy costs. The rest would be spent on weatherizing American homes, investing in clean energy, and creating a privateAi??investment fund for green technology.

Watch Sanders and Boxer introduce their bill:

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Corporate lobbyists want to pass so-called “right to work” laws nationwide to weaken unions and crush organized labor. In Missouri, Republican lawmakers recently held a strategy session with a number of right-wing special interest groups where they laid out their plan to pass such an anti-union law.

At one point, Ai??Steve Hunter, a former Missouri lawmaker who took up work as a lobbyist after leaving public service, told the Republicans that they would lose donors if they don’t take up a radical anti-union bill:Ai??ai???If you donai??i??t take on the fights, and these guys that are giving money? I mean, this is just all basic 101. Youai??i??re going to start losing donors.ai???

Another speaker promises that if lawmakers push for this bill, “we want to make sure your backs are covered when it comes time for re-election. And thatai??i??s where we come in. To have the groundwork laid for you. So your backs can be covered.”

Progress Missouri captured these remarks and others in an audio recording of the entire meeting. Listen to it:

“Our legislators need to be listening to Missourians and solving Missouri problems, not following the orders of extreme billionaires and their secretive front groups,” said Progress Missouri Executive Director Sean Soendker Nicholson. “These bills are all about limiting the political voices of workers and the middle class on behalf of CEOs and corporations.ai???

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Yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took part in a Senate Banking Committee hearing titled “Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections.”

Warren asked the committee — consisting of bank regulators from the federal government — about the “last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial.” Not a single witness was able to bring up anAi??occurrenceAi??of the government actually taking a big bank to trial in recent times. This is how Warren followed up on that shocking response from federal regulators:

WARREN:Anyone else want to tell me about the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? [silence] I just want to note on this, there are district attorneys and U.S. Attorneys who are out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example as they put it. I’m really concerned that too big too fail has become too big to jail. That just seems wrong to me. [applause from audience]

Watch it (relevant section at 03:26):

In advance of any upcoming budget deal, progressive groups have begun pushing House Democrats to sign a letter to President Obama indicating that they will not back anything that cuts entitlement benefits. As of Wednesday, the letter, originally written by progressive Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Mark Takano (D-CA), had 10 additional signers.

The coalition pushing the letter, including the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, MoveOn.org and Credo Action, announced it also added two unions, the National Nurses Union and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, to the list.

The groups said 110,000 supporters had also signed the letter within 24 hours of it being put online and supporters have placed more than 4,000 calls to members of Congress.

What if American workers were actually paid for increases in productivity?

Activists are mobilizing around President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage to $9.00, and polling shows that Americans across the political spectrum agree with such a policy.

But here’s an interesting fact about what the minimum wage could be instead. The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s John Dewitt looked at what the minimum wage would be if it simply rose with productivity — that is, if workers were actually paid for the increasing amount of output — since 1968, and found that it would be almost 3 times what it is now:

Since 1968, however, productivity growth has far outpaced the minimum wage. If the minimum wage had continued to move with average productivity after1968, it would have reached $21.72 per hour in 2012 ai??i?? a rate well above the average production worker wage. If minimum-wage workers received only half of the productivity gains over the period, the federal minimum would be $15.34.

Even Obama’s modest plan to raise the minimum wage is expected to face intense opposition from Big Business and its lobbyists.

A Quinnipac University poll released last week finds that 92 percent of Americans support President Obama’s proposal for universal background checks for gun purchases (seven percent oppose). Yet most Republican lawmakers in Congress have yet to voice support for such a policy, and continue to side with the fringe of American public opinion.

Opposition to background checks is represents such a small portion of Americans that there are actually more Americans who believe that Elvis is alive — eight percent of respondents to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll thought that the King of Rock n’Roll may be living it up somewhere.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan.

(Photo credit: Flickr user psd)

Last night, President Obama made the proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour and then to index it to inflation. This would be a wage increase for workers in every single state except Washington.

While Republicans have already stated their intention to obstruct this proposal, they should know that raising the minimum wage is actually wildly popular. Polling conducted by Lake Research in February 2012 found that voters actually want a proposal even more progressive than Obama’s suggestion.

Their poll found that 73 percent of voters want to see the minimum wage raised to $10 an hour by 2014. This includes 50 percent of Republicans.

Some Members of Congress want to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits. President Obama has indicated he is still open to cutting Social Security benefits with a so-called “Chained CPI.”

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is organizing to stop these benefit cuts. He’s circulating a letter among his colleagues that states the following:

We will vote against any and every cut to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security benefits — including raising the retirement age or cutting the cost of living adjustments that our constituents earned and need.

But he needs your help for the letter to gain momentum. With our friends at Democracy for America, CREDO Action, Ai??Social Security Works, Working Families Party, Move On, and Rebuild The Dream, we’re working on getting citizen co-sponsors of Grayson’s letter. Click here to sign on.

As Congress continues to debate a possible replacement to the $1.2 trillion in sequestration-related cuts set to kick in on March 1, a coalition of progressive organizations on Wednesday launched an effort urging Democratic lawmakers to reject to any deal that entails cuts to benefits from popular entitlement programs.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy For America, MoveOn, CREDO Action, Rebuild The Dream, the New York-based Working Families Party and Social Security Work are endorsing a letter to President Barack Obama, signed by Reps. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) and Mark Takano (D-Calif.), warning against cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) wants to raise the Medicare age. He says he wants to do this to save money, but he opposes letting Medicare negotiate for drug prices — meaning he would rather seniors bear the burden with benefit cuts than cut into Big Pharma’s profits.

Today, several lobbyists who represent the industry will be throwing him a fundraising lunch in Washington, D.C. The lunch will be held at Charlie Palmer Steak, a popular fundraising spot, and individuals can attend for $500 or host for $1,000. Meanwhile, political action committees can attend for $1,000 and host for $2,500. Here are the lobbyists who represent the industry who will be hosting:

John Herzog: Herzog represents Salix Pharmaceuticals, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, Astellas Pharmas USA, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Allergan Inc., Novartis AG, and other Big Pharma clients. He also happens to be a former aide to Alexander.
Jeff Kimbell: Kimbell works for the same firm as Herzog and has a similiar Big Pharma client list.
Mathew Lapinksi: Lapinski represents AmerisourceBergen Corporation.
Katie Openheim: Openheim had a single client in 2012, Japanese drugmaker Eisai.
Jennifer Swenson: Swenson’s only 2012 client was Pfizer.
Rachel Mack: Mack’s only client in 2012 was Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

There will doubtlessly be additional industry lobbyists at the event, but weak disclosure laws mean it will take months for us to learn their identities.

Click here to join our Take Back Democracy campaign to help stop the influence of money in our politics.

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State Senator Bill Jackson (R)

Yesterday, Georgia state senator Bill Jackson (R) addressed his colleagues by attacking sensible gun regulations. During the climax of his speech, Jackson implied that frying pans and hammers are as dangerous or more dangerous than guns:

JACKSON: In the meantime, the gentleman from the 22nd, my colleague he’s worried about guns, and you know insinuating guns. They killin’ people with frying pans. They killing people with hammers. There’s more murders with hammers last years than there was shotguns, pistols, and ak-47’s. Let’s help the people that need the help. That’s the end of this story. Thank you very much.

Watch video of Jackson provided by Better Georgia:

For the record, 496 people were killed by hammers and clubs in 2011. There were 9,146 firearm deaths.

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Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week announced that he is recommending Congress limit military pay increases to 1 percent in 2014. In comparison, the pay increase in 2013 was 1.7 percent.

To put this in perspective, this is the smallest pay increase since 1962, when there was no pay increase. Despite the country’s involvement in protracted wars, pay increases for men and women in uniform have continued to decline. In 1978, when the country wasn’t even at war, the military’s pay increased by 6.2 percent.

The U.S. spends more on its military than almost the rest of the world combined, and the budget is rife with waste. But there is no evidence that the meager salaries of most members of the armed services is a major contributor to this waste. Polling shows that while Americans favor reducing waste in the Pentagon budget, they oppose major reductions in military pay.

It is a frequent conservative mantra that government taxation and regulation prevent economic growth. EconomistsAi??Atif Mian and Amir Sufi looked at this claim for a new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Using survey data from the National Federation of Independent Business, the two researchers found that when businesses complained most of lack of sales and demand, unemployment was highest. The research also showed that “there was almost no correlation between job growth in a state from 2008 to 2011 and the increase in the percentage of businesses citing regulation and taxes as their primary concern. In fact, if anything, the correlation is positive.”

This new research, which again relies on the complaints of businesses themselves, seems to undermine this conservative mantra.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) just announced that he will hold up President Obama’s nominees to head the Pentagon and CIA until he gets more information about the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

Graham’s justification is puzzling because Obama’s nominees have nothing to do with this issue. But what if the Senator is holding up the nominees — specifically, Chuck Hagel — for another reason?

As we’ve noted before, Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel is a critic of the Pentagon’s spending, calling it “bloated” and demanding that it must be “pared down.” Graham has been a critic of Pentagon cuts, categorically opposing themAi??in a speech this past December.

The Senator is widely considered to be vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right, so he has needed to amass aAi??sizableAi??campaign warchest. To do this, he’s been courting defense industry donors. In this cycle, Boeing is his seventh-largest donor, and Lockheed Martin is his eleventh (together they’ve given $45,100).

Additionally, his second-largest donor is Nelson, Mullins et al, a lobbying firm, giving him $74,084 between its political action committee and employees. The firm has a number of corporate clients, but one of its major ones in 2012 was defense contractor General Dynamics, which paid it $120,000.

Its certainly possible that Graham has ideological objections to Hagel or any of the other Obama nominees he has opposed. But his influx of defense contractor cash creates another possibility.

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During anAi??appearanceAi??on Fox News, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was asked about raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67. She strongly rebuked the idea, saying that beneficiaries aren’t going to “evaporate from the face of the earth for two years”:

PELOSI: Those people are not going to evaporate from the face of the earth for two years, they’re going to have medical needs and they’re going to be attended to. And the earlier the intervention for it, the less the cost will be and the better the quality of life. I do think we should subject every federal dollar that is spent to the harshest scrutiny. I do think the challenge in Medicare is not Medicare it’s health care costs in general. […] There is money to be saved there, I don’t think it has to come out of benefits or beneficiaries, and I don’t think you have to raise the age.

Watch it:

Recall that raising the Medicare age to 67 wouldAi??pass on costs to seniors of $11.4 billionAi??every year.

Click hereAi??to pledge to hold any Democrat who agrees to a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits accountable.

After the tragedy at Sandy Hook, special interest lobbyists for the NRA and the gun industry are actually trying to expand the number of guns out on the streets. In Arkansas, they actually succeeded in lifting the ban on guns in church.

But in other communities, citizens are fighting the NRA and winning. In Wyoming, the House passed an NRA-backed bill to allow guns on college campuses.

But educators, led by University of Wyoming PresidentAi??Tom Buchanan, got involved. “Our colleges and universities have to be safe and secure sanctuaries for learning,” he told the press, rallying educators to testify against the bill and petition their lawmakers. “Weapons on campus or in the classroom would have a chilling and unacceptable impact on education.”

Following the educator outrage, the Senate Education Committee chose to take no action on the bill, effectively killing it.

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