The Daily Change

The Defense Department is the most wasteful part of the federal budget. We spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined, and the Pentagon has never been fully audited.

In Washington, D.C. today, dozens of demonstrators organized by USAction converged outside the lobbying headquarters of Lockheed Martin, calling on the government to “pull the pork” and cut down on defense waste in the budget. To demonstrate this, they inflated a giant pig:

Help us push for a balanced approach that cuts Pentagon waste, asks the rich to pay their fair share, and protects Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits from cuts.

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UPDATE: Here’s a video from the event:

Today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before the Senate Banking Committee. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked Bernanke about the $83.5 billion subsidy that Big Banks get every year from American taxpayers.

Warren suggested that Bernanke support a policy of ending this subsidy. After a back and forth with him about the question of “too big to fail,” Warren suggested that Big Banks — backed by the government — are causing smaller banks to get “smashed.”

WARREN: $83 billion says that there really will be a bailout for the largest financial institutions if they fail.

BERNANKE:That’s the expectation of markets, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it. […] Too big to fail is not absolute. […]

WARREN: It is working like an insurance policy. Ordinary folks pay for home owners insurance, ordinary folks pay for car insurance, and these big financial institutions are getting cheaper borrowing to the tune of $83 billion in a single year simply because people believe that the government would step in and bail them out. And I’m just saying, if they’re getting it, why shouldn’t they pay for it?

BERNANKE: I think we should get rid of it. […]

WARREN: I know we’re both trying to go in the same direction, I’m just pointing out that in all that space in between what’s happening is the Big Banks are getting a terrific break, and the little banks are just getting smashed on this, they’re not getting that kind of break, and that has long-term impact for all of the financial system.

BERNANKE: I agree with you 100 percent.

Watch it:

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Economists are warning that the upcoming sequester could severely harm the economy as government agencies at the federal, state, and local level will see sharp spending cuts.

The sequester’s cuts this year will amount to $85.3 billion. Around half of this spending will be cut from the waste-ridden defense budget, but much of the rest of it will come out of necessary investments in the country’s public infrastructure.

But there’s another area of the budget where almost as much money is spent — subsidies to Big Banks. In an editorial published last week, Bloomberg noted that the ten biggest banks get an effective annual subsidy of $83 billion from taxpayers, and that almost all their recent profits are subsidized by the federal government.

That’s only $2.3 billion short of the amount of money that the sequester cuts. It would therefore be logical if the government were to instead look at cutting these subsidies to Wall Street instead of investments in Main Street America.

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With the sequester looming, many progressive economists have made the argument that these across-the-board cuts would be damaging to the economy and that there should instead be more targeted cuts focused on defense, corporate welfare, Big Agribusiness, and other wasteful areas.

But with half of the sequester’s cuts set to fall upon the Pentagon, the defense industry is making a self-interested argument against the sequester, claiming that it would hurt military readiness (a false claim, as military expertsAi??recommendAi??twice the level of defense cuts as are in the sequester).

Here’s one example. Defense giant Northrup Grumman has set upAi??StopSequestration.com. This website asks you to petition your lawmakers to demand that they stop the sequestration, which it says would cost jobs and hurt U.S. security.

But while asking that the government not enact the sequester and sizeable cuts to defense spending, the site also fearmongers about the U.S. debt:

Government spending continues to exceed government revenues, which means that the national debt keeps growing. Without a change in spending and taxation plans, the national debt will soon reach unprecedented levels. Such debt levels risk triggering a financial crisis.

There is no evidence that the levels of U.S. debt is anywhere near close to “triggering a financial crisis.” As economist Paul Krugman points out, as “long as the economy recovers, which is an assumption built into….projections, the debt ratio will more or less stabilize soon.”

The message this defense contractor is therefore positing is this: there should be major budget cuts for Americans, but not for waste-riddled defense contractors.

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

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With the budget sequester looming, some lawmakers are compiling alternative to the across-the-board cuts, and some conservatives want to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits as part of a deal.

A new poll out today from The Hill finds that this would put them out of step with the American public and even with self-identified Republicans.

In the poll, 62 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats opposed cutting Social Security and Medicare, while 49 percent of overall respondents said they favored cutting back on defense spending. Even among Republicans, 56 percent said they would oppose defense cuts while a larger 62 percent said they would oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

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

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This morning, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee released a second video challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on his deference to the NRA and opposition to gun reforms.

In the ad, Gary Nutt, a military veteran and hunter, says that he would be a “pretty bad hunter” if he needed an assault weapon to hunt, and notes that McConnell has taken $198,615 from the gun industry during his campaigns.

Watch it:

Click here to pitch in a few dollars to help run this ad in Kentucky.

Rising tides threaten polar bears today, they may threaten the entire state of Louisiana soon.

In new research about to be released by the NationalAi??Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency concludes that the state of Louisiana will face the highest sea-level rise “on the planet.”

This sea-level rise is largely due to the effects of man-made global warming. But as Louisiana faces looming catastrophe over the next few decades, much of its congressional delegation continues to drag its feet on climate action or deny the phenomena altogether. Here’s a rundown:

Sen. David Vitter (R): Vitter warned that global warming studies are often “ridiculous psuedo-science.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R): Scalise has said that the science “is not settled” and that there “is dispute” over man-made climate change.
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D): While she has not engaged in global warming denialism, she has worked to stop the Obama administration from combating the threat of climate change.
Rep. John Fleming (R): Fleming has signed the Koch Brothers front group’s Americans For Prosperity’s pledge to block a tax designed to rein in carbon emissions.
Rep. Rodney Alexander (R): Alexander co-sponsored a resolution saying that the Ai??”impacts of climate change and proposed resolutions, tainted by the recent uncovering of climategate, are not universally accepted.”
Rep. Bill Cassidy (R): Cassidy denies global warming outright, saying it could just be a “shift in the axis” of the planet.
Rep. Charles Boustany (R): Boustany has voted against letting the Environmental Protection Agency work to stop global warming and defends subsidies for oil and gas companies.

Out of all of the delegation, only Democratic Rep. Cedric Richmond has taken actions to protect the environment and battle climate change.

With a persistently poor economy, one uphill battle unemployed Americans have to face is job discrimination. Many employers explicitly discriminate against jobless Americans, warning them not to even apply.

Joining New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., the New York City council recently passed a bill to ban this discrimination. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg just vetoed it. He had previously called the bill “misguided” and claimed that it would “hurt small businesses.”

Recall that New York City’s unemployment rate is 9.4 percent. The council is expected to try to override Bloomberg’s veto.

Erskine Bowles

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have released yet another austerity plan that lowers taxes on corporations while proposing Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts.

But in a surprising statistic released from Alan Grayson’s office, it appears that there’s one deficit-enlarging tax break that Bowles personally benefits from that he is refusing to touch.

According to the SEC, Bowles owns 20,000 restricted stock units in Facebook. Thanks to Facebook’s ability to claim tax deductions worth $16 billion — what the company raised in its recent IPO — it is able to collect a $500 million tax refund, which would zero out its 2012 taxes.

As a result of this tax loophole, the value of Erskine Bowlesai??i?? share of the company increased by $114,000.

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

Call on New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to bring a paid sick days bill to a vote.

New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn is considered a front-runner for that city’s mayoral race, but her bid has been dragged down by the factthat she refuses to allow a vote on a proposal that would give residents of the city guaranteed paid sick days.

One of her leading supporters — author Gloria Steinem — just announced that she will withdraw her support from Quinn unless she allows a vote on the sick days proposal. “Making life fairer for all women seems more important than breaking a barrier for one woman,” said Steinem about Quinn’s bid to be the first female mayor without helping guarantee that women in the city get paid sick days.

Join with PCCC to ask New York City Council Speaker Speaker Christine Quinn to hold a vote on a city-wide paid sick leave.

In Georgia, both progressive groups like Common Cause and conservative organizations like the Tea Party have joined hands to demand restrictions on the gifts that lobbyists can give to lawmakers.

Many in the legislature are considering a gift limit of $100 per gift, and others want to ban gifts outright. Polling shows that 72% of Georgians want to see gifts to lawmakers capped.

Under the watchful eyes of this new bipartisan reform movement, lobbyist gift spending has actually plummeted. While lobbyists spent aAi??sizableAi??sum on gifts in January 2013 — $240,000 — this is actually a 35% decline from January 2012.

This is evidence that an engaged public tackling the issue of corruption can make an impact even before it passes actual reform laws.

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

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Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX)

As Congress gears up to craft immigration reform legislation, some LGBT advocates are demanding that it include equal rights for same-sex binational couples, who currently face a mountain of legal hurdles in the system.

At a Stonewall Democrats meeting on Tuesday, freshman congressman Marc Veasey (D-TX) demanded that this equality be in the legislation.

VEASEY: Comprehensive immigration reform to me means including same-sex families. Same-sex families that want to have their loved ones reuinted with them hear in the United States, that has to be covered, that has to be included. Any bill we pass does not go far enough if same-sex language is not included.

Watch it (relevant section begins at 4:21):

Prominent gay Americans have faced drastic circumstances due to the lack of equality for LGBT partners in U.S. immigration law. For example, prolific civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald was forced to live in Brazil part time because he could not live alongside his partner in New York City, where he studied law.

Wisconsin was the site over an epic struggle in 2011 to defend public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Backed by Koch brothers cash, Republicans were successful in rolling back public employee rights. In doing so, Republicans claimed that they were just concerned with budget matters and did not want to target unions specifically.

But a year and a half later, Republicans are now advancing a bill that has nothing to do with Wisconsin’s budget but everything to do with crushing unions.

House Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow private businesses to cut back on hours unilaterally, without having to talk to the unions or negotiate with their workers. As the Chippewa Herald notes, this law would be “in contrast to almost all similar laws in other states.”

Republicans are fast-tracking the bill, and it may get a committee vote as soon as Thursday. “It’s one more step toward their goal of ending the right of Wisconsin citizens to have their voice heard in the workplace,” said Democratic state senatorAi??Julie Lassa in a statement.

Recall that Republican Governor Scott Walker told a billionaire donor that he is pursuing a “divide and conquer” strategy with respect to unions — going after public ones first to take on private ones later. His strategy seems to be in action here.

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.

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

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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:

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

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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.

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

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.”

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.

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

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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???

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

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):

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.