My brother David has always had the special spark in our family.
Like our two older brothers, David served in the military. When he got out, he started a small business — and when that one didn’t work out, he started another one. He couldn’t imagine an America where he wasn’t living by his wits every single day.
Year after year, my brother paid into Social Security. He never questioned it. He figured he was paying so that he — and a lot of other people — could have a secure retirement.
Today my brother lives on his Social Security. That’s about $1,100 a month. $13,200 a year.
I’m telling you my brother’s story not because it’s unusual, but because it’s like the story of so many other people. I can almost guarantee that you know someone — a family member, friend, or neighbor — who counts on Social Security checks to get by.
That’s why I was shocked to hear that the President’s newest budget proposal would cut $100 billion in Social Security benefits. Our Social Security system is critical to protecting middle class families, and we cannot allow it to be dismantled inch by inch.
The President’s policy proposal, known as “chained CPI,” would re-calculate the cost of living for Social Security beneficiaries. That new number won’t keep up with inflation on things like food and health care — the basics that we need to live.
In short, “chained CPI” is just a fancy way to say “cut benefits for seniors, the permanently disabled, and orphans.”
Two-thirds of seniors rely on Social Security for most of their income; one-third rely on it for at least 90% of their income. These people aren’t stashing their Social Security checks in the Cayman Islands and buying vacation homes in Aruba – they are hanging on by their fingernails to their place in the middle class.
My brothers and I grew up in an America that invested in its kids and built a strong middle class. An America that allowed millions of children to rise from poverty and establish secure lives. An America that created Social Security and Medicare so that seniors could live with dignity.
We can’t chip away at America’s middle class and break the promise we make to our seniors.
John Jeffers, president of the United Steelworkers Local 8183, seated at right, listens to U.S. Rep. Keith Rothfus, far right, respond to Jeffers concerns about the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement and its possible negative effect on U.S. jobs at a “Coffee with Keith” event at the Maple Restaurant on Maplewood Avenue in Ambridge on Tuesday, April 2, 2013. Seated with Jeffers are John Wakeley, 8183 unit chair for Horsehead Corp., front left, and 8183 vice-president Tim Yeater. Jeffers was also concerned about retraining opportunities for workers as more mill jobs are being replaced by machinary.
BEAVER — Some might consider U.S. Rep. Keith Rothfus’ recent round of coffee klatches with constituents to be more political theater than substantive work, but don’t tell that to Rothfus.
“This is the front line for me,” Rothfus, R-12, Sewickley, said Wednesday in his Beaver office after a day of public events. Rothfus said it’s vital for lawmakers to provide district services and get out among the voters for face-to-face meetings.
“If we’re not delivering basic constituent services, we have a problem,” Rothfus said. “You’ve got to be engaged with your constituents.”
Besides getting a baptism into the hectic traveling schedule of a congressman, Rothfus’ first 100 days in office have been a trial by fire, including budget and sequestration talks, controversial votes on Hurricane Sandy relief and the ongoing debate over Social Security reform.
Rothfus acknowledged that he did not expect Congress to be working with President Barack Obama. “That has its own set of challenges,” he said.
With the House in Republican hands while Democrats control the Senate, Rothfus said legislators should respect the will of Americans who have installed a divided government.
Washington, D.C. – Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chairs
Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) released the
following statement today responding to reports that President Obama will
include chained CPI in his annual budget.
“Republicans have been trying to dismantle Social Security ever since
President Roosevelt proposed it during the Great Depression. We should
not try to bargain for their good will with policies that hurt our
seniors, especially since they’ve been unwilling to reduce tax loopholes
for millionaires and wealthy corporations by so much as a dime.
“One hundred seven Members of the House of Representatives, a majority of
the Democratic Caucus, have already stated our vigorous opposition to
cutting Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. Americans all
over the country depend on every single dollar they get from Social
Security to put food on the table and pay for housing. Using chained CPI
will shift more costs onto already struggling American families, seniors,
veterans – including our 3.2 million disabled veterans who also depend on
the Social Security calculation for their Veterans Affairs benefits –
individuals with disabilities, and children on survivors’ benefits.“This
week, a new study from the New America Foundation finds that proposals to
cut Social Security benefits could be disastrous for our economy because
the recession has led more seniors to rely to Social Security for income.
Cutting benefits now, when people are already struggling to make ends
meet, will mean unnecessary hardship for millions of people. It is
unpopular, unwise and unworkable.”
Over 7,000 March to Demand Return of Stolen Health Benefits By: Kay Tillow Thursday April 4, 2013 9:43 am
16 arrested in Charleston, WV
Charleston,West Virginia. April 1, 2013. They boarded buses and cars before dawn, some the night before, coming from the coalfields of Illinois,Pennsylvania,Kentucky,Virginia,Ohio,Indiana, and all acrossWest Virginia. By10:00 AM over 7,000 had packed into the giant Charleston Civic Center to voice their support for the 23,000 miners and their families who face the loss of their lifetime health benefits in a bankruptcy scam.
In a series of mergers and deals, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal transferred their contractual health benefit obligations to Patriot Coal. InSt. Louis,Missouri, in March, 2013, Patriot Coal filed in bankruptcy court seeking to terminate the United Mine Workers (UMWA) contract and set up instead a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) for the retirees and families.
Patriot seeks to put only a pittance into the VEBA, vastly underfunding it. UMWA President Cecil E. Roberts has said this plan would “put thousands of retired coal miners, their dependents or their widows on the path to financial ruin, worsening health conditions or even death.”
The UMWA pioneered in healthcare benefits and pensions when they battled coal operators and the American Medical Association to establish the UMWA Health & Welfare Fund. John L. Lewis and the union defied accusations of socialized medicine to set up miners’ clinics and built the miners’ hospitals that serve today as the backbone of health care in Appalachia. The UMWA won early retirement with family coverage for miners who retired before they were 65. These achievements of the miners’ struggles are under attack by Patriot, Peabody, and Arch. Most unions, following the lead of the UMWA, have negotiated early retirement with employers picking up the cost of health care until Medicare kicks in. The attack on UMWA retirees is a snapshot of what employers have in store for union negotiated early retirement plans.
Union Members Fight Foreclosure Evictions With Sit-Downs and Blockades
March 6, 2013 |
Ramon Suero fell behind on his mortgage payments after he got fired for organizing a union.
Suero, a hotel worker and UNITE HERE Local 26 member in Boston, got his job back after a year. But then his wife had to quit hers and travel to the Dominican Republic to care for her sick mother — and they fell further behind.
They applied to modify their home loan, but federally sponsored mortgage company Freddie Mac said no, foreclosed, and demanded the family get out by February 1.
The Sueros aren’t leaving.
“I want to send a message to the banks: we deserve a second chance,” Suero said. “That’s why I decided to fight — not only for my family, but for our community.”
Local 26 members and activists from the housing justice group City Life/Vida Urbana vow to thwart the eviction with a human blockade if necessary.
Battering Ram
In the wake of Occupy, the tactic is spreading. Activists around the country are placing their bodies in the way of police doing the banks’ dirty work.
In the Twin Cities, supporters get text-message alerts from the grassroots group Occupy Homes MN and mobilize quickly to stop surprise evictions.
It took Minneapolis police four attempts — and 39 arrests — to evict the Cruz family last spring. When they showed up at 4 a.m. and attacked the front door with a battering ram, 60 volunteers held them off.
The whole effort cost the city $40,000, and activists carried the battered door down to city hall to shame elected officials for the misuse of public resources.
“It becomes really politically costly — both to the banks who are creating this kind of chaos, and also to city politicians,” said organizer Nick Espinosa.
Many foreclosure resisters his group works with are current or former union members — like Monique White of Service Employees (SEIU) Local 26, who lost her youth-counselor job to state budget cuts. White kept her house after she confronted the U.S. Bank CEO in front of 200 shareholders.
Statement in Response to U.S. Simulated Nuclear Attacks
on North Korea and Cyber Attacks in North and South Korea
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has long opposed military actions on the Korean peninsula that serve to deepen and prolong a conflict that has persisted since the Korean War. This month another round of military actions and escalations by all parties are now underway in the region, including repeated simulated U.S. nuclear attacks against North Korea by B-2 and B-52 bombers in the midst of ongoing U.S.-South Korean war games. We call once again for an end to such provocative actions and a concerted effort to de-escalate and resolve the longstanding regional conflict that has taken a deep, generations-long toll on the region.
Such simulations and the history of U.S. nuclear threats during past Korean crises contributed to the development of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and its recent nuclear test, threatening to ignite a regional nuclear arms race. Military threats made routinely by North and South Korea as well as recent and possibly related cyber-attacks against North Korean media outlets and against South Korean broadcasters and banks further escalate the conflict.
Provocations of this sort – routine or otherwise – can too easily lead to miscalculations, and generate fears and passions that make it difficult for political leaders to respond with necessary caution. We are sobered by the memory of how such miscalculations have triggered cataclysmic wars in the past and even brought nuclear powers to the brink of all-out war.
The escalation of tensions and confrontations needs to be halted:
AFSC urges all parties to step back from further provocations.
AFSC further calls for the suspension of war games and military exercises on all sides. In particular, the U.S. should halt its provocative simulated nuclear attacks which are more likely to reinforce the DPRK’s commitment to its incipient nuclear arsenal, rather than to open a constructive dialogue.
To set relations on a better course:
AFSC urges renewed diplomatic engagement and negotiations between the North and South Korean Governments.
Echoing the views of former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg, AFSC reminds the U.S. government that sanctions and military threats will not succeed in ending decades of militarized tensions. The Obama Administration should reach out to North Korea with the goal of negotiating a peace agreement to finally end the Korean War.
Philadelphia, PA – March 30, 2013 Contact: Alexis Moore (215-241-7060)
###
The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization that includes people of various faiths who are committed to social justice, peace and humanitarian service. Its work is based on the belief in the worth of every person and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice.
Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.
New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th:
The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . .
Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.
Can They Do That?
Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.” The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.
The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.” It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain “financial stability.” Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state:
An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself—thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.
No exception is indicated for “insured deposits” in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks. The directive is called a “resolution process,” defined elsewhere as a plan that “would be triggered in the event of the failure of an insurer . . . .” The only mention of “insured deposits” is in connection with existing UK legislation, which the FDIC-BOE directive goes on to say is inadequate, implying that it needs to be modified or overridden.
It’s hard to believe considering what happened in 2008 on Wall Street and in Washington, but banking is built on trust.
A worker hands his hard-earned dollars to a teller and trusts the money will be deposited and available for withdrawal when needed. Despite the crash on Wall Street, workers still trust bankers to safeguard deposits from robbers and reckless investments.
Granting banks a little less credulity might be wise. Just consider what happened in the past two weeks. A U.S. Senate investigation revealed that the 2010 Dodd-Frank banking reforms utterly failed in the case of the $6.2 billion “London Whale” gambling loss at JPMorgan Chase. Then a U.S. House committee passed seven measures to weaken Dodd-Frank. And there was the European Union’s demand that Cyprus expropriate money from depositors to prevent that nation’s big banks from failing. That means no depositor can trust that a government won’t dip its hands into savers’ accounts to bail too-big-to-fail banks. The trust is gone, baby.
Posted: Mar 12, 2013 10:02 AM EDT Updated: Mar 12, 2013 10:02 AM EDT
HARRISVILLE, Pa. (AP) – Police say there are no injuries after an apparent drive-by shooting at a Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling site in northwestern Pennsylvania.
The Butler Eagle (http://bit.ly/hMQZ9u ) reports that on Saturday a suspect in a pickup truck pointed a small-caliber rifle in the direction of a drilling rig and fired two rounds.
State police report that the occupants of the vehicle were shouting profanities at the drilling site as they fled the scene.
Authorities say there’s no known motive for the shooting, nor were there any previous threats directed at the operators of the site or its employees.
Shell Exploration & Production Co., a unit of Royal Dutch Shell PLC, owns the drilling site.
Authorities are searching for leads in the case.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” candidate Barack Obama April 2008
by Randy Shannon
Progressive Democrats of America, PA Coordinator
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a large increase in jobs in February as compared to January. At the same time the January jobs data was revised lower, which gave a boost to the February number. Let’s look at what happened to the people behind the numbers.
This graph shows two sets of data: the Employment to Population ratio and the Labor Force Participation rate. These are updated with February data.
They show that the percent of the population employed has not changed in February. The Employment-Population ratio was unchanged at 58.6% in February (black line).
It also shows that fewer members of the labor force are working.The Labor Force Participation Rate decreased to 63.5% in February (blue line). This is the percentage of the working age population in the labor force.
How can this be true with all the jobs added and the drop in the unemployment rate that the corporate media is advertising?
The answer starts with the rise in the number of long term unemployed shown in this second graph. According to the BLS, there are 4.8 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks and still want a job. This is up from 4.71 million in January.
Long term unemployment is a violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Long term unemployment is the ugly reality of dead end capitalism. The media doesn’t like to talk about this issue. These folks don’t count when calculating the unemployment rate.
The composition of the new jobs also contributes to the happy headline numbers. The February report shows that the number of part-time workers increased while the number of full-time workers decreased. Voila! more jobs. In February according to the Household Survey, the number of full-time jobs declined by 77K from 115,918 to 115,841 while part-time workers rose from 27,467 to 27,569, or 102K.
The income disparity is getting worse and the spending power of working people is further declining while more jobs are being created. This is not the stuff that makes for an economic recovery. The impact on working families is shown in this graph of wages and salaries compared to the value of the fruits of our labor (GDP).
The point of sequestration and austerity is to drive this line lower and lower to make corporate profits higher and higher. This thinking is natural for owners of finance but it is flawed because profits can only be realized when workers consume the output of their own labor.
The graph titled ‘multiple job holders’ shows an interesting development raised by blogger Zero Hedge: “But the most surprising development in February from a quality standpoint was that the number of multiple job-holders rose by a massive 340K, which just happens to be a record. One wonders: how many actual people got new jobs, as opposed to how many qualified single individuals ended up getting more than one job in February in order to boost that much needed weekly income to sustainable levels.”
This last graph should be familiar to those who’ve read It’s Time to Fight for Full Employment. This shows the slow paced advance out of the depths of the employment recession that began in 2007. This is a much longer and deeper employment recession than any since the Great Depression. It is evidence that the system isn’t working any more and those in control have lost control.
The rise in jobs just this year has come at the cost of $1.2 trillion in US government debt. Most of this debt was transfers to the big global criminal banks that are speculating in stocks, bonds, and politicians while calling for more austerity for working people.
The political servants of the wealthy, now in power, must be replaced by political servants of the people. Then our capital can be invested in productive enterprises, our social fabric can be repaired, and the criminal banks can be liquidated.
Rep. Keith Ellison, co-chair of Congressional Progressive Caucus
A Congress controlled by Progressive Democrats can pass HR 1000, the 21st Century Full Employment Act, that will tax Wall Street speculation to create a jobs and training fund controlled by the Department of Labor. Such a Congress will pass HR 676, the Medicare for All Act that will put everyone on Medicare, save $billions and create 3 million new jobs in the healthcare sector. Such a Congress will pass S 332,the Climate Protection Act, that will tax carbon to fund consumer rebates and transfer energy production from climate killing carbon burning to renewable solar, wind, and geothermal energy, another huge job creation project.
Voters in the PA 12th Congressional District are ready for a progressive Democrat to represent them in Congress. They have shown that corporate Democrats who oppose equal rights for women, who don’t support the top of the ticket, who oppose EPA protection for our air and water, and who cater to the right, can’t win elections anymore. Union members, young people, minorities, and women want to move our district out of the past and into a future of jobs, healthcare, and a sustainable environment.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 