Rothfus reflects on first three months

Kevin Lorenzi of The Times

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.

Posted: Sunday, April 7, 2013 11:30 pm

By J.D. Prose jprose@timesonline.com | 4 comments

Progressive Caucus Co-Chair

Statement to President Obama:

Social Security Benefit Cuts Hurt Our Economy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 5, 2013

Press Contacts
Adam Sarvana (Grijalva) –

(202) 225-2435

Jeremy Slevin (Ellison) –

(202) 225-4755

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.

Continue reading 7,000 March for Return of Miners’ Health Benefits →

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.

The Confiscation Scheme Planned for U.S. and U.K. Depositors

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_confiscation_scheme_planned_for_us_and_uk_depositors_20130328/

Posted on Mar 28, 2013

By Ellen Brown, chairman of the Public Banking Institute

This article first appeared at Web of Debt.

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.

Continue reading US Plans to Seize FDIC Insured Bank Deposits in Next Crisis →

Leo W. Gerard

International President, United Steelworkers

Bank on Being Bilked

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/bank-on-being-bilked_b_2944357.html

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.

Continue reading USW President: Bank on Being Bilked →

Full Show on Bill Moyers…

Sheila Bair, the longtime Republican who served as chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) during the fiscal meltdown five years ago, joins Bill to talk about American banks’ continuing risky and manipulative practices, their seeming immunity from prosecution, and growing anger from Congress and the public.

Also on the show, Richard Wolff, whose smart, blunt talk about the crisis of capitalism on his first Moyers & Company appearance was so compelling and provocative, we asked him to return. This time, the economics expert answers questions sent in by our viewers, diving further into economic inequality, the limitations of industry regulation, and the widening gap between a booming stock market and a population that increasingly lives in poverty.