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Mike Hall

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

In a continued crackdown on coal mines with histories of serious safety and health violations, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has issued notices that 13 mines will be placed in a special stepped-safety enforcement program unless mine owners begin immediate corrective actions.

The mines were notified earlier this month that they were on the verge of being put in what is known as pattern of violations (POV) status because of chronic and persistent safety and health violations uncovered during inspections in the past 12 months. A POV status brings the mine under more intense scrutiny and gives MSHA broader power to stop mining operations and withdraw miners.

These notifications are the first MSHA has issued since it began reforming the pattern of violations program after the Bush administration, at the urging of the coal industry and with former coal industry executives running MSHA, changed the rules to make it harder to crack down on pattern violators. Says MSHA administrator Joe Main:

I have been saying since I arrived at MSHA that the POV system is broken. This screening represents a positive step forward, but it won’t be the only step. POV is on MSHA’s rulemaking agenda, and there are also statutory changes pending before Congress that would further improve the system. (more…)

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Sarah Palin watched from the audience as daughter Bristol danced on ABC. Twenty-three million other Americans joined her from their homes. The next day, the former vice-presidential candidate started a 13-state book tour for her new book, America By Heart, which has a first printing of 1 million. Her reality show on TLC, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” is in its third week. Last week she was the cover story in the New York Times magazine.

It’s all part of The Palin Strategy for becoming president in 2012 — or 2016 or 2020.

Republican leaders don’t believe it. “If she wanted the Republican nomination she’d be working on the inside,” one influential Republican told me a few days ago. “She’d be building relationships with Republican Senators and representatives, governors, and state party officials. She’d be smoothing the feathers she ruffled by backing Tea Party candidates. She’d be huddled with GOP kingmakers.” When I suggested she has a different strategy, the influential Republican smiled knowingly. “That’s how it’s done — how McCain, Bush, and everyone has done it. That’s the only way to do it. But all she really wants is celebrity.”

The Republican establishment doesn’t get it. Celebrity is part of The Palin Strategy — as is avoiding the insider game. She doesn’t want to do what Huckabee, Pawlenty, Gingrich, or Romney have to do. She has an outside game. (more…)

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Welcome to National Fiscal Hypocrisy Week.

Today (Monday), Congress takes up a measure delaying by one month a scheduled 23 percent cut in federal reimbursements to doctors. The cut will automatically go into effect unless Congress acts. But of course Congress will act. Doctors threaten to drop Medicare patients if their rates are cut. Congress has delayed scheduled Medicare cuts for years.

The best outcome would be an agreement to contain future health-care costs by allowing Medicare to use its bargaining power with drug companies and medical suppliers to reduce rates; by allowing Americans to buy drugs from Canada; by applying the antitrust laws to health insurers; and by giving the public an option to buy their health care from a government-run public option.

The likelihood of any of this happening over Republican and Democrats-in-name-only (DINO) objections is zero.

Tuesday, the president meets with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders to begin working out a compromise for extending the Bush tax cuts. Both parties say they want to preserve the tax cuts for lower- and middle-income families. But this would cost $3 trillion over the next decade. Republicans also want to extend them permanently for the top 2 percent of earners, for an added $700 billion. The top don’t need the cuts, don’t deserve them, and won’t spend the windfall (and thereby stimulate the economy).

The best outcome would be an agreement to extend the tax cuts for the bottom 99 percent, for two years. This would stimulate the economy in the short term when it most needs it, and reduce the long-term deficit.

The likelihood of this happening over Republican and DINO objections is zero.

Meanwhile, unless Congress agrees to extend unemployment benefits by Tuesday, 800,000 long-term unemployed will start running out. Extended benefits are not only necessary given the record number and level of long-term unemployed, but they’re also one of the best means of stimulating spending. The unemployed will spend every dollar of benefits they receive.

The best outcome would be another six-month extension, at a cost of $34 billion. This would help an additional 4 million long-term jobless who would otherwise run out of benefits over the next few months. Add in a new WPA that offers work to the jobless — everything from teacher’s aides to improving public parks and installing insulation in public buildings.

The likelihood of this happening over Republican and DINO objections is zero.

Finally, on Wednesday, the president’s deficit commission will issue a report on how to reduce the nation’s long-term deficit. The initial draft was regressive — cutting $3 of spending for every $1 of tax increase, and decimating the Earned Income Tax Credit, among other things.

The best outcome would be a unanimous report that focused on taming rising health-care costs (see first item above), rejected Republican calls to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (see second item above), and supported extending unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and a new WPA (third item). Ideally, the report would also call for new investments in infrastructure and education that would grow the economy and thereby shrink the deficit as a share of GDP.

Likelihood, zero.

National Fiscal Hypocrisy Week may be carried over into next week, too.

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Cross-posted from Robert Reich’s Blog

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Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, now in bookstores. His earlier book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.robertreich.org.

Robert Kuttner

By Robert Kuttner
Co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect

If anything is more overrated than bipartisanship, it is post-partisanship. The Republicans surely get this. They dig in their heels, don’t budge, and wait for the Democrats either to fail, or to come to them.

But the media are infatuated with the idea that excessive partisanship is a symmetrical problem. If only the Republicans and the Democrats would meet each other halfway, the nation’s ills would be solved. It is hard to watch the Sunday talk shows without seeing one interviewer after another demanding, why can’t you people just compromise?

There are two problems with this formulation, one tactical and the other substantive. The tactical problem is that the Republicans and Democrats aren’t playing the same game. So if the Democrats meet the Republicans half way, the Republicans only demand that they do it again. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is identified as media enemy number one because she rejects this nonsense.

The tactical asymmetry connects to the substantive problem — the fact that the solution to what ails the economy is somewhere to the left of most Democrats, not midway between, say, President Obama and Mitch McConnell. The economy will be fixed only with more public investment, more progressive taxation, and more regulation, but partisan compromise dictates less of each. (more…)

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

The White House deficit commission is expected to vote in two days — on Wednesday, Dec. 1 — on a final report of recommendations. And it will likely not be much different than the draft released by its co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.

Bowles said last week: “We aren’t going to make it softer than it is today. It’s going to be a tough report. If we get 14 votes, great. If we don’t, then by God, we’ll put it out there.” (14 out of 18 is needed to trigger an agreement with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to vote on the recommendations.)

Though today’s Washington Post reports: “Bowles and Simpson are rewriting their plan to accommodate the concerns of commission members, though the two insist, in Simpson’s words, that it will not be watered down to ‘mush’ for the sake of winning votes.”

That was an odd sentence in a W. Post report that claimed we already had a “consensus” for what Simpson-Bowles are offering. It’s a strange consensus that doesn’t have the votes in hand, let alone any obvious support from the broader public, as my colleague Dave Johnson observed. (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Let’s go through it one more time. A simple truth: You can’t get the right answer if you ask the wrong question.

The furious debate over how best to cut the deficit illustrates the point. The debate is about how we best enforce austerity. How do we bring the federal budget into “primary balance” by 2015 (“primary balance” is wonk for a balanced budget not counting interest payments on the national debt)? Pencils sharpen; green eye shades are donned.

This is a debate about who takes the hit. It is likely to turn ugly. There are progressive answers and regressive ones; some that make more sense, and some that make less. It is bizarre, for example, that at a time of Gilded Age inequality, the co-chairs of the President’s Deficit Commission release a report that starts by lowering tax rates and creating a more regressive tax code than under Bill Clinton. Or that after financial gamboling and speculation has blown up the economy, they omit any mention of a tax on financial speculation or a tax on the banks, as even the International Monetary Fund recommends. Or that after Americans have lost some $11 trillion in savings and home values, the co-chairs would feature cuts in Social Security benefits.

A valuable alternative submitted by Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a member of the deficit commission, shows that it is possible to balance the budget by taking more from the Pentagon, hiking corporate taxes, and preserving Social Security. A Citizen’s Commission convened by the Campaign for America’s Future (which I help direct) will release a report next week arguing strongly that we need greater investment for jobs and growth, and can still bring the deficits down with progressive tax and spending reforms. (more…)

James Parks

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Big insurers spent millions to try to gut a proposed new rule that requires they spend a certain amount of premium dollars on actual medical care. But American families and businesses are coming out on top.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last week issued a new rule—known as “medical loss ratio”—that will require health insurance companies to spend 80 percent to 85 percent of your health care insurance premiums on making you healthier instead of overhead costs like advertising or executive pay.

Last month, big insurers sent more than 1,000 executives and lobbyists to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) meeting in Orlando to try and get the rule changed, according to the coalition, Health Care for America Now (HCAN).

AFL-CIO state federation officers actively lobbied their state insurance commissioners to listen to working families and their unions and to not give in to the big insurers’ push to stop the regulation. Their efforts played a significant role in making the rule a reality.

HCAN Executive Director Ethan Rome says the new rule will change the way health insurance companies do business and end such unconscionable abuses as denying people coverage because they are sick. He adds:

When the Republicans call for repeal (of health care reform), they’re talking about throwing out rules like this one and putting consumers at the mercy of the insurance companies again. The Republican repeal-mongers are not only on the wrong side, they’re also just plain out-of-touch with the needs of businesses to move forward and the desires of consumers to have better care.

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Re-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

Republicans were triumphant in this year’s election in part by arguing they would do a better job at creating jobs.

But what have they been prioritizing since they won? What are they actually proposing to do now?

Here are the biggest actions Republican have taken since Election Day. See if you can guess what’s missing:

1. Defund NPR. Last week, House Republicans tried to pass legislation that would strip NPR of all federal funding. Why?

As The Hill reported, “Republicans had indicated that they sought to take action against NPR after it dismissed news analyst Juan Williams for making controversial remarks about Muslims.”

So because conservatives hate NPR for firing a Fox News personality, House Republicans put aside their stated concerns about high unemployment to make a personal vendetta their top priority.

2. Block unemployment insurance extensions. But if House Republicans are actually concerned about high unemployment, they clearly are not concerned about actual unemployed people.

Last week they prevented Democrats from using a fast-track procedure to ensure long-term unemployed Americans don’t get cut off from assistance, during a time when there are far more jobless than jobs. (more…)

Sam Pizzigati

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, “Too Much”

The rich, many Americans have come to believe, rule. But how? The current hubbub over the federal budget deficit opens a welcome window to understanding just how our rich keep riding so high.

How can you tell whether you live in a plutocracy? Easy. Just conduct this simple test. First, identify a “pressing problem” that pundits are splashing over your nation’s op-ed pages. Then take a glance at the “solutions” to this national woe that pop up, on these same op-ed pages, as “politically possible.”

If you live in a plutocracy, not one of these “politically possible” proposals will ever do more than, at worst, inconvenience your nation’s super rich.

Ready to put this plutocracy test to a real-life trial? Let’s consider the problem that America’s pundits have this fall tabbed as our nation’s most pressing: the federal budget deficit.

Earlier this month, the New York Times offered readers an interactive online opportunity to solve this deficit situation. Our national newspaper of record published a long list of deficit-cutting options, all culled from Washington insiders, and invited readers to choose enough of these options to end the deficit. (more…)

James P. Hoffa

James P. Hoffa
General President, International Brotherhood of Teamsters

America has been in plenty of tough spots and each time emerged as a stronger nation. We overcame British tyranny, reconciled after the Civil War, vanquished Hitler and rebuilt our economy after the Great Depression.

These are hard times for many Americans, with underemployment at 17 percent and 43 million people on food stamps. But I am convinced that we will once again restore our economic greatness.

Something to think about if you’re out shopping on Black Friday is that many of the products sold at retail stores were made in China. And that many China-made children’s products in stores like Toys R Us contain toxic materials like polyvinyl chloride.

If you decide to buy electronics on Cyber Monday, you might want to remind yourself that the U.S. makes exactly zero cell phones and fewer personal computers than it did in 1975, when the first PC was sold. (more…)