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On the House floor on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) argues that manmade global warming doesn’t make any sense because “carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature.” Attempting to repeat the goofy denier talking point that CO2 makes up only a fraction of the atmospheric content and thus isn’t of concern, Bachmann errs wildly. She claims that carbon dioxide makes up “three percent of the atmosphere,” when in fact it only comprises 0.03% — off by a factor of a hundred.

Two years ago, 4.5 million of America’s workers enjoyed a modest pay increase, as the federal minimum wage rose from $6.55 to $7.25 an hour. The increase was the final of a three-step boost enacted in 2007.

Of those getting a bump in pay, more than three-quarters were adults, nearly two-thirds were women, and nearly half a million were single parents with children under 18.

Yet during the past two years, these working families have seen the real value of their wages fall. Minimum-wage earners working full-time make roughly $15,000 a year. Had the minimum wage rate kept up with inflation, their paychecks would have increased by $800 this year.

Instead, our nation’s lowest-paid workers have had an even harder time providing basic needs for their families. (more…)

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

Glenn Beck has captured national attention with his caustic poison. The aging right-wing troubadours — Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly — still rouse the wingnuts and enforce discipline among Republican legislators. They’ve peddled the fantasies about ACORN and the all-powerful poverty lobby, and launched a search-and-destroy hunt for targets of opportunity in the Obama administration. Progressives have sensibly organized to question Beck’s advertisers, and even the president has called him out.

But it is worth remembering — Glenn Beck is not blocking the passage of a good health care bill. The old and new carny acts of the right aren’t undermining the energy legislation or frustrating financial reform. To focus on who and what is standing in the way — follow the money.

On health care, the lockstep opposition of Republicans in Congress is deplorable, but Republicans don’t have the votes to block progress. The president is forced to negotiate with Democrats who have 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House and could pass a good bill tomorrow if they unified.

The angry tea bag activists shouting slogans in town meetings in August provided drama, but the true opposition is writing checks, not waiving signs. They are wearing pin stripes, not jeans and t-shirts. They represent wealthy insurance company CEOs, not angry workers or small business owners.

The Washington media likes to paint the divisions as ideological. Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats are said to be opposed to “big government,” cautious about spending, more concerned about deficits, reflecting more conservative districts and voters. Sure, there are ideological differences between the parties. And legislators do cater to the major interests in their districts. And no doubt, the Democratic Party is a big tent, with a broad range of political opinion.

But the president didn’t cut a deal with Big Pharma to sustain the ban that prohibits Medicare from negotiating lower prices on drugs because of ideology or a policy debate. He did it to neutralize one of the powerful lobbies standing in the way of reform. The deals with utilities and coal companies in the energy bill aren’t about ideology; they are about special interests and political clout. Republicans don’t mind government spending when pouring hundreds of millions into subsidizing insurance companies to compete with Medicare. Blue Dogs aren’t worried about costs when they oppose a public option that would help keep insurance companies honest.

The re-born McCarthy like conspiratorial fantasies of Glenn Beck should not go unanswered. His effort to discredit the administration by searching for appointees to target should be resisted and scorned.

But everyone should be clear. The president has called on the Congress to act on fundamental reforms that cannot be avoided. Our broken health care system is unaffordable and must be fixed. Moving to new energy is a national security, economic and environmental imperative, not a choice. Fundamental financial reform is necessary if we are to avoid a worse crisis in the near future.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans in Congress oppose these reforms. They want, as Limbaugh proclaimed, the president to fail. But they aren’t the major roadblocks to the change we need. What stands in the way is the organized power of the entrenched lobbies that have a direct stake in limiting change, and are willing to spend hundreds of millions to obstruct it. Their legions are less angry citizens, than sophisticated lobbyists, increasingly Democrats, many of them retired legislators. They deliver campaign contributions, not votes. They threaten negative campaign ads, not authentic citizen uprisings.

With literally billions at stake, progressives will never be able to match the money of the industries fighting off change. Our only chance is to make their money toxic — to expose the contributions, the lobbyists, the inside deals — and to make legislators understand the president was right when he said we can’t let the permanent lobbies define what is possible in the nation’s capital.

The struggle over health care reform is now reaching its climax. The backroom struggle over energy and financial reform is already fierce. It is time for Democrats to unite to get these done. It is time for the two or three Senate Republicans with any iota of independence to put country over party and be part of the solution. But most of all, it is time for us to follow the money, to track the contributions, expose the lobbyists, and challenge the legislators in both parties who hope to benefit by serving special interests rather than representing their constituents.

Check out opensecrets.org, where the Center for Responsive Politics tracks contributions. Take a look at their study with the Sunlight Foundation on the lobbyists undermining health care reform. Get angry, not cynical. Let your legislators hear from you — and join with your neighbors to demand that they represent you and not the interests that are writing campaign checks. The president has called on the Congress to deal with fundamental national challenges that can not be ignored (although his predecessors were happy to do so). We’ll not have a better chance to get vital reforms done. But to succeed, legislators in both parties will have to learn that voters aren’t going to put up with the cozy beltway business as usual.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Let’s go back, just for a minute, to a time before screaming teabaggers, before Republicans decided to kill health insurance reform as a means to politically destroy this country’s first African-American president.

Try and remember what it was like before discussion of health insurance reform raised voices, a time when instead it raised concern. Recollect Aug. 7, 2007, during the Democratic primaries, when then-60-year-old retired and disabled steelworker Steve Skvara stood at a microphone during a political debate and told his story with tears in his eyes and a catch in his throat.

He’d worked more than 30 years at LTV Steel in East Chicago, Ind., and assumed like many who earned pensions and retiree health coverage that those benefits were guaranteed. But then LTV went bankrupt and ditched its obligations. Skvara told the candidates:

“Every day of my life, I sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family and I can’t afford her health care. What’s wrong with America, and what will you do to change it?”

Skvara asked that question two years ago when 45 million Americans lacked health insurance. Now 46.3 million are without it.

And yet, teabaggers and Republicans are bent on preventing reform. They want to ensure only one thing – that another million Americans suffer no health coverage two years from now.

President Obama invoked Skvara’s name at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh on Sept. 15 in a speech about the middle class.

Mostly Skvara is a symbol of health insurance failure. But to Obama, he’s an emblem of something much bigger. It is a struggle of economic philosophies. For the past 20 years, the winning view has been that government should give breaks to big corporations and rich individuals. Obama told the AFL-CIO he believes in something different — an economy built on a vibrant and wide middle class.

Here’s what he said:

“For over half a century, the success of America has been built on the success of our middle class. It was the creation of the middle class that lifted this nation up in the wake of a great depression. It was the expansion of the middle class that opened the doors of opportunity to millions more. It was a strong middle class that powered American industries, propelled America’s economy, and made the 20^th Century the first American Century.

And the fundamental test of our time is whether we will heed this lesson; whether we will let America become a nation of the very rich and the very poor, of the haves and the have nots; or whether we will remain true to the promise of this country and build a future where the success of all of us is build on the success of each of us.”

Because of the extraordinary cost of health care in this country, insurance is a middle class issue. Health insurance can make or break a family – place it firmly in the middle class if an employer provides a good plan or bankrupt it if a family loses coverage during a serious illness.

Obama said as much to the AFL-CIO: “We’ll grow our middle class by finally providing quality, affordable health insurance in this country.”

Just this week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report showing premiums for family coverage rose 130 percent over the past decade. They now average $13,375, which is about the same as the entire annual take-home pay of a minimum wage worker.

Coverage is not affordable. The price of it is pushing families down the economic ladder. Look what it did to Skvara.  He had been a middle class steelworker and remained in the middle class after retirement. But he moved toward poverty after the LTV bankruptcy cost his wife her health insurance coverage. Loss of health insurance and the ensuing medical bills robs families of their life savings, their homes, everything until they’re bankrupt.

Skvara asked the candidates what was wrong with America and what would they do to fix it. Obama’s plan for fixing health insurance would forbid dropping or denying coverage because a person is sick or has a pre-existing condition.

He wants the public option to provide competition so that rates are affordable. That public option would cover Skvara’s wife – at a reasonable cost. So he could remain in the middle class and not find himself asking heartbreaking questions at public meetings.

The teabaggers are apoplectic because this isn’t just about health care. This is about the values of a government.

The Obama administration fails to fawn over the affluent.

Instead, Obama talked of downtrodden workers in the former Jones & Laughlin Steel mill in Aliquippa. Bosses there fired a dozen workers shortly after the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935. The workers, mostly union organizers, challenged the dismissals all the way the U.S. Supreme Court, securing a landmark win that not only got them their jobs back, but also affirmed the constitutionality of the labor law that led to the burgeoning of union organizing, and the growth of America’s large, stable middle class.

To win that case, Obama told the AFL-CIO convention, workers of different ethnicities and faiths had to work together and stick together. That will be necessary to win this struggle to reform health insurance as well. But that reform is only the first part of Obama’s plan for the middle class:

“We will make possible the dreams of middle class families and make real the promise of the United States of America.”

That’s worth fighting for.