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Rep. Carolyn Maloney Seeks To Deny Tax Breaks To Men-Only Businesses

by Laura Bassett on April 17, 2012

Huffington Post…

If businesses like the Augusta National Golf Club, home to the Masters tournament, can continue to deny women membership , then the government should withhold their tax breaks, says Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.). Maloney’s Ending Tax Breaks for Discrimination Act, which she has introduced multiple times since 2003, prohibits businesses that discriminate on the basis of sex or race from deducting travel or advertising expenses from their taxes. Now, on Equal Pay Day and in light of the prestigious Georgia golf club’s refraining from extending membership to IBM’s new CEO, Virginia Rometty, because she is a woman, Maloney has reintroduced the bill with a new working title: the Equal Play at Augusta Act. “When a woman, Virginia Rometty, took over as head of IBM, it was an excellent time for the [Augusta National Golf Club] to change that tradition of not admitting women,” Maloney told The Huffington Post. “But instead of recognizing her and breaking with this outdated tradition, they decided to continue with this discrimination.” “I am filing a bill that really follows the example of when Congress passed Title IX for athletic equality,” Maloney added. “Any organization or institution that discriminates against women or men should not be able to deduct the cost of doing business, such as their meetings, flights and food.” While there is no official count of how many private country clubs and other organizations in the United States discriminate against women, media outlets have identified at least 24 males-only country clubs since the Augusta club garnered attention in 2003. If the bill makes it out of the House Ways and Means Committee this time around, it could put the GOP in an awkward position, since many prominent Republicans , including presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, former aspirant Rick Santorum, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have publicly criticized the Augusta National Golf Club for not admitting women. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is a member of a Maryland all-male golf club , which makes the issue even more awkward for him. But if Maloney’s ultimate aim is to coax private males-only clubs into changing their policies, the support of influential Republican men can provide her with more leverage to do so. “A woman can run a great company, she can run a country, she can run circles around her competition, she can be at the top of her profession, but Augusta National Golf Club believes she cannot be a member of its club simply because she is female,” Maloney wrote in an April 13 letter to William Payne, the club’s chairman. “There is a wide and growing consensus that this is a policy whose time has long since past. There are not many things in this world that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, President Obama and I can all agree on. But this is one of them.”

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Rep. Carolyn Maloney Seeks To Deny Tax Breaks To Men-Only Businesses

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Dueling Tax Proposals Affecting Small Businesses, Millionaires May Be Doomed

by AP on April 16, 2012

Huffington Post…

WASHINGTON — Democrats and Republicans are forcing votes in Congress this coming week on competing tax plans that affect millionaires and smaller businesses, and they know the proposals are doomed from the start. But that doesn’t matter to either party. Their efforts, including a Senate vote Monday on President Barack Obama’s “Buffett rule” proposal to impose a minimum tax on the wealthiest Americans, are more about pontificating than legislating, aimed at voters in November’s congressional and presidential elections. Neutral economists say neither bill would do much for the economy or job creation. Some political professionals are equally unimpressed with their potential impact on voters. Undaunted, congressional leaders hope to maximize public attention by timing both roll calls with an eye to Tuesday, the annual deadline for filing income taxes with the Internal Revenue Service. The upcoming votes probably are just a start. Senate Democrats later this year may hold additional votes tied to the “Buffett rule,” using his idea of a minimum 30 percent tax on top earners to raise money for proposal to create jobs and keep student loan rates from rising. With trillions in tax cuts dating from President George W. Bush set to expire in January, House and Senate leaders also are considering campaign-season votes on extending popular parts of those reductions, such as preventing the $1,000 child tax credit from being cut in half. In addition, Obama and his all-but-certain GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, will spend much of the campaign promoting their tax blueprints as antidotes to an economy still struggling to generate jobs. Besides raising taxes on the wealthy, Obama would boost levies on many U.S. companies that do business overseas, and on the oil and gas industry. The new money would help lower individual and corporate rates and reduce federal deficits. Romney would continue all Bush tax cuts, including those for the richest people, while trimming rates and eliminating estate taxes. “If this were a heavyweight fight, we’re still in the first round where both sides are kind of feeling each other out,” Republican consultant Mike McKenna said about the votes in the week ahead. On Monday, as Congress returns from a two-week spring break, the Democratic-led Senate expect votes on a “Buffett rule” measure by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. It would slap a minimum 30 percent income tax on people making over $2 million yearly and phase in higher taxes for those earning at least $1 million. Republicans are sure to block the bill, nicknamed for billionaire Warren Buffett, who backs higher taxes on the rich. The GOP-run House plans a Thursday vote on legislation providing a 20 percent tax deduction for businesses that employ fewer than 500 workers, which covers 99.9 percent of all companies. The proposal, sponsored by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., seems certain to pass, but fail in the Senate. Those votes are set just as many Americans stare at their own tax returns. The Internal Revenue Service says that through April 6, it had received 99 million of 145 million expected returns. So far, 80 million refunds have been issued averaging $2,794, down $101 from last year. For political leaders looking ahead to the November elections, the demise of this week’s bills will matter little. Democrats think the Buffett rule vote will underscore their commitment to economic fairness and GOP favoritism for the rich, a prominent election theme. Hammering at it lets Obama shine a spotlight on Romney, a former private equity executive who has paid an income tax rate of about 15 percent on annual earnings of $21 million, which is a lower rate than many middle-class families pay. “It’s simple. If you make more than $1 million every year, you should pay at least the same percentage of your income in taxes as middle-class families do,” Obama said Saturday in his weekly broadcast address. Republicans believe the business tax measure will spotlight their efforts to lower taxes and create jobs, contrasted with Democrats’ preference for higher taxes to finance ever-larger government. They believe they win the debate by keeping the focus on those subjects, not what the wealthy pay. “We want small-business people to have more money go to their pockets, not the government’s,” Cantor said recently at a Virginia high school. “And then they have more money to make decisions about hiring, about retaining jobs and about creating more jobs.” Democratic political consultant Alan Secrest said both measures might excite the most fervent partisans but do little for independents, who he said care more about jobs. “And neither party has a particular advantage on that right now,” Secrest said. The Buffett rule is clearly popular. An Associated Press-GfK poll in February showed that nearly 2 in 3 favor a 30 percent tax for those making $1 million annually, including most Democrats and independents and even 4 in 10 Republicans. Yet the measure would raise just $47 billion over a decade, a smidgen of the $7 trillion in federal deficits expected during that time. While a 20 percent tax deduction would be welcomed by any company, the $46 billion in lower taxes Cantor’s bill would provide over the next six years would barely register on the $100 trillion in U.S. economic activity projected for that period. There also are doubts that it would spur new jobs. “If they have more sales, they’ll hire,” said Maury Harris, chief U.S. economist for UBS, the investment bank. “If they don’t have the sales, they won’t hire. That’s what it’s all about.” Senate Democrats, who champion a narrower bill providing tax credits for firms hiring workers, call the GOP small-business cuts “a profit-padding tax giveaway.” Democrats have also criticized extending Bush’s tax cuts for being too costly at a time of big budget deficits, though most favor extending them for all but the highest earners. Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the business tax cut bill would show that Republicans are trying to spark job growth. He also said he would welcome Democratic opposition to any votes this year, should they occur, on renewing Bush’s tax cuts. “If the Democrats want to have all those taxes go up, let them,” said Camp, R-Mich.

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Dueling Tax Proposals Affecting Small Businesses, Millionaires May Be Doomed

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Dueling Tax Plans Spell Long Fight Ahead

April 15, 2012

WASHINGTON — Democrats and Republicans are forcing votes in Congress this coming week on competing tax plans that affect millionaires and smaller businesses, and they know the proposals are doomed from the start. But that doesn’t matter to either party. Their bills are more about pontificating than legislating, aimed at voters in November’s congressional and presidential elections. Neutral economists say neither bill would do much for the economy or job creation. Some political professionals are equally unimpressed with their potential impact on voters. Undaunted, congressional leaders hope to maximize public attention by timing both roll calls with an eye to Tuesday, the annual deadline for filing income taxes with the Internal Revenue Service. The upcoming votes probably are just a start. Senate Democrats later this year may hold votes tied to President Barack Obama’s “Buffett rule,” using his idea of a minimum 30 percent tax on the wealthiest to raise money for proposal to create jobs and keep student loan rates from rising. With trillions in tax cuts dating from President George W. Bush set to expire in January, House and Senate leaders also are considering campaign-season votes on extending popular parts of those reductions, such as preventing the $1,000 child tax credit from being cut in half. In addition, Obama and his all-but-certain GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, will spend much of the campaign promoting their tax blueprints as antidotes to an economy still struggling to generate jobs. Besides raising taxes on the wealthy, Obama would boost levies on many U.S. companies that do business overseas, and on the oil and gas industry. The new money would help lower individual and corporate rates and reduce federal deficits. Romney would continue all Bush tax cuts, including those for the richest people, while trimming rates and eliminating estate taxes. “If this were a heavyweight fight, we’re still in the first round where both sides are kind of feeling each other out,” Republican consultant Mike McKenna said about the votes in the week ahead. On Monday, as Congress returns from a two-week spring break, the Democratic-led Senate expect votes on a “Buffett rule” measure by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. It would slap a minimum 30 percent income tax on people making over $2 million yearly and phase in higher taxes for those earning at least $1 million. Republicans are sure to block the bill, nicknamed for billionaire Warren Buffett, who backs higher taxes on the rich. The GOP-run House plans a Thursday vote on legislation providing a 20 percent tax deduction for businesses that employ fewer than 500 workers, which covers 99.9 percent of all companies. The proposal, sponsored by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., seems certain to pass, but fail in the Senate. Those votes are set just as many Americans stare at their own tax returns. The Internal Revenue Service says that through April 6, it had received 99 million of 145 million expected returns. So far, 80 million refunds have been issued averaging $2,794, down $101 from last year. For political leaders looking ahead to the November elections, the demise of this week’s bills will matter little. Democrats think the Buffett rule vote will underscore their commitment to economic fairness and GOP favoritism for the rich, a prominent election theme. Hammering at it lets Obama shine a spotlight on Romney, a former private equity executive who has paid an income tax rate of about 15 percent on annual earnings of $21 million, which is a lower rate than many middle-class families pay. “In America, prosperity has never just trickled down from a wealthy few,” Obama said Wednesday during a week packed with events promoting his plan. “Prosperity has always been built from the bottom up and from the heart of the middle class outward. And so it’s time for Congress to stand up for the middle class and make our tax system fairer.” Republicans believe the business tax measure will spotlight their efforts to lower taxes and create jobs, contrasted with Democrats’ preference for higher taxes to finance ever-larger government. They believe they win the debate by keeping the focus on those subjects, not what the wealthy pay. “We want small-business people to have more money go to their pockets, not the government’s,” Cantor said recently at a Virginia high school. “And then they have more money to make decisions about hiring, about retaining jobs and about creating more jobs.” Democratic political consultant Alan Secrest said both measures might excite the most fervent partisans but do little for independents, who he said care more about jobs. “And neither party has a particular advantage on that right now,” Secrest said. The Buffett rule is clearly popular. An Associated Press-GfK poll in February showed that nearly 2 in 3 favor a 30 percent tax for those making $1 million annually, including most Democrats and independents and even 4 in 10 Republicans. Yet the measure would raise just $47 billion over a decade, a smidgen of the $7 trillion in federal deficits expected during that time. While a 20 percent tax deduction would be welcomed by any company, the $46 billion in lower taxes Cantor’s bill would provide over the next six years would barely register on the $100 trillion in U.S. economic activity projected for that period. There also are doubts that it would spur new jobs. “If they have more sales, they’ll hire,” said Maury Harris, chief U.S. economist for UBS, the investment bank. “If they don’t have the sales, they won’t hire. That’s what it’s all about.” Senate Democrats, who champion a narrower bill providing tax credits for firms hiring workers, call the GOP small-business cuts “a profit-padding tax giveaway.” Democrats have also criticized extending Bush’s tax cuts for being too costly at a time of big budget deficits, though most favor extending them for all but the highest earners. Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the business tax cut bill would show that Republicans are trying to spark job growth. He also said he would welcome Democratic opposition to any votes this year, should they occur, on renewing Bush’s tax cuts. “If the Democrats want to have all those taxes go up, let them,” said Camp, R-Mich.

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President Obama: ‘For The Americas, This Is A Moment Of Great Promise’

April 14, 2012

By Laura MacInnis CARTAGENA, Colombia, April 14 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama stressed on Saturday the “great promise” for business growth in the Americas, seeking to play up the economic heft of the region he has paid little attention to in his first three years in office. In remarks prepared for a meeting of corporate chief executives in Cartagena, Colombia, where he is attending the 33-nation Summit of the Americas, Obama described U.S.-Latin American ties as “one of the world’s most dynamic trade relationships.” “With nearly a billion citizens – nearly a billion consumers – among us, there’s so much more we can do together,” according to excerpts of his speech released by the White House. “For the Americas, this is a moment of great promise. And I believe if we seize the opportunities before us, we’ll continue to be each other’s economic partners of choice,” he was set to tell the gathering of CEOs on Saturday morning, which precedes the formal start of the regional leaders’ summit. Among the companies represented at the CEO gathering were Pfizer Inc, Chevron, Pepsico and Cisco Systems Inc. Obama, a Democrat running for re-election in November, is under pressure in Colombia to show he is committed to engaging with Latin America and is addressing regional issues including drug trafficking and violence. His critics – including many pivotal Hispanic voters in the United States – have accused him of largely neglecting Washington’s neighbors to concentrate on crises in the Middle East and Afghanistan and on an effort to boost U.S. trade ties with fast-growing Asia. On his way to Colombia on Friday, Obama gave a speech at a shipping port in Tampa, Florida, on the ways U.S. businesses and workers can benefit from increased trade with Latin American countries like Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Florida, with its large Hispanic population, is expected to be an electoral battleground on Nov. 6 and Latino voters could also make or break Obama’s re-election chances in swing states including Nevada, Colorado and Virginia. Polls show the president well ahead of Mitt Romney – the presumed Republican nominee for the White House race – among Latino voters despite concerns about his lack of attention to Latin American issues and disappointment about his failure to produce the broad immigration reform he promised in 2008.

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The 10 States Taxing The Poor Most

April 14, 2012

24/7 Wall St.: In an effort to help families work their way out of poverty, most of the United States do not tax the incomes of working-poor families. A handful of states do, however. 24/7 Wall St. examined a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to identify the states that tax the poor the most. Read The States Taxing the Poor Most The decision of these states to continue taxing the poor is notable because most states have stopped. Over the past two decades, there has been a widespread, bipartisan effort to roll back taxes on working-poor families. Today, only 15 states still tax families with incomes that are at, or below, the federal poverty line — currently $23,018. However, the effort to reduce taxes on the poor has stalled, according to the CBPP. In 2011, no new states exempted working-poor families of four — the benchmark family unit used in the study — from income taxes. Worst still, in almost all 15 states, these taxes have increased. The number of states that continue to tax poor, working families remains too high, Phil Oliff, policy analyst at the CBPP and coauthor of the report told 24/7 Wall St. “That makes it harder for those families to pay for basic necessities like food and clothing; it makes it more difficult for them to afford work related expenses like child care and transportation costs; and it’s bad for the state’s economy.” While the average median income of the residents of these states varies, a number are particularly poor relative to the rest of the country. States such as West Virginia, Georgia and Alabama have among the highest poverty rates in the country. As a result, a larger percentage of these states’ populations are affected by taxes on poor families. According to Oliff, “States should be helping poor families to work their way into the middle class, not taxing them deeper into poverty.” 24/7 Wall St. identified 10 states that tax two-parent families of four living at the poverty line at the highest rate, based on CBPP’s report, “The Impact of State Income Taxes on Low-Income Families in 2011.” All of these states also tax families with incomes that place them below the poverty line. For each state, we also included the income level below the poverty line where families would not be taxed. In addition to this, we included the poverty rate and median household income for each state, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. These 10 states tax the poor the most, according to 24/7 Wall St. :

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Drilling Mud Spilled Into PA Creek

April 13, 2012

PINE BANK, Pa. (AP) — The Department of Environmental Protection says about 500 gallons of drilling mud spilled into a western Pennsylvania stream at a pipeline project site. DEP spokesman John Poister says in a statement that the spill happened Wednesday afternoon on a tributary of Dunkard Creek, about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, near the West Virginia border. Poister says Equitrans, based in Pittsburgh, was drilling under the creek for a pipeline. The company reported the spill and began cleaning the site, and DEP has taken water samples. Poister says DEP will return to the site Friday to determine the state of the cleanup. An Equitrans spokesperson did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

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America’s Shale Gas Boom: Coming To A Theater Near You

April 9, 2012

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Dairy farmers-turned-shale millionaires. Rural widows gypped by smooth-talking landmen. Revitalized communities. Exploding wells. Dreams realized and hopes dashed. At the local level, the story of America’s unquenchable thirst for fossil fuels is a very human one. Upstate New York journalist Tom Wilber’s new book reads like a character-driven novel as it tells the stories of the winners and losers, industry leaders and regulators on the new frontier of shale gas. As a reporter for the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin, Wilber began chronicling the story of the 50,000-square-mile Marcellus Shale long before geologists ignited the gas rush with their 2008 announcement that it could be the biggest natural gas field in the United States. His new book, “Under the Surface,” to be released May 8 by Cornell University Press, builds on his work as a reporter and later as a full-time author. Books and documentaries have a long history of informing debate on environmental issues, from Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” which generated a storm of controversy over chemical pesticides, to “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning film on climate change. That tradition continues with the growing collection of media telling the story of America’s shale gas boom. More works will debut this summer, including dueling documentaries. The anti-industry “Gasland 2,” an HBO-funded sequel to Josh Fox’s Emmy award-winning 2010 documentary “Gasland,” will be screened across the country to coincide with the election season. The most famous scene in “Gasland,” where a man lights water from his faucet on fire, is an icon of the anti-fracking movement. Meanwhile, “FrackNation,” an upcoming movie by California couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, attempts to debunk Fox’s portrayal of health and environmental ruin. They recently put up a billboard along Route 17 in New York near the Pennsylvania border stating, “The water was on fire in 1669.” That’s a reference to Burning Springs, N.Y., where Seneca Indians showed early explorers water that burned with naturally occurring methane. Wilber’s book is the second one telling the story of the Marcellus Shale, which extends from southern New York through parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. “The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone,” by Seamus McGraw, was published last June. It grew out of McGraw’s personal experience as a native of rural northeastern Pennsylvania, where shale drilling is intense. New York state has had shale drilling on hold for four years while it drafts new regulations for controversial high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which stimulates well production by injecting millions of gallons of chemically treated water deep underground. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said permits may be issued within months but a strong opposition movement has vowed to prevent it. Wilber doesn’t push an agenda but tries to maintain a journalist’s objectivity and attention to detail from all angles. As a publication from an academic press, the book was subjected to peer review by experts in the field. The book is populated with colorful characters. There’s Victoria Switzer, whose once-idyllic retreat in Dimock, Pa., is now surrounded by nearly 100 gas wells. She’s among 32 Dimock families who claim their wells were tainted by Cabot Oil’s operations. And then there’s Dewey Decker, a cattle farmer in the village of Deposit in New York’s western Catskills. He got neighbors together to negotiate a lease that would protect their land and give them fair compensation. They struck a deal with XTO of Fort Worth, Texas, giving them $2,411 per acre up front and 15 percent royalties. The landowners were instant millionaires in 2008, and drilling has yet to begin. Wilber also gives a behind-the-scenes look at key state regulatory officials at the center of the shale gas policy debate in New York, and how they came to put the brakes on drilling. And he shines light on the lack of transparency in record-keeping in New York that makes it all but impossible to get a true picture of spills, accidents, and contamination related to gas drilling. “I’m skeptical, especially given the industry’s reaction from the beginning: ‘Never had a problem,’” he told The Associated Press. “We’ve found problems. We know there are problems and industry has to be held accountable for those.”

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Recovery No Help For Many Laid-Off Government Employees

April 8, 2012

By Lisa Lambert April 8 (Reuters) – Since 2009, the city of Chesapeake, tucked up against the Great Dismal Swamp in southern Virginia, has cut its workforce twice. This summer, nearly three years after the recession ended, the city of 222,209 has plans for a third round of layoffs. “We’re not seeing the recovery we want to see,” said Budget Director Steven Jenkins, who is hoping many of the 20 people will move into other jobs. The city’s revenues are still feeling the concussions from the housing market downturn, which started in 2006, even as overall growth in the United States has improved. “We are heavily reliant on the residential real estate market,” said Jenkins. In a recent assessment the average property value dropped 3.7 percent, which hits property taxes, and hurts government budgets. “The reassessment we just had was as big as any we’ve seen since the recession started.” While Friday’s report of weak growth in U.S. March payrolls raised concerns about the pace of private-sector hiring, local government jobs remain a drag on the recovery, one that is not anticipated to end soon. State and local governments for a time were able to shield public safety and education workforces from harmful cuts as the recession deepened. The 2009 federal stimulus fund helped offset lost tax revenue, but that money is gone. Now, many cities and counties nationwide are facing the same dilemma as Chesapeake. Squeezed by depressed property tax revenues and cuts in state aid, they are chipping away at their workforces. The result? The last three years of job losses at the state and local government level has been the most dramatic since Labor Department records began in 1955, according to a Reuters analysis. Public-sector employees tended to have more job security, which in some ways helps during weak economic climates, as their steady demand for goods and services spread through the economy. The recent trend, conversely, can make things worse. “If public-sector employment had grown since June 2009 by the average amount it grew in the three previous recoveries (2.8 percent) instead of shrinking by 2.5 percent, there would be 1.2 million more public-sector jobs in the U.S. economy today,” said the Economic Policy Institute in a recent report, which included federal employees in the calculation. Local governments have cut 482,000 jobs since the beginning of 2009. They added jobs in just two months since 2011 started. Previously, states only had two consecutive years of layoffs, 1995 and 1996, when they scrapped about 57,000 jobs, or about one-third of the 150,000 cut since the beginning of 2009. “The current recovery is the only one that has seen public-sector losses over its first 31 months,” the report said. As of March, 14.1 million people worked for local governments and 5.1 million for states. Public employees outnumber those in manufacturing, construction, and other areas typically considered engines of the economy. HIT BY HOUSING, LOW DEMAND Three weeks ago, firefighters in Scranton, Pennsylvania, took 10 minutes to respond to a fire, instead of the usual four minutes or less. Lighter staffing was blamed, as the city had laid off 29 firefighters in January. “We had been telling them … there’s a catastrophe that’s going to happen here,” said John J. Judge IV, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 60. After the delay, 12 of the firefighters were rehired, but that’s still a reduction of 17 workers. In March, local governments shed 3,000 jobs after gaining 1,000 in February, according to the Labor Department. State governments added 2,000 jobs. However, states employ 39,000 fewer people than a year ago, and the slight recent improvement is unlikely to be confirmed. “The rate of decline is slower,” said Christopher Hoene, research director at the National League of Cities. “But I don’t think the curve is shifting upward. I don’t think we’re going to see hiring in the local government sector.” Meanwhile, the private sector is creating jobs. Friday’s employment report showed private payrolls gained 121,000 jobs in March, while public payrolls lost 1,000. Moody’s expects states to lose at least another 15,000 jobs through 2012 and local governments between 150,000 and 175,000. “It’s going to continue to be a drag on overall employment,” said Moody’s Investors Services Economist Daniel White. STATES VS. LOCALS Des Moines, Iowa, weathered the recession better than many other cities. Its unemployment rate is 6.1 percent, more than two percentage points below the national average. Nonetheless, it recently eliminated more than 40 full-time positions after property valuations dropped 3.5 percent. It too wants to put those workers into other jobs, said Deputy City Manager Allen McKinley, a former finance director and budget officer for the Iowa capital. Des Moines also has fewer dollars to spend as the state recently mandated bigger contributions to police and fire pensions, McKinley said. As public pensions attempt to close total shortfalls of at least $600 billion, many state and local governments are having to pitch in more money to retirement systems, taking dollars away from other departments. Also, with fewer employees on the payrolls, the smaller the worker contributions to pension systems that must send retirees fixed amounts each month. A new threat has emerged in Iowa. Both parties in the legislature, along with the governor, hope to boost growth by cutting commercial property taxes, which make up around half of Des Moines revenues, by about 40 percent. Cities across the state are protesting the three proposals. All states except Vermont must end their fiscal years with balanced budgets. For its upcoming fiscal year, Florida cut 4,000 state jobs and reduced higher education and healthcare funds. Spending cuts in the $70 billion budget are so bad that Palm Beach County Clerk and Comptroller Sharon Bock said constituents might sue. Florida’s new budget means Bock must find $2.5 million in savings and still “keep the courts open,” she said. The office has already laid off 111 employees to cope with four years of budget cuts. Now, it will not fill 40 vacancies or replace departing employees – its annual turnover rate is about 10 percent. The staff size is currently around 430 people. The worker shortage will result in 10 hours of backlog each week, Bock said. “Here is the dilemma that I am in: I take an oath as a constitutional officer to provide services to the public,” she said about her duties, which include keeping vital records and operating court systems. “Do I get sued by the public because I can’t open a branch office or because I have to close one day a week? Or do I lay off people, and e n d up in the same scenario?”

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Don’t Worry, Grandma’s Got It Covered

April 5, 2012

By Linda Stern WASHINGTON, April 4 (Reuters) – The generation that invented “helicopter parenting” is moving into its grandparenting years with a wad of cash and strong ideas about how their precious posterity should live, so get ready for Granny and Grandpa Baby Boomer to shake things up. Already, today’s first-time grandparents are the youngest ever, with an average age of 47, according to an AARP survey. Boomers have the highest median household income of any age group, according to the U.S. Census; by some accounts they control as much as 70 percent of American net worth and stand to inherit another $8 trillion or more. What could be more American boomer-esque than spending that money on the grandchildren, indulging them and exerting influence along the way? Roughly 36 percent of the grandparents surveyed by AARP said “spoiling (grand)children by buying them too much” was a part of a grandparent’s financial role. And it’s fun. Ask George Marotta, who is not a baby boomer. The 85-year-old Palo Alto patriarch has turned helping his 10 grandchildren into a hobby that has paid off for multiple generations. He and his wife started in the mid-1980s, and over the years have plowed cash into bank accounts, 529 plans and Roth IRAs for all of the grandchildren. Their total investment of just under $700,000 into 529 college savings plans has already put five grandchildren through college; four more are now in college and one is still in high school. And there’s $708,335 left to fund medical school for one, divinity school for another, and graduate school and continuing education for all. “We had more than we needed for ourselves, and so we thought we would help the grandchildren,” Marotta said, noting that he and his wife became financial planners in Palo Alto in the mid-1980s, just around the time the dot-com boom was taking off. Widowed 10 years ago, Marotta has since remarried and is now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. “I recently sent an email to my 10 grandchildren, saying ‘Don’t worry about your career; do something you really would like to do. Experiment if you want,” said Marotta. “We’ve got you covered.” David John Marotta, one of George’s three sons, said: “He has been my mentor.” So how do you do that? Even if you don’t have Silicon Valley/Marotta wealth, you can make a difference in the lives of your grandchildren, and do it without hurting your relationship with your kids. Here are a few ideas, from the real experts — folks like Marotta who are financial advisers as well as grandparents. — Ask for permission. It may sound funny to ask your child if it’s okay before you start throwing money at your grandchild, but it is a key step. “Some parents don’t want their children to get a lot of toys and things; it’s important that you honor their view,” says Janet Briaud, a fee-only financial planner (and grandmother) in College Station, Texas. — Give experiences, and memories. One new trend that baby boomer grandparents are likely to latch on to are the multi-generation family vacations. “That’s become kind of a popular thing to do,” observes Robert Carlson, a northern Virginia financial adviser and editor of “Bob Carlson’s Retirement Watch” newsletter. Carol Pankross, a fee-only financial adviser in Palatine, Illinois, takes her kids and three grandchildren to Lake Lawn Resort in Delavan, Wisconsin, every year for Easter weekend. She went there as a child, as did her mother. “It’s a tradition we’ve always maintained, and we enjoy it,” she said. But key to her approach is the weekend nature of the trip. A command appearance for a longer trip might consume more vacation time than her children could afford to give up and could make them feel less indulged than controlled. — Roth it up. Roth individual retirement accounts are great savings vehicles for teens and young adults. Grandparents with the cash can match earnings of their grandchildren up to $5,000 a year for each one, and have them invest it in a Roth IRA. The income that earns should be tax free for life to the account holders, as long as they hold it for retirement. And they can use some of the money for a house down payment or for college. Marotta took that one step further. He converted roughly $200,000 of a tax-deferred IRA into 10 Roth IRAs that he owns, with his grandchildren named as beneficiaries. He expects them to eventually inherit those accounts, after many years of them growing income-tax free. — Do 529 plans, or don’t. The first advice of most financial advisers to the “how to help a grandchild” question is to seed college savings plans with money. This money will grow tax free if used for college, and you can name new beneficiaries to the account if one grandchild doesn’t use up the money and another one needs it. But not everyone likes this best. The planners at Briaud Financial Advisors, which includes not just Janet, but the parents of her grandchildren, daughter Natalie Pine and son in law Roger Pine, tend not to recommend them. Well-heeled clients with more than $100,000 to give may prefer to set up a generation-skipping trust that generally conveys more flexibility and allows the parents of the grandchildren to spend earnings every year as they see fit. — Keep it simple. Folks who want to help with college but don’t have trust levels of cash can also just keep the money and pay tuition for their grandchildren once they are enrolled in school, says Roger Pine. That avoids a lot of 529 fees and limits and complications, and allows grandparents to keep the cash if the kid ends up going to the school of motorcycle riding and partying instead of an accredited college. It also allows grandparents to take care of themselves first. Pankross says she sees clients who want to give their grandchildren everything, even though they themselves may not have enough for their own retirement. — Spoil them, just a little. Briaud’s grandson gets to watch Barney at her house; that’s a luxury he doesn’t have in his no-TV home. But, following her own advice, she did ask his parents for permission first.

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Gene Marks: Prospective Employees: Please Show Me Your Facebook Page

April 4, 2012

We call her Aunt Dolores but she’s really not our Aunt. She is… now see if you can follow me… the 70-year-old sister of my sister’s father-in-law. We see her a lot at family functions. A year ago Aunt Dolores got on Facebook. And so that she could live up to her reputation as the “fun” aunt, she “friended” my teenage kids. They accepted. What happened next is no surprise. She saw pages that shocked her. Girls and boys trash talking each other. Lewd and racy photos. Profane and filthy comments. Inappropriate postings on each others’ walls. And that was just in her Bridge Club group. The activity on my kids’ pages was even worse! And then Aunt Dolores committed the ultimate Facebook faux pas: she commented on my son’s wall in response to something stupid another kid wrote. Grandparents and older relatives heed my warning. If you want to have an online relationship with your younger relatives remember this: stay silent! Aunt Dolores violated the code. Her reward: instant un-friending. My wife and I aren’t bad parents. We’ve sat through excruciatingly long middle school plays, listened without comment as 22-year-old teachers gave us advice on raising children and endured endless drives to Virginia, Maine and parts of Pennsylvania where most inhabitants have one eye and are married to each other’s cousin — just so that we could cheer on our kids as they played soccer, baseball, squash and track. Yes, squash. But we’ve drawn the line at Facebook. We don’t go there. The amount of dribble, trash talk and mostly undecipherable nonsense exchanged between middle and high school-aged kids would make any grown man’s brain melt after an extended period of exposure. When it comes to their online activities I have to cross my fingers and trust that my kids use judgment. I am being incredibly naive. But this is a battle I’m not up to fighting. You would think I would feel the same about Facebook privacy for prospective employees. But I don’t. In fact my stance, as a small business owner and employer, is different. When someone applies to work at my company I want to see what they’re up to on Facebook. Recently the House of Representatives voted down a bill that would restrict employers’ access to prospective and current employees’ Facebook pages. In a blog published last week, PCWorld ‘s Tony Bradley argued that he does not want employers to have any access to his Facebook page saying it is an invasion of privacy and a breach of security. “The practice is at least unethical, if not illegal,” he wrote . “There is simply no valid reason for an employee to give you his or her Facebook credentials — or any other password for that matter.” I respect Tony’s opinion on this issue. He’s a good writer and I’m a fan of his. But he’s not an employer. I’m an employer. And if you want to work for me, then I want to see what you’re up to on Facebook. I understand if this upsets you. It would upset me if I was applying for a job too. I wouldn’t want anyone digging into my Facebook activities. If you’re anything like my kids you probably have lots of things on your Facebook timeline that do not do you proud. As a parent that concerns me even more. You can’t be responsible for others writing on your wall or tagging you in pictures when you’re out having fun. You’re human and like all of us you’ve written things that you now regret. And maybe you’d prefer not to share the fact that you’re a member of the Maroon 5 fan group. Believe me, I wouldn’t want to reveal those details either. But as a prospective employer I want to see what you’re up to on Facebook. I don’t want your “password.” I don’t want to be able to go onto Facebook and be you. I don’t even want to monitor your activities on Facebook once you’re hired. All I want is to be “friended” for a short period of time while I’m evaluating you as a prospective employee. Because if I’m going to be a “friend” to you by giving you a job and allowing you to enter into my company, my community, my life, my employees’ lives… is it not so unreasonable to ask to be your friend in return? I may not even look at your page. It may not even be necessary. And if I do visit your site I doubt I’d even spend much time there. Like most employers, I get it. We know that our employees have personal lives and do goofy things. You should see the moronic exchanges I still have with my fraternity brothers… and we graduated college more than 25 years ago. I don’t really care about that stuff. But there are some activities that would raise my antenna. I’m no human resources expert, but I am looking for extreme issues. Is your online behavior severely inappropriate? Do you belong to any groups or participate in any activities that could be construed as harmful, racist, demeaning or offensive? Are you a member of the KKK, the Nazi Youth or the New York Mets fan club? Are you crossing a professional line in your personal life that I can’t ignore? This is my livelihood. Why do I care? Because before I hire someone I want to know as much information about that person as possible. And there are three reasons why. For starters, I have to consider the welfare of my existing employees. I can’t bring someone into the company who is disruptive or abusive or just not a good fit. At the age of 47, I am still the world’s worst judge of human character. I need all the help I can get. A simple interview doesn’t suffice. Checking references is never enough. A resume doesn’t tell me everything I need to know. If Facebook helps me determine that a prospective employee may be offensive to others in my office I want to know that. Whenever I hire someone I feel like I’m taking a gamble. Any information that can help me reduce this risk is welcome. Access to a candidate’s online activities would be very helpful. Secondly, for most small businesses hiring a new employee is no small matter. It’s a large risk. We are investing our time, resources and money in a new person. This is a person who will be representing my company to my customers, suppliers and partners. Who I hire says a lot about me and my company. If, after six months, it turns out to be a failure the result could be a major setback. We want to avoid this from happening. I hire someone with the intention of employing them for life. I don’t want to have to do this all over. So, again, the more information I have during the review process the better. Finally, in a close contest with another candidate, access to Facebook could turn out to be to a prospective employee’s benefit. Maybe there’s some educational activity that wasn’t on a candidate’s resume. Maybe the candidate is part of a group or has friends that I know who could serve as that extra little reference that I need. Maybe that candidate is doing something special online, like writing poetry or recommending books that sets that person apart or serves as a deeper connection to me. I’m not looking at just a piece of paper. I’m looking to invest in a person. I want to know everything about that person. I want to feel right about that person before I open up my life to him or her. And make no mistake: for any small business owner, our business is our life. And what if, as I was asked recently on MSNBC’s “Your Business,” a candidate refused my request to give me access to his or her Facebook page? Would that impact my decision to hire that person? It may. I wouldn’t be upset with that person because, like I wrote earlier, I wouldn’t be thrilled about giving up my privacy either. But, if by refusing to share with me information that other candidates are sharing, I may not know enough about this candidate to hire him or her. Is LinkedIn enough information? Maybe. But I always want more. It’s 2012. Most of us evaluate employees like it’s still 1960. We look at resumes and have an interview and call up a reference or two. Times have changed. The process for hiring people is changing too. Social media is now a deep part of our culture. And it should also be part of the hiring process. Another version of this post appears on The Philly Post .

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Stressed At Work? How Fido Can Help

April 1, 2012

Here’s a way to de-stress at work that we can get behind: Bring your dog to work! New research from Virginia Commonwealth University showed that bringing dogs to work could lower stress and increase employee satisfaction. The study was published in the International Journal of Workplace Health Management . “Pet presence may serve as a low-cost, wellness intervention readily available to many organizations and may enhance organizational satisfaction and perceptions of support,” study researcher Randolph T. Barker, Ph.D., a professor of management at Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a statement . “Of course, it is important to have policies in place to ensure only friendly, clean and well-behaved pets are present in the workplace,” he said. Researchers conducted their study on the employees of a manufacturing retail company called Replacements, Ltd., that allows employees to bring pets to work. There are about 550 people who work at the Greensboro, N.C. company. The employees of the company were designated into three different categories: those with dogs, who brought them in to work during a workweek; those with dogs who did not bring them into work; and those who don’t have a dog. All the employees filled out surveys and produced samples of their saliva to gauge levels of stress hormones. In the mornings, all three groups’ stress hormone levels were about the same. However, as the day went on, the people who brought their dogs in had lower levels of self-reported stress. Meanwhile, self-reported stress increased for the people who didn’t bring in their dogs, and for those who don’t have dogs. The researchers also noted that the employees were making positive comments like “pets in the workplace can be a great bonus for employee morale … ” and ” “having dogs here is great stress relief.” USA Today reported in 2009 on a survey showing that 20 percent of companies are pet-friendly. Some include Urban Decay, in California, and Healthwise, a nonprofit based in Boise. Mother Nature Network reported that Google, Ben and Jerry’s and Build-A-Bear Workshop also are dog-friendly . And of course, HuffPost’s LA office allows dogs to come in to work, too! For more health benefits of pets , click through this slideshow from HuffPost blogger Joan Liebmann-Smith, Ph.D:

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Democrats Campaign Off Oil Subsidy Debate

March 28, 2012

Democrats are taking their oil debate off the Senate floor and onto the campaign trail this week, launching a series of online ads and a petition targeting a half-dozen Republican Senate candidates. “From Scott Brown to Dean Heller to George Allen, Republicans on Capitol Hill and on the campaign trail have made protecting multi-billion dollar tax breaks for their Big Oil campaign contributors the cornerstone of their agenda. It’s unbelievable that Republicans continue to go to bat for Big Oil companies who are raking in ridiculous profits while consumers are stuck with skyrocketing prices at the pump,” said Matt Canter, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “It’s time for Republicans to stand up for consumers, not their Big Oil contributors, starting with tomorrow’s vote.” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) offered oil legislation this week that would strip about $24 billion in subsidies from the five biggest oil companies. Democrats think letting oil companies keep taxpayer-backed subsidies while they reap record profits of prices at the pump is a winner for them. The online ads target Senate candidate Allen in Virginia, Rep. Denny Rehberg in Montana, Senate candidate Josh Mandel in Ohio, Sen. Heller of Nevada, Rep. Jeff Flake in Arizona, and Rep. Connie Mack in Florida. Although the GOP repeatedly has voted against cutting subsidies, Republican senators voted to let the Senate debate the bill in hopes of making the debate solely about gas prices. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued that it shows joust how out of touch Democrats are.

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Is The EPA Really Waging A ‘War On Coal’?

March 28, 2012

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — West Virginia’s congressional delegation joined Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin on Wednesday in bashing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a plan to limit heat-trapping pollution from new power plants, calling it a job-killer for the state and its coal industry. The rule announced Tuesday could either derail or jump-start plans for 15 new coal-fired power plants in 10 states, depending on when they start construction. Eventually, all coal-fired power plants would need to install equipment to capture half of their carbon pollution. Tomblin said it’s clear the Obama administration is trying to “end the use of coal as we know it.” The proposed guidelines would eliminate jobs and drive up electricity costs in West Virginia, he said. “I will not stand for it,” Tomblin declared. “This latest announcement is yet another example of the EPA’s inappropriate use of its regulatory authority to set policy for our country. Those decisions reside within the Congress, not an unelected bureaucracy.” The regulation stemmed from a settlement with environmental groups and states. The government already controls global warming pollution at the largest industrial sources, has adopted the first-ever standards for new cars and trucks and is working on regulations to reduce greenhouse gases at refineries. But EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says the agency has no plans to pursue regulations for existing power plants. The EPA proposal fell short of environmentalists’ hopes, however, because it goes easier than it could have on coal-fired power, one of the largest sources of the gases blamed for global warming. Jackson said her agency’s plan “creates a path forward for future facilities to use technology that burns coal, while releasing less carbon pollution.” The president of the United Mine Workers of America countered that coal plants would meet the EPA standard only if they employ expensive carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technology. “EPA knows very well that CCS technology has not been commercially demonstrated,” Cecil Roberts said. The EPA would require the potential builders to commit to CCS “at the time of their permit applications, despite the associated costs and uncertainties,” he said. “In practice, it would not be possible to finance a new coal plant to meet the proposed EPA standards.” Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin called the proposal “wrong-headed” and said it effectively prevents construction of any new coal-fired plants. “This EPA is fully engaging in a war on coal,” he said, “even though this country will continue to rely on coal as an affordable, stable and abundant energy source for decades to come.” The EPA’s approach “relies totally on cheap natural gas, and we’ve seen that bubble burst before,” Manchin added. “It might sound good now, but what happens if those prices go up? Your average hardworking families and manufacturers will be left holding the bag of uncertainty — either in the prices they pay or in the reliability of our electrical system.” Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall called it “irresponsible and unreasonable.” “To be energy independent, we need to have a full menu of domestic energy choices,” he said. “Cutting off coal at the knees, as this rule does, undercuts our energy and economic security.” Republican Reps. Shelley Moore Capito and David McKinley argued the EPA is once again overstepping its authority. “Whether coal, natural gas or oil,” Capito said, “this administration is intent on holding our fossil fuels hostage.” McKinley noted that just last week, a federal judge found the EPA had overreached in vetoing a water pollution permit the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had given Arch Coal for its Spruce No. 1 surface mine in Logan County. “Plain and simple, this will kill West Virginia jobs,” McKinley said. “… The fact that they are nonetheless proceeding with new regulations that effectively ban new coal-fired power plants is a signal that their arrogance knows no limit.”

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Pro-Fracking Filmmaker Make His Point In Big Way

March 22, 2012

WASHINGTON — Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who famously attacked Al Gore over global warming issues, stepped up his support for fracking on Thursday, erecting a billboard on Route 17 in Rock Hill, N.Y., on the road to Pennsylvania. The billboard serves as a teaser for McAleer’s upcoming documentary, “FrackNation.” Produced with his wife, Ann McElhinney, the film explores the implications of fracking — or hydraulic fracturing — a controversial process in which undisclosed chemicals are injected at high pressure into rocks containing oil or natural gas. McAleer has argued that media portrayals of fracking have been largely “exaggerated hyperbole” that ignores the millions of people whose lives have been “positively transformed” by the fracking industry. “There’s lots of anecdotes and there’s lot of stories and there’s lots of scare stories,” McAleer told HuffPost. On his billboard and in his upcoming film, McAleer has targeted a particular claim made by filmmaker Josh Fox in the Academy Award-nominated “Gasland” documentary. In his film, Fox showed that after fracking was done in Colorado, residents’ tap water was so polluted with methane that it could be set on fire. After a screening of “Gasland,” McAleer approached Fox to challenge his views. McAleer said that “burning springs” — in which so much natural gas was bubbling up through natural springs that the water would burn when lit — have long been documented in New York, West Virginia and Kentucky. “The water was on fire in 1669,” his billboard says, referring people to McAleer’s website for more information. In their exchange, Fox responded that such springs had no bearing on his documentary. “The citizens reported that they could not light their water on fire before the drilling,” he said, “and after the drilling, they could light their water on fire.” Meanwhile, a recent Environmental Protection Agency study found that fracking was responsible for polluted groundwater at an aquifer that supplied public drinking water in Pavillion, Wyo. The EPA has since been tasked with formulating rules on emissions from natural gas operations, as part of a broader move by the Obama administration to address safety concerns around fracking. McAleer taped the conversation with Fox, which he says Fox has continued to ignore. Such “censorship,” McAleer adds, is what first inspired him to make a film. “I just feel, as a journalist, it was an ethical requirement for him to show the science behind these allegations and the historical context on which to hang these allegations,” McAleer said of Fox. “He fails to do that.”

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‘Excessive’ Health Insurance Premium Hikes Called Out by Obama Administration

March 22, 2012

Health insurance premium hikes in nine states as high as 24 percent are “excessive” and should be blocked, the federal Department of Health and Human Services said Thursday. The agency will have to depend on states to take action, however, because the federal government lacks the authority. The health care reform law enacted in 2010 requires health insurance companies to present premium hikes of 10 percent or more for federal review. Since the law took effect, the Department of Health and Human Services has reviewed and made public more than 180 rate-review proposals for health plans that cover 1.3 million individuals and small-business employees. Big annual health insurance premiums became a heated issue during the congressional debate over health care reform in February 2010, just one month before the legislation passed, when a California subsidiary of the insurance giant WellPoint sought to raise rates on its 800,000 customers by as much as 39 percent . At the time, President Barack Obama said he was “very disturbed” by what WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross proposed. “It’s time for these companies to immediately rescind these unreasonable rate hikes , issue refunds to consumers or publicly explain their refusal to do so,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a press release about Thursday’s announcement. The agency didn’t name the health insurance companies in its notice. Congress gave Health and Human Services the power to force reviews of large premium increases but not the power to stop them. States, not the federal government, are in charge of rejecting premium hikes or allowing them to go ahead. Thirty states had their own rate-review rules in place prior to national health care reform and seven more have set up the process since the law provided $250 million in funding, according to the federal department. Agencies in 27 states, including California, New York and Oregon, have made insurers dial back premium hikes since 2010, the department says. Today’s announcement affects health insurance plans covering 43,000 people in Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The health insurance industry maintains that health plans base their premiums on the actual medical costs incurred by customers and the prices charged by doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers .

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Bill Bartmann: It’s Time for a "Regulatory Cocktail" Against Unethical Debt Collectors

March 21, 2012

Medical researchers came up with a breakthrough in the 1980s in their quest to cure patients of HIV. They developed the Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy, which non-scientists called a “drug cocktail.” Even though any single medicine was not powerful enough to cure people with HIV, it was discovered that the right cocktail of drugs could be highly effective. Many U.S. attorneys general are working with each other and with the federal government to employ the same strategy to control and eventually eradicate the scourge that is unethical debt collectors, because just one strategy alone seems not to be enough. West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw saw how the settlement against a major debt collector in a class-action lawsuit would pay out a lousy ten bucks per victim. Exercising his rights to protect the citizens of West Virginia, McGraw then brought his own suit against the company for using false affidavits when obtaining default judgments against West Virginians and for not including necessary details when suing consumers. Attorney General McGraw said : Many consumers are frightened or unaware of their rights when they are sued and fail to respond to these groundless lawsuits, leaving them subject to judgments on debts that cannot be proved. Companies such as Midland rely upon this fear and typically drop their lawsuits if consumers know their rights. Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson is prosecuting agencies who work with attorneys to scam consumers. Debt-settlement companies align themselves with lawyers so they can use official-looking letterhead to collect fees up-front for promising to help consumers with their overwhelming debts. Then they fail to deliver, leaving the consumers in even-deeper debt. Attorney General Swanson said : “It’s particularly galling. Here you’re seeing people who have a special privilege — the privilege to practice law — abusing consumers who are down on their luck.” Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is going after lawyers who specialize in requesting arrest warrants for consumers behind on their bills. One example is a 53-year-old woman who was stopped for a broken taillight. When the police ran her name, she was handcuffed in front of her kids and hauled away for a $2,200 debt that had turned into a default judgment. The Wall Street Journal surveyed just nine counties in the U.S. and found more than 5,000 such arrest warrants issued since 2010 for debt-related cases. Attorney General Madigan said: “We can no longer allow debt collectors to pervert the courts.” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has gone after multiple debt-collection companies, including one whose employees took the arrest-warrant threat to a whole new level. Their employees claimed to be associated with law-enforcement agencies and the IRS. They would insist that consumers pay their debts or risk facing arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is onto the game some debt collectors play of threatening consumers with legal action while hiding the fact that the debt is “time-barred”; in other words, the debt has passed the statute of limitations for any legal action. Her amended regulations would require that consumers be informed of that fact. Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has banded together with 18 other states to go after NCO Financial, a large debt-collector, for a whole range of violations, including extracting money from consumers for debts they did not owe, and charging excessive interest. Ohio has a tradition of pursuing debt collectors. As Attorney General in 2010, Richard Cordray investigated two other debt-collection firms, and now he heads the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He therefore has first-hand knowledge of the games debt collectors play. No doubt that is why Director Cordray has already proposed regulations that would involve on-site federal inspection of the top debt collectors representing 63 percent of collections in the U.S. More bad news is in store for crooked debt collectors. Recently, state and federal officials gathered to announce the $25 billion mortgage-servicing settlement. Attorney General Lisa Madigan used that event to reinforce the regulatory cocktail that’s being assembled against the worst debt collectors: Know that this is neither the beginning nor the end of our work to hold banks and other institutions accountable…. Today’s settlement should serve as a warning for financial institutions: there are consequences for engaging in practices that jeopardize the stability of our communities and our economy. Bill Bartmann is CEO of CFS II, a debt-collection company. His companies have helped to settle debts of more than 4.5 million people without ever filing suit against a customer.

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Coal Companies Sued Over Runoff Pollution

March 20, 2012

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Environmentalists are suing two more coal companies over pollution from mining operations in West Virginia’s Boone and Nicholas counties. The Sierra Club, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and Ohio Valley Environmental Council say that Elk Run Coal Co. and Alex Energy have contaminated headwater streams with sulfate and other dissolved solids. The case in U.S. District Court in Charleston says runoff affects the Laurel Creek and Twentymile Creek watersheds in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. It says Elk Run’s White Castle No. 1 is polluting Mudlick and Stolling forks, while Alex’s Robinson North Surface Mine is polluting Robinson Fork. The groups argue state and federal regulators have failed to address the problem. They’re employing the same legal strategy they used to win a cleanup settlement last fall with Fola Coal Co.

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American Cities Where Manufacturing Is Booming

March 18, 2012

Last Friday, President Obama pointed to the improving labor market as a sign the economy is recovering. According to the jobs report released last week, companies hired more than 200,000 workers for the third consecutive month in February. The president, speaking to workers at a Rolls-Royce aircraft parts plant in Virginia, touted the 31,000 new manufacturing jobs, and suggested that manufacturing was fueling the recovery.

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James Peron: Conservatives Really Do Hate Markets

March 13, 2012

Conservatives hate “free markets.” I mean that quite literally. I define markets as institutions where individuals are free to make voluntary exchanges according to their own personal values, without politics distorting their actions. While conservatives say they believe in the market process, actions speak louder than words. During the shameful kerfuffle where Rush Limbaugh engaged in misogynistic, slanderous comments toward a university student for speaking about birth control, something was missing. I don’t remember a single conservative coming out with an obvious position, consistent with open markets: allow birth control pills to be sold over the counter, no prescription necessary. Virginia Postrel did make that point, but she’s not a conservative, she’s a libertarian. Perhaps some conservative did make this point, but he or she would certainly be the exception, not the rule. Risks from the pill are extremely low, as billions of doses have proven. There may be a tiny number of women who shouldn’t take the pill because of adverse affects. But similarly, about 4 million Americans are allergic to peanuts, and one-third of them are sufficiently allergic that a peanut can kill them. Peanuts can still be bought over the counter. Even something as innocuous as aspirin has risks . “For 50-year-old men, taking an aspirin every day to prevent heart disease and stroke carries a risk of 10.4 deaths per 100,000 men per year over and above their overall death risk.” Life entails risks. We’ve found no way to avoid that. But, on a rational scale of risk, the “threat” from over-the-counter birth control pills is very small indeed and it’s time to deregulate them. Doing so will have two results. First, it will lower the price. Second, these contraceptives will become more accessible. This is precisely the reason conservatives are NOT speaking out in favor of “deregulation” of birth control pills. They don’t want them easily and cheaply available — especially to the young. They desire adverse consequences. Prevalent in conservative circles is the view that “sin” must be punished. Religious conservatives in particular argue that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is sinful. They don’t support a depoliticized market in birth control pills because it wouldn’t produce results commensurate with their religious beliefs. They believe the fear of pregnancy is an important tool for restricting sinful, sexual activity. Pregnancy and disease, to them, are the earned results of disobeying God. When we look at the evolution of attitudes toward gay people and same-sex relationships we again note that markets are more accepting than governments. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 87% of Fortune 500 companies prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and 58% will provide health insurance coverage for the spouses of gay employees. HRC notes: “The higher a company ranks on Fortune magazine’s list of the most successful businesses, the more likely it is to provide comprehensive protections and benefits to LGBT employees.” When it comes to political bodies, the opposite is true. Take marriage laws as an example. If marriage was regulated at the local level there probably would be hundreds, if not thousands of cities where same-sex marriage would be legal. It is likely that most, if not all states would have at least one such island of tolerance. However, the higher up the political food chain you go the more difficult it is to secure equal rights. There are 50 large political bodies: the states. Yet the percentage of states recognizing same-sex relationships does not even come close to what prevails with Fortune 500 corporations. When new marriage laws in Maryland and Washington go into effect, and providing there is no repeal in New Hampshire, the percentage of states that recognize same-sex relationships will rise to 16%. Among the Fortune 500, it is 58%. Our largest political bodies have a long way to go before they catch up with our largest businesses. Consider recent attempts by right-wing zealots to use market boycotts in order to push their agenda. The “One Million Moms” boycott of JC Penney for hiring open-lesbian Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson, fell flat. JC Penney told the “Moms” to go take a hike. The same group demanded Toys R Us remove an Archie comic book because it depicted a same-sex wedding. That demand removed the comic from the shelves, but not through a boycott, the comic almost instantly sold out thanks to the publicity. Rick Santorum expressed this sort of view when he said, “This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view.” He described libertarians as believing that “government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we should get involved in cultural issues… Well, that is NOT how traditional conservatives view the world.” The Religious Right may talk about “markets,” but in the end they get their way through regulations, controls and legislation. As I previously noted , while many conservatives invoke the classical liberal thinker F.A. Hayek, they ignore his actual views. Hayek was highly critical of the conservative mentality. He accurately described the conservative’s fear of depoliticized markets. According to Hayek, conservatives “are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rates to whatever appeals to the more timid mind.” Whether they like to admit it or not, the Religious Right is really the Regulating Right. They do hate markets.

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Mortgage Lenders Aren’t The Only Ones Accused Of Robo-Signing

March 12, 2012

Apparently robo-signing might not be a practice reserved solely for the foreclosure crisis. West Virgnia’s attorney general is suing two units of a debt collection company, Encore Capital Group, alleging that they robo-signed affidavits when they were trying to get default judgments against West Virginia borrowers, according to Bloomberg. For their part, Encore officials said that the lawsuit came as a “surprise,” according to the West Virginia Record . As the economic downturn pushed more Americans deeper into debt, the debt collection industry has boomed, and the sector is coming under increased scrutiny. Consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about debt collectors rose 17 percent in 2010, according to USA Today . The agency last year filed a complaint against another debt collection company , this one based in California, alleging it used aggressive tactics to get borrowers to pay up — even when they didn’t owe any money. In addition, the FTC announced in January that a Michigan-based debt collection agency is paying $2.5 million to settle charges of misconduct . The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — another consumer watchdog — may also be pursuing debt collectors as part of a larger effort to crack down on alternative lenders, according to a January report from TIME . The boost in enforcement could be because debt collectors are becoming a presence in the lives of many Americans. One in seven consumers are being pursued by a debt collector , according to Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. That’s a good deal more than the number of U.S. households facing foreclosure — more than 80 times more, in fact . And since even that much smaller foreclosure percentage caused a complete robo-signing crisis, there is cause for concern. Indeed, the nation’s five largest lenders recently signed an agreement with the U.S. government to pay $25 billion to settle allegations of questionable and illegal lending practices, with robo-signing among them.

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The Future of Health Insurance: Health Care Reform Rule Sets up "Exchanges"

March 12, 2012

The Obama administration released a 643-page regulation today spelling out how states can establish health insurance “exchanges” under health reform, but it doesn’t spell out what happens if Republican-led state governments continue to progress in an effort to obstruct the law. The health insurance exchanges are a centerpiece of the reform law President Barack Obama enacted in 2010. These exchanges will allow people and small businesses to compare insurance plans available in their states and find out whether they qualify for tax credits or for government benefits like Medicaid. By 2019, more than 24 million Americans will buy health insurance through the exchanges in their states, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The exchanges will operate as Web-based marketplaces for consumers to review health insurance benefits and prices, and to apply for financial assistance. Toll-free telephone numbers and counselors called “navigators” will be available to help insurance shoppers, said Tim Hill, the deputy director of the federal Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, during a conference call with reporters Monday. The rule is intended as a road map for states, which are supposed to set up and run their own exchanges under federal guidelines. But what if states simply refuse to carry it out ? Most states have been reluctant to throw themselves into the process of implementing health reform. Indeed, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments this month in a case brought by 26 states claiming that the law’s mandated expansion of Medicaid and requirement that nearly everyone obtain health insurance violate the Constitution. The high court is expected to decide on the case by the end of June. The possibility of the entire law being struck down by the Supreme Court , means Republican governors and Republican-led state legislatures have resisted moving ahead with exchanges in their states. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli suggested last week that even a ruling in favor of the law might not bring an end to state protests . If the Supreme Court upholds health reform, or only strikes down parts of it and leaves provisions about the exchanges in place, delays at the state level could hamper the success of the overall law. “It’s hard to imagine how a state could take all the necessary legislative, policy, operational, and IT system development steps needed to meet this compressed timeline if it doesn’t start work until the summer,” Dave Chandra, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote last month. Under the regulation, states are given latitude to make decisions in a number of areas, including whether to limit their exchanges to certain insurance companies and whether to run the exchange through a state agency or a nonprofit. Twelve states have engaged in “no significant activity” on exchanges while 12 states and the District of Columbia have established them in advance of 2014, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The rest of the states either plan to establish an exchange or are “studying options,” the Kaiser Family Foundation reports. Nearly all states have accepted some federal funding for exchanges, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The health reform law permits the federal government to set up exchanges in states that aren’t ready (or refuse to participate) but today’s announcement doesn’t explain how. “We are moving forward to set up a federally facilitated exchange” for states that aren’t prepared, Hill said. States have to be ready by Jan. 1, 2013, or the federal government can step in, according to the health reform law.

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Why The FBI Says Corporate Fraud Is Increasing

February 27, 2012

In China, the former president of the state-owned Shanghai Pharmaceutical Group was recently sentenced to death for taking almost $2 million in bribes and embezzling $5 million. Over here, the authorities are a little less aggressive. The FBI insists it is on the case. In its latest financial crimes report , the bureau said corporate fraud remains one of its “highest priorities” and that its agents in 2011 pursued about 726 such cases that include false accounting, fraudulently inflated assets, insider trading and kickbacks, a 10 percent increase from 2010. Those cases resulted in 242 indictments and 241 convictions of corporate criminals, with the FBI securing $2.4 billion in restitution orders and $16.1 million in fines. Due to the volatility of the stock market, the FBI “witnessed a steady rise in securities and commodities frauds” — such as securities market manipulation, Ponzi schemes and “foreign-based reverse merger market manipulation schemes,” the report said. Such fraud investigations have increased 52 percent from 2008 and the FBI has more than 1,800 pending probes, requiring it to add 91 agents. In addition, mortgage fraud seems to be on the rise, with suspicious activity reports jumping by a third from the previous year to 93,508, though the average fraud was smaller, since the total resulted in a slightly smaller dollar loss. The number of pending fraud cases involving financial institutions declined in 2011, sure to anger critics who claim the FBI and the Justice Department have not been assiduous enough in prosecuting and jailing financial fraudsters. Industry Ahead of Regulators In Recognizing Harm of Silica More than 2 million workers are exposed to potentially hazardous levels of silica dust , common in construction and sandblasting, according to Public Citizen, the watchdog group. But a proposal to update the current exposure standard, adopted in 1971 and considered inadequate by health professionals, has languished at the White House Office of Management and Budget for a year. While the regulators and analysts consider whether silica is a hazard, some employers have already made up their minds. An industrial hygienist at a Coast Guard ship repair yard told the Baltimore Sun that “many workplaces had shifted years ago to coal and copper slag for blasting, after it became clear that blasting with sand was exposing workers to harmful silica, which can also cause serious lung disease if inhaled.” That quote was noted by National COSH , a federation of non-profit coalitions of labor unions, health and technical professionals. You Think Our Regulations Are Bad? The business lobby often complains that U.S. regulations are burdensome, but they should be happy they don’t live in Greece. Economist Megan Greene tells the tale of the bookstore/cafe in Athens that neither sells books nor makes coffee: A friend and I met up at a new bookstore and café in the centre of town, which has only been open for a month. The establishment is in the center of an area filled with bars, and the owner decided the neighborhood could use a place for people to convene and talk without having to drink alcohol and listen to loud music. After we sat down, we asked the waitress for a coffee. She thanked us for our order and immediately turned and walked out the front door. My friend explained that the owner of the bookstore/café couldn’t get a license to provide coffee. She had tried to just buy a coffee machine and give the coffee away for free, thinking that lingering patrons would boost book sales. However, giving away coffee was illegal as well. Instead, the owner had to strike a deal with a bar across the street, whereby they make the coffee and the waitress spends all day shuttling between the bar and the bookstore/café. My friend also explained to me that books could not be purchased at the bookstore, as it was after 18h and it is illegal to sell books in Greece beyond that hour. I was in a bookstore/café that could neither sell books nor make coffee. Quick Hits * The Securities and Exchange Commission released its second risk alert so far this year on unauthorized trading, which includes “rogue trades in customer, client, or proprietary accounts or trades that exceed firm limits on position exposures, risk tolerances, and losses.” * After a 20-month probe, the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training released its report on the fatal explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine almost two years ago. * Bloomberg News joins the class war, tweets, “Rich people are more likely to lie, steal and cheat”

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Wealthy More Likely To Cheat And Steal Than Poor: Study

February 27, 2012

MONTREAL – A new study says rich people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour than their poorer counterparts. That’s the finding from researchers at the University of California and the University of Toronto, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. In two tests, researchers found that upper-class drivers were more likely to cut off other cars and pedestrians at crosswalks. The researchers used age, vehicle make and appearance to assess drivers’ social class. In another series of tests involving undergraduate students and adults, researchers found that those who consider themselves “upper class” were more likely to take valued items from others, lie during negotiations and cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize. The authors of the study say the differences in ethical behavior can be explained, at least in part, by the upper-class participants’ more favourable attitude toward greed. But they also stress that this is not a universal trend, arguing that there are many examples of ethical behaviour amongst more affluent people, such as philanthropic work. The authors also point out that unethical behavior is not absent from lower-class individuals, as has been demonstrated by numerous studies on the relationship between the concentration of poverty and violent crime. The findings in the tests conducted on undergraduates and adults were consistent across age, gender, ethnicity, religion and political orientation of the participants.

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LOOK: Auto Workers Protest Romney, Praise Obama In Detroit

February 24, 2012

Around 250 auto workers and supporters marched in Detroit Friday to send a message to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney: “Don’t bet against the American Worker.” Romney is set to speak on tax policy at Ford Field as part of an event hosted by the Detroit Economic Club. Former Sen. Rick Santorum, Romney’s chief rival for the Republican nomination, spoke to the group about economic policy last Thursday. Both candidates are vying for Michigan, and remain close in the polls ahead of the upcoming Tuesday primary here. Though Romney has campaigned hard here in recent weeks, attempting to play up his hometown pride and even calling himself a “son of Detroit,” auto workers at the rally Friday were none too pleased with the former Massachusetts governor’s attempt to rebrand himself as a Michigander. (SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS) GM worker Ken Figley said he’d like to tell Romney to “Go back to Massachusetts. Why didn’t he run for reelection there?” Figley said he thought Romney had a 50/50 chance of winning the GOP primary here, but he no longer considers Michigan a swing state. “It’s definitely a Democratic state now, because of the auto policy.” “He wasn’t there when we needed him,” said a United Auto Workers member named Bob, who did not want his last name published because he was skipping work to attend the rally. Sharon Scott, an autoworker from downriver, wore a UAW jacket and carried a hot pink Planned Parenthood sign. She said she had come out to protest Romney’s economic policies, as well as his positions on women’s health and reproductive rights. “He wanted to give up on all of us here,” she said. “He’s against me and my family.” And for Scott, part of the idea of family is the right to family planning. “The problem I have is with guys trying to decide what happens with birth control when they have no problem supporting erectile dysfunction medication,” she said. “We deserve the right to choose.” The UAW organized the event in conjunction with Progress Michigan, whose executive director, Dave Holtz, said his organization wants to both push hard against Romney and promote a conversation among Michiganders about the consequences of the auto bailout. “We want to have that debate,” he said, “between the folks who are Republicans, and are in the auto industry, who have said the auto rescue worked.” “On the other side, we have the Tea Party standing on ideology rather than being pragmatic and acknowledge that it worked,” he added. “For Romney and the Republican candidates, it’s time to admit it — it worked.” The UAW rally seemed designed as much to advocate for Democrats as it was to criticize Romney. While a truck-mounted billboard proclaiming “Let Romney Go Bankrupt” cruised around Ford Field, rally organizers chose a more upbeat message. UAW President Bob King used call and response to get the crowd cheering, “Thank you President Obama!” “When all the polls said, ‘Do not help the auto industry,’ who stood with us,” King asked. “Who was there for auto workers, for steel workers, for glass workers and working people in America?” King applauded the auto industry’s turnaround, and said “every single one” of the Republican candidates “has gone against this great American success story.” “We were especially angry with what Mr. Romney said, that we were given something,” he said. “Our members gave up from $7,000 to $30,000 a year to keep jobs in America and revitalize and save the companies that we work for. Our members made the sacrifices.” Auto workers, of course, gave up pay and benefit increases during contract negotiations following the bailout and automaker restructuring. When asked how they might reconcile those significant givebacks with a pro-industry spirit, King said he believed the industry had turned around sufficiently to offer workers ample job security. “There’s no need for concessions,” he told The Huffington Post. “We’re moving toward a successful industry. Ford, GM and Chrysler are profitable.” King would not speculate, however, on whether the record profits for some automakers would result in pay or benefit increases for UAW members. The UAW is now focused on supporting Obama, and tapping into the 99 percent rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Several members in the crowd carried signs that read “99%” and the UAW is rumored to announced a spring campaign with a similar theme. King told HuffPost he sees the campaign as tapping into a desire for “all things fair” in society. “It’s a broad social and economic justice movement,” he said. He would not comment on his feelings about local politicians, like Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), who endorsed Romney while remaining supportive of the auto bailout, but he said he thought “the general population will support Obama” in November. The UAW protesters marched on the sidewalk outside Ford Field, but on the opposite side of the stadium from the entrance for the Romney event. The closest they came to encountering a Romney supporter was when they loudly booed a passing truck decked out in Romney signs and a billboard. Jim Wilson, a Virginia resident, drove the white GMC 1500 plastered with Romney campaign signs. He said he drives the truck to campaign events in states across the Midwest. “I just love a good party,” he said. See more photos from the UAW protest below:

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Arthur Bruzzone: Unemployment Sobers Up the GOP

February 23, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Just when you thought the GOP was headed off the moral cliff, reality has struck. This week, Gallup reported that unemployment rocketed up to 9% from 8.3% in February. This should sober up the Republican candidates and voters. It should, but the GOP has often shown itself to be a suicidal political party. There’s a reason why, in the last several weeks, the Republican primary campaign has been dominated by candidates’ news bites and emotionalized commentaries on social issues — contraception, abortion, gay marriage. Previously, fiscal imbalances, economic reverberations from the 2008 financial crisis, and war clouds over the Middle East were the focus of the candidates, voters, and 19 debates. That reason is that January’s unemployment statistics showed an improving economy. The Department of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment in January had dropped to 8.3%. President Obama’s approval ratings began to rise, especially in several key battleground states. Also with that report, the wind was vacuumed out of the Romney campaign. Jobs and the economy were Mitt Romney’s focus from the beginning. He would thrive or die based on the state of the economy and new job formation. So when unemployment statistics in January showed a drop to 8.3%, his campaign faltered. Rick Santorum saw an opening and took it. Enter the plethora of Santorum-friendly issues that enveloped the primaries. This switch was heightened by a court case in California (same sex marriage), an anti-abortion measure in Virginia, and the strategic decision by the Obama Administration to take on the Catholic Church on contraception insurance coverage. At its crescendo, Rick Santorum described a secular society not based on religious principles as a renewal of the French Revolution and “the guillotine.” Then on Monday, Gallup Poll released its unexpected survey report. “The U.S. unemployment rate, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, is 9.0% in mid-February,” Gallup said in its mid-month unemployment survey, released on February 17. “The mid-month reading normally reflects what the U.S. government reports for the entire month, and is up from 8.3% in mid-January.” The survey also found that “underemployment” — those unemployed and those working part-time because full-time jobs are unavailable — rose to 19 percent, up from the 18.7 percent. If the month-ending Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report does fall in line with the mid-month Gallup survey, the Romney campaign should be solidly back on track. Even if unemployment rates gyrate up and down in upcoming months, with last month’s up tick, no real trend has been established. The economy, not social issues, will be the prime concern for voters, along with the growing Iran crisis and its impact on gas prices. That may have saved the GOP. The Republican Party is not a party; it is a loose coalition made of factions that really don’t like each other. Only a strong leader or a weak economy have united the party. That strong leader has yet to emerge in 2012. True, we’ve seen rotating front runners — from Romney to Cain to Gingrich to Santorum and likely back to Romney. We’ll see if Mitt Romney can emerge from the savage beating that he’s endured in the primaries as hardened, strong and inspiring leader. In the end, the economy will decide his and President Obama’s fate.

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Leak Reveals Behind-The-Scenes Peek At Climate Skeptic Efforts

February 16, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Leaked documents from a prominent conservative think tank show how it sought to teach schoolchildren skepticism about global warming and planned other behind-the-scenes tactics using millions of dollars in donations from big corporate names. More than $14 million of the money used by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute would come from one anonymous man, according to the leaked documents prepared for a meeting of the group’s board. Heartland is one of the loudest voices denying man-made global warming, hosting the largest international scientific conference of skeptics on climate change. Several of its documents were leaked this week to the news media, showing the planning and money behind its efforts. Heartland said some of the documents weren’t accurate, but declined to be more specific. As detailed in the papers, Heartland’s plans for this year included paying an Energy Department consultant $100,000 to design a curriculum to teach school children that mainstream global warming science is in dispute, even though it’s a fact accepted by the federal government and nearly every scientific professional organization. It also pays prominent global warming skeptics more than $300,000 a year and plans to raise $88,000 to help a former television weatherman set up a new temperature records website. “The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on Jan. 17,” Heartland said in a statement. “The authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.” The institute singled out one of the six documents — claiming to be a summary of efforts on the issue of global warming — as a fake. Because Heartland was not specific about what was fake and what was real, The Associated Press attempted to verify independently key parts of separate budget and fundraising documents that were leaked. The federal consultant working on the classroom curriculum, the former TV weatherman, a Chicago elected official who campaigns against hidden local debt and two corporate donors all confirmed to the AP that the sections in the document that pertained to them were accurate. No one the AP contacted said the budget or fundraising documents mentioning them were incorrect. David Wojick, a Virginia-based federal database contractor, said in an email that the document was accurate about his project to put curriculum materials in schools that promote climate skepticism. “My goal is to help them teach one of the greatest scientific debates in history,” Wojick said. “This means teaching both sides of the science, more science, not less.” Five government and university climate scientists contacted said they were most disturbed by Wojick’s project, fearing the teaching would be more propaganda rooted in politics than peer-reviewed science. Businesses and other interests often offer free curriculum materials to financially strapped schools, hoping that teachers will use them and help disseminate their views or promote their products. Energy Department spokeswoman Jen Stutsman said Wojick’s federal work has nothing to do with climate change and that the agency maintains that global warming is real and manmade. Heartland also planned to spend $210,000 to help Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas tour the nation to speak about municipal debt, according to one document. Pappas lost to Barack Obama in the 2004 Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat. Pappas confirmed this in a phone interview, saying what Heartland was doing was exposing a “financial tsunami” of municipal debt. The leaked document also discusses a new million-dollar Heartland initiative to promote the ability of patients to use experimental drugs that have not yet received federal safety approval, and efforts to support embattled Wisconsin Republican leaders in “Operation Angry Badger.” Those parts of the documents were not independently confirmed. The documents also show Heartland has raised more than $2 million from large insurance companies and nearly half a million dollars from tobacco interests. A person who emailed 15 media and bloggers as “Heartland insider” sent six different documents purporting to be from the libertarian think tank. The insider then killed the email account used to send the documents and could not be reached. Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely would not confirm or deny the claims made in the five documents that he did not call fake. The most sensational parts of the documents — and much of what has been confirmed independently — had to do with global warming and efforts to spread doubt into what mainstream scientists are saying. Experts long have thought Heartland and other groups were working to muddy the waters about global warming, said Harry Lambright, a Syracuse University public policy professor who specializes in environment, science and technology issues. “Scientifically there is no controversy. Politically, there is a controversy because there are political interest groups making it a controversy,” Lambright said. “It’s not about science. It’s about politics. To some extent they are winning the battle.” A 2010 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences surveyed more than 1,300 most cited and published climate scientists and found that 97 percent of them said climate change was a man-made problem. Yet, public opinion polls show far more doubt in the American public. An environmental advocacy group, Forecast the Facts, on Thursday started a petition and social media campaign to complain to two of Heartland’s corporate donors listed on the documents, Microsoft and General Motors. The two were not the biggest donors; Microsoft donated $69,000 over three years, while the General Motors Foundation gave $45,000. But those are companies that “need to hear from their customers” that they are not happy about promoting climate skepticism, especially after General Motors got a government bailout, campaign director Daniel Souweine said. General Motors spokesman Greg Martin said the company’s foundation gives money to “a variety of different groups holding a variety of opinions.” Microsoft said through its public relations agency that it donates software to 44,000 nonprofits that pass IRS standards, as Heartland does, and that it considers climate change a serious issue. The documents showed how heavily Heartland relies on a single person it identified only as “Anonymous Donor.” In the past six years, the man has given $14.26 million to the institute, nearly half its $33.9 million in revenue. ___ Online: Heartland Institute: http://heartland.org/ Forecast the Facts campaign against Heartland donors: http://bit.ly/wfd3uY

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Santorum Releases Tax Returns

February 16, 2012

WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum released four years of federal income tax returns on Wednesday night, showing a sharp rise in his personal wealth spurred by his growing work as Washington-based corporate consultant and media commentator. Santorum’s returns show that his federal income taxes rose from 2007, when he paid $167,000, to $310,000 in 2009, then dropped to $263,000 in 2010. During that same period, his annual income surged from nearly $660,000 in 2007 to $1.1 million in 2009 before slipping to $923,000 in 2010. Santorum, 53, has sold himself in the Republican primaries as both a Washington outsider and a social conservative, stressing his family’s coal-mining background and his appeal to religious and working-class voters. His personal finances tell a different story, detailing the trajectory of a politician who grew more prosperous in the Senate and became a millionaire afterwards, at times capitalizing on his Beltway connections. His 2010 tax returns show he made more than $550,000 in media and consulting fees – paid to him through a corporation he set up, Excelsior LLC. The previous year, Santorum made more than $820,000 in fees, also paid through the same firm. Santorum’s wealth doesn’t come close to the multimillion-dollar fortune amassed by Mitt Romney’s high-finance prowess or Newt Gingrich’s smaller but still-lucrative blend of foundation and consulting work. But his newfound affluence reflects his close ties to Washington’s business and lobbying circles during his 12 years in the Senate and his smooth transition into their world after he left office. Both Romney and Gingrich recently disclosed income tax returns. Last year, the former Pennsylvania senator disclosed investment and real estate assets totaling as much as $2.5 million. In his presidential financial disclosure spanning 18 months between 2010 and 2011, Santorum also listed $1.3 million in income as a consultant – much of it coming from media appearances and corporate work on behalf of health care, energy and social conservative interests. Rising to GOP leadership in the Senate as Republican Conference chairman, Santorum pushed to expand the influence of Republican-leaning business interests. As conference chairman, he headed GOP Senate communications efforts and met regularly with GOP-leaning business and lobbying figures. He raised more than $550,000 from lobbyists during his unsuccessful 2006 Senate re-election campaign. After his Senate defeat, Santorum did not register as a lobbyist, but he aided corporate and other interests as a consultant. He was paid $142,500 by Consol Energy, a Pennsylvania-based energy firm with numerous Appalachian coal mines. The firm has lobbied against Obama administration efforts to tighten limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Santorum also was paid $65,000 by the American Continental Group, a D.C. lobbying firm with an assortment of corporate clients, and $125,000 by the Clapham Group, a Virginia firm that aids religious rights organizations. He benefitted from media work, paid $230,000 for appearances on Fox News, as well as more than $80,000 for stints as a radio commentator. Santorum was also paid nearly $400,000 in compensation and stock options as a board director at Universal Health Services, a hospital management firm, after he left the Senate in 2006. He also owns up to $250,000 in Universal stock. As a senator, Santorum had sponsored several unsuccessful bills that would have secured more Medicaid funding hospitals run by Universal and other medical firms in Puerto Rico. Santorum also owns five rental properties in State College, Pa., worth $500,000 and $1.25 million, but also with as much as $750,000 in mortgage debt, according to his presidential disclosure. His taxes show that he took mortgage and depreciation deductions on those properties, and also that he sold more than $23,000 worth of stocks in 2010. Santorum and his wife, Karen, took standard deductions each year for their seven children, the returns show. In 2007, the Santorums took a $4,000 charity deduction for giving away “clothing, footwear, accessories and household items.” That year, the family moved into a larger home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Santorum and his family now live in a four-bedroom northern Virginia house on five acres assessed at $1.4 million in 2010. The tax returns were first made available Wednesday night by Politico.

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Netflix Settles Class Action Suit

February 11, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO — Netflix pressed the rewind button on its fourth-quarter earnings after settling allegations that the video subscription service violated a consumer-privacy law. Accounting for the $9 million settlement resulted in a 14 percent decrease in the fourth-quarter net income that Netflix Inc. reported Jan. 25. The bottom line for the final three months of last year now comes to $35.2 million, or 64 cents per share, down from the previously reported $40.7 million, or 73 cents per share. The company, which is based in Los Gatos, disclosed the change in a regulatory filing late Friday. Netflix’s stock price has surged 23 percent since the fourth-quarter results were released, partly because the company’s earnings were substantially above analysts’ average estimate of 57 cents per share. But investors mostly were impressed with Netflix’s fourth-quarter gain of 600,000 subscribers – a number unaffected by Friday’s accounting adjustment The upturn in subscribers indicated that Netflix had bounced back from a public-relations nightmare triggered by a 60 percent increase in its U.S. prices last September. Netflix expects to sustain a loss this year as it pays higher licensing fees for video and establishes its service in Latin America, the United Kingdom and Ireland. The $9 million legal settlement rids Netflix of another potential headache. A lawsuit on behalf of Virginia residents Jeff Milans and Peter Comstock alleged Netflix had been breaking a 24-year-old law by retaining records of the DVDs and Internet video that its subscribers watched for up to two years after they cancelled their plans. The complaint, filed in San Francisco federal court, cited the Video Privacy Protection Act, which was passed in 1988 to prevent video rental services from sharing information about what their current and former customers have been watching. The class-action lawsuit asserted Netflix violated a section of the law requiring personally identifiable information to be destroyed within a year “from the date that the information is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected.” Retaining former customers’ viewing records allows Netflix to restore their old video queues and make better recommendations if they reactivate their subscriptions. In a statement Friday, Netflix said it didn’t make any admission of wrongdoing in the settlement. No other details were disclosed in a settlement notice filed Friday in federal court. In most class-action settlements, attorneys filing the case usually are paid a large portion of any money that is paid out. Sean Reis, an attorney representing Milans and Comstock, didn’t immediately return phone calls Friday. Netflix has been lobbying Congress to revise the Video Privacy Protection so it can introduce a feature on Facebook’s online social network that would allow its U.S. subscribers to automatically let their family and friends know what they have been watching. Netflix already offers the Facebook tool in the 46 other countries it operates, but all but more than 90 percent of its roughly 26 million subscribers are in the U.S. “This matter is unrelated to the company’s concerns about the ambiguities contained in the VPPA,” Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said. Netflix shares closed Friday at $123.93, down 91 cents.

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The States Where Companies Are Hiring

February 10, 2012

From 24/7 Wall St.: Companies across the country are hiring more workers, at least if you ask their employees. In 2011, 31 percent of U.S. workers reported that their employers were hiring, according to Gallup’s Job Creation Index . Only 18 percent said that their employers were laying workers off. Of course, residents of some states report much higher rates of job creation than others. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the Gallup Index, as well as a number of other economic indicators, and identified the eight states where residents think companies are hiring most. Read The Eight States Where Companies Are Hiring To develop the Job Creation Index, Gallup asked those surveyed whether companies are hiring or letting employees go. While the national score reflects that most states believe employers are hiring, 24/7 Wall St.’s analysis suggests that self-reporting by workers may not perfectly align with reality. These states are not experiencing the greatest recoveries — including in employment — as they have little to recover from. The states’ strong economies may be affecting their residents’ perception of the economy. Five of the eight states on this list are among the top nine states on another recent Gallup poll ranking states’ confidence in the national economy. Those who live in states that are doing well see the entire country as doing well. The majority of states where high percentages of workers reported job creation also have extremely low unemployment rates to begin with. Six of the eight states have among the 10 lowest unemployment rates in the country. North Dakota, the state where the largest share of workers reported that their employers are hiring, has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. And while unemployment rates are low, the majority of these states have had relatively low unemployment rates for some time. Most did not have particularly impressive improvements in unemployment last year. Other than Utah and West Virginia — the only states with exceptionally large drops in unemployment — the rest have had low unemployment rates since 2006 and throughout the recession. Housing markets in most of the states where respondents believe jobs are plentiful also have been stable. Seven of the eight states on the list are among the 15 markets that suffered the least from the third quarter of 2006 to the third quarter of 2011. Five of the states actually experienced increases in home prices over this period. These are the eight states where workers say companies are hiring, according to 24/7 Wall St. :

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House Dems: Drilling Fines Are ‘Pocket Change’ For Oil & Gas Companies

February 8, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal policing of oil and natural gas drilling on public lands is lax and inconsistent, with only 6 percent of violations resulting in monetary fines over 13 years, House Democrats said in a report Wednesday. Fines over that time totaled less than $275,000, an amount that the Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee characterized as little more than “pocket change” for oil and gas companies. The report said federal regulators issued no fines in the period studied, February 1998 to February 2011, in eight of the drilling states. The report, obtained by The Associated Press before its public release later Wednesday, said the government does little to ensure accountability or protect the environment, even as drilling on federal land has increased in recent years. The increase is driven in part by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a drilling technique that has allowed companies to extract oil and gas long locked underground. The report focuses on drilling activity that occurred on federal land in 17 states during three administrations, two Democratic and one Republican. A total of 2,025 citations for safety and drilling violations were issued to 335 companies, the report said, with 64 companies fined a total of $273,875 “It would be an overstatement to even call these fines a slap on the wrist. For oil and gas companies making billions from drilling on America’s public lands, this kind of inadequate oversight and enforcement is little more than a pin prick,” said Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey, the committee’s top Democrat. Markey and Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., requested the report. “American citizens and workers should feel confident that oil and gas companies are conducting business in the safest manner possible, and when they don’t, that the U.S. government will step in and make sure they pay the price for their actions. This report indicates that confidence in the oversight of drilling on public lands should be limited, at best,” Markey said. The Obama administration is considering new rules for fracking at oil and gas wells on federal land. President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union speech last month that the Interior Department will require energy companies to publicly disclose chemicals used in drilling for natural gas on public lands. Federal rules for fracking on public lands are set to be released in a few weeks. Adam Fetcher, a spokesman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, said the department received the report Wednesday and will review it. At Obama’s direction, Interior is taking additional steps to ensure that domestic energy resources are developed safely and responsibly, “including measures to enhance public confidence in hydraulic fracturing on public lands, Fetcher said, referring to the new fracking rules expected in a few weeks. “It is essential that the public have full confidence that the right safety and environmental protections are in place,” Fetcher said. Officials said several large penalties have been assessed recently against drilling companies, including a $2.1 million civil settlement last year with Denver-based Berry Petroleum Co., after an employee disabled production gauges that could have affected royalty payments on more than 150 Utah oil wells. In fracking, millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are pumped into wells to break up underground rock formations, allowing oil and gas to escape. Energy companies have greatly expanded their use of fracking as they tap previously unreachable shale deposits, including the lucrative Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania, New York and neighboring states. The drilling practice has also attracted increased attention from Congress and regulators, as private groups and government agencies research whether it poses a danger to drinking water. The report found that more than 2,000 violations were handed out by the Interior Department to oil and gas companies drilling on federal land. Of these, 549, or 27 percent, were classified by committee staff as a major environmental or safety violation. More than half the major violations stemmed from a nonfunctioning or missing blowout preventer, the same device that failed in the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the report said. A total of 113 major violations cited inadequate well-casing or cementing, another problem that occurred in the BP spill. Onshore, well-casing and cementing are a key defense against groundwater contamination. On at least 54 occasions, oil and gas companies began drilling on federal land before receiving formal approval to do so, the report said. Despite those problems, monetary fines were rarely issued, the report said. In eight states — Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Nevada, Ohio, South Dakota and West Virginia — no fines were issued for the period studied. Thirteen companies were cited for at least 30 violations over the period studied, topped by Oklahoma-based Williams Production RMT Co., which received 98 citations and seven fines totaling $6,000. Colorado-based Encana Oil & Gas Inc. received 63 citations and four fines totaling $11,000, while Texas-based Anadarko E & P Co. received 61 violations and one fine totaling $5,000. ___ Online: House Natural Resources Committee: http://naturalresources.house.gov/ ___ Follow Matthew Daly: Twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC

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Feds: Offshore Wind Power Will Not Cause ‘Major Environmental Damage’

February 2, 2012

BALTIMORE (AP) — Offshore wind farms from New Jersey to Virginia took a big step closer to reality with the completion of a review that showed the renewable energy source would not cause major environmental damage, officials said Thursday. Obama administration Interior Secretary Ken Salazar also said his department also was trying to speed up the process for issuing renewable energy leases. Wind projects off the coasts of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and New Jersey are being studied. “There are a number of developers who are very interested in developing offshore wind here and our goal is to hold the auctions and be able to issue the leases now, in 2012,” Salazar said. “So, this is not something that’s going to be waiting around.” The Mid-Atlantic lease proposal follows the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts that was given the go-ahead in 2010 after years of federal review. That project is still in development and Salazar said the department had learned from that experience. “No developer should have to wait nine or 10 years,” for approval, Salazar said. Dominion Virginia Power said that it is interested in building up to 400 wind turbines in waters about 20 miles off Virginia Beach, but the cost of the power was an issue. The 2,000 megawatts the turbines could produce would generate enough power for 500,000 households. “If everything aligns and it makes good sense and we have our regulators on board, yes, we would be moving forward on a wind farm,” senior vice president Mary Doswell told The Associated Press. The Interior Department said before the waters would be opened, the public would have a chance to comment on the projects. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who appeared at the announcement with Salazar, said his administration had contacted Defense Department officials to discuss the possibility of the military using offshore wind energy. O’Malley, a Democrat, and Salazar both described the decision as a major step forward for offshore wind, and environmentalists agreed. Environment America Clean Energy Advocate Courtney Abrams said “tapping into the power of offshore wind along the Atlantic coast is vital to getting the region and the nation off fossil fuels without creating more pollution.” Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said the decision “just makes sense.” “It is a reliable, clean energy resource that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, curb harmful air pollutants, and create good paying American jobs in manufacturing and construction,” Carper said. Jim Lanard, president of the OffShore Wind Development Coalition, said the decision means that a lengthier environmental impact assessment for offshore power along the mid-Atlantic won’t have to be conducted, although reviews for individual projects will still have to be done. Lanard said that could shave two years off the review process. Michele Siekerka, the Assistant Commissioner of Economic Growth and Green Energy in New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, said Thursday’s announcement will speed the building of offshore turbines by a year or more. Eleven developers have submitted proposals totaling 12,000 megawatts and are expected to be able to bid later this year for leases. The companies will still have to do environmental studies of their own areas, but could be producing power by 2016 or 2017, she said. “The key is the federal government is not doing another one,” Siekerka said. Lanard said legislation pending in the Maryland General Assembly could do a lot to entice developers. “If there’s a revenue stream, you’ll see a great deal of interest,” Lanard said. Lawmakers killed a bill last year that would have required utilities to enter into long-term power purchase contracts and O’Malley said it wasn’t clear how a toned-down bill would fare this year. Kit Kennedy, Clean Energy Counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said offshore power holds the promise of clean energy that could also provide jobs, but it would watch the process carefully to make sure the environment is protected. Dominion’s Doswell said absent tax credits, power generated by towering wind turbines costs about 28 cents per kilowatt hour, while the state’s largest electric utility’s rates are now in the range of 11 to 12 cents per kilowatt hour. “So that’s what we’re battling,” Doswell said. “Wind is a great resource and you can do it with scale, but we’ve got to work on this cost equation.” ___ Associated Press writer Steve Szkotak in Richmond contributed to this report..

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Mark Yzaguirre: Don’t Blame Liberal Arts Majors for High Unemployment

January 31, 2012

Virginia Postrel recently wrote a piece at Bloomberg.com that is an important addition to current discussions about higher education. Postrel wrote her article in response to critics of higher education who argue that unemployment rates for recent college graduates (namely, liberal arts and humanities majors) justify a cutoff of student loan funding for such majors. One of the critics Postrel mentions, Bill Frezza, decided to target art history majors as the focus of his criticisms. Now, I’m not a fan of the current student loan system. I’ve written about the issue of student loan debt and the negative effects of high student loan debt on college graduates. There are others who have written on the topic as well and I suggest that anyone interested in this subject spend some time looking at the public policy questions that are at issue here, such as in those discussed in this Rortybomb piece from a few months ago. But Postrel is correct when she says that: There’s nothing like a bunch of unemployed recent college graduates to bring out the central planner in parent-aged pundits. While college students should take hiring practicalities into consideration in picking their majors, the idea that unemployment among recent college graduates is primarily a function of their choice of major is simply not true and the idea that over-education leads to unemployment isn’t supported by the facts. First of all, college graduates in general have a lower unemployment rate than non-college graduates. While this doesn’t argue against the need for more vocational and technical training opportunities for young people (and I strongly support the expansion of such training opportunities) it does undermine claims that there may not be a college premium anymore in the job market. Further, while unemployment rates for recent liberal arts graduates are slightly higher than those in business or engineering, the gap is not vast and frankly one would think the gap to be greater because business and engineering are touted as the prime “practical” degrees. (Has there ever been a time when it was thought that someone with a B.A. in philosophy has the same job prospects as someone with a B.B.A. in finance?) In fact, according to the Georgetown report that is linked in the previous sentence, the degree with the worst recent unemployment problem is architecture, which is a pre-professional degree. Also, as Postrel points out, most college students seek out pre-professional, job-oriented majors “and art history majors are so rare they’re lost in the noise.” Whatever one can say about art history or gender studies majors, they aren’t a large part of the college student pool and they certainly aren’t a prime driver of college graduate unemployment. To claim otherwise might say more about the cultural or ideological assumptions of the person making the claim than the apparent facts. None of this minimizes the issue of student loan debt and how it is a strain on both the lives of those who graduate as debtors and on the general economy. But going for a sort of central planning in which the government picks the winners for funding of college majors isn’t the right solution. The fact that the Frezza article mentions the education policies of the People’s Republic of China as an inspiration doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. One way to bring market discipline into this equation is simple — allow student loan debt to be dischargeable in bankruptcy, after a waiting period (perhaps five or seven years) to prevent people from racking up huge debts for degrees in lucrative fields and then declaring strategic bankruptcy. The Rortybomb article I cite above goes into detail about this and how it would simply be a return to the manner student loan debt was handled for decades. Allowing bankruptcy would make lenders look at individual debtors and make decisions on whether to fund their debt, rather than using the very blunt instrument of government selection of entire majors to support or not support as the tool to handle this issue. Central planning doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to determining how millions of people should live their lives and I don’t see any reason to think that it would be a good tool for determining what majors should receive student loan funding. One can definitely argue that the existence of federally-backed student loan debt creates market distortions and maybe we would be better off without it. I wouldn’t agree with that, but if we are going to have federally-backed student loan debt, turning it into an even bigger social engineering tool is an even more distortive act. I would agree, however, that it’s probably not a good idea for a student to rack up six figures of student loan debt to get a degree in an interesting but generally not lucrative humanities field from a middle-tier private liberal arts college. But that’s not where most student loan debt is coming from. For one thing, most college students go to public universities where one can get a great education at a lower cost. Furthermore, public universities have created innovative programs in recent decades to create an environment in which liberal arts and humanities majors can thrive and not feel lost in massive survey classes. There’s been an expansion of excellent honors colleges at state universities all over the country and students at such honors colleges can get a liberal arts college environment at a state university price, especially in-state students. This is an avenue for students who want to study whatever they want to have an opportunity to do so without incurring massive debt. And if students go to honors colleges at schools like the University of Oklahoma or Louisiana State University , they can read Aristotle during the week and go see top-ranked football teams on the weekend. Try doing that at an expensive New England liberal arts college. I suggest that exposure to a liberal arts and humanities education is good for all who engage in such study, regardless of what they eventually choose to do with their lives. Such an education is in many ways the most traditional form of education. The purpose of a liberal arts and humanities education is to teach young people how to think critically and become thoughtful citizens, separate from any particular job preparation that may develop. There’s nothing wrong with studying engineering or finance. Our society needs people who excel at both. But we also need historians, poets and writers in our society and an appreciation for such work among the general public. Let’s not allow current economic travails to pull American higher education even further away from encouraging learning for its own sake in favor of simple job training. While there’s plenty of room to improve higher education in the United States, attacking and defunding the liberal arts and humanities isn’t the way to improve higher education and it certainly isn’t the way to fight joblessness in any real capacity.

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6 Coal-Fired Power Plants Closing

January 26, 2012

AKRON, Ohio — FirstEnergy Corp. said Thursday that new environmental regulations led to a decision to shut down six older, coal-fired power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland, affecting more than 500 employees. The plants, which are in Cleveland, Ashtabula, Oregon and Eastlake in Ohio, Adrian, Pa. and Williamsport, Md., will be retired by Sept. 1. They have generated about 10 percent of the electricity produced by FirstEnergy over the last three years, the company said. In a statement James Lash, head of the company’s generation unit, indicated that a review of the company’s coal-fired plants determined it would not be cost-effective to get the older ones into compliance with environmental regulations the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced in December. The new standards are designed to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollution from coal- and oil-fired power plants. An Associated Press survey found that the changes were likely to result in the mothballing of dozens of units in the Midwest and in the coal belt – Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. The Obama administration was under court order to issue a new rule, after a court threw out an attempt by the Bush administration to exempt power plants from controls for toxic air pollution. Two factors have made it easier for utilities to shut old coal plants in recent years. Power demand has been weakening in recent years because of the slow economy and energy efficiency programs. And natural gas prices, which have fallen to decade-low levels in recent weeks, have allowed utilities to switch from coal to natural gas without impacting customer bills. Meanwhile, demand from China and elsewhere has driven up the price of coal. FirstEnergy said its decision would directly affect 529 employees. Some of them could end up transferring to other FirstEnergy facilities and work sites, while others could take advantage of a retirement benefit being offered to employees 55 years and older, the company said. FirstEnergy has a total of 17 coal power plants, including those that will close by September. The plants targeted to shut down have been producing less power over the last few years, mainly during times of peak demand, the company said. Eastlake, a community of about 18,500 people and located alongside Lake Erie northeast of Cleveland, will lose $590,000 a year in taxes, or about 4.5 percent of its regular budget, Mayor Ted Andrzejewski said. With about 100 good-paying jobs, the plant was among the top employers in the community, according to the mayor. Most communities weren’t caught off guard by the decision to shutter the plants. “This wasn’t much of a surprise,” said Michael Beazley, city administrator in the Toledo suburb of Oregon where about 80 people will lose their positions. A message requesting comment from the Utility Workers Union of America in Cleveland was not immediately returned on Thursday. FirstEnergy’s electric system has 6 million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia. Coal and nuclear power plants generate about 80 percent of the company’s output. The company employs about 17,000 people. The new EPA rules include setting standards for mercury and other toxic pollutants that billow out of smokestacks and reducing air pollution in states downwind from the power plants. FirstEnergy has taken steps at several of its coal-burning plants to make them cleaner for the environment. It said that once the closings are completed, nearly all of its power will come from low emission sources. Last month, an Associated Press survey found that more than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to shut down and an additional 36 might have to close because of the new federal air pollution regulations. Together, those plants produce enough electricity for more than 22 million households, the AP survey found. _______ Energy reporter Jon Fahey in New York contributed to this report.

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Is Industry Pressure Delaying Safety Rule At White House?

January 25, 2012

WASHINGTON — A long-awaited federal rule designed to protect workers in the construction and mining industries has been tied up in red tape at the White House, leading scientists to worry that the rule has been left in limbo due to political concerns. The rule put forth by the Labor Department would limit workers’ exposure to crystalline silica, a dangerous breathable dust commonly found in sand, granite and other materials used in construction. For construction workers and sandblasters in particular, breathing the dust over the course of years has long been known to lead to silicosis , a respiratory disease linked to lung cancer and respiratory failure. Companies in the mining and construction fields are concerned the tighter regulations could lead to higher production costs. The silica rule has been under review by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for more than 11 months. Such rules are supposed to be reviewed by the administration within 90 days and then undergo a public-comment period before being finalized. While this rule’s been at the White House, the budget office has held nine closed-door meetings on the issue with interested parties, many of them trade groups such as the National Association of Home Builders, the American Chemistry Council and the National Industrial Sand Association. Proponents of the rule have grown so worried about the holdup that more than 300 occupational health experts, public health advocates and labor officials signed a letter sent Wednesday to the White House urging President Barack Obama to release the rule for public comment. Laying out the scientists’ “serious concern” with the rule’s “extraordinary delay,” the letter notes that an estimated 1.7 million American workers are exposed to silica and roughly 200 die from silicosis each year, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control. “These closed door meetings with special interests are wholly inconsistent with your promise of openness and public participation,” the letter states. Those signing included officials from the American Medical Association, various occupational health and safety boards, and the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, which advocates for sound science in policymaking. Several observers, some of who signed on to the letter, told HuffPost the White House may not want to release a rule that would annoy deep-pocketed interest groups just as Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign gets under way. In an email, OMB spokeswoman Meg Reilly declined to comment on the status of the rule. “It’s not uncommon for review periods to be extended for regulatory actions that require additional time for consideration of public comment and analysis by OMB and all the affected agencies,” she wrote. “I don’t know precisely when review will conclude.” “It affects a lot of industries, and they’ll say this could be a very expensive rule,” explained Celeste Monforton , a former Labor Department safety official now with the George Washington University School of Public Health. “That’s a legitimate point. But more important is to have time for the public dialogue, and not have the debate through these back-door meetings.” The debate over the silica rule highlights some of the dissatisfaction on the left with what they see as the Obama administration’s sluggishness on regulations . Although the president has been blasted by Republicans for his alleged regulatory zeal, the White House in reality has issued relatively few new rules, especially pertaining to labor and the workplace . In fact, many safety advocates feel that the administration bends too often to industry when it comes to putting workplace protections. According to Wednesday’s letter from safety experts, the administration has proposed “no new significant … worker safety and health rules” and “promised rules have been repeatedly delayed.” “The Obama administration has been bad on regulations in general,” said Justin Feldman, workplace safety coordinator for the watchdog group Public Citizen, which has tracked the silica issue for years. “There are people within the administration who held genuinely anti-regulatory views. I think [the silica rule] is up in the air.” Feldman said he’s concerned that the administration won’t release the rule before the election — and that Obama might possibly lose. “That’s what we’re worried about,” he said. “Romney or Gingrich would be very unlikely to publish this rule. The construction industry does not like it.” The silica rule isn’t the first politically sensitive safety regulation to undergo a lengthy review at the Obama White House. Controversial child labor rules that would limit the work activities children could perform on farms and in grain facilities were tied up at the White House for nine months, until finally being made available for public comment in August. Although workers’ and children’s advocates said the rules are decades overdue, many farmers oppose the federal encroachment. If the White House had political concerns, they were well-founded. One GOP candidate for Congress in Arkansas has gone so far as to make repealing the child labor rules a central part of his platform . According to Feldman, tighter silica rules have been under consideration by the Labor Department for at least eight years. Although few know the exact language of the proposed rule because it hasn’t been released, experts said it’s probably modeled on a California state law already on the books. That law requires that construction companies mitigate silica dust through better ventilation and so-called wet cutting — that is, wetting down the brick and concrete before cutting it to reduce the dust clouds commonly seen on construction sites. The dangers of intense or prolonged silica exposure have been known for decades. In the 1930s, hundreds of workers in West Virginia were believed to have died due to exposure to silica dust while building the Hawks Nest Tunnel , making silicosis a national issue at the time. Experts now liken it to the better-known black lung disease , or coal worker’s pneumoconiosis “It’s a silent disease in the sense that a lot of workers are exposed to silica dust and just feel it as an annoyance,” said Robert Harrison, M.D., a clinical professor at the University of California-San Francisco who has treated workers with silicosis. “It irritates the throat, but they don’t realize it has long-term effects. … It can cause disability, difficulty breathing, chest tightness, cough — it has a real impact on someone’s everyday life. And it’s also a carcinogen.” Among those now suffering from silicosis is Leonard Serafin, a California resident who worked for a railroad for 32 years. It was part of Serafin’s job as a trackman to lay out the ballast, or crushed rock and gravel, in which the tracks were placed. He often spent hours a day breathing in dust from the ballast cars, and he said he now suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a host of other lung-related ailments. At the urging of an occupational health expert, Serafin drafted a letter explaining his condition and his support for a new silica rule. The Serafin family shared the letter with HuffPost. In it, Serafin writes that his chronic cough has affected “all aspects of my life,” making it difficult even to do household chores, let alone anything that requires exertion. “I never dreamed I would have to spend my retirement years in this debilitating manner,” Serafin writes. “I find it difficult to attend social events such as concerts and plays with my family because of my chronic cough. Even coughing while standing at a cash register line at a retail store causes people to distance themselves from me. … When I exert myself, my daily coughing becomes a spastic type of cough, which leaves me exhausted, breathless with chest pain.” In closing, Serafin urges the White House to conduct its review and draft a regulation as soon as possible. “You have the power to prevent thousands of new cases of silicosis,” he writes. “In good conscience, how can you put a price tag before the safety of U.S. workers?”

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More IKEA Workers Vote To Unionize In U.S.

January 19, 2012

WASHINGTON — Officials with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union announced Thursday that more than 350 workers at an IKEA distribution center in Maryland have voted to join the union. If the vote is certified by the federal labor board, the workers in Perryville, Md., will become the second American IKEA workforce to join the IAM’s ranks. The first group, which is employed by the IKEA-owned Swedwood Group at a furniture factory in Danville, Va., voted overwhelmingly over the summer to join the union, a move that American labor activists considered a high-profile victory. “I think they saw what happened in Danville and saw the deal we were able to negotiate there,” Rick Sloan, an IAM spokesman, said of the Maryland employees. “It certainly helped.” When the L.A. Times ran a story on the Virginia factory last April, the disgruntlement of some of the workers there shocked readers in the U.S. and abroad, given the furniture retailer’s cultish following among consumers and generally solid reputation among employees. The company was criticized for an apparent double standard: While it was progressive and union-friendly in Europe, it did not show American workers the same kind of respect, critics said. “IKEA is a very strong brand and they lean on some kind of good Swedishness in their business profile. That becomes a complication when they act like they do in the United States,” a Swedish union official told the paper . “For us, it’s a huge problem.” According to IAM official John Carr, who recently visited the Maryland site, the same workplace issues raised by employees in Virginia had cropped up in Maryland. In particular, workers wanted more of a hand in the scheduling, vacation and seniority systems. “These are things that are important in any place if you want to make a future and a career out of it,” Carr said. The National Labor Relations Board is expected to certify the vote within 10 days, Carr said. If it does, the union and the company will begin contract negotiations. IKEA could not immediately be reached for comment.

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‘It’s Just Math’: States Look To Hike Gas Taxes

January 19, 2012

In 2009, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, ran against Democrat Creigh Deeds in part by hitting his opponent over a vote to increase the state’s gas tax. Now, just two years later, McDonnell seems to be waffling. “It’s just math,” he told WRVA, according to the Washington Post . “You’re going to continue to have less revenue — and more demand for roads and more people driving them.” A McDonnell spokesman quickly backtracked on the statement, saying the governor would not raise the tax — but that legislators in the state would still like him to consider it. The state’s gas tax of 17.5 cents per gallon, one of the lowest in the country, has not changed since 1986 . States across the country are giving a longtime political hot potato, the gas tax, another look as revenues disappoint and road repair backlogs mount. Political leaders from both major parties in Iowa and Maryland are also considering raising state gas taxes. The move, which comes despite widespread public disapproval, illustrates the growing gap between gas tax revenues and transportation infrastructure spending needs. In recent years, Congress has actually been forced to transfer $34.5 billion of general tax revenues between 2008 and 2010 to cover the gap between what we take in and expenditures promised under the federal transportation bill. Americans are driving less and using more fuel-efficient cars when they do drive, meaning that gas tax revenues are down across the board. And the fact that the federal and most states’ gas taxes are not pegged to inflation means that the fixed amounts devoted to the tax — 18.4 cents at the federal level — are worth less in real terms every year. “What we’re seeing is the huge hole that exists right now for infrastructure funding is putting states in the positions of having to figure out some way to fix the gap,” said Rob Perks, the transportation advocacy director for the National Resources Defense Council. “I think the states are saying we have no choice. We cannot pay for the construction or repair work on bridges or roads that we already have,” Perks said. If they opt for gas taxes, however, politicians will likely be setting themselves up for a political backlash. Some 77 percent of Americans are against raising the federal gas tax, according to a December Reason-Rupe poll . Opposition cuts across party lines, with 66 percent of Democrats opposed. In Iowa, another Republican governor, Terry Branstad, said he would “definitely consider” raising the tax. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, is also looking into it . Just a few months ago, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Maryland Transportation Funding recommended raising the gas tax by 15 cents over three years. As their thus-far hesitant language shows, politicians of both parties are approaching the subject gingerly for fear of angering voters. Many academics say, however, that from a policy perspective, raising the gas taxes has some surprising hidden benefits. Economist Christopher Knittel of MIT has found, for example, that increasing the gas tax would get Americans fuel-efficient cars more quickly and more efficiently than simply mandating tougher fuel efficiency standards, as the Obama administration has proposed. Carmakers have actually been extraordinarily successful in making a gallon of gas last longer over the last 30 years, he said. But those improvements have been funneled into bigger, heavier cars like SUVs. “Had we kept weight and horsepower at their 1980 levels, fuel economy would have increased by 60 percent instead of the 15 percent we observed,” Knittel said. So auto manufacturers could give us more efficient cars — if only there were more market demand. And Knittel said he believes the best way to foster that demand would be to put a price on gas. “Basic economics tells us that unless consumers are facing the right price, the social price of gasoline, you’re not going to get the efficient outcome,” he said. “All the levers that we want to push or pull are pooled with the gas tax, as opposed to a [fuel efficiency] standard, which ignores all the cars on the road,” he said. “Consumers shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles, they drive them less, the old Yukons and Explorers get retired faster.”

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Cities Getting Hit Hardest Since The Recession: Report

January 19, 2012

Official recovery or not, it turns out that cities around the world still have a long way to go to get back to where they were before the downturn. More than half of the world’s 200 largest cities have yet to return to their pre-recession levels in either income or employment, according to a new report from the Brookings Institute . Compared to the pre-recession years of 1993 to 2007, cities all around the world are struggling, especially in North America and Western Europe. In cities like Dublin and New Orleans, income growth rates decline last year. Chinese cities, which have generally fared much better through the recession, are also seeing a drop off. Industry hubs like Beijing and Guangzhou have seen growth rates drop by over half compared to pre-recession levels. “China took proactive steps last year to cool off its real estate market, which people were concerned was facing the same kind of bubble condition as in the U.S. and Europe prior to the recession,” Alan Berube, an author of the report told The Huffington Post. “In the process of doing that it managed to cool off the economy altogether.” The Brookings findings for U.S. cities mirror other reports. Brookings, which looked only at the 57 largest cities in the U.S., found that none “had fully recovered its recession induced losses by 2011,” while and IHS Global Insight report found that only 26 of the nation’s 363 cities had returned to pre-recession levels of employment. While the Brookings report notes significant employment growth declines in cities like Las Vegas, Berube said some cities have faired better than others, a pattern that will likely continue going forward. “In the United States it will be a mixed bag,” he said. “Some places will be back to where they were prior to the recession, growing their income and employment levels — not at a rapid rate — but one that should bring unemployment down. Others are still trying to escape the vortex leftover from the recession.” Here are the ten cities whose income growth has dropped most significantly since before the recession, according to the Brookings Institute :

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S&P Downgrades France And Italy As Investors Avoid Eurozone

January 13, 2012

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services slashed the credit ratings of nine eurozone countries on Friday, marking a deterioration in confidence in the troubled eurozone. S&P stripped France and Austria of their gold-plated AAA ratings, downgrading them to AA+, and downgraded Italy and Spain two notches to BBB+ and A, respectively. It also downgraded Portugal and Cyprus to junk, or non-investment grade, ratings: BB and BB+ respectively. Slovenia was downgraded to A+ from AA-, Slovakia was downgraded to A from A+ and Malta was downgraded to A- from A. “The policy initiatives that have been taken by European policymakers in recent weeks may be insufficient to fully address ongoing systemic stresses in the eurozone,” S&P said in a statement on Friday. S&P emphasized that more downgrades were likely. S&P said that it has placed 14 eurozone countries on negative outlook, including France — the second-largest economy in Europe — Belgium, Italy, Spain and even the AAA-rated Netherlands and Finland. Just Germany and Slovakia escaped from a negative outlook. Some Northern eurozone countries avoided a downgrade, such as AAA-rated Germany, the AAA-rated Netherlands and AA-rated Belgium. Ireland’s BBB+ rating also did not take a further hit, though its outlook is negative. Unlike during S&P’s downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating, which investors largely ignored as they continued to buy U.S. debt, European investors this time have preempted the rating cuts by already pulling investments out of the eurozone. Though the news had been expected for weeks, American and European stocks fell on Friday. The S&P fell 0.49 percent, the DAX in Germany fell 0.58 percent and the FTSE 100 in Britain fell 0.46 percent. The euro plunged 1 percent to $1.2684, near a 16-month low, according to Bloomberg. Investors also sold off Italian and Spanish government bonds, driving up the interest rate on 10-year Italian government debt to 6.74 percent as of 4:40 p.m. EST, according to The Financial Times . Investors told The Huffington Post that European leaders simply are not focused on the essentials for investor confidence — such as economic growth and a credible backstop for European governments — as the European Central Bank maintains its hardline stance against buying much government debt and the eurozone plunges into recession. Though the downgrade will hurt French national pride, the real issue is that eurozone countries are being cut off from market funding and may suffer from a prolonged recession, said Jonathan Lemco, principal and senior analyst at Vanguard, an investment company. “In the absence of clarity, why get involved?” Lemco said. He said plenty of safer government debt is being issued elsewhere, and as long as the European Central Bank does not provide backstop funding for governments and economic growth does not appear likely, investors will continue to avoid eurozone countries. Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, said that investors are concerned that German leaders are pursuing priorities in the wrong order. He said that first, the European Stability Mechanism — a European bailout fund — should triple in size to 1.5 trillion euros, or $1.9 trillion, as a backstop for troubled governments, then the eurozone should become fiscally integrated. But instead, Germany is trying to implement tougher penalties for countries that exceed deficit limits. When someone is drowning, a lifeguard should not insist that the drowning person learn to swim before saving him, he said. “The timing of what they want to do is wrong,” van Ark said. Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen, head of macroeconomic strategy at ING Investment Management, said that three preconditions are essential for investors to be confident enough to invest in the government debt of countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Van Nieuwenhuijzen said that first, the ECB needs to act as a lender of last resort for governments, even if through another institution such as the International Monetary Fund. Second, the eurozone needs to be set on a path toward economic growth, ideally driven by a two-year stimulus in Northern European countries led by Germany, which would boost exports from Southern Europe to Northern Europe and support economic growth throughout the eurozone. Third, the eurozone needs to become more fiscally integrated and commit to implementing more economic reforms that would make Europe more competitive. “What is misperceived by a lot of policymakers and commentators is that investors only want fiscal reform,” van Nieuwenhuijzen said. “It’s still a very popular political ploy along with this fantasy that fiscal austerity will generate expansion in the real economy…. There is no global support of this theory in academia, but still it’s very popular.” But Germany still seems far from pursuing such a plan. Jens Weidmann, head of the German central bank, recently said that he wants Germany to do no new borrowing, even though investors now are paying Germany for some government bonds. Weidmann recently told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Germany, ”We must quickly achieve a structurally balanced budget.” This story has been updated from its original version to reflect S&P’s official announcement Friday of its downgrades and outlook for eurozone countries.

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Dan Solin: 2011 Winners Can Make You a 2012 Loser

January 11, 2012

Everyone wants to be a stock market winner. There were some big winners in 2011. Investors in US TIPS did great. This index tracks U.S. Treasury inflation-protected securities that have at least one year remaining to maturity, are rated investment grade and have $250 million or more of outstanding face value. They were up 13.56%. Does that seem odd to you? The U.S. lost its triple A credit rating in August, 2011. Do you know of anyone who invested a significant portion of their portfolio in US TIPS? If you were an investor in almost any segment of the stock market, domestic or foreign, 2011 was rough sledding. With the exception of the S&P 500 (which posted a modest 2.11% gain), all other segments of the domestic stock market were flat or in negative territory. Many “experts” extolled the virtue of foreign stocks. Too bad. Foreign markets were clobbered in 2011. The MSCI World ex USA index measures the performance of stocks issued by companies located outside of the U.S. It was down 12.21% in 2011. Emerging markets fared even worse, losing 18.4% . With the benefit of hindsight, the best advice for 2011 investors would have been to avoid domestic and foreign stocks altogether and invest in US TIPS. If you had to pick one asset class of stocks, commercial REITS would have been a good bet. The Dow Jones US Select REIT Index was up 9.37%. Raise your hand if you received and implemented this advice. The stock picks of analysts fared no better. In a thoughtful blog , Brett Arends did an analysis of how Wall Street analysts’ top picks fared in 2011. He found they lost money and you would have been better off investing in the S&P 500 index. More surprising was his finding that “top 10″ analyst picks earned less than the S&P 500 index over the past six years. It gets worse. Arends looked at the “most hated” stocks with the most analyst “sell” recommendations. The top 10 of these stocks underperformed the most “loved” stocks by less than 1%. The overwhelming evidence that no one can predict which asset classes (much less which stocks or mutual funds) will perform well in the future has not deterred the same “experts” from making predictions for 2012. I want to get in on the action so here are my predictions: 1. A majority of investors will continue to believe brokers have the ability to pick outperforming stocks and actively managed mutual funds and to provide guidance on “what is happening” in the market; 2. A minority of investors will cancel their retail brokerage accounts and invest in a globally diversified portfolio of low management fee index funds in an asset allocation appropriate for them. 3. Over time, the returns of the minority of investors described in #2 are likely to outperform those of the majority of investors described in #1. 4. The primary beneficiary of perpetuating the myth that retail brokers and financial pundits can predict the future will be those dispensing this advice. The victims will be those relying on it. Dan Solin is a senior vice president of Index Funds Advisors. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read, The Smartest 401(k) Book You’ll Ever Read, The Smartest Retirement Book You’ll Ever Read and The Smartest Portfolio You’ll Ever Own. His new book, The Smartest Money Book You’ll Ever Read, was published December 27, 2011.The views set forth in this blog are the opinions of the author alone and may not represent the views of any firm or entity with whom he is affiliated. The data, information, and content on this blog are for information, education, and non-commercial purposes only. Returns from index funds do not represent the performance of any investment advisory firm. The information on this blog does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice and is limited to the dissemination of opinions on investing. No reader should construe these opinions as an offer of advisory services. Readers who require investment advice should retain the services of a competent investment professional. The information on this blog is not an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy or sell any securities or class of securities mentioned herein. Furthermore, the information on this blog should not be construed as an offer of advisory services. Please note that the author does not recommend specific securities nor is he responsible for comments made by persons posting on this blog.

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SAY IT AIN’T SO: SF Institutions Facing Closure In 2012

January 10, 2012

It’s a sad day in downtown San Francisco. According to SFist , Union Square’s favorite (and only remaining) dive bar, Gold Dust Lounge, is facing the axe. Inside Scoop reported that the iconic bar — founded in 1933 and loved for its cheap sticky drinks, ancient decor, live music and rowdy clientele — received an unexpected eviction notice and lease cancellation, even though the business still has three years left on the contract. The cause? The landlord wants to make way for enormous Chicago-based clothing company, The Limited. Since clearly that’s what Union Square is lacking. (SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS) Owner Tasios Bovis (whose family has run the bar since 1965) told Inside Scoop that he plans to appeal the eviction. In the meantime, he’s offering $3.50 margaritas, Irish coffees and glasses of champagne every day (!) until 8:30 p.m. The Bovis family has launched an aggressive campaign to save the bar, which the family wisely pointed out, is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. Check out Gold Dust Lounge’s new Facebook page , Twitter Feed and website to help with the effort. Oh, and get in on those $3.50 cocktails. The Limited may have the final word, but not without a fight from the bar, the community and, according to Gold Dust press agent Lee Housekeeper , the ghost of Herb Cain. It’s been a tough year for business in San Francisco. Check out some other San Francisco icons fighting the good fight in 2012 in our slideshow below:

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David Macaray: Watchdogs and Underdogs

January 10, 2012

By now most people are aware that while Congress was in recess, President Obama, on January 4, appointed former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The move drew considerable attention, with consumer advocates expressing their delight, and business groups predicting the demise of the free enterprise system. Then, only hours after Cordray, Obama recess-appointed three people to the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), giving it a full complement of five members for the first time in almost a year. The new faces are Sandra Block, Richard Griffin and Terrence Flynn. They join current members Mark Pearce and Brian Hayes. Block, Griffin and Pearce are Democrats; Flynn and Hayes are Republicans. Despite the hype surrounding these appointments, it’s hard to know how much praise Obama deserves. After all, appointing qualified people to government posts is what a president is supposed to do. Why would it require kudos? And as to the “audacity quotient” of recess-appointments, that’s also been a bit inflated. Consider: Bill Clinton made 139 such appointments; George W. Bush made 171; and in 1903, Teddy Roosevelt made 160 of them… all in the same day. On the other hand — given that Republicans despise regulatory agencies, given that they’ve spent 75 years beating up on the NLRB, given that they’ve purposely kept it understaffed (a labor board with two members isn’t a quorum, and doesn’t have the authority to issue rulings), and given that, even with a 53-47 senate majority poised to approve Obama’s nominees, they’d promised to filibuster — Obama’s moves were, in fact, quite bold. Not only were they bold, they were way overdue. Credit organized labor for keeping the president’s feet to the fire. That reported $400 million they donated to the Democrats in 2008 finally bought them something. While Republicans regard the NLRB as “interfering with” and “restricting” business, the board views itself as providing the underdog with basic safeguards — safeguards, incidentally, that are written into our federal labor laws. The board merely enforces those laws. When people get fired for engaging in union activism, or when a workforce requests a union election but is denied, or when management negotiators refuse to bargain in good faith, it’s the NLRB that comes to the rescue. Although congressional Republicans are already threatening legal action and issuing hysterical statements, there’s not much they can do about it, which means the NLRB, at least through 2012, is going to have a fair amount of latitude in addressing workers’ concerns. One of those concerns will be union membership drives. According to surveys, upwards of 60 percent of American workers have expressed an interest in joining a union, attracted by across-the-board advantages in wages, benefits and working conditions. But national membership stands at barely over 12 percent. While part of that differential can be written off to the unreliability of surveys, the larger part is clearly due to management’s ability to keep the union out through the use of its two favorite weapons: stalling and intimidation. There are hundreds of documented cases of companies illegally attempting to dissuade workers from joining a union. They threaten, they lie, they cajole, they bully, they bribe, they spy, they hire professional goons to assist them. They also use legal tactics. I knew a retired woman who, on a whim, decided to take a part-time job at Walmart to augment her pension. She was astonished by the level of anti-union propaganda. As a new employee, she was immediately shown a 45-minute movie on the evils of labor unions. Consider the FDA (Food and Drug Administration, established way back in 1906). One can only imagine the extent of marketplace mischief if the FDA weren’t there to serve as watchdog. The same applies to the NLRB. Indeed, without the labor board, there would be no way to ensure workplace justice. Employees would be at the mercy of “management tyranny.” A healthy and active NLRB is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor”), was a former union rep. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net

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Why Was Rupert Murdoch Tweeting About Arts Site? Oh, Right

January 10, 2012

In case you haven’t heard, Rupert Murdoch is on Twitter. Here, he says such cheerful and grammatically questionable statements as “Education only way to real equality. US a disgrace. Millions every year headed for underclass or worse. Half kids drop out in LA , others,” and “Re complaints about my spelling! Problem is my pathetic typing. Sorry, if anyone really cares” (touché, Mr. Murdoch). His latest zany message to his 123,428–and counting!–followers? “For those interested in art try beautiful new site art.sy.”

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Robert Reich: The Bain of Capitalism

January 10, 2012

It’s one thing to criticize Mitt Romney for being a businessman with the wrong values. It’s quite another to accuse him and his former company, Bain Capital, of doing bad things. If what Bain Capital did under Romney was bad for society, the burden shifts to Romney’s critics to propose laws that would prevent Bain and other companies from doing such bad things in the future. Don’t hold your breath. Newt Gingrich says Bain under Romney carried out “clever legal ways to loot a company.” Gingrich calls it the “Wall Street model” where “you can basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers,” and charges that “if someone comes in, takes all the money out of your company and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.” Where has Newt been for the last 30 years? Leveraged buyouts became part of traditional capitalism in the 1980s when enterprising financiers began borrowing piles of money, often at high interest rates, to buy up the stock of ongoing companies they believe undervalued. They’d back the loans with the company assets, then typically sell off divisions and slim payrolls, and resell the company to the public at a higher share price — pocketing the gains. It’s a good deal for the financiers (the $25 billion buyout of RJR-Nabisco in 1988 netted the partners of Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts around $70 million each — and most of Mitt Romney’s estimated $200 million fortune comes from the same maneuvers), but not always for the company or its workers. Some workers lose their jobs when the company downsizes. Others, when the company, now laden with debt, can’t meet its payments to creditors and has to go into bankruptcy. According to the Wall Street Journal , of 77 companies Bain invested in during Romney’s tenure there, 22 percent either filed for bankruptcy or closed their doors by end of eighth year after Bain’s investment. But, hey, this is American capitalism — at least as it’s been practiced for the past three decades. Is Newt proposing to ban leveraged buyouts? Or limit the amount of debt a company can take on? Or prevent financiers — or even CEOs and management teams — from taking a public company private and then reselling it to the public at a higher price? None of the above. Rick Perry criticizes Romney and Bain pushing the quest for profits too far. “There is nothing wrong with being successful and making money,” says Perry. “But getting rich off failure and sticking someone else with the bill is indefensible.” Yet getting rich off failure and sticking someone else with the bill is what Wall Street financiers try to do every day. It’s called speculation — and at least since the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act, investment bankers have been allowed to gamble with commercial bank deposits, other people’s money. So is Perry proposing to resurrect Glass-Steagall? Not a chance. Gingrich, Perry, and others are putting particular focus on the people who lost their jobs as a result of Romney’s Bain Capital. Gingrich’s Super PAC will be running $3.5 million of ads featuring emotional interviews with some of them. But what, exactly, are Romney’s opponents proposing to do about layoffs that harm so many people? Millions of Americans have lost their jobs over the last four years — and as a result have often lost their health insurance, their homes, and their savings. Are Gingrich, Perry, and others proposing to expand health insurance coverage for jobless Americans and their families? All I hear from the Republicans is their determination to repeal the law that President Obama championed — which still leaves millions of Americans uninsured. Do Romney’s opponents have plans to keep people in their homes even when they’ve lost their jobs and can’t pay their mortgages? No. Do they propose expanding unemployment insurance? If memory serves, most of them were opposed to the last extension. I’m all in favor of reforming capitalism, but you’ll permit me some skepticism when it comes to criticisms of Bain Capital coming from Romney’s Republican opponents. None of these Republican candidates has exactly distinguished himself with new ideas for giving Americans more economic security. To the contrary — until the assault on Romney and Bain Capital — every one of them has been a cheerleader for financial capitalism of the most brutal sort. The party that has repeatedly saved capitalism from its own excesses and thereby preserved capitalism is the Democratic Party. So the only serious question here is what kind of serious reforms Obama will propose when, assuming Romney becomes the Republican nominee, Obama also criticizes Bain Capitalism. Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future , now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org .

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Gambling Gains: Another Victory for Sports Betting, in N.J.

January 10, 2012

Fresh off a victory in his state on the path towards legalizing sports betting, New Jersey state Sen. Raymond Lesniak pledged Tuesday to take the fight nationwide. On Monday Lesniak, a Democrat, succeeded in rushing a sports-betting bill through the state legislature. The bill would allow wagering on pro and college games in Atlantic City and at the state’s racetracks if a federal ban on sports betting is reversed. Following an expected signature of the measure by Gov. Chris Christie, the New Jersey attorney general could file suit in federal district court as early as this month to try to overturn the federal prohibition, Lesniak said. The economic funk is empowering gambling proponents like Lesniak, who is also behind a state online gambling bill. New Jersey is bearing $10 billion of a collective $95 billion debt carried by U.S. states in 2012. And the Garden State is losing gambling revenue to Nevada and betting rings run by organized crime, Lesniak said. While other states are looking to generate revenue through casino gambling, New Jersey is taking the lead on sports betting. And it’s doing so without much help. “Other than mild encouragement, [other states] let us carry the ball for the rest of the country,” Lesniak said. If New Jersey’s challenge succeeds in overturning the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, people could bet on the Super Bowl and other sporting events in any state that legalizes bookmaking. Four states — Nevada, Delaware, Montana and Oregon — are already exempt from that law. Americans bet $100 billion a year on sports, legally or otherwise, according to the University of California, Los Angeles gambling studies program. Lesniak believes that all that stands in the way of cash-hungry states getting their share though sports betting is persuading the court that the law is unconstitutional. States should be allowed to determine how they raise revenue, particularly when four states are already given the privilege, he said. New Jersey’s expected battle with the Justice Department would be a rematch of sorts. Lesniak, through his law firm, filed suit last year to strike down the ban. He firm handled the work pro bono, he said. But the federal appeals court threw out the suit, declaring that the state itself would have to file the action. Momentum has been building for pro-gambling forces. The Justice Department this month eased its interpretation of the Wire Act, opening the possibility for states to pursue online gambling for games such as poker. And Lesniak is optimistic about the upcoming challenge against the Sports Protection Act. He cited a letter in which the Justice Department objected to Congress’ passing the law because it violated states’ rights. The letter was addressed to Joe Biden, the current vice president who was then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Attorney Peter Dugas , director of government affairs for the Washington, D.C., firm Clark Hill, said no challenge has come close to eliminating the sports betting ban and that a different outcome was “really questionable.” Lesniak remains undaunted, saying if the court addresses substance over procedural issues, the outcome should be a no-brainer in favor of his side. “It should not take long in U.S. District Court to get a decision,” he said.

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Ian Fletcher: Greg Thanos Interviews Me on What’s Wrong With Free Trade

January 6, 2012

Here I am in a video interview with documentary filmmaker Greg Thanos on what’s wrong with free trade:

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New Gym Only Welcomes Overweight Clients, Skinny Uninvited

January 6, 2012

The fitness industry has long featured toned and perfect figures effortlessly gliding on a elliptical machine or treadmill. But at Downsize Fitness , skinny people aren’t welcome. Instead, eligible clients must be at least 50 lbs overweight, according to the company’s website . When members reach their goal, they “graduate” from the gym. With locations in Chicago and Las Vegas, the gym first opened its doors last fall with the goal of creating a non-intimidating environment where members can focus on working out, Headline News reported . Though some 42 million Americans joined health clubs in 2011 , according to a report by IBISWorld, the Chicago Tribune notes gyms are guilty of alienating obese members who most need the fitness industry’s help. So far, the gym’s members are happy with the atmosphere the club provides. Club member Tara Lawton told the Tribune she’s lost 20 pounds since joining in October. “I want to cry sometimes at how it changed my life,” Tara Lawton, 42, said in an interview with the paper . “My body is responding positively to being pushed.”

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Restaurant Hurt By Occupy Wall Street Closes, Donald Trump Takes Over

January 6, 2012

A local New York restaurant that saw business drop off as Occupy Wall Street protests erupted nearby has finally shut its doors — and will be taken over by the ultimate 1 Percenter, Donald Trump . The real-estate magnate, who owns the building at 40 Wall Street, where Milk Street Cafe was located, has retained the restaurant hall for “penny’s on the dollar,” according to a source close to the deal, and will turn the all-kosher cafe into a Trump Street Bar & Grille. In early November, Marc Epstein, owner of Milk Street, which had moved into the space in June, claimed that metal barricades police had erected in response to the nearby Occupy Wall Street protests were impeding access to his cafe’s front door. Amid slumping sales, Epstein was forced to lay off 21 of the restaurant’s 120 workers . Though police ultimately removed the barricades in front of the cafe, the barricades on the street remained, creating a “siege mentality” that continued to hurt foot traffic, Epstein said. “In the end we could not continue to lose money while foot traffic had dwindled down to that level,” Epstein recalled. “The barricades, which I’m told are still there, not directly in front of the space, but to the left and right down Broad Street, cut the legs out from underneath us,” he added. “Everyday that they’re still there reaffirms that I made the right decision to close.” Steve Lafiosca, Trump’s director of commercial properties, told the Tribeca Trib, a local news site, that operators of Trump Street Bar & Grille will try to retain as many of the employees as possible . Lafiosca didn’t mention the barricades on Broad Street, but told reporters that he suspects Milk Street Cafe’s all-kosher theme, which Trump will do away with, played a role in the restaurant’s downfall. Epstein, for his part, is now refocusing efforts on Milk Street Cafe’s 30-year old Boston location where he said business is fine. “I have no plans to expand beyond Boston any time soon,” he added.

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Bank Mistake May Cost Foreclosure Lawyer Her Home

January 6, 2012

Christine Jackson’s three-bedroom wood-frame home in Indianapolis is in danger of foreclosure. It’s not because she can’t afford her mortgage, but because of a bank error, she said. While millions of U.S. home loans have sunk into default or foreclosure since 2007 because owners can’t keep up with payments, Jackson’s situation is different. Thousands of homeowners from all walks of life have complained that the major banks that service their mortgages have made frequent errors in calculating their loans. These errors include slapping unnecessary inspection fees onto accounts, misapplying payments in violation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guidelines and “force-placing” expensive insurance on homes that are already insured. Jackson knows all this all too well because she is a lawyer who represents homeowners trying to stave off foreclosure. Often, those clients have claimed that their bank or mortgage servicer made a mistake in tabulating the cost of their loan, triggering a wrongful default. Jackson, 54, a former fraud investigator for the Internal Revenue Service, now understands firsthand the frustration that her clients feel. JPMorgan Chase & Co., the bank that services Jackson’s mortgage, has declared her loan in default, blocked access to her online account and threatened foreclosure if she doesn’t pay late charges that she said are unwarranted. Her once sterling credit is ruined and she could lose her home if the mess isn’t resolved, Jackson said in a recent interview. Jackson blames her situation on an extra annual insurance premium that she said Chase deducted from her account in 2009 on top of her usual payment. The overcharge triggered a series of account miscalculations, eventually leading to default, according to Jackson. “I’m disgusted with the whole thing,” she said. “My credit is trashed. I have nothing at all to finance my business. I might have to file for bankruptcy.” Banks’ servicing arms manage all aspects of a borrower’s home loan, from collecting payments for the owners of the mortgage to pursuing a foreclosure if a loan is in default for too long. Since the housing market crashed in 2007, banks and some standalone mortgage servicers have struggled to keep up with an unprecedented wave of foreclosures, without much success. A group of state attorneys general is trying to craft a blanket settlement with several large financial institutions following allegations that these banks filed false and “robo-signed” affidavits in foreclosure proceedings. Also, the biggest banks and independent servicers agreed in November as part of a consent order with federal regulators to give homeowners with residences involved in a foreclosure action from Jan. 1, 2009, to Dec. 31, 2010, the option of an independent audit of their loan account to resolve cases like Jackson’s. Regulators have boasted that the move could grant more than 4 million borrowers a chance to have their accounts examined by qualified auditors. But Jackson doesn’t qualify for such a review because her troubles don’t fit within the designated time frame and her home hasn’t been foreclosed on. That’s also the case for many of the estimated 3 million U.S. homeowners whose loans are in default or some stage of foreclosure. Jackson, who with her husband had their house built in 1997, said in February 2009 the mortgage servicing arm of JPMorgan Chase withdrew $1,422 from her escrow account to pay her annual homeowners insurance premium. The next month, Chase withdrew $838 from her escrow — again to pay her annual insurance premium; the second amount was the correct amount, Jackson claimed. At the end of 2009, Chase recalculated the amount needed to fund the following year’s insurance premium, adding $1,422 and $838 together and incorrectly increasing Jackson’s required monthly payment, Jackson claimed. Since Jackson’s monthly payment was automatically deducted from her bank account, she did not notice until the end of 2010 that she was paying an extra $108 each month, she said. Jackson finally noticed the mistake when she logged onto her account online, she said, noting that she called a Chase representative who promised to fix the problem. Instead, things got worse. In January 2011 she received eight letters from Chase stating that her previous month’s payment was insufficient and that her loan was now in default. Jackson, whose clients have had similar problems, has coined a term for her situation: phantom default. Jackson has spent dozens of hours on the phone and sending letters in an attempt to resolve the problem with Chase, to no avail, she said. She is now ready to pay home loan payments she has withheld over the past year, provided the bank repair her credit, reimburse her for damages and costs, and waive all the late and default fees, which she estimated total several thousand dollars, she said. Thomas Kelly, a Chase spokesman, said that while he could not comment on the details of Jackson’s situation, “we work with customers individually when there is confusion or dispute about payments.” Other homeowners have also complained of banks making errors with insurance premium. In 2010, a Mississippi federal bankruptcy judge ordered American Home Mortgage Servicing to pay Glen Cothern’s legal expenses as a result of the “obvious mental anxiety, stress, and frustration” he suffered when the servicer charged him for insurance he didn’t need, triggering two wrongful foreclosures and a customer-care experience termed “Kafka-esque” by the judge. New Orleans bankruptcy attorney Greta Brouphy saw her monthly mortgage payment balloon after Chase deducted two $3,200 annual insurance premiums in one year and imposed costly forced-place insurance on top of that. Brouphy spent a year trying to get the situation sorted out at her local Chase branch. “The loan officer should invite me to his kid’s birthday party because I spent so much time with him,” Brouphy said. Finally, a federal judge intervened. “I’m about to choke somebody,” Brouphy recalled saying to New Orleans bankruptcy judge Elizabeth Magner after court one day. Magner, who has developed a national reputation for sanctioning servicers for their behavior, gave Brouphy the phone number of a Chase lawyer, who quickly cleared things up. Jackson hasn’t been as fortunate. “Regardless of my knowledge of the law and my connections, my account has not been corrected, all my credit has been reduced, and I cannot get any operating loans for my business, which is fatal when you work on a contingent basis,” she said. Bank of America Corp. and other lenders cancelled lines of credit for Jackson totaling more than $100,000 that she needs to finance cases. She closed her law office and moved into her home. She even canceled her $260 subscription to a legal research website. Jackson, who worked for the IRS for 18 years, said she has paired down her client roll to just 10 and is considering moving with her husband to Mexico and abandoning law altogether. That’s bad news for any Indiana homeowner who might have wanted to tap her experience in navigating this type of bureaucratic nightmare. The little apartment on Lake Chapala near Guadalajara that Jackson has rented several times for a few hundred dollars a month beckons, she said. “The stress has made me ill,” she said. “I don’t need this.” Here are some other awkward foreclosure stories from last year:

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Charles Kolb: The American Business Community’s Collective-Action Problem

January 6, 2012

The Occupy Wall Street movement has not been kind to the American business community. Among other things, OWS highlights the income disparity between the top 1% of U.S. income earners and the 99% “rest of America.” Guess who’s among that top 1%? Too many Americans see Wall Street and American business as gaming the system to promote personal profit. CEO compensation is now at least 400 times the average employee compensation in many companies. Thirty years ago, that multiple was 40. Certainly neither productivity nor performance explains this disparity, so populist rhetoric turns to the simplest rationale: greed. Many observers question whether today’s business leaders have a heart when it comes to their role in the country’s growing income disparity. Far too many business leaders also turn a blind eye to the nation’s urgent needs: on fiscal and deficit policy, health care, education, the environment, and our campaign finance system. A more appropriate question might be to ask whether they have a head. What is surprising is that the reluctance of business leaders to pay serious attention to these policy issues cuts against their own self-interest. Doesn’t every CEO care about the cost of capital, health care inflation, whether the workforce has sufficient skills, whether energy costs can be reduced, and whether their organizations are being shaken down by the taxpayer-funded professional politicians who dominate our Congress? (Insider trading can send business leaders to prison. In Congress, it appears to have been tolerated for years.) Now, Gillian Tett in the Financial Times observes that former Clinton White House Chief of Staff and North Carolina businessman Erskine Bowles — co-chair with former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction panel created and then ignored by President Obama — has convened at Harvard a new “CEO fiscal reform council” to see if a business voice can help break the Washington political logjam. Erskine Bowles is an exceptionally thoughtful, energetic, patriotic, and optimistic business leader. He should be a model for every U.S. CEO, along with Honeywell’s CEO Dave Cote , who served on the Simpson-Bowles panel, and Dow Chemical’s CEO Andrew Liveris who is trying to address many of the issues highlighted above. For much of the last year, the 70-year-old Committee for Economic Development has been trying to mobilize American CEOs to address our fiscal-health challenges. We now have some 85 endorsers of the standards by which we felt the now defunct Super Committee should have been judged. These endorsers included Dave Cote, PIMCO’s Mohamed El-Erian, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, George Conrades of Akamai Technologies, former Blackstone co-founder Peter G. Peterson, and even Erskine Bowles himself. But the effort has been slow-going when it should have been much easier. Why the difficulty? The answer lies in what economists call the collective-action problem, where a wedge exists separating a company’s or a CEO’s private interests from their public interests. Cornell University economist Robert Frank explains how individual incentives often conflict with those of the larger group in a terrific new book, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition and the Common Good . How the collective action problem plays out to frustrate CEO engagement in sound public policy can be seen clearly in the way one major business association addressed health care reform in 2009 and 2010. America’s employer-sponsored health care system has been a key factor in weakening the global competitiveness of our large companies. A few years ago, General Motors reported that more than $1,000 of a new car’s sticker price went to cover the health insurance costs of its existing and retired workforce. Today, fewer U.S. companies are offering health coverage, and the employer-sponsored system faces inexorable decline. It was clearly in the collective interests of all American businesses to move to an incentive-based, market-oriented health care system and jettison the model that emerged during World War II by accident as a way to skirt wartime wage and price restrictions. Instead of abandoning this anachronistic, uncompetitive approach to health care costs, this business association blocked reform and supported the status quo. The rationale offered for this position was interesting: since many of their member companies could afford the costly premiums, they saw providing gold-plated health insurance benefits as a way to compete for scarce talent in the workforce. If this zero-sum rationale was so compelling, then why did General Motors file for bankruptcy? On the day General Motors filed for bankruptcy protection, one of their former senior officers told me that two reasons accounted for the company’s sorry situation: taking the focus off quality and the consumer, and health care costs. In a private conversation, this association’s president admitted what everyone knew: that the employer-sponsored system was doomed but the association’s individual members preferred to stick with the shorter-term goal of attracting talent. They chose to ignore the longer term, more fundamental, competitiveness issues that are harming their interests. The collective-action problem explains why so many companies and their leaders often behave in this manner. Additionally, other factors reinforce this shortsightedness. Ms. Tett notes that many U.S. corporate leaders today think of their companies and employees as being more global than American. She writes: “American companies might spend heavily to lobby special interests; but it is unclear whether they have [a] similar incentive to change wider American policies.” The Committee for Economic Development is betting that they do — but the headwinds are, indeed, strong. Corporate leaders and their boards are still bewitched by quarterly earnings reports, and CEOs often face shorter tenures at the top. So much of short-term behavior in corporate America is rationalized in the name of “maximizing shareholder value.” Perhaps a rejuvenated shareholders’ rights movement can make a needed, and positive contribution by stiffening the spines of more CEOs and their boards to follow the splendid example of leaders like Dave Cote . We need more American business leaders who put their country first rather than bend to narrow short-term pressures. ______________________________________________________________________________ Charles Kolb is the President of the Committee for Economic Development in Washington, D.C. He served in the first Bush White House from 1990-1992 as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and in the Department of Education as Deputy Undersecretary for Planning, Budget and Evaluation (1988-1990). The views in this article are solely the author’s.

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The Law Moms All Over Have Been Waiting For

January 6, 2012

As part of Obama’s health care reform legislation, employers are now, for the first time, federally mandated to provide nursing mothers with breaks and a place to pump. If you’re thinking, “Huh? This didn’t exist yet?” you’re not alone. The Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March 2010 (which also seems late in the game, no?), but the government is now cracking down on employers who don’t comply. McDonald’s and Starbucks are among the 23 companies that have been cited by the Department of Labor, Sonia Melendez, a spokeswoman told MSNBC . Hard and fast rules haven’t been finalized yet, but the Wage and Hour Division fact-sheet gives us a sneak preview. According to the document: “[Employers are required to provide] reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for 1 year after the child’s birth … [as well as] a place, other than a bathroom , that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public.” The bold is ours because it bears emphasizing that bathrooms — even private ones — are not considered acceptable locations in which to feed a person. As mothers are fighting to nurse in public without being ridiculed (or worse), these guidelines may be the next step to align directives from doctors about breastfeeding (breast is best!) with the messages they get from employers.

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