Obama's Social Sec.Cuts For Debt Ceiling Creates Poverty? Rep. Sanders

Sanders: Obama Social Security proposal would impoverish 250,000

The Social Security Administration estimates that a proposal floated by the Obama administration would put 245,000 people into poverty, according to an analysis released by liberal senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday.

That level of impact would be felt by 2050 if a proposal to change the way inflation is measured is adopted, Sanders announced. The change to the way SSA would calculate the Consumer Price Index has been floated in debt ceiling talks between Congress and the White House. The White House has suggested revising CPI for both the tax code, in order to generate more revenue, and for benefits.

Social Security Administration’s Office of Retirement Policy estimated that by 2030, according to the report prepared for Sanders, there would be 173,400 more people living in poverty in the United States.

Benefits for those who are 80-89 would drop by $960 a year. Benefits for women would fall by 3.5 percent overall while men’s benefits would drop by 2.9 percent.

By 2050, seniors in the 80-89 age bracket would see benefits fall by $1,200 a year.

"I am especially disturbed that the president is considering cuts in Social Security after he campaigned against cuts in 2008," Sanders said. "The American people expect the president to keep his word."

This week Sanders demanded that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) join House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in flatly ruling out any benefit cuts to Social Security as part of the debt deal.

Reid in the past has said Social Security does not need to be reformed for decades. While Social Security is expected to be unable to pay full benefits by 2036, it is not a major driver of the budget deficit. Republicans want the program reformed now because they fear otherwise that as 2036 approaches massive tax hikes that could stall the economy would be demanded by senior citizens.


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Sources: The Hill, Youtube, Google Maps

Bernanke Confirmed For Second Term 70-30

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Senate Confirms Bernanke For Second Term


The Senate has confirmed Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The Senate voted 70-30 on Thursday to reappoint Bernanke amid criticism of his judgment ahead of the financial crisis and his support for massive Wall Street bailouts. His supporters credited him for engineering a financial industry rescue in time to prevent a catastrophic collapse.

The vote was the closest ever for a nominee for Fed chairman. It came amid roiling public anger over the economy and stubbornly high unemployment that fueled a populist backlash against Bernanke. No Fed chairman has been rejected in the Senate.

Bernanke's current term expires Sunday.

Senate critics had arrayed themselves against Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, determined to take issue with his bid for a second term leading the nation's central bank even as his confirmation seemed assured.

Bernanke needed a 60-vote super majority to beat a filibuster aimed at blocking his reappointment. He received enough votes.

"Bernanke fiddled while our markets burned," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., voicing a common complaint that Bernanke did not detect the coming crisis and failed to rein in the banking industry.

His supporters argue that once the crisis was upon him he used aggressive and creative measures to bring stability to the financial system.

"He has kept a steady hand on the tiller in a perfect economic storm," Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said.

The final confirmation vote could still be the slimmest for a Federal Reserve nominee, eclipsing the opposition to Paul Volcker in 1983, when he was confirmed for a second term by a vote of 84-16. No Fed chairman nominee has been rejected by the Senate.

The stock market has been rooting for Bernanke. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged last week amid news of mounting opposition, then recovered when his prospects brightened.

The Federal Reserve wields enormous power over American pocketbooks. It has the power to set interest rates that influence economic activity, employment and inflation. And it helps maintain economic stability by making emergency loans to banks when they can't get cash elsewhere.

"I believe that the chairman is going to be confirmed by a bipartisan vote," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Wednesday.

Widely credited with avoiding a financial catastrophe, Bernanke has angered the public and lawmakers with his support of Wall Street bailouts — especially the $182 billion rescue of insurance giant American International Group Inc. The criticism has mounted as unemployment has risen to double digits and banks paid out huge bonuses to their executives.

"He was asleep at the switch while Wall Street became a gambling casino," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who is among the opposition.

The biggest challenge facing the Fed this year will be how and when to reverse course and raise interest rates. To foster the recovery, the Fed on Wednesday kept interest rates at a record low and pledged to hold them there for some time.

Though Bernanke may overcome a filibuster threat with 60 or more votes, his support on the final confirmation vote will probably be smaller. Several senators have said they would oppose blocking a vote on his confirmation but would vote against his re-appointment.

Sanders stopped short of conceding that Bernanke would be confirmed, but he said the close tally would send a message to President Barack Obama.

The confirmation fight and the attacks on the Fed have become a test of central bank independence. The Fed jealously guards its autonomy as a crucial element for carrying out monetary policy, even if it isn't popular with politicians.

Bernanke, 56, was first tapped by President George W. Bush to run the nation's central bank. Obama picked him for a second term in August. His term expires Jan. 31.

Most of his professional career was in academia. He spent 17 years teaching economics at Princeton.

Bernanke came to Washington to take a job at the Federal Reserve, working with then-Chairman Alan Greenspan. Bush selected him to be his top economist. After that, he went on to run the Fed, starting in 2006.


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Sen. Bernie Sanders Admits Lobbyists Own Congress

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Lobbyists On Pace For Record Year



Main Street has had a tough year, losing jobs and seeing little evidence of the economic revival that experts say has already begun.

But K Street is raking it in.

Washington’s influence industry is on track to shatter last year’s record $3.3 billion spent to lobby Congress and the rest of the federal government — and that’s with a down economy and about 1,500 fewer registered lobbyists in town, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Many lobbying firms have escaped the worst of the corporate belt-tightening, thanks, in large part, to the ambitious agenda set out by President Barack Obama — who, ironically, came to Washington with a pledge to break what he considered the undue influence of special-interest lobbyists.

Plenty of sectors have scaled back their K Street spending, including traditional big spenders like real estate and telecommunications. But Obama’s push for legislation on health reform, financial reform and climate change has compensated for the grim economic times.

And that’s after Obama kicked off the year with a massive economic stimulus package — and every major business sector tried to get a piece of the action.

“Lobbyists love it ... when you’ve got an activist agenda like this, and you’ve got serious problems like this, and people want to do something about it,” said James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.

“It is the most active time that I have ever seen in the advocacy business — from 1973 on,” Thurber added.

“We’ve never had as good a year,” said one lobbyist whose shop deals mostly with financial services and health care issues. “It’s been a tremendously busy year, and it’s going to keep getting that way,” the lobbyist said, noting that both health care and financial reform will remain active as congressional action moves from drafting legislation to implementation to the inevitable fixes.

The year-end lobbying expenditure figures don’t come out until late January, but Thurber and others predict that the top line number will exceed the $3.3 billion spent in 2008. Groups spent $2.5 billion during the first three quarters of 2009, which is a slightly faster quarterly pace than 2008, according to CRP.

And the fourth quarter has been a particularly busy time on Capitol Hill, with the House passing health care and financial reform bills and the Senate digging in on health care, too.

Health care has provided a particular jolt to the lobbying business, insiders say, since the scope of the legislation outstrips any health efforts in recent history.

“This was the biggest, most broad attempt at passing legislation that we’ve seen. This is even bigger or more broad than ’93,” said Bill Pierce, senior vice president and health care guru at APCO Worldwide, referring to President Bill Clinton’s attempt at health care reform. “It touches all the various parts of the entire health care environment. ... Everybody has some dog in the fight.”

And the lobbying expenditure figures don’t include the heaps of cash interest groups are throwing at advertising, coalition-building, grass-roots and Astroturf outreach — all of which don’t get reported in the figures. Advocacy groups have spent almost $200 million on ads on the health care issue so far this year, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group.

The legislation’s reach has drawn in an almost-encyclopedic expanse of interest and corporate groups — from activists on both sides of the abortion debate, to MoveOn.org and FreedomWorks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to health insurance companies.

“That doesn’t happen every day. When it does happen, you get this great deal of money being pumped into the political system on the lobbying end because all of these folks feel like they need to be a participant, and that if they don’t participate, they do so at their own peril,” said Dave Levinthal, a spokesman for CRP, a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog group. Nearly $400 million has been spent on health care lobbying during the first nine months of 2009, according to CRP’s data.

A closer look at some of the health care lobbying expenditures shows just how high the stakes are. PhRMA, a top trade group for drug makers, spent as much as it did in all of 2008 — $20.2 million — during the first nine months of 2009. America’s Health Insurance Plans is also on pace to outspend its 2008 lobbying budget, spending $6.3 million during the first nine months of this year.

The Obama administration’s determination to revamp the nation’s financial rules and regulatory structure has fueled a somewhat less broad but no less intense advocacy business.

Lobbyists for the industry describe working nonstop since last August, when the financial system started to crumble, through the fight for the $700 billion bailout last fall. This year, they’ve battled several attempts by Democrats to pass so-called cramdown legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to modify troubled mortgages and fought — ultimately unsuccessfully — against strict new credit card rules, among other policy battles.

All this while the industry must keep up with the larger financial reform bill, which is moving through Congress. “If it weren’t for the crisis, that bill could have easily taken four years, minimum,” observed one exhausted financial lobbyist of the bill that the House passed Dec. 11.

The Credit Union National Association has already spent about $650,000 more than it did during the same period last year and is on track to spend “considerably more” lobbying than it did in 2008, said John Magill, the trade association’s senior vice president of legislative affairs.

“It’s been such a frantic pace this year. The Congress has churned out so many things,” he said, ticking off a list that includes financial reform, credit card legislation, new bank overdraft rules and credit unions’ ongoing battle to raise the amount they can lend to small businesses.

Magill said that the lobbying expenditures CUNA reports to Congress don’t take into account its extensive grass-roots efforts, such as the 5,000 members that “hiked the Hill” last spring or the approximately 650 who flew into town the week the House debated the financial reform bill on the floor.

Magill credits that grass-roots lobbying for the defeat of a House bill on a cramdown amendment, which came after the House passed a similar measure earlier in the year.

While times may be good for lobbyists, there’s a more dismal lesson to be learned from the relentless upward trend of lobbying spending that appears undaunted by even a massive recession: Lobbying is seen as an issue of political and economic survival in this town.

“If lobbying the federal government did not work, people wouldn’t spend money doing it,” Levinthal said.



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Sources: MSNBC, Morning Joe, Politico, Google Maps

GOP Succeeds In Health Care Reform Slowdown

Senate debate stalls as GOP forces reading


The debate on the health care reform bill stalled Wednesday as Senate Republicans forced the Senate clerk to read a 767-page amendment establishing a government-financed health care system.

"Republicans have a number of tools at their disposal that can be used, this is an option that was discussed for some time and our conference is unified in its execution," said a Senate Republican leadership aide.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), added, "This will take several hours, if not the balance of the day."

Senate staff estimate the reading could take eight hours.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offered the amendment, and asked to dispense with the reading of it, which is almost always agreed to by unanimous consent. But Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) objected -- it takes only one senator -- which then forced the reading.

Sanders called it a "bit absurd" that Coburn was objecting. Coburn insisted he wasn't intentionally stalling the bill. "We're going to understand what single payer is all about and read the bill," he said.

Republicans appear to have no immediate plans to stop the reading.

This development will prevent senators from offering, debating or voting on any other amendments. While it might seem like the reading would set back efforts to finish the bill by Christmas, the timetable doesn't really depend on what happens on the floor.

It depends entirely on Majority Leader Harry Reid's ability to reach a compromise on the bill that can pick up 60 votes.

“The only thing that Sen. Coburn’s stunt achieves is to stop us from moving to the DoD appropriations bill that funds our troops – not exactly the kind of Christmas gift that our troops were expecting from Dr. No,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid.

Manley said the amendment will take 12 hours to read. The reading can only be interrupted to ask that it be waived, which presumably would be objected to by Coburn, who is sitting in the chamber.

Before forcing the reading, Coburn asked to certify that every senator has read and understands the bill. But Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said it would be impossible for the Senate to certify that all its members understand the bill.


Sources: Politico