 |
|
| MORE | |
 |
|
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Obama Sues Arizona
 |
||||||
 |
||||||
The Department of Justice just filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona to challenge the racial profiling law that state is trying to implement. This lawsuit is a sign that the Obama Administration won’t let rogue states create laws from hatred and fear. It’s a good first step, and it paves the way to keep copycat laws off the books in other states. In President Obama’s speech on immigration reform last week, he said that he’s committed to fixing our broken system. This is a down payment on that promise, but there’s so much more we still need to do. Can you join me in faxing the President and tell him to keep it up? Send this fax to President Obama: The Justice Department’s actions are proof that the government isn’t going to stay on the sidelines and let states attack our basic human rights. Tell President Obama not to stop with Arizona! Thank you, p.s. I know that anti-immigrant forces are going to be trying to pressure the President to drop this lawsuit – we can’t let them overwhelm us! Send a fax, then tell five friends to do the same. |
Share this:
Let them Eat Cake
|
They don’t get it — or don’t care.
Nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed, and nearly 7 million Americans have been out of work for over 6 months.
Yet, once again, a minority of Senators blocked help for millions of struggling families. Hold your Senators accountable for their actions by making a phone call today.
Providing unemployment benefits and other assistance to families and helping states and localities protect jobs and services aren’t just compassionate. They are the best ways to help a fragile economy.
While your Senators are home, they need to hear from you. We can’t let another week go by without giving families the support they need.
Tell your Senators that we need legislation that extends unemployment insurance benefits and emergency assistance for families in crisis. And it needs to include additional Medicaid funding for states, or else we’ll face further cuts to health care, education, emergency assistance and other vital services for children and families. That’s right, inaction means more pink slips.
We need your help. Contact your home offices and demand real help for families, states, and the economy.
Thank you for continuing to fight for women and families.
Sincerely,
National Women’s Law Center
Share this:
9.5% Unemployment
|
The new unemployment figures came out on Friday and they’re bad. We lost 125,000 jobs and the unemployment rate is 9.5%.
But instead of helping those who are out of work, Congress just went on vacation without extending unemployment benefits. That means 2 million Americans are losing a desperately-needed source of support because of Congress’ continued failure to act.
Congress seems to think they’re doing the popular thing by pulling back support for the economy, but in fact, a recent poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans want benefits extended, even if it means temporarily increasing the deficit.
Thankfully, your senators, Sens. Murray and Cantwell did the right thing and voted to extend benefits. But there weren’t enough senators willing to stand with them. We need to keep up the pressure so every senator knows this urgent issue has to be dealt with right away. Click here to send a free fax to Sens. Murray and Cantwell with the results of the poll along with a demand that the Senate act.
http://pol.moveon.org/fax?tg=FSWA_1.FSWA_2&cp_id=1395&id=21582-9640874-tSp8G8x&t=3
Friday’s unemployment numbers drive home the point that Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman made last week about the perils of government inaction. He goes so far as to say we may be heading for a depression.
Here are some key excerpts from Krugman’s op-ed:
We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost—to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs—will nonetheless be immense. And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world…governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.
Unemployment—especially long-term unemployment—remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly.
In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.
While long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.
So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.
You can read the whole thing and pass it on to your friends here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28krugman.html
And click here to send Sens. Murray and Cantwell a fax to demand that the Senate does their part to get the economy growing again:
http://pol.moveon.org/fax?tg=FSWA_1.FSWA_2&cp_id=1395&id=21582-9640874-tSp8G8x&t=4
Thanks for all you do.
–Daniel, Laura, Nita, Duncan, and the rest of the team
Share this:
UNDER THE RADAR … thinkprogress.org
BUSINESS — BP USED OIL INDUSTRY TAX BREAK TO WRITE-OFF ITS RENT FOR FAILED DEEPWATER RIG: Reports continue to demonstrate how deeply unprepared BP was to deal with its disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with tar balls reaching Texas’ shores and entering Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain. But the New York Times now explains how the oil behemoth took advantage of U.S. tax policies to significantly benefit from the failed Deepwater Horizon rig. Transocean, the company that owns that rig, used well-known tax havens in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland to reduce its U.S. corporate tax rate by almost 15 points. And due to a break in the U.S. tax code, BP was also allowed to write off 70 percent of the rent it paid to Transocean on its own tax bill. “According to a letter sent in June to the Senate Finance Committee,” the benefit amounted to “a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began.” As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo writes, “[E]ssentially, the U.S. taxpayer paid BP to lease a rig that was incorporated in a foreign country for the purpose of avoiding the U.S. corporate tax.” This benefit to BP is a symptom of a larger issue. Garofalo explains that “the U.S. tax code is actually riddled with breaks for the oil industry, despite that industry’s record profits in recent years.” Sima Gandhi, a senior policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, has counted nine different subsidies that the U.S. government gives to the oil industry, including refunds for drilling costs and refunds to cover the cost of searching for oil. Last month, only 35 senators voted for eliminating $35 billion of the industry’s subsidies. Fully cutting this corporate welfare would save $45 billion per year and, according to the Office of Economic Policy at the Department of Treasury, “affect domestic production by less than one-half of 1 percent.” “The flow of revenues to oil companies is like the gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico: heavy and constant,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in response to BP’s Deepwater write-off. “There is no reason for these corporations to shortchange the American taxpayer.”
Be a Seed for Change 
You must be logged in to post a comment.