I work for the Courage Campaign

The stimulus plan isn’t the only thing Republicans are obstructing. Hilda Solis, still the representative from CA-32, was nominated as Secretary of Labor by President Obama on December 19. It’s been nearly two months and her nomination still hasn’t moved out of the Senate HELP committee.

Republicans, led by Mike Enzi of Wyoming, are trying to stop Hilda Solis because of her support of workers’ rights, including – but not limited to – the Employee Free Choice Act. They even want her to promise to not lobby on behalf of Employee Free Choice as a condition of confirmation – which she has so far refused to do.

A hearing was finally to have been held in committee on her nomination last week but news of a tax problem her husband had – which has since been resolved – caused yet another delay, and conservatives are hoping to use the delays to kill one of Obama’s most progressive nominees entirely.

It’s time for Californians to stand up for Hilda Solis.

She’s been there for us in the past. Last summer when Arnold Schwarzenegger planned to slash the wages of over 200,000 state workers to the minimum wage, Solis joined our successful grassroots effort to block that move. Now that she is poised to bring significant progressive change to an important part of the federal government, it’s vital that California progressives show that we have her back.

The Courage Campaign is asking its members to show their support for Hilda Solis by asking them to sign a letter to Senator Ted Kennedy, chair of the Senate HELP committee, encouraging him to lead the fight against conservative resistance and for Hilda Solis’s confirmation.

In doing so we join our allies at SEIU and MoveOn.org who have also pushed out their own kinds of support Solis actions in recent days. There’s also a Facebook group to join as well.

Why a letter to Senator Kennedy? We’re not at all worried that he isn’t supportive of the nomination or that he’s unwilling to move quickly to get it done. What we want to do instead is demonstrate to key Senators just how wide and deep public support for Hilda Solis truly is. To reinforce the case for her confirmation, and to help Kennedy and other Democrats beat back the conservative attack on a true progressive hero.

So sign the letter here and show your support for Hilda Solis!

Over the flip is the email we sent to our members and the letter we’re asking folks to sign:

Dear Robert,

Hilda Solis has consistently stood up for Californians. And now, as she faces a tough confirmation battle to become Secretary of Labor, it’s time for progressives to take a stand for her.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened to cut the salaries of state employees to the minimum wage, Hilda Solis stood with tens of thousands of Courage Campaign members who successfully forced the Governor to back down.

All her life, Solis has stood up for the values we all share — democracy, justice, and prosperity. As one of Barack Obama’s most progressive Cabinet picks she is poised to bring much-needed change to not only the Department of Labor, but to American politics as a whole.

But now, Hilda Solis needs our help. Senate Republicans, led by Mike Enzi of Wyoming, have declared all-out war on our progressive hero. They are determined to kill her nomination so they can stop the momentum of President Obama and the labor movement.

We cannot let them succeed. It’s time for progressives to rally together to stop the right-wing campaign to deny her appointment. Please sign our letter to Senator Ted Kennedy, chair of the Senate Labor Committee, asking him to lead the confirmation of Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor:

http://www.couragecampaign.org…

Conservatives want to destroy her nomination because they do not like President Obama’s policies, the ones Hilda Solis holds so dear. The same policies and values that are Senator Kennedy’s legacy.

If Solis is not confirmed then conservatives will be emboldened to attack other progressives and their causes.

We must draw the line here.

Please join us in asking Senator Kennedy once again to lead progressives and fight for Hilda Solis. Sign our letter to Senator Kennedy and join him in standing up to the right-wing campaign to deny Americans the change they voted for in November:

http://www.couragecampaign.org…

Thank you for standing up and supporting one of California’s progressive heroes.

Rick Jacobs

Chair

And the letter to Senator Kennedy:

   Senator Ted Kennedy,

   As one of the greatest champions for progress in America, we once again need your leadership as the right-wing seeks to make an example of another champion, Labor Secretary-designate Hilda Solis.

   They want to destroy her chances of confirmation as President Obama’s Secretary of Labor because they do not like his policies. These are policies Hilda Solis shares — democracy, justice, prosperity. They are the same policies that you have spent your life promoting.

   Congresswoman Solis has always stood for the people and for progress. Her efforts on behalf of the rights of women, the working class, the poor, and of environmental justice show that Congresswoman Solis is a leader America needs in these tough times. She will bring these values to the Department of Labor, where after eight years of George W. Bush’s misrule, those values are desperately needed.

   We know Hilda Solis because we are her neighbors and friends and constituents here in California. By nominating Hilda Solis, President Obama chose a person dedicated to crafting bipartisan solutions to rebuild our middle class and ensure workers’ rights are protected. Hers is the kind of smart, innovative leadership we need as we face the highest jobless rate in more than 16 years and record job losses of 3.6 million since the start of the recession in December 2007.

   The Republicans who are stalling Solis’ confirmation are the very same group who spent the last eight years putting the needs of big corporations over the needs of working Americans. It’s an insult to every Californian for the Republicans to hold up, postpone or otherwise delay her confirmation. We urge the Senate to quickly confirm Secretary-designate Solis so she can use her expertise to help us through these tough economic times.

   Senator Kennedy, please lead the confirmation of Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor.

Sources say that Gov. Schwarzenegger is spending the day in Idaho.  Now, he normally visits Idaho to ski in Sun Valley, so I’d have to assume that’s the reason for this trip.  But we’re in the midst of secret budget negotiations, and right when a deal is nearing, the Governor leaves for the ski lifts and the hot cocoa?

Here are some images of Californians who won’t be making the trip out to Sun Valley now or probably any time in the future.  First, the jobless who will be lucky just to receive their benefits:

California not only has the nation’s third highest unemployment rate but its Unemployment Insurance Fund has taken a bigger beating than any other state, a new report from the National Conference of State Legislatures indicates.

California’s UIF dropped from $639.2 million to just $71.8 million during 2008 as unemployment soared to about 1.5 million workers, forcing it to join six other states in borrowing money from the federal government to keep the checks rolling out to the jobless.

Then there are the state employees, who got their own vacation last Friday, albeit one of the “forced and unpaid” variety, and the effect on the cities that serve them was immediate and negative:

An unpaid holiday for its largest employer was the last thing Sacramento needed Friday.

Already suffering under 8.7 percent unemployment, the region endured its first day of state-worker furloughs. Most state offices stayed closed, while an appeals court denied a last-ditch union petition to block the furloughs.

The effect was immediate. Traffic was light through much of downtown and midtown Sacramento, where tens of thousands of employees normally congregate, and business was down at numerous restaurants and stores.

“It’s tough to be a small business downtown, and for them to take out a Friday,” said Ryan Rose, manager at Zocalo restaurant east of the Capitol. Friday is usually his busiest day for lunch, and though business was better than he feared, it was lighter than usual.

And then there are those serviced by county governments, who are seeing those services vanish due to the delay in payments from the Controller because of the cash crisis.

What exactly is the controller withholding from counties?

The controller is getting ready to delay the state’s February payment to counties for social service programs. Meanwhile, the Schwarzenegger administration is proposing to defer payments for up to six more months as part of a new state budget agreement.

How much money are we talking about?

The state controller is looking to delay $172 million in payments to counties for February, according to the California State Association of Counties.

What is that money for?

That money is for social service programs like foster care, food stamps, child welfare, adoption programs, adult protective services and more.

What happens in March if counties don’t get their state payments this month?

It depends on the county, but many will not be able to cover the cost of state- mandated social service programs. Sacramento County spent most of its reserves in recent years and doesn’t have enough to pick up the tab.

With the state at rock bottom and some kind of deal urgently needed, it’s curious that the very man who railed against lawmakers for dawdling and dithering and leaving the state during budget negotiations for years is doing the EXACT SAME THING himself.

The fourth installment of a six part series on the Orange County toll roads is now up at Orange County Progressive. Here’s the intro on the story of the ill-fated extension of the 241, where the OC Power Structure met their Waterloo at the hands of DFH’s, Surfers, and a motley crew of environmental activists.

Opponents of the extension of the 241 were waiting anxiously for TCA Directors to emerge from their January closed session meeting with their attorneys.  “We were looking at the body language, and when they slumped into the room with a beaten look and hang-dog expressions, we knew that their lawyers had given them glum news.” The agency attorneys had apparently advised that further legal action would add additional waste to the 40 million plus that had been expended in an attempt to build the final 16 miles of the 241 Toll Road.

Although some directors continued to bluster, for the first time there was talk of reaching out to all stakeholders to put together a new plan. The arguments and logic developed and articulated by toll road opponents had prevailed with the coastal commission, and even the Bush cronies in the waning lame-duck days of the Commerce Department wouldn’t buy the cart-load of preposterous arguments concocted by the TCA flacks.

But their willingness to compromise is too little, too late. It’s like a late stage alcoholic abusive husband, still unable to face the fundamental addiction. The disease is pathetically obvious to close observers, and in moments of sobriety or remorse, the abuser promises to do better. Until the board members of TCA hit bottom and start working a new program, they’ll continue with a pattern of denial, victimhood, and relapse.

A key part of Republican ideology continues to revolve around piratizing our regulatory agencies, roads, water supply, retirement, and social services.

Just as the early California Progressives battled the railroads, we need to fight every one of the modern era pirates trying to steal our most important public goods.

Did FDR’s Jobs and Spending Programs Make the Depression Worse?

A HISTORY LESSON FOR OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES

During the debate on President Obama’s stimulus package, I was astonished to hear Republican Congressional leaders argue that history shows us that massive government spending programs make economic crises worse. As an example, they invoke the jobs and public works programs of the Roosevelt Administration, which, they claim, lengthened the Depression rather than ameliorated its impact.

Their arguments are based on a 2004 book called “Roosevelt’s Folly” by a resident scholar with the Cato Institute named Jim Powell, a book that has been rejected by most historians of the period as unbalanced and inaccurate. There is no question that Powell is right that FDR’s policies did not lead to full recovery from the Depression- that only came as a result of World War II.

But his argument that reliance on the free market would have produced better results than government job creation, public works and encouragement of collective bargaining is not only impossible to prove , it flies in the face of the common sense understanding held by most Americans of what FDR achieved, as well as the assessment of FDR’s policies offered by most scholars in American history.

As someone who has studied the impact of New Deal policies “on the ground, ” in the rural South as well as black and working class neighborhoods in New York City, I would like to offer my own deeply skeptical view of this revisionist history Republicans are promoting.

From my point of view, Roosevelt’s policies offered hope and opportunity to a deeply wounded, fearful American population who had lost their jobs, their homes, their savings and their dignity during the three years between the stock market crash and Roosevelt’s inauguration.

At the time Roosevelt took office, almost a third of the labor force was unemployed, and another third was working part time.

The banking system was in paralysis and the signature American industry, steel, was operating at 29% of capacity.

Large numbers of Americans were hungry. Long breadlines extended outside charities in New York and other cities and city governments lacked the funds to supply hungry people with food.

Millions of Americans were homeless. Shantytowns, often called “Hoovervilles,” filled parks and vacant lots in American cities, and an estimated 3 million people rode the rails from town to town and city to city looking for work.

Evictions and foreclosures,undertaken by banks and landlords provoked violent resistance in many sections of the country, Eviction riots involving thousands of people made throwing out working class families a dangerous proposition in the South and East Bronx, while gun wielding farmers prevented banks from taking over foreclosed farms in portions of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

When you combine this level of popular distress with a financial system in disarray, and a near paralysis of economic activity in agriculture, manufacturing, construction and retail trades, you have conditions very similar to those which paved the way for the rise of fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany.

Left on their own, this is what market forces had wrought, so New Deal leaders took what in the context of American history was very radical step.

They decided to get money into the hands of displaced and demoralized people through direct relief, funded by the federal government, distributed by the states, through payments to farmers for restricting production, and for public works jobs created by the federal government.

These measures didn’t restore the economy to pre 1929 levels. But they did dramatically reduce hunger and homelessness, bring a modest revival in manufacturing, construction agriculture and retail trades, reduce unemployment by half, and make dramatic improvements in the infrastructure by through the construction or roads, dams and bridges

More importantly, they restored the morale of a population which had feared that their poverty would be permanent and that their hard earned skills would no longer have value. The work relief programs of the New Deal gave millions of unemployed Americans a renewed sense of their own value, which spilled over into their responsibilities as family members and citizens.

And when war did come this restored and reinvigorated people rose to the challenge of with a vigor and a unity that amazed the world, both on the product line and the battlefield

This is hardly a legacy of failure!

Nor did the American people understand it as such.

That is why they elected Roosevelt to four terns as president, and why pictures of Roosevelt adorned the mantelpieces of tens of millions of Americans, rural and urban north and south, east and west, black and white, native and immigrant.

This is the lived experience that Republicans seek to denigrate, offering as evidence only the mythic properties of private markets as exist in the imagination of conservative economists

Let us remember: it was unregulated private markets that got us into the Great Depression and it is unregulated markets which have been are destroying our jobs and incomes for the last year and a half.

Now, as then, public works and government spending are needed to restore economic growth and ease the suffering of an increasing worried and frightened American people.

Republicans in the California Legislature are singing the same revisionist history for the California Budget. The SAME spending is needed and the very same type psychology applies to the California Budget (and will certainly be needed if the FEDERAL STIMULUS for States that was cut by Republicans on Friday are not restored), thanks to the Republicans in Congress and the Senate.

Elected Officials, especially Republicans, Take Note! And get a new song book while you are at it.

Credit to Dr Mark Naison for original concept/used w/Permission

Both the Washington Post and the LA Times have stories today about the budget crises facing the states, where governors and legislatures have exhausted every gimmick and now must enact painful cuts that will work against the federal program to bring us out of the economic downturn.  The personal stories are significant:

Nevada resident Margaret Frye-Jackman, 71, was diagnosed in August with ovarian cancer. She had two rounds of chemotherapy at University Medical Center, the only public hospital in the Las Vegas area.

Soon after, she and her daughter heard the news on TV: The hospital’s outpatient oncology services were closing because of state Medicaid cuts. Treatment for Frye-Jackman and hundreds of other cancer patients was eliminated […]

“If this is what it’s like in Nevada, with cancer stuff closing, is it like that everywhere?” said Frye-Jackman’s daughter, Margaret Bakes, accompanying her mother to the doctor’s recently. “Are all the other states closing stuff too?”

The answer, in at least 39 states, is “yes” — or “soon.” With personal, sales and corporate income tax revenue plummeting, state governments — which recently trimmed their budgets to cover a cumulative $40.3-billion shortfall for the current fiscal year — are now watching in horror as a $47.4-billion gap opens for 2009.

And for fiscal year 2010, they will face a $84.3-billion hole, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The total shortfall through fiscal 2011 is estimated at $350 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

This article frames it as there being “no choice” but tough budget cuts or tax increases for states facing shortfalls, states that cannot print money or run budget deficits.  But that’s not entirely true.  There was a good deal of help being offered by the federal government in the House stimulus bill, which included $79 billion in state fiscal stabilization aid.  But among their other cuts, the Axis of Centrism cut that aid in half, by $40 billion dollars, and in so doing guaranteed additional layoffs to teachers and firefighters and cops and nurses and all sorts of other professions which rely on a state paycheck.

California law mandates that layoff notices to teachers be given out by March 15 for the next school year. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing $10 billion in education cuts. Republicans, which use our state’s rule requiring a 2/3 vote of the legislature to pass a budget, are demanding these cuts as the price of a tax increase to close the remaining $40 billion and ensure that the cuts aren’t bigger.

But all of us were hoping and expecting that the US Congress would come through with aid to stabilize state budgets, to help ameliorate the problem and save teacher jobs by providing stimulus money. It must be in the stimulus because, as I just noted, the layoff notices will go out within 5 weeks – there is no time to include it in another bill.

Now we are told that Ben Nelson and Susan Collins, two Republican Senators, have reached a deal to cut that education assistance and that the Senate is likely to accept it.

In short, what they have done is guarantee to my sister and to thousands like her that they will receive a pink slip within five weeks.

To call this fearmongering, as John Ensign did on Meet the Press today, just denies reality, par for the course for both Republicans and bipartisan fetishists like Claire McCaskill, who was at first giddy about cutting 600,000-700,000 jobs in the stimulus, and then passive-aggressively “defended” it by saying the alternative was no bill.

Claire McCaskill is now defending herself against Krugman on Twitter:

Just saw Krugman’s comments on reduction in recov act. Question for him. Would no stimulus act be better than one thats 800 B instead of 900.

She follows that up with

Compromise had to happen or we would NOT have 60 votes. Period.

And for further evidence of how much the bill is the same, she claims:

Original Senate bill was 60% appropriationss, 40%tax cuts. Compromise was 58, 42.Senate bill is 90% the same as House bill.

I’m glad that’s she expressing herself here, and that we’re able to somewhat have a dialogue. But I’m not sure how much in good faith it is. McCaskill began by stating how glad she was that they got a $100 billion cut out of the bill, that the “silly stuff” that Republicans didn’t like is now out. She then switches to a passive aggressive mode in defending the cuts – it’s basically the same bill and it wouldn’t have made it through the Senate – but glosses her own role in making the cuts. From the way she talks about the bill, wouldn’t she have been among those voting against the bill if the cuts hadn’t been made and new non-stimulative tax cuts hadn’t been added in?

McCaskill doesn’t want to admit her role in putting 600,000 Americans out of work on Friday, which will harm public safety and increase class sizes and shut down bus and rail lines and send the sick and uninsured looking in vain for treatment and a host of other inadvisable outcomes.  And there’s no rational economic reason for it, just that the Axis of Centrism choked on the price tag and had to compensate for the non-stimulative tax cuts the Senate tossed into the bill.  Massive job loss or increased property tax rates (as states compensate for the loss to education funds) is on McCaskill and Nelson and Collins and Spector’s hands.

The big question is what will come out of the House-Senate conference next week, whether the cuts, especially the state government relief, will be restored at the expense of things like the $70 billion dollar patch to the alternative minimum tax.  Larry Summers left that an open question on ABC this morning.

One of President Barack Obama’s top economic advisers forecast Sunday a difficult struggle with Congress over Senate cuts of $40 billion for state and local governments from the administration’s massive spending and tax cut package to stimulate the failing economy.

The $827 billion Senate version of the plan — designed to bring the economy out of the worst downward spiral since the Great Depression — was expected to pass the Senate on Tuesday. The House had already passed its $819 billion version of the measure.

And in the opening moments of This Week, an exchange between George Stephanopoulos and Larry Summers went like this:

STEPHANOPOULOS: …does that mean the President prefers the Senate version to the House version?

SUMMERS: No, the President feels that above all, we need a major program enacted very quickly that would create 3 to 4 million jobs. He believes we need to perfect it in every way we can.

If the cuts are restored, suddenly the sense of urgency works back in the direction of passing a bill more like the House version.  The Republican business lobby is urging passage.  I don’t think the moderates signed on to the bill could break ranks on the final vote if the changes in conference are limited to, say, swapping the state cuts for the AMT patch, combined with an assurance from the President that they will make that fix down the road.

The action needs to be entirely directed at the Speaker, who has spoken out against these cuts and ought to appoint conferees that will get the House version at least partially restored.  Being from California, she knows exactly how hard-hit the states are and what the consequences will be.