The Week in Review
Are Republicans listening to warnings from scientists about global warming? While many in Congress write off climate change as a hoax, it turns out some leading Republican figures are beginning to take the problem seriously. Big Oil and Wall Street speculators used turmoil in Iraq as a bogus excuse to raise oil and gas prices. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced legislation to stop runaway speculation. A Senate and House conference committee met Tuesday to try to hash out differences in legislation to reform health care services for veterans. Sanders chairs the Senate veterans committee. As Congress broke for a Fourth of July recess, however, he voiced frustration with members of Congress who are willing to send troops into war but balk at paying for the health care that was promised to those who fought our wars. He spoke about that and other issues on Friday during his weekly radio and Internet appearance on The Thom Hartmann Program.
Gas Prices
Sanders and 19 other senators on Thursday introduced legislation to make federal regulators use emergency powers to stop speculators from artificially driving up oil prices. The price of crude oil has risen by more than 5 percent since militants attacked and took control of several Iraqi cities in early June. Prices hit a nine-month high of $115.71 on June 19, but dipped in recent days. Meanwhile, pPump prices for gasoline also rose by more than a nickel in the past month to $3.70 a gallon despite the fact that today there is more supply and less demand for gasoline than five years ago, when the average price of a gallon of gas was only $2.67 a gallon.
War or Jobs
The Bush administration’s war in Iraq will end up costing the United States some $3 trillion — all with deficit spending. Meanwhile, serious efforts to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and create millions of desperately-needed jobs keep running into Republican roadblocks. “In other words, for most Republicans in Congress it is okay to spend unlimited sums on a war we should never have gotten into but it’s wrong to rebuild our bridges, roads, rail and water systems, wastewater plants, dams, culverts and airports — and make our country more productive,” Sanders said on Wednesday.
American Jobs
A bill to provide a tax credit to companies that provide fair wages and good benefits to U.S. workers was proposed on Thursday. Sanders cosponsored the bill by Sen. Dick Durbin that also would close a tax loophole that actually gives incentives to corporations to send jobs overseas. The loophole costs the U.S. Treasury approximately $50 billion a year. “It’s time to stop giving tax breaks to companies that have shipped millions of American jobs overseas, and start investing in small- and medium-sized businesses that are increasing decent-paying jobs in America,” Sanders said.
Income Inequality
Wages have fallen over the last decade and inequality has steadily gone up, according to a new study released on Tuesday by a group called Opportunity Nation. It’s the latest evidence of income inequality in America, a trend that Sanders has called both a moral and economic issue. “We have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country in the world,” Sanders said at a gathering of religious leaders he hosted last week in Vermont. “We have a moral responsibility to reduce the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else.”
Global Warming
“This is a crisis we can’t afford to ignore,” warned Henry Paulson. The former treasury secretary’s op-ed in The New York Times last Sunday came days after four former EPA administrators — William Ruckelshaus, Lee Thomas, William Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman — testified at a Senate hearing on climate change. What’s really remarkable about that roster is that they all served Republican presidents: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. “After years of denying the reality of global warming, more and more leading Republicans are now acknowledging that climate change is real, that it is significantly caused by human activities and that it already is causing devastating problems,” Sanders said on Monday.
