The Week in Review
The White House and congressional negotiators stepped up efforts to reach an agreement on a deficit reduction deal. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday went to The National Press Club to detail his approach. Unemployment in November dipped to 7.7 percent, the Labor Department announced on Friday. Sanders and others on Thursday called for an extension of long-term unemployment benefits. There was yet more scientific evidence that the planet is dangerously warming, but no evidence of real progress at U.N. climate talks in Doha. The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to review California's ban on same-sex marriage and to decide whether Congress can deprive legally married gay couples the same benefits available to other married people. Sanders in 1996 was in a small House minority that voted against the so-called Defense of Marriage Act. Also in Washington, the Federal Communications Commission resurrected a plan to let more big conglomerates control more broadcast and print media outlets. Sanders on Monday sat down with Bill Moyers for a discussion about the consequences. The interview airs this weekend.
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Photo: Dale Robbins, Moyers & Company
National Press Club
With the gap between rich and poor growing wider in America, Congress must adopt a plan for fixing federal deficits that won't hurt working families, Sanders said during a speech on Wednesday at The National Press Club. He proposed allowing Bush-era tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans to expire, eliminating corporate tax loopholes, ending tax breaks and subsidies for oil companies, cutting Pentagon spending and allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower-price prescription medicine. He also said it was “obscene and extraordinarily arrogant” for Wall Street CEOs to seek cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. National polls Sanders cited have found that 77 percent of Americans do not want to cut Social Security, 79 percent do not want to cut Medicare and 63 percent do not want to cut Medicaid. “The question is whether the president and the Democrats will finally stand firm and do what the American people want them to do,” Sanders said.
‘Fiscal Cliff’
“The American people do not want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and they do think that … the wealthiest people in this country are going to have to start paying their fair share,” Sanders said in a video interview on Thursday with The New York Times. Sanders proposed reducing the deficit by making Medicare and Medicaid more efficient, by making cuts to defense and by cracking down on fraud by large pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors that bilk taxpayers for billions of dollars.
The Boehner Plan is ‘Crazy’
House Republican leaders on Monday endorsed a plan to reduce the national debt that includes massive cuts to social programs and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. Their plan would lower the top tax rate, implement a so-called chained CPI that would drastically diminish Social Security benefits, raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 and enact massive cuts of $300 billion to federal agency budgets. Sanders appeared that evening on MSNBC's Politics Nation to talk with Rev. Al Sharpton. “Not only is what they are proposing absurd, I think they are crazy politically,” said Sanders. “When the people understand that they want to maintain tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, whose effective tax rates are very, very low, and at the same time they want to balance the budget by cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, I think people all over this country are going to say, ‘You guys are nuts, you're really out of touch with what ordinary Americans are thinking and believing.’”
Disabled Veterans
Sanders said the proposal floated by Boehner also would slash benefits for disabled veterans. A member of the Senate Budget Committee and the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Sanders said deficits must be reined in, but not by taking benefits away from more than 3 million disabled veterans, many of them injured fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The largest cuts in benefits would impact young, permanently disabled veterans who were seriously wounded in combat. According to the Social Security Administration, permanently disabled veterans who started receiving VA disability benefits at age 30 would see their benefits cut by more than $1,300 a year at age 45; $1,800 a year at age 55; and $2,260 a year at age 65. Sanders called the proposal “devious” and “despicable.”
Jobs
The unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent in November. The announcement by the Labor Department on Friday came one day after Sanders and a group of Senate Democrats held a news conference to call for an extension of emergency unemployment insurance programs. The benefits run out near the end of this year. The senators said an extension should be part of any year-end deficit deal. “We must not fail the unemployed workers of this country now. If Congress does not act, it will mean that some 2 million people and their families will really be at a loss as to how to survive economically,” Sanders said at the press conference. “Sometimes, maybe especially here inside the Beltway, we forget that this terrible recession continues in many parts of the country,” he added. “Real unemployment – counting those people who have given up looking for work and those people who are working 20 hours and they want to be working 40 hours – is closer to 15 percent.”
Profits and Wages
Just four years after the worst shock to the economy since the Great Depression, U.S. corporate profits are stronger than ever. In the third quarter, corporate earnings were $1.75 trillion, up 18.6 percent from a year ago, according to last week's gross domestic product report. The record profits were the greatest percentage of GDP in history while at the same time workers' wages fell to their lowest-ever share of GDP.
Read the Commerce Department report »
Global Warming
Delegates from nearly 200 nations met this week in Doha, Qatar, for the latest round of United Nations talks on climate change. Despite a treaty pledging to limit warming, two decades of negotiations on how to do it have so far made scant progress toward accomplishing anything. Meanwhile, global emissions of carbon dioxide were at a record high in 2011 and are likely to take a similar jump in 2012, scientists affiliated with the Global Carbon Project reported Sunday. Emissions are growing so rapidly that a goal of limiting the ultimate warming of the planet to 3.6 degrees is becoming unattainable. Sanders is a member of the Senate environment committee. “Virtually all the scientists who study this issue agree that global warming is real, that it is significantly caused by human activity and that it is already wreaking havoc on this planet in terms of floods, drought, wildfires and severe weather disturbances,” he said. “I will do all that I can to move our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and such sustainable energies as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass. This is not only imperative for the future of our planet, but it will improve our economy by creating a significant number of green jobs.”
Media Monopolies
Sanders on Thursday told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference why he is fighting a proposed Federal Communications Commission rule change that would allow media conglomerates to dominate broadcast and print media. “We cannot live in a vibrant democracy unless people get divergent sources of information and have the opportunity to have serious debate about the major issues of the day,” Sanders said at the news conference. Sanders also was interviewed for this weekend’s broadcast of Moyers & Company about the renewed FCC bid to allow more so-called cross-ownership of broadcast and print media in the top 20 markets. “We’re going to do everything we can to prevent it from happening,” Sanders told Bill Moyers.
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