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• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 9/24/11: Air Canada has opted to transition their Catalogue services (gts) to Cairo. They get paid $500 USD a month & they speak French. How can anyone compete with that? Sadly my colleague is there now, & is showing a bunch of high school graduates how to perform ID administration. But he first needed to show them how to copy/paste. Can you believe this? Join the union & help put an end to this nonsense. -Shadowschild-
  • Comment 9/29/11: To Alliance Supporter: I am no longer on the fence. I'm all in. Just joined the Alliance. 34 years with IBM and hoping to make a difference. -Nolongeronthefence-
  • Comment 9/30/11: To any current IBMers, I again urge you to do *something," no matter how small, to support our cause. I am fortunate enough to be in a financial position where I can easily afford the $10/month to be full member. If you are also able to comfortably shoulder that load, then that would be the most obvious, helpful action to take.

    If you are not so fortunate, there are still other actions you could take. Talk to your co-workers about Alliance, for example. Or leave some Alliance flyers in the lunch room -- a protected right so long as you don't use IBM resources such as their printers, and you don't do it during your working hours (if you look, you'll probably find a National Labor Relations Act flyer posted somewhere in or near your lunch room that describes your protected rights).

    If you are mad and want to get back at IBM, support this cause -- there is nothing that scares IBM more than the prospect of an American union. Heck, merely seeing that they've pushed us so far that we're seriously thinking about it will probably cause them to treat us better. Egypt and Tunisia emboldened other countries like Libya to fight for their rights. Follow the example of our Chilean and Argentinian co-workers, and demand your rights as well. -Flabbergasted-

    Alliance Reply: Excellent comment! If you decide to hand out flyers, within IBM property or even off IBM property, please read the information in the link: http://www.endicottalliance.org/dosdontsflyer.htm You must make sure to follow all the rules, when handing out flyers.

  • Comment 9/30/11: I want to know what gives managers the right to block transfers. If the manager cannot get me a raise then they should not be able to block me from getting out of this stink pot they call Dubuque. To anyone thinking of moving there for a job with IBM, DO NOT! Any job where you are at now is 10X better, trust me. IBM Dubuque's managers are completely useless and should all be fired first and foremost. Then they can give raises to the SA's actually doing the work. Drop the stupid huddles and Green Team as well. Metrics have no place in Dubuque. -GDF Loser-
  • Comment 9/30/11: "I want to know what gives managers the right to block transfers" You know what? It is called not having a union contract! -IBMUnionYes-
  • Comment 9/30/11: -GDF Loser- There is an old joke about "they can't fire me, Slaves have to be sold". These days it applies to transfers too. Live Better Work Union. -Exodus2007-
  • Comment 9/30/11: >> "I want to know what gives managers the right to block transfers." What gives them the right? The fact that you and the majority of other IBM employees don't have a contract that denies them that right. Only the upper executives have contracts spelling out what IBM can and can't do to them. You? You're an "at will" employee. Meaning, if they want to do it to you, they can and will. Wake up, and join the union, or shut up and keep your head down, or leave the company. Those are your choices. -irRational-

    Alliance Reply: To find out more about what an At Will Employee is, click here: http://www.endicottalliance.org/atwillemployment.htm and here: http://www.endicottalliance.org/allianceibmsimplefactsheet.htm

  • Comment 10/01/11: -Flabbergasted- I totally agree, folks need to do something/anything they can to promote the visibility of the Alliance. I always enjoyed handing out flyers at the cafeteria entrance at lunchtime, or at the exit gates before or after work. The expressions on the faces of some as they try to deny that you're there doing that is priceless. I'd recommend that all your supporters try it in groups, the more the merrier. Visibility counts! -Dave G -
  • Comment 10/01/11: Back in the good old days of IBM, a manager could delay your request for transfer for some time. In 1986 IBM East Fishkill had an open site, meaning if you wanted to transfer elsewhere you could. So many people took advantage of it that my request was delayed from the summer of 1986 all the way until December 1988. But no manager in those days wanted to force you to stay in a position. Today the employee alone has almost no power. Nonetheless, ask nicely for a date of departure and keep doing your job. Today there are no guarantees without a union to advocate for the employee. -Anonymous-
  • Comment 10/01/11: To GDF Loser, The managers have the right to do as they wish since you do not have a contract detailing your rights as an employee. The only way this will change is to join the union and vote for for collective bargaining. -Anonymous-

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

• Washington Post: Health insurance costs shifted to workers, even as premiums surge. By N.C. Aizenman. Excerpts: Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance continued to escalate this year even as the share of workers getting less generous coverage reached a new high, according to survey data released Tuesday. In 2011, for the first time, half of workers at small firms with individual policies faced annual deductibles of $1,000 or more. In 2006, that figure was 16 percent. At large firms, the share has grown from 6 percent to 22 percent over the same five years.

  At the same time, the survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that premiums for family plans rose 9 percent in 2011, after several years of slower annual growth. A similar recent survey by the consulting firm Mercer found that yearly premium increases have been hovering around the 6 percent mark and will grow by slightly less in 2012. Both sources point to the same fundamental long-term shift: Faced with continually climbing premiums, a record share of employers have moved to plans that require workers to pay more out of pocket.

  “Without any real national discussion or debate, there’s a quiet revolution going on in what we call health insurance in this country,” said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser foundation, which conducted the annual survey of employers in conjunction with the Health Research & Educational Trust. “Health insurance is becoming less and less comprehensive. . . . And we expect that trend to continue.”

• New York Times: Health Insurers Push Premiums Sharply Higher. By Reed Abelson and Nina Bernstein. Excerpts: Major health insurance companies have been charging sharply higher premiums this year, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and creating more uncertainty for the Obama administration and employers who are struggling to drive down an unrelenting rise in medical costs. ...

  The higher premiums are particularly unwelcome at a time when the economy is sputtering and unemployment is hovering at about 9 percent. Many businesses cite the cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. The cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages. ...

  How much the new federal health care legislation pushed by President Obama is affecting rates remains a point of debate, with some consumer advocates and others suggesting that insurers have raised prices in anticipation of new rules that would, in 2012, require them to justify any increase of more than 10 percent. Kaiser pointed out that the increase this year could be an anomaly, after several years of 3 percent to 5 percent increases during the recession.

  Kaiser estimates that one to two percentage points of the increase this year is related to provisions of the law already in effect, like coverage for children up to 26 years old and for prevention services like mammograms. ...

  Consumer advocates contend that the latest requests exceed any documented rise in costs, with some companies enjoying three years of record profits and paying millions of dollars in dividends and executive compensation.

• USA Today editorial: Health premiums jump, but don't blame 'ObamaCare'. Excerpts: No sooner had the Kaiser Family Foundation, in its annual survey of health insurance, found that the average premium rose a whopping 9% this year to $15,073 for an employer-sponsored family plan, than the usual partisans began pointing fingers.

  Republicans cited the increase as proof of the failure of the 2010 health care law, aka "ObamaCare." Never mind that very few of its provisions have gone into effect, and that experts attribute only a percentage point or two of the 9% increase to the new law. Those provisions have added nearly 1 million young people to their parents' policies and helped people with pre-existing conditions.

  Democrats, meanwhile, attributed the cost surge to greedy insurance companies trying to ram through rate hikes while they still can. Never mind that hefty increases have been compounding for decades.

  Spare us the simplistic explanations. These latest increases are just further evidence of deep, long-standing flaws in the U.S. health care system that are only modestly impacted by the new law.

• New York Times op-ed: To Save on Health Care, First Crack Down on Fraud. By Kathleen Sharp. Excerpts: LAST week, the Obama administration announced a plan to cut $320 billion over 10 years from the projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid. The plan would raise premiums and deductibles, lower payments to hospitals and require elderly people who receive care at home to make co-payments.

  But before charging consumers more and eliminating valuable services, we should be much more aggressive in recovering money stolen from these taxpayer-supported programs. According to some estimates, health care fraud is a $250 billion-a-year industry, and about $100 billion of that is stolen from Medicare, the health care program for the elderly, and Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor and disabled.

  There are many ways to defraud taxpayers. For example, a hospital chain can buy drugs at a steep discount and then bill Medicare for high sticker prices. Doctors can bill for procedures that never happened, or for drugs that were supplied to them by pharmaceutical companies free of charge, or pharmaceutical companies can promote a drug for risky, unapproved uses.

• Plan Sponsor: Employment-Based Health Coverage Continues to Decline. Excerpt: While employment-based health coverage is still the dominant source of health insurance in the U.S., it has been steadily shrinking for 18 years. The report, “Sources of Health Insurance and Characteristics of the Uninsured: Analysis of the March 2011 Current Population Survey,” found that in 2010, 58.7% of the non-elderly population (under age 65) had employment-based health benefits, down from 69.3% in 2000.
• New York Times: Few Bright Spots in Perry’s Health Care Record. By Emily Ramshaw. Excerpts: At campaign stops and in the three Republican presidential debates he has participated in so far, Gov. Rick Perry has made a sport out of bashing the 2006 state health insurance plan of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. He has not missed a chance to yoke “Romneycare” to “Obamacare,” the federal health care reform that Republicans largely revile.

  But while Mr. Perry condemns both efforts to make carrying health insurance mandatory, Texas faces a staggering crisis in health coverage: the state leads the nation in the number of uninsured residents, has the third-lowest percentage of people covered by their employers and spends less per capita than all but one other state on Medicaid, the joint state-federal insurance program for the disabled and poor children.

  In the 10 years Mr. Perry has been governor, his critics say there have been few effective initiatives out of his office to increase either public or private health coverage significantly in Texas, where today an estimated 6.2 million people — one-quarter of the state’s population — are uninsured, including 1.3 million children. ...

  Texas enters the health insurance game at a disadvantage. Mr. Perry likes to remind voters that the state is responsible for more than 40 percent of new jobs created in America since June 2009. But many of those jobs are in the service industry, in agriculture, construction and the small-business sector, which either do not provide insurance or do not pay their workers enough to buy it. Texas Medicaid is austere — many low-income Texans who might qualify for public insurance in other states do not qualify in Texas.

  Just 50 percent of Texans get insurance through their employers, 10 percentage points below the national average. And though health insurance premiums in Texas are slightly below the national average, they have nearly doubled in the last decade. Despite suggestions that Texas’ illegal immigrants are to blame for the sky-high rate of the uninsured, they make up just one-sixth of the total, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Center for Public Policy Priorities, or C.P.P.P.

• Christian Science Monitor: Health care law's future: four scenarios. Excerpt: One year ago, President Barack Obama signed a sweeping health-care law to fulfill a long-standing Democratic pledge to ensure health-care coverage for all Americans. Passage of the law was a major legislative victory for Obama and helped change the political landscape, but not always in the way Democrats had hoped. Republicans strongly opposed the law and successfully worked public skepticism about it into sweeping election victories in November. Here's a look at the uncertain future of the health care law.
• truthOut: Montana Governor Schweitzer Wants to Design His Own Universal Health Care System. By Zaid Jilani. Excerpts: As ThinkProgress previously reported, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) made history earlier this year when he signed into law legislation that would make his state the first state to lay the groundwork for a single payer health care system. In order to enact this system, the state needs a waiver from the federal health care law, which it will be able to obtain in 2017. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) has introduced legislation to move the waiver date up to 2014, an idea President Obama has endorsed.

  Now, another governor is looking to take advantage of flexibility in Obama’s health care law in order to establish a single payer system. Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) announced yesterday that he will be seeking a waiver to set up his own universal health care system in his state modeled after the single payer Canadian health care system that began in the province of Saskatchewan.

News and Opinion Concerning the "War on the Middle Class"

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

• The Guardian (United Kingdom): Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination. The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future. By David Graeber. Excerpts: Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?

  There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates. ...

  Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"

• New York Times: A Tax Plan That Might Not Be So Painful. By Ron Lieber. Excerpts: If you’re among the households with earnings of $200,000 to $350,000 or so, you can be forgiven at this point for thinking that you have a giant target on your back. This week, President Obama once again took aim at what he calls “tax preferences” for these high-income households, proposing two changes that would affect the low six-figure set starting in 2013. ...

  What gets lost in all of the hand-wringing over the proposed tax increases is that many of the people this is aimed at wouldn’t pay a whole lot more. And families who work at it just a bit, using employer-sponsored flexible spending and other accounts to pay for things like day camp and the commuter train and visits to the therapist, could offset that 2013 tax increase and then some.

• truthOut: Why Don't the Deficit Hawks Want to Tax Wall Street? By Dean Baker. Excerpts: The intensity with which the country's leading deficit hawks continue to ignore financial speculation taxes (FST) is getting ever more entertaining. While deficit hawks like Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson, Morgan Stanley Director Erskine Bowles and The Washington Post never tire of preaching the virtues of shared sacrifice, somehow sacrifice for Wall Street never features as a part of this story. ...

  Last week, Bill Gates added himself to the list of FST supporters. In a report that he was asked to prepare for the G-20 on funding development assistance, he cited an FST as one possible mechanism. But the deficit hawks never discuss FST. The deficit hawks manage to ignore FST even when they pop up in front of their faces. Two summers ago, Peter Peterson helped to finance a lavish full day set of town halls in dozens of communities around the country. ...

  In short, FST are a route to reducing long-term deficits that has won support both among the general public and among policy experts and leading political figures around the world. Yet, they are somehow excluded from discussions of the deficit in policy circles in the United States. Could this have to do with the fact that so much of the support for deficit reduction comes from Wall Street? It is difficult not to believe that Wall Street's outsized role in pushing deficit reduction has some impact on the route the debate takes. After all, if the Farm Bureau was sponsoring most of the research on deficit reduction and financing the campaigns of the leading deficit hawks, it is reasonable to believe that lower farm subsidies would not be a prominent item in debates on the deficit. ...

  In short, it is hard to understand why taxing financial speculation never appears on the agenda of the deficit hawks or gets mentioned in budget reporting, if the issue really is deficit reduction. On the other hand, if this is all about using an economic crisis to push a long-standing agenda to cut Social Security and Medicare, then everything suddenly makes sense.

• New York Times editorial: Killing the Recovery. Excerpt: The world has barely dug out of recession and the global economy is again slowing dangerously. Most leaders seem eager to make things even worse. Instead of looking for ways to reignite growth, Europe’s leaders — and Republicans on Capitol Hill — are determined to slash public spending. Europe’s fixation on austerity is also compounding its debt crisis, bringing the Continent even closer to the brink. Meanwhile, China’s government, which is struggling to contain inflation without letting its currency rise, has been trying to slow domestic demand, allowing its trade surplus to balloon. Each of these policies is wrong. In combination, they are likely to tip the world into a deep recession.
• Huffington Post: The Men We Trusted to Lead Us. By Robert Scheer. Excerpts: Now he tells us. On Wednesday Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke referred to the nation's unemployment rate as a "national crisis," an obvious if depressing fact of life to the 25 million Americans who have been unsuccessfully attempting to find full-time employment.

  But to finally hear those words from the man George W. Bush and Barack Obama both appointed to lead us out of the great recession is a bracing reminder of how markedly the policies of both those presidents have failed: "We've had close to 10 percent unemployment now for a number of years, and of the people who are unemployed, about 45 percent have been unemployed for six months or more," Bernanke said. "This is unheard of."

  But why is Bernanke just now discovering this after having overseen the Fed's purchase of trillions in toxic mortgage-backed securities from the too-big-to-fail banks that sacrificed people's homes in a giant Ponzi scheme? Why did he throw all of that money at the banks without getting anything back in the way of relief for the people the bankers swindled?

  The housing meltdown, which has robbed Americans of a considerable portion of their net worth, has led to the continued depressed consumer confidence that is the prime cause of crisis-level unemployment. In another of his too-late-to-matter moments, Bernanke acknowledged that "strong housing policies to help the market recover" would "clearly be very useful," but he failed to suggest any.

  Bernanke, along with then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, helped implement the Bush strategy of saving the banks in the hope that their rising tide would lift our little boats. That remained the strategy when President Obama rewarded Geithner for having saved AIG and Citigroup by naming him treasury secretary in the incoming government.

• Borowitz Report (satire): Banks Raise Fees on Same People Who Bailed Out Their Asses. Introduce New ‘Thank You’ Fee on Debit Cards. Excerpts: The largest banks in the US made history today by hiking fees on the same people who bailed out their asses three years ago.

  “We would not exist today without the generosity of the American taxpayers,” said CEO Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, which received billions of dollars of Federal bailout money. “And we want to thank them by assessing a special monthly ‘thank you’ fee on all of our debit cards.”

  Becoming emotional, Mr. Moynihan added, “We think of the taxpayers every time we vacation on our yachts or visit our third homes, and we want them to think of us every time they try to spend $20 on groceries.” Mr. Moynihan said that even after paying the new $5 monthly fee, “American taxpayers should still have enough money left over to let them eat cake.”

• AlterNet: Wall Street Employees Watch "Occupy Wall Street" Protest While Sipping Champagne on a Balcony (Seriously). Excerpts: It's hard to believe it's real, but here is video evidence of Wall Streeters drinking champagne from a balcony as they watch the protesters walk by.

  You cannot make this stuff up.

  Wall Street has been like this from the very beginning of the financial crisis, going out of their way to scoff at average people in trouble in this economy. ("We're doing God's work!")I guess they just don't see any need to keep a low profile and ride this out without inflaming the polloi. These "winners" want to rub their noses in it.

• Washington Post Writer's Group, courtesy of truthOut: Why They Hate Warren Buffett. By E.J. Dionne Jr. Excerpts: Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes. You can't accuse a big capitalist of "class warfare." That's why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up. ...

  Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He's said this for years, but he's a target now because President Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes on millionaires. ...

  Buffett's sin is that he spoke a truth that conservatives want to keep covered up: Taxing capital gains at 15 percent means that people who make their money from investments pay taxes at a much lower marginal rate than those who earn more than $34,500 a year from their labor. That's when the income tax rate goes up to 25 percent. (For joint filers, the 25 percent rate kicks in at $69,000.) For singles, the 28 percent bracket starts at $83,600, the 33 percent bracket at $174,400.

  So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money. For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they're paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn't apply to capital gains, or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than the wealthy.

  So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money. For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they're paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn't apply to capital gains, or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than the wealthy.

  • the bias of the tax system against labor;
  • the fact that in comparison with middle- or upper-middle class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes;
  • and the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.
• New York Times op-ed: Phony Fear Factor. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: The good news: After spending a year and a half talking about deficits, deficits, deficits when we should have been talking about jobs, job, jobs we’re finally back to discussing the right issue.

  The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality.

  Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy.

  The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false. ...

  Still, isn’t there something odd about the fact that businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment? No. After all, why should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more. Business investment always responds strongly to the state of the economy, and given how weak our economy remains you shouldn’t be surprised if investment remains low. If anything, business spending has been stronger than one might have predicted given slow growth and high unemployment.

• AlterNet: Meet the Wealthy Men Trying to Buy Our Upcoming Election. These are America's best-funded political factions, their war chests filled by some of the richest men (and almost all are men) in the country. By Justin Elliott. Excerpts: The hidden infrastructure of the 2012 campaign has already been built. A handful of so-called Super PACs, enabled to collect unlimited donations by the continued erosion of campaign finance regulations, are expected to rival the official campaign organizations in importance this election. In many cases, these groups are acting essentially as outside arms of the campaigns. These are America's best-funded political factions, their war chests filled by some of the richest men (and almost all are men) in the country.

  More than 80 percent of giving to Super PACs so far has come from just 58 donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis of the latest data, which covers the first half of 2011. The Republican groups have raised $17.6 million and the Democratic groups $7.6 million. Those numbers will balloon, with American Crossroads, the main Republican Super PAC, aiming to raise $240 million.)

• Washington Post opinion: In Senate vote, a win for the middle class and a rebuke to China. By Harold Meyerson. Excerpts: The news that our trade with China has been bad for the American middle class has finally reached the U.S. Senate. On Monday, the Senate will take up legislation that would impose tariffs on Chinese goods so long as China depresses the value of its currency. Despite the partisan polarization that grinds lawmaking to a halt these days, the bill’s support is thoroughly bipartisan, with sponsors ranging from such conservative Republicans as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham to liberal Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown. The legislation is expected to clear the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle for a floor vote and move on to the House.

  For students of America’s deranged romance with free trade, the fact that the Senate is willing to take on China is little short of amazing. Since the 1980s, the House has been the legislative body where epic battles have been waged over the free-trade agreements that have decimated American manufacturing. The impact of factory closures on congressional districts is generally too big for representatives to ignore. Local manufacturers and bankers, no less than local union members, complain to their House members; when the town’s biggest employer leaves, grief knows no party. Senators, on the other hand, move in a larger world, one where Wall Street contributors and Washington pundits assure them that free trade is invariably good. So while the House has been home to furious fights over NAFTA, CAFTA and extending permanent normalized trade relations to China, the Senate has long passed such measures with much less fuss and sublime indifference to the consequences.

  But the consequences can no longer be denied. Between 2001 and 2010, the U.S. trade deficit with China cost Americans 2.8 million jobs, according to a report by economist Robert Scott, issued last week by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Most of those jobs — 1.9 million — were in manufacturing, and of those, almost half were in computers and electronics.

• Huffington Post: The Moral Question. By Robert Reich. Excerpts: We dodged another shut-down bullet, but only until November 18. That's when the next temporary bill to keep the government going runs out. House Republicans want more budget cuts as their price for another stopgap spending bill.

  Among other items, Republicans are demanding major cuts in a nutrition program for low-income women and children. The appropriation bill the House passed June 16 would deny benefits to more than 700,000 eligible low-income women and young children next year.

  What kind of country are we living in?

  More than one in three families with young children is now living in poverty (37 percent, to be exact) according to a recent analysis of Census data by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies. That's the highest percent on record. The Agriculture Department says nearly one in four young children (23.6) lives in a family that had difficulty affording sufficient food at some point last year.

  We're in the worst economy since the Great Depression -- with lower-income families and kids are bearing the worst of it -- and what are Republicans doing? Cutting programs Americans desperately need to get through it. ...

  Yet Republicans won't consider increasing taxes on the rich to pay for what's needed -- even though the wealthiest members of our society are richer than ever, taking home a bigger slice of total income and wealth than in seventy-five years, and paying the lowest tax rates in three decades. The president's modest proposals to raise taxes on the rich -- limiting their tax deductions, ending the Bush tax cut for incomes over $250,000, and making sure the rich pay at the same rate as average Americans - don't come close to paying for what American families need.

• Washington Post opinion: What Wall Street doesn’t want us to know about oil prices. By Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Excerpts: The top six financial institutions in this country own assets equal to more than 60 percent of our gross domestic product and possess enormous economic and political power. One of the great questions of our time is whether the American people, through Congress, will control the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, or whether Wall Street will continue to wreak havoc on our economy and the lives of working families.

  I represent Vermont, a rural state where many workers drive long distances to jobs that pay $12 an hour or less. Many seniors living on fixed incomes heat their homes with oil during our cold winters. These people have asked me to do all that I can to lower outrageously high gasoline and heating-oil prices. I intend to do just that.

  Why have oil prices spiked wildly? Some argue that the volatility is a result of supply-and-demand fundamentals. More and more observers, however, believe that excessive speculation in the oil futures market by investors is driving oil prices sky high.

  A June 2 article in the Wall Street Journal said it all: “Wall Street is tapping a real gusher in 2011, as heightened volatility and higher prices of oil and other raw materials boost banks’ profits.” ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson, testifying before a Senate panel this year, said that excessive speculation may have increased oil prices by as much as 40 percent. Delta Air Lines general counsel Richard Hirst wrote to federal regulators in December that “the speculative bubble in oil prices has concrete detrimental consequences for the real economy.” An American Trucking Association vice president, Richard Moskowitz, said, “Excessive speculation has caused dramatic increases in the price of crude oil, which harms end-users like America’s trucking industry.” ...

  First, the American people have a right to know why oil prices are artificially high. The CFTC report proved that when oil prices climbed in 2008 to more than $140 a barrel, Wall Street speculators dominated the oil futures market. Goldman Sachs alone bought and sold more than 860 million barrels of oil in the summer of 2008 with no intention of using a drop for any purpose other than to make a quick buck.

  Wall Street, of course, wants to hide this information. They don’t want the American people to know the extent to which speculators keep oil prices artificially high and the great damage that does to our economy. After the information became public, it was suggested that some on Wall Street may stop trading in the oil futures market. Good!

  Second, Congress recognized last year that excessive oil speculation must end. The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation required the CFTC to eliminate, prevent or diminish excessive oil speculation by Jan. 17, 2011. Months after that deadline, the commission still has failed to enforce the law, and speculators still are making out like bandits. ...

  I agree with former commissioners James E. Newsome and Fred Hatfield in one respect. Trust in government is at an all-time low. That’s not because Washington is too heavy-handed with Wall Street. Quite the contrary! The American people are angry and disillusioned because they see our government act boldly to protect Wall Street CEOs but not ordinary Americans. When Wall Street needed a $700 billion bailout, the government was there for them. When working families need an end to excessive oil speculation and real relief at the gas pump, the government has failed to act.

• Harvard University's Nieman Watchdog: Heeding fake concerns about propriety -- instead of real matters of substance. By Dan Froomkin. Excerpts: After firebrand Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders leaked confidential data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to the Wall Street Journal last month -- data that dramatically illustrated how speculators were dominating the oil futures market during the 2008 spike in oil prices -- other news outlets jumped on the story.

  In the worst possible way.

  The data, which exposed precisely how much Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other Wall Street speculators dominated the crude oil futures market, was a big new lead reporters could have used to further explore the dynamics behind the staggering gas price increase that resulted in a huge transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to the very rich.

• Bloomberg: Obama Jobs Plan Prevents 2012 Recession in Survey of Economists. By Timothy R. Homan. Excerpt: President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said.
• MoveOn: The Elizabeth Warren Quote Every American Needs To See. Excerpt: “I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

  “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

  “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

• Nation of Change: Big Oil Clings to Tax Breaks While Hoarding Tens of Billions. By Daniel J. Weiss and Vivian Yang. Excerpts: On September 19 President Barack Obama announced his plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years, including raising $1.5 trillion by closing special interest loopholes and other revenue raisers. This includes eliminating $41 billion in tax loopholes for the oil and gas industry (p. 63) over the next decade.

  Big Oil is predictably opposed to losing its unnecessary tax breaks. The American Dream Institute, or API, the oil industry’s lobbying muscle, quickly claimed that “the Administration plan would hurt jobs and investment.”

  But this claim ignores the fact that the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—have ample financial resources that dwarf the value of these tax breaks. These companies enjoy billions in cash reserves, made nearly $1 trillion in profits over the past decade, and at least one company (ExxonMobil) pays a lower effective tax rate than the average American family. ...

  The past decade was very prosperous for the big five oil companies due in part to high oil prices, including the record of $147 per barrel in July 2008. A CAP assessment determined that these companies made more than $900 billion in profit from 2001 to 2010. High oil prices this year earned them a whopping $67 billion in six months. These funds come from the pockets of American drivers forced to pay up to $4 per gallon for gasoline.

  At this rate, Big Oil could easily exceed $100 billion in profits for 2011. Why can’t these companies afford to forgo $2 billion annually in taxpayers’ money?