Posts Tagged ‘Congress’
Tisha Thompson
Aug 2, 2011 10:12 a.m.
As members of Congress rush from one news conference to another to tell us why we have to cut the spending and raise the debt ceiling, we wondered…
What is Congress willing to sacrifice? Especially when it comes to how they transport themselves to all those news conferences.
FOX 5 has found Congress is rolling high-end SUVs, some leased from luxury companies like Lexus and Cadillac, all paid for by you – the taxpayer.
Our investigation uncovered at least 90 members of the U.S. House of Representatives use federal money to pay for automobile leases.
(Click here to see if your representative leased a car on your dime)
The U.S. Senate outlawed using government money to pay for personal cars.
But in the House, we found a diverse variety of Republicans and Democrats, high-ranking veterans and Tea Party freshmen taking advantage of a perk that can cost as much as $1,400 a month per vehicle.
 |
|
To date, 8 Presidential candidates, 4 Governors, 12 U.S. Senators, 35 Congressmen, and over 120,000 citizen activists have signed the Cut, Cap, Balance Pledge to not even consider raising the debt ceiling unless Congress first passes significant spending cuts, a spending cap, and a strong balanced budget amendment.
With last evening’s debt ceiling talks between President Obama and congressional leaders ending in disarray, it is time for us to TURN UP THE HEAT!
That’s why this Thursday, July 14th at noon locally Americans across the country are joining the fight to save America by dropping off the Cut, Cap, Balance Pledge at their elected officials’ district offices and asking them to sign the pledge.
Will you join them?
If so, please go to www.CutCapBalancePledge.com/OfficeBlitz to find the address of the district office closest to you for your U.S. Representative, download the Cut, Cap, Balance Pledge, and drop off the pledge at noon on Thursday, July 14th (or another time that is more convenient for you).Then forward this email to five friends and ask them to join you in this critical office blitz to save America! |
CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton has hit back at Republican plans to delay for 18 months all rulemakings involving derivatives under the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law.
Four Republican lawmakers on the Financial Services and Agriculture committees are pressing for legislation to extend the deadlines for fear that the reforms could weaken US market during a time of economic recovery.
While the prospects of the proposals being passed are small, CFTC Commissioner Chilton says such legislation is not needed.
“Regulatory reforms are important to implement correctly, but they are also time-sensitive,” he says. “Hundreds of trillions of dollars in trading remain completely unregulated. It is exactly this “dark” trading that helped lead to a hideous bail-out paid for by taxpayers.”
While acknowledging that regulators may be unable make every deadline required under the reform bill, Chilton adds: “The urgency Congress has already placed on getting reforms implemented is just as important today as it was when this good and needed legislation became law.”
http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22481
The thing that the government would most like you to forget…~jude #justsaying
The NY labor department warned on Friday that 200,000 unemployed New York state residents will have their unemployment benefits cut off by the end of the year if Congress fails to continue the extensions that are currently in place.
“These are the facts: Without federal legislation to extend Unemployment Insurance benefits past November 28, some 200,000 New Yorkers will prematurely exhaust their extended UI benefits by the end of the year,” the department said in a statement.
Unemployment insurance extension programs currently total 93 weeks in New York State. They are set to expire on November 28th, 2010. If Congress does not act before then, those who have not yet reached the current maximum will be unable to move to the next “tier.”
“To our nation’s lawmakers: now is the time for decisive action on behalf of our nation’s unemployed. There is not a moment to lose,” State Labor Commissioner Colleen Gardner said. The labor department appears to be urging Congress to both continue the extensions that are currently in place, and to enact legislation adding an additional 20 weeks for those who have exhausted the current maximum.
Music labels and radio broadcasters can’t agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.
The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. “The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,” thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is “not in our national interest.”
“Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.”
By Paul Craig Roberts
Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it.
One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests.
Income inequality in the US is now the most extreme of all countries. The 2008 OECD report, “Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries,” concludes that the US is the country with the highest inequality and poverty rate across the OECD and that since 2000 nowhere has there been such a stark rise in income inequality as in the US. The OECD finds that in the US the distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the distribution of income.
Joshua M Brown August 2nd, 2010
You know how, like, your grandparents have no choice but to buy the convertible bonds of casino companies and trade Chinese penny stocks because the rate on their money market fund is basically 2 basis points?
Yeah.
So, the reason for the seemingly endless drought in responsible yield options for savers is that banks needed to “reflate” themselves and “rebuild their balance sheets” for the good of the system. Yeah “The System“, that’s the ticket. So rates were brought down to effectively zero in an effort to stabilize housing and ensure liquidity for businesses who wanted to borrow or hire.
And since the part about stabilizing housing and helping business owners to hire people was a scam and was demonstrably unsuccessful, we can really only point to the reflating banks part and say that something has been accomplished.
Except the banks are doing a lot more than shoring up balance sheets with the zero-cost dollars they have been gorging on over the last 18 months – in addition to reporting record profitability and almost record compensation levels, they’ve also been attempting to buy both sides of the aisle, lobbying like there’s no tomorrow in our nation’s capital.
Get a load of this (from CNN Money):
The financial industry has spent $251 million on lobbying so far this year as lawmakers hammered out new rules of the road for Wall Street, according to the latest lobbying reports compiled by a watchdog group.
The financial sector spent more than any other special interest group from April through the end of June — a whopping $126 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics‘ latest estimates. Wall Street banks, as well as insurance and real estate firms, hiked the amount they spent on lobbying by 12% in the second quarter compared to the same period last year.
And really, what are you going to do about it? Probably nothing, because this has been going on for almost 2 years and you are busy DVRing True Blood and downloading apps that map out the closest Chipotle locations.
Lobbying is what industries do when pending legislation threatens their future profitability. This is perfectly normal, except in the case of the banks they are using your money to lobby against protections that may save you from the next Frenzy-Depression combo that is surely around the corner.
And it is Your Money. Between TARP (which was paid off because of the reflation derby), extraordinary assistance, stupid-low interest rates and other treats from Congress, banks have been given carte blanche, much of it directly from taxpayers.
And now this money is being used to fund an army of roughly 240 lobbyists, many of them ex-government officials who “know how the system works”.
Nice.
Source:
Banks Open Up Their Wallets To Lobby Congress (CNN Money)
I actually first read this when I picked up a copy of Time magazine [remember those?]It was a flimsy copy of the original Time and the article took up almost 8 pages…
So there is quite a bit missing here but the general idea is still intact. Despite the promised transparency from Senator Dodd and Senator Frank, whose two committees wrote the bill, the largely brokered on June 24th when committee members, their staff, lobbyists and reporters spent 20 hours crowded into a large senate hearing room, where last minute deals were made on the fly until 5 o’clock in the morning…
~jude/rockingjude
Illustration by John Ritter for TIME
By STEVEN BRILL – Fri Jul 2, 6:45 pm ET
The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010, print and iPad editions of TIME.
Two weeks ago, along a marble corridor in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, I watched about 40 well-dressed men (and two women) delivering huge value for their employers. Except that we, the taxpayers, weren’t employing them. The nation’s banks, mortgage lenders, stockbrokers, private-equity funds and derivatives traders were.
They were lobbyists – the best bargain in Washington. Capitol Tax Partners, for example, is one of 1,900 firms that house more than 11,000 lobbyists registered to operate in Washington. Last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), firms like Capitol Tax were paid a total of $3.49 billion for unraveling the mysteries of the tax code for a variety of businesses. According to Capitol Tax co-founder Lindsay Hooper, his firm provided “input and technical advice on various tax matters” to such clients as Morgan Stanley, 3M, Goldman Sachs, Chanel, Ford and the Private Equity Council, which is a trade group trying to head off a plan to increase taxes on what’s called carried interest, a form of income enjoyed by the heavy hitters who run venture-capital and other types of private-equity funds. (Time Warner, the parent company of TIME magazine, is also a client of Capitol Tax Partners.)
Since 2009, the Private Equity Council has paid Capitol Tax, which has eight partners, a $30,000-a-month retainer to keep its members’ taxes low. Counting fees paid to four other firms and the cost of its in-house lobbying staff, the council reported spending $4.2 million on lobbying from the beginning of 2009 through March of this year. Now let’s assume it spent an additional $600,000 since the beginning of April, for a total of $4.8 million. With other groups lobbying on the same issue, the overall spending to protect the favorable carried-interest tax treatment was maybe $15 million. Which seems like a lot – except that this is a debate over how some $100 billion will be taxed, or not, over the next 10 years. (Read about lobbyists and health care.)
And what did the money managers get for their $15 million investment? While lawmakers did manage to boost the taxes of hedge-fund managers and other folks who collect carried interest as part of their work, they agreed to a compromise (tucked into a pending tax bill) that will tax part of those earnings at the regular rate and another part at a lower capital-gains rate. The result? A tax bite about $10 billion smaller than what the reformers wanted.
The Psychopathic Criminal Enterprise Called America
The Government uses the Law to Harm People and Shield the Establishment
By Prof. John Kozy
Most Americans know that politicians make promises they never fulfill; few know that politicians make promises they lack the means to fulfill, as President Obama’s political posturing on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico makes perfectly clear.
Obama has made the following statements:
He told his “independent commission” investigating the Gulf oil spill to “thoroughly examine the disaster and its causes to ensure that the nation never faces such a catastrophe again.” Aside from the fact that presidential commissions have a history of providing dubious reports and ineffective recommendations, does anyone really believe that a way can be found to prevent industrial accidents from happening ever again? Even if the commissions findings and recommendations succeed in reducing the likelihood of such accidents, doesn’t this disaster prove that it only takes one? And unlikely events happen every day.
The president has said, “if laws are insufficient, they’ll be changed.” But no president has this ability, only Congress has, and the president must surely know how difficult getting the Congress to effectively change anything is. He also said that “if government oversight wasn’t tough enough, that will change, too.” Will it? Even if he replaces every person in an oversight position, he can’t guarantee it. The people who receive regulatory positions always have ties to the industries they oversee and can look forward to lucrative jobs in those industries when they leave governmental service. As long as corporate money is allowed to influence governmental action, neither the Congress nor regulators can be expected to change the laws or regulatory practices in ways that make them effective, and there is nothing any president can do about it. Even the Congress’ attempt to raise the corporate liability limit for oil spills from $75 million to $10 billion has already hit a snag.
This is a site I love…but after this article was put up google and my computer
tried to tell me it was dangerous and did I want to proceed!!!! HECK YES I DID…
and will again!!!
~jude
(Image: Source)
For those who want to know why hardly anybody in the financial industry has been called to account (or fired or locked up) for the role they played in bringing about the worst financial crisis this century, or why the meltdown we experienced in 2007-2008 hasn’t spawned the kinds of reforms that past crises have, look no further than the following Washington Post article, “Report: More than 1,400 Former Lawmakers, Hill Staffers Are Financial Lobbyists”:
Even for Washington, the revolving door between government and Wall Street spins at a dizzying pace.
More than 1,400 former members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers or federal employees registered as lobbyists on behalf of the financial services sector since the start of 2009, according to an exhaustive new study issued Thursday.
The analysis by two nonpartisan groups, Public Citizen and the Center for Responsive Politics, found that the “small army” of financial lobbyists included at least 73 former lawmakers and 148 former congressional staffers connected to the House or Senate banking committees. More than 40 former Treasury Department employees also ply their trade as lobbyists for Wall Street firms, the study found.
Some of the biggest names highlighted in the study include former Senate majority leaders Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.); former House majority leaders Richard K. Armey (R-Texas) and Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.); and former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Ex-Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.) has the largest number of financial-services clients of any former lawmaker, representing 13 companies and groups, including Deloitte, Ernst & Young and the Real Estate Roundtable, the report shows.
The revolving door is evident in almost every major issue that comes before Congress, from regulation of the coal industry to the auto industry to the health-care sector.
But the sheer scale of the overlap within the financial sector is remarkable: For every sitting member of Congress, the new study shows, there are three former colleagues or government staffers lobbying on behalf of the banks.
Banana republic-ville, here we come…
« Older Entries
