Alaska State Troopers, AFSCME Members Profiled on National Geo Channel

Alaska state troopers and AFSCME members (from left) Aileen Witrosky, Honie Culley and Anne Sears.

State trooper Ann Sears patrols 15 villages from an off-road post in Nome, a western Alaskan city of 35,000 residents. Riding in a boat or a snowmobile or flying a small plane, she responds to all calls—from drunkenness to domestic assaults—frequently without backup. 

“I’m often out in the middle of nowhere by myself. Law enforcement is tough enough but it’s a lot tougher in a state where just about every resident is armed, the weather is treacherous, and wild animals are always nearby.”

Sears is among 400 state troopers the National Geographic Channel profiles in its series on Alaska State Troopers—members of Public Safety Employees of Alaska (PSEA)/AFSCME Local 803. 

Each Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST, the show highlights those whom it describes as “the first line of defense on the last frontier,” women and men who often travel hundreds of miles over the rugged and unforgiving terrain of the nation’s largest state to enforce the law where nearly every resident is armed. The next episode is Dec. 2. 

The series captures a mixture of raw nature and criminal activity throughout the Alaskan wilderness and its remote village.

Sears says the television series—filmed over 10 months last year—gives viewers “a glimpse of the reality of what we do serving the people of Alaska.” 

Because of the unusual challenges we face every day, we are unlike any law enforcement agency anywhere else in the U.S. 

Click here for more information, photos and video clips. A tip of the hat to AFSCME webmaster Clyde Weiss for alerting us to the show.

Senate Votes to Proceed with Health Care Debate

The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act currently:

• Requires employers, with at least 50 full time employees, that offer no health coverage to pay a penalty of $750 per employee, if one or more full-time workers qualify for a government subsidy in the health insurance exchange. The AFL-CIO union movement continues to press for a full employer mandate covering all workers in all firms, but this at least creates a serious penalty for free rider employers.
• Would cover 94 percent of Americans while reducing the deficit by $130 billion over the next 10 years. 
• Includes a public insurance plan option that will help bring down costs by keeping insurance companies honest and forcing them to compete.  The inclusion of the public option in both the House and Senate bills shows that Members of Congress believe the public option is an essential part of any final health care legislation.
• Would also hold insurance companies accountable by ending the practice of denials and raising premiums because of preexisting conditions or gender.
• Includes a provision that will cut the rate of growth in Medicare spending in half, according to the Congressional Budget Office, through a powerful new Medicare Commission.  Besides being a strong mechanism for controlling Medicare costs, the Commission will set a path that private purchasers can, and likely will, follow to control private health care spending.

But as Trumka noted, the bill needs work, especially its provision taxing the benefits of middle-class families:

The Senate bill’s strong cost cutting measures go further than any previous legislation.  But the bill must be improved in important areas.  The employer responsibility provision should be expanded to cover all employers.  And any plan to tax working families’ benefits should be eliminated — taxes on the middle class are the wrong way to pay for health care.   

Get Your Socks On: Help Children With AIDS

Some 2 million children are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, and 1,000 more become infected every day. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is teaming up with the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and the producers of the fun children’s DVD “Sockville—A New Pair of Socks” to help fight pediatric HIV/AIDS.

For every DVD purchased at a special $9.99 price, $3 will go to the Elizabeth Glaser Foundation, CWA’s charity of choice for nearly 20 years. The foundation is a global leader in efforts to raise awareness, prevent HIV transmission and expand life-saving treatment to HIV-positive children around the world.

 Click here to buy the DVD at this special rate and help children with AIDS. This special offer is only good until Dec. 15, 2009.

The “Sockville” DVD was designed and produced by Patrick Voss, a member of CWA Local 6300 in St. Louis. The story explores the question that has been bugging us, our parents and even our grandparents—”Where does that one sock go when it gets lost in the laundry?”

“Sockville: A New Pair of Socks” introduces us to Bobby Sock and Polly Esther, who, like many socks before them, got lost in the dryer. But have no fear. Sockville awaits them. It’s a land full of imagination, creativity, learning and lots of colorful and unique sock friends. Check out the video trailer for the DVD here.

State, Local Budgets Tanking, Need Help Fast

With official unemployment at 10.2 percent, creating new jobs is a critical part of any economic recovery. But huge state and local budget shortfalls caused by the nation’s economic crisis will make joblessness worse unless state governments receive massive amounts of aid, according to a new report. 

The report by Ethan Pollack, an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) policy analyst, says the recession has led to much lower tax revenues for state and local governments. Unlike the federal government, state and local governments must balance their budgets by law. So state and local policymakers are cutting spending and raising taxes, steps that will lead to lower consumer demand and more unemployment.

At an EPI forum yesterday to release the report, Trenton [N.J.] Mayor Douglas Palmer said mayors and governors could use additional federal stimulus money to create jobs now, improve the nation’s infrastructure and help small businesses—all of which would have lasting economic and environmental benefits.

Metropolitan economies now account for 86 percent of national employment, 90 percent of workers’ income and 90 percent of our gross domestic product, Pollack said. Mayors lead these metro economies that drive the nation, Palmer said. To reverse the current economic situation and create jobs, the only way to do so is to invest in these metro economies.

In the EPI report, Pollack says states face a two-year $357 billion budget shortfall for the fiscal years 2010 and 2011, while local governments face an additional $80 billion deficit. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided much-needed relief, but its $106 billion in aid to states fills only about 25 percent of the shortfall. The rest of the budget must be balanced by spending cuts and tax increases. Click here to read the report, “Dire States: State and Local Budget Relief Needed to Prevent Job Losses and Ensure a Robust Recovery.”

State and local spending cuts can be particularly harmful to the economy, Palmer and Pollack said. Not only do they deprive citizens of needed public services like health care, transportation, education and safety, they also fall disproportionately on the backs of those with low incomes. Businesses’ sales fall, forcing firms to slash wages or lay off workers, and these workers then cut their own consumer spending. As a result, each dollar of spending reduction by state and local governments leads to $1.41 in lost economic activity.

Without additional state and local budget relief, current and future shortfalls will cause millions of job losses and likely contribute to a drawn-out and painful recovery.

Pollack put it this way:

At this point, Congress has a choice. On the one hand, it can do nothing, thereby forcing states and local governments to cut budgets and raise taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. The result will be a drag on the economy that will at best lead to a long, painful, and relatively jobless recovery and at worst cause enough damage that the economy reverses course and begins to contract again.

Bipartisan Report Shows U.S. Must Move Aggressively on China’s Illegal Acts

The 2009 report to Congress by the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) is a call to action for the United States to move aggressively against China’s illegal moves in the global economy and to create an industrial strategy to rebuild our manufacturing base, several experts said today.

During a telephone press conference sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future, Carolyn Bartholomew said China has developed a plan to build national wealth and increase its power and influence in the world and the United States has not.    

Bartholomew, who chairs the USCC, said the commission found that China employs a wide range of subsidies that include land, loans, energy, water and tax incentives to attract foreign manufacturers for the production and export of higher technology products. State-owned banks also provide massive loans to industries producing over capacity. Click here to read the report.

As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says:

The report drives home the point that the Chinese government’s export-led manufacturing strategy is driven by a full range of subsidies, many of which are illegal under both the WTO [World Trade Organization] and our own trade agreements with China. These industrial policies begin with the most important illegal subsidy of all—the continuing substantial undervaluation of the Chinese currency. 

Bartholomew warned that a side product of our growing trade deficit with China is that as more business goes abroad, the technology that we have developed for aircraft, computer chips and other products go with it. She related how the Army recently had a problem buying domestically made triggers for its rifles because the tool-and-die industry is so decimated.  

Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, just returned from a trip to China and said the reality of the global economy is that some countries like China don’t always play by the rules of free trade. Although the United States should not emulate China’s illegal actions, lawmakers should develop a deliberate and well-planned strategy to build national wealth, create jobs and protect our national security, he said.

Writing on the Campaign for America’s Future website, Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, says Obama should have insisted that China play by the global rules of free trade.

China, I believe, wants to be treated with the dignity and respect of a rising economic power. The Obama administration should have made clear exactly how that could have been accomplished: playing by the rules of global trade, achieving balance in its current account, and taking steps to ensure that more Chinese are able to share in the country’s prosperity.

 Trumka says the 2009 report

makes it clear that the United States needs a new strategic approach to our relationship with China as part of our nation’s economic strategy. Such an approach must begin by responding vigorously to the problems created by the Chinese economic strategy of massive trade subsidies.

Working America, Union Members Deliver for Health Care Reform

Working America members in Louisiana and in several other states wrote thousands of letters to their senators urging them to pass health care reform now.

In Louisiana, Maine, North Dakota, Delaware, Arkansas and Indiana this week, Working America members and union volunteers are sending a message to their senators: You need to pass real health care reform.

Working America and union members delivered thousands of handwritten letters to senators in these key states. On Tuesday in Louisiana, Wednesday in Arkansas and yesterday in four other states, these activists brought more than 15,000 letters to their senators in support of health care reform that expands coverage, doesn’t raise costs for middle-class families because it doesn’t tax their benefits and includes a public health insurance option to help hold insurance companies accountable.

You can join the fight and demand a Senate                                                                                                                                               debate on health care reform here.

The Senate’s health care bill, launched yesterday, still has flaws, but it’s moving in the right direction, and the Senate will be voting tomorrow night on whether to proceed with debate. Debating and voting on a bill in the Senate are critical and necessary steps toward passing health care reform and improving the lives of millions of working families, both those with and those without insurance today.

State and local union leaders and activists were also in Washington, D.C., yesterday visiting members of Congress to ask them to pass health care reform. This is the time when grassroots activity will matter the most, so contact your senators today.

Join Tweet-a-Thon and Expose the Chamber of Commerce Friday

“U.S. Chamber of Greed” is a nice short tweet to start the day with a NotMyChamber Tweet-a-Thon.

Get set to join a tweet-a-thon Friday, at 10 a.m. EST, to help launch the #notmychamber campaign spearheaded by the worker advocacy group, American Rights at Work.

If you are on Twitter, starting at 10 a.m., sign the organization’s “Not My Chamber” act.ly petition at http://act.ly/1cc or by tweeting: RT @araw petition @chamberpost: The U.S. #Chamber doesn’t represent me. It’s Not My Chamber! http://act.ly/1cc #notmychamber (RT to sign!)

If you don’t use Twitter (and can understand nary a word of the previous paragraph), you can sign the “Not My Chamber” pledge here: www.notmychamber.org. Already, 20,301 people and 3,102 business owners have signed the pledge.

With its nearly $100 million lobbying budget, the Chamber of Commerce is actively fighting issues like aid to jobless workers, paid sick leave and creation of an agency to watchdog the interests of consumers. Most recently, it tried to kill health care reform by hiring a paid gun to call health care reform “a job-killer.” The Chamber has “U.S.” at the front of its name but relentlessly promotes trade and jobs policies that send good U.S. jobs overseas.
So, don’t stop at one tweet. Here are some samples to send out throughout the day:

1. US #Chamber of Commerce reconsidering junk “study” to attack healthcare reform. http://bit.ly/3ZXfbP #notmychamber
2. Apple, Nike, Johnson & Johnson rejected the U.S. #Chamber over global warming. I agree: they’re #NotMyChamber http://act.ly/1cc
3. Over 3,000 businesses have joined with Apple, Nike, PG&E to speak against the #Chamber on climate change! http://act.ly/1cc #notmychamber
4. US #Chamber demands that employees give up their legal rights to press charges if they are raped. #NotMyChamber http://bit.ly/2ierXS
5. The US #Chamber of Commerce doesn’t believe in climate change. #NotMyChamber
6. US #Chamber tops the charts at $34M in lobbying in ONE QUARTER! http://bit.ly/2RaJl3
7. US #Chamber of Commerce has 300k members. In September, it was 3 million. Quite a difference! #NotMyChamber http://bit.ly/M3d3g
8. US #Chamber of Commerce leads spending against health care reform: $24M total last month http://bit.ly/2uXhtf It’s #NotMyChamber.
9. The US #Chamber opposes emergency H1N1 sick leave. It’s #NotMyChamber http://bit.ly/1rlnL5

The Rich Are Different. They Have Jobs

Wall Street doesn’t look back at the disaster it wrecked on Main Street.

Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that got the H1N1 flu shot well ahead of millions of America’s school children, sent this health tip in a memo to its pampered, out-of-touch execs: “Resist the urge to open your own car door; let your driver do it.”

Yo, Jeeves. While you’re at it, dust around the edges of those massive CEO pay packages. Because according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), top executives at four companies that jettisoned their employee pension plans received $49.5 million in retirement and severance benefits in the years before the companies filed for bankruptcy, while retirees saw their benefits cut by as much as two-thirds.

Yet Wall Street bankers are making that cash flow keeps coming: Yesterday, writes David Dayen, Senate Republicans bowed low before their corporate masters and delayed a move by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) to immediately take up a bill that would freeze all credit card rates, charges and fee increases.

The freeze would be in effect until the CARD Act, a bill passed earlier this year, became law. Because of the time lag between passage of the CARD Act—which prevents arbitrary interest rate, fee and finance charge increases on existing balances—and its implementation next year, credit card companies have been jacking up their rates in what Dodd described as “a last-ditch attempt” to pad their profits until all of the provisions of the CARD Act became effective.

Back on Main Street, the scene is bleak. Not only do we not have any drivers to open our limo doors, millions of us—more than 26 million unemployed or underemployed—don’t have jobs. And by January, 1 million people without work also will be without unemployment insurance—unless Congress acts fast to extend unemployment aid.

Now you’d think throwing a lifeline to people—to voters—would be a no-brainer. But seems many of the same Republican senators who blocked a freeze on credit card interest rates are likely to be those who block a vote on extending aid to jobless workers. They did it this fall, stalling passage of unemployment aid for weeks. Guess they haven’t figured out that if they want U.S. consumers to pay outrageous interest rates on credit cards, they need money to do so.

Extending unemployment aid to people without jobs is one of five points the AFL-CIO union movement and our allies are pushing for in our jobs initiative announced this week. The others include:  

• Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems.
• Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services.
• Fund jobs in our communities.
• Put TARP funds to work for Main Street.

We’ll take this message to the White House as part of President Barack Obama’s Dec. 3 Jobs Summit. Already, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka met earlier this week with House Democrats to explain our plan, which will “create or save” 2 million jobs over the next year.

Because America’s workers don’t need limo drivers. They need jobs.

Without Jobs, the Nation’s Future Circles the Drain

After he was elected AFL-CIO president in September, Richard Trumka traveled around the country on a listening tour. Here’s one story he heard, which he described this week as the AFL-CIO, along with several key allies, launched a jobs initiative to help get our nation back to work.

Last summer at an event in Ohio, I met a young woman who is facing this crisis head-on. Lacey, who is not yet 20 years old, wants to become a teacher. But after her dad’s factory closed and he was laid off, she had to put off her hopes of attending college to help her parents keep a roof over their heads. Lacey took a job in a school cafeteria—until the state budget got cut, and she got laid off, too.

After months in which she and her father were both searching for jobs, Lacey said she felt lucky to find a part-time fast food job that pays half of what the cafeteria paid. Lacey has more unemployed friends than friends with jobs, and, like a third of workers her age, she’s still living with her parents. Here’s what Lacey said to me that day:

I wanted to be a teacher to help children get the education they need to get ahead. But now I feel like I’m just going backward myself. I’m really scared for the kids my age. We want to work. We need jobs.

For many Washington insiders, Lacey’s life is hard to fathom. They’re obsessed with the GDP and fixated on the budget deficit (as opposed to the trade deficit, which, if it were addressed, would improve the U.S. jobs situation). The fact that more than 26 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed just isn’t registering. And who in D.C. can grasp that there are just no jobs in this country—that, in fact, there is more than six workers for every one job?

Yet as we found in our recent survey of young people, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade,” the recession is flushing their earning power and their futures down the drain:

• More than one in three young workers say they are currently living at home with their parents.
• 31 percent of young workers reports being uninsured, up from 24 percent without health insurance coverage 10 years ago.
• One-third of young workers cannot pay the bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.

Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, has described the debilitating effects of the oxymoronic “jobless recovery” on young people: Every 1 percent increase in unemployment results in the loss of 7 percent of income for young people entering the job market.

Overall, the long-term damage of an ongoing recession, says Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist John Irons, seriously damages the chances unemployed workers will get jobs. Irons cites a study in which some 35 percent of jobless workers don’t have jobs two years later and 13 percent had only part-time jobs. Meanwhile, 13 percent of those who did find full-time work were paid less than at the job they lost.

David Dayen lists the five points in our jobs proposal here. We’re pushing it with our partners: the NAACP; National Council of La Raza (NCLR); Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR); and the Center for Community Change. Together, we’re trying to light a fire under lawmakers on Capitol Hill—who, if they don’t act fast, likely will get a close up and personal look at the unemployment line themselves. We plan to press the White House and Congress to act on these recommendations immediately, starting at President Barack Obama’s Dec. 3 Jobs Summit.

Speaking at yesterday’s event, LCCR President Wade Henderson said the nation’s jobs crisis requires urgent attention—because it’s not just an economic imperative to put people to work, it’s a moral responsibility:

Make no mistake, for us this is the civil rights issue of the moment. Unless we resolve the national job crisis, it will make it hard to address all of our other priorities.

The 2008 campaigns mobilized young people and turned them out to vote. Lawmakers have an obligation to ensure they—and our nation—have a future. As Trumka says:

We owe Lacey our support. We owe Lacey and millions like her a future to be hopeful about—not one to be feared. Lacey and her generation could find their future permanently stunted, their potential never fully met. That’s unacceptable. We can’t afford to let that happen.

This is a cross-post from the Firedoglake blog.

Senate Health Care Bill: Moving in the Right Direction

Around the country, union volunteers are taking grassroots action to get their senators to support real health care reform.

Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) officially released the Senate’s version of health care reform legislation, a major step toward the health care reform bill America has been waiting for. The first vote to begin debate on this historic bill could happen as soon as Saturday.

It’s an improved bill from the one passed by the Senate Finance Committee last month. It still falls short of an ideal bill but, like the one passed by the U.S. House earlier this month, it greatly increases coverage, helps make health insurance more affordable and includes a public health insurance option to compete with insurance companies.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says Reid has shown courage and leadership in bringing a good bill to the full Senate. Trumka says the bill is a step in the right direction, because it would cover 31 million people, control costs, include a public option and cut $127 billion from the deficit in the first decade. Trumka notes that unfortunately, while many of the bill’s financing mechanisms are fair, it is still partially funded through a tax on health benefits.

We commend Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for bringing forward a health care bill that moves us closer to the historic goal of health care for America—high quality, affordable health care for all in our rich nation. The Senate leadership bill takes the strongest steps yet to bring down costs. But the bill is not perfect. It retains a version of the excise tax from the Senate Finance Committee bill. We continue to believe that a tax on working families’ benefits is the wrong way to finance health care and we will work hard to eliminate this provision as the bill heads to the floor. 

You can read the bill here or at Open Congress. Read the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the bill here.

There still are some procedural hurdles toward passing this bill. To even begin debate in the Senate, 60 votes are needed for cloture—the initial procedural vote that allows a real vote to happen—on a “motion to proceed.” Contact your senators here and tell them you think we deserve a fair debate on health care reform.

Here’s more news from the fight for health care:

• The AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff, writing at the Huffington Post, says the Senate’s health care bill moves us “towards a just America” and promises union members will keep up the grassroots pressure.
• The Senate bill would have a number of immediate benefits, including beginning to close the “donut hole” gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage, preventing insurers from rescinding coverage when customers gets sick, stopping insurers from putting arbitrary lifetime limits on coverage, tax credits to small businesses to help them provide coverage, extending coverage for young people under parents’ insurance through age 26 and immediate assistance to uninsured people and early retirees.
• Ed Coyle, president of the Alliance for Retired Americans, praised Reid and other senators for moving in the right direction on health care.
• Mike Lux at Open Left looks at the process ahead in the Senate.
• J.P. Green looks at what the bill will do, and when, if it passes.
• Wonk Room compares the details of the Senate bill to the House bill and looks at how the new Senate bill stacks up against other proposals.