Republicans Try To Break US Postal Service

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Postal Service Set to Default on Pension Payment for First Time, but Congress Could Easily Fix the Problem

Ben Sherman

Think Progress / News Analysis

Published: Thursday 19 July 2012

“A vast majority of postal offices under consideration for closure are located in rural areas, where poverty rates are higher than the national average.”

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In 2006, the Republican-led Congress passed an unnecessary law requiring the United States Postal Service to prefund its pension benefits for 75 years through a $5.5 billion annual payment. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) is theonly one of its kind for a government agency. On August 1st of this year, the Post Office will likely default for the first time in its history on its 2011 pension payment. If Congress does not act, it will also default on its 2012 payment due September 30th.
The requirement has drastically harmed the functions of the agency, which is used by almost every American. In July, USPS began closing offices around the country to meet the annual payment. By the time current downsizing plans are completed in 2014, Americans will see 229 processing plants closed and 28,000 jobs lost. In June, ten USPS employees launched a multi-day hunger strike to protest the cuts.
Without the pension payment, USPS would have a $1.5 billion surplus instead of a $20 billion shortfall. “[T]hese ongoing liquidity issues unnecessarily undermine confidence in the viability of the Postal Service among our customers,” said USPS spokesman David Partenheimer.
Postal Service cuts also threaten to increase economic inequality. A Reuters analysis released in February found that America’s poorest communities “stand to suffer most if the struggling agency moves ahead with plans to shutter thousands of post offices.”

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A vast majority of postal offices under consideration for closure are located in rural areas, where poverty rates are higher than the national average. Nearly 90 percent of Americans without broadband access live in rural areas, making USPS cuts especially harmful to the pocketbooks of rural Americans.
Congressional Republicans have consistently pushed to downsize USPS. In 2011, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduced legislation that would end to-the-door mail delivery and put USPS under a control board, moves which would lead to more layoffs and bust postal service unions. Such proposed “fixes” are a thinly-veiled Republican ploy to use the unnecessary PAEA requirement to attack public sector employment.
In April, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill to stretch the pension payments over only 40 years,reducing the annual payment to $2.5 billion. The bill would also return $11 billion to USPS that was overpaid into one of its pension funds. “The longer the House delays consideration of the bill, the longer the uncertainty about the Postal Service’s financial future remains,” said Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who co-sponsored the Senate bill. “This is irresponsible and unfair.”
The House is currently preparing to leave for its August recess, making action to prevent a USPS default unlikely.

Voter Suppression Is Voter Election Fraud

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Home Suppressing Democracy by Stealing the Right to Vote Is the Ultimate Election Fraud Submitted by mark karlin on Wed, 07/18/2012 - 11:15am. EditorBlog MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT We've seen it all before. Passing laws to keep certain groups of people from voting, when they are entitled to do in a democracy under the Constitution. It used to be a "poll tax" in the South, where blacks were kept from voting because they didn't pay sufficient taxes. It was, of course, racist, but it also set the precedent of tying voting rights to wealth. In the last few decades -- with a new surge in the past two years, -- we have seen Republican controlled states pass a number of voter identification laws - with additional limitations on advance voting and restrictive residency requirements in many cases. These new legal requirements for voting are meant to keep minorities, students, the disabled and the poorer elderly from voting, because these groups tend to lean Democratic in their affiliation. A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice indicates that "since January 2011, partisans in 19 states have rushed through new laws that cut back on voting rights. In a comprehensive study released last October, the Brennan Center concluded these laws could make it far harder for millions of eligible citizens to vote." The Department of Justice has successfully challenged a few of the new voter suppression laws, but hardly enough. Remember that if Jeb Bush and Kathryn Harris had not eliminated tens of thousands of minorities from the voting rolls in 2000, through a vetting process called caging, Al Gore - who won the popular vote in the US by half a million votes - might have carried Florida easily, instead of having the election stolen by the Supreme Court. The right of an American citizen to vote is the fundamental ingredient that makes a democracy representative of the will of the people, of all US citizens. To intentionally keep people from exercising their right to vote, in the absence of any significant voter fraud, is a crime against the Constitution. The Brennan Center concludes: The result is plain: Voter ID laws will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of poor Americans to vote. They place a serious burden on a core constitutional right that should be universally available to every American citizen. This November, restrictive voter ID states will provide 127 electoral votes - nearly half of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Therefore, the ability of eligible citizens without photo ID to obtain one could have a major influence on the outcome of the 2012 election. The report also notes: Ten states now have unprecedented restrictive voter ID laws. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin all require citizens to produce specific types of government-issued photo identification before they can cast a vote that will count. Legal precedent requires these states to provide free photo ID to eligible voters who do not have one. Unfortunately, these free IDs are not equally accessible to all voters.... More than 1 million eligible voters in these states fall below the federal poverty line and live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office. These voters may be particularly affected by the significant costs of the documentation required to obtain a photo ID. Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25. Marriage licenses, required for married women whose birth certificates include a maiden name, can cost between $8 and $20. By comparison, the notorious poll tax - outlawed during the civil rights era - cost $10.64 in current dollars. Stealing the most basic right in a democracy, the right to participate in the election of a representative government, is a thuggish form of state-sanctioned election theft. It is election fraud that legally steals elections and replaces the rule of the majority with the rule of the entitled.

Lies Told and Repeated by Republicans About the Economy

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Published: Wednesday 18 July 2012

“Each of these claims has grabbed national attention in a big way, sucking up years’ worth of precious airtime.”

Four Spending Myths that Could Wreck Our World

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We’re at the edge of the cliff of deficit disaster! National security spending is being, or will soon be, slashed to the bone! Obamacare will sink the ship of state!

Each of these claims has grabbed national attention in a big way, sucking up years’ worth of precious airtime. That’s a serious bummer, since each of them is a spending myth of the first order. Let’s pop them, one by one, and move on to the truly urgent business of a nation that is indeed on the edge.

Spending Myth 1: Today’s deficits have taken us to a historically unprecedented, economically catastrophic place.

This myth has had the effect of binding the hands of elected officials and policymakers at every level of government. It has also emboldened those who claim that we must cut government spending as quickly, as radically, as deeply as possible.

In fact, we’ve been here before. In 2009, the federal budget deficit was a whopping 10.1% of the American economy and back in 1943, in the midst of World War II, it was three times that -- 30.3%. This fiscal year the deficit will total around 7.6%. Yes, that is big. But in the Congressional Budget Office’s grimmest projections, that figure will fall to 6.3% next year, and 5.8% in fiscal 2014. In 1983, under President Reagan, the deficit hit 6% of the economy, and by 1998, that had turned into a surplus. So, while projected deficits remain large, they’re neither historically unprecedented, nor insurmountable.

More important still, the size of the deficit is no sign that lawmakers should make immediate deep cuts in spending. In fact, history tells us that such reductions are guaranteed to harm, if not cripple, an economy still teetering at the edge of recession.

A number of leading economists are now busy explaining why the deficit this year actually ought to be a lot larger, not smaller; why there should be more government spending, including aid to state and local governments, which would create new jobs and prevent layoffs in areas like education and law enforcement. Such efforts, working in tandem with slow but positive job growth in the private sector, might indeed mean genuine recovery. Government budget cuts, on the other hand, offset private-sector gains with the huge and depressing effect of public-sector layoffs, and have damaging ripple effects on the rest of the economy as well.

When the economy is healthier, a host of promising options are at hand for lawmakers who want to narrow the gap between spending and tax revenue. For example, loopholes and deductions in the tax code that hand enormous subsidies to wealthy Americans and corporations will cost the Treasury around $1.3 trillion in lost revenue this year alone -- more, that is, than the entire budget deficit. Closing some of them would make great strides toward significant deficit reductions.

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Alarmingly, the deficit-reduction fever that’s resulted from this first spending myth has led many Americans to throw their support behind de-investment in domestic priorities like education, research, and infrastructure -- cuts that threaten to undo generations of progress. This is in part the result of myth number two.

Spending Myth 2: Military and other national security spending have already taken their lumps and future budget-cutting efforts will have to take aim at domestic programs instead.

The very idea that military spending has already been deeply cut in service to deficit reduction is not only false, but in the realm of fantasy. The real story: despite headlines about “slashed” Pentagon spending and “doomsday” plans for more, no actual cuts to the defense budget have yet taken place. In fact, since 2001, to quote former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, defense spending has grown like a “gusher.” The Department of Defense base budget nearly doubled in the space of a decade. Now, the Pentagon is likely to face an exceedingly modest 2.5% budget cut in fiscal 2013, “paring” its budget down to a mere $525 billion -- with possible additional cuts shaving off another $55 billion next year if Congress allows the Budget Control Act, a.k.a. “sequestration,” to take effect.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen. It’s likely that lawmakers will, at the last moment, come to an agreement to cancel those extra cuts. In other words, the notion that our military, which has been experiencing financial boom times even in tough times, has felt significant deficit-slashing pain -- or has even been cut at all -- is the Pentagon equivalent of a unicorn.

What this does mean, however, is that lawmakers heading down the budget-cutting path can find plenty of savings in the enormous defense and national security budgets. Moreover, cuts there would be less harmful to the economy than reductions in domestic spending.

A group of military budget experts, for example, found that cutting many costly and obsolete weapons programs could save billions of dollars each year, and investing that money in domestic priorities like education and health care would spur the economy. That’s because those sectors create more jobs per dollar than military programs do. And that leads us to myth three.

Spending Myth 3: Government health-insurance programs are more costly than private insurance.

False claims about the higher cost of government health programs have led many people to demand that health-care solutions come from the private sector. Advocates of this have been much aided by the complexity of sorting out health costs, which has provided the necessary smoke and mirrors to camouflage this whopping lie.

Health spending is indeed growing faster than any other part of the federal budget. It’s gone from a measly 7% in 1976 to nearly a quarter today -- and that’s truly a cause for concern. But health care costs, public and private, have been on the rise across the developed world for decades. And cost growth in government programs like Medicare has actually been slower than in private health insurance. That’s because the federal government has important advantages over private insurance companies when it comes to health care. For example, as a huge player in the health-care market, the federal government has been successful at negotiating lower prices than small private insurers can. And that helps us de-bunk myth number four.

Spending Myth 4: The Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare -- will bankrupt the federal government while levying the biggest tax in U.S. history.

Wrong again. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this health-reform legislation will reduce budget deficits by $119 billion between now and 2019. And only around 1% of American households will end up paying a penalty for lacking health insurance.

While the Affordable Care Act is hardly a panacea for the many problems in U.S. health care, it does at least start to address the pressing issue of rising costs -- and it incorporates some of the best wisdom on how to do so. Health-policy experts have explored phasing out the fee-for-service payment system -- in which doctors are paid for each test and procedure they perform -- in favor of something akin to pay-for-performance. This transition would reward medical professionals for delivering more effective, coordinated, and efficient care -- and save a lot of money by reducing waste.

The Affordable Care Act begins implementing such changes in the Medicare program, and it explores other important cost-containment measures. In other words, it lays the groundwork for potentially far deeper budgetary savings down the road.

Having cleared the landscape of four stubborn spending myths, it should be easier to see straight to the stuff that really matters. Financial hardship facing millions of Americans ought to be our top concern. Between 2007 and 2010, the median family lost nearly 40% of its net worth. Neither steep deficits, nor disagreement over military spending and health reform should eclipse this as our most pressing challenge.

If lawmakers skipped the myth-making and began putting America’s resources into a series of domestic investments that would spur the economy now, their acts would yield dividends for years to come. That means pushing education and job training, plus a host of job-creation measures, to the top of the priority list, and setting aside initiatives based on fear and fantasy.

See Tom Engelhardt's response here.

Too Much Pride In Republican Governors About ACA

TPMLivewire

9:06 AM EDT, Wednesday July 18, 2012

Bill Frist To GOP Governors: Adopt ‘Obamacare’ Insurance Exchanges

While the likes of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) vow to resist implementation of state-level insurance exchanges mandated under the Affordable Care Act, former Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) is one notable Republican who endorses the provision.
In an editorial for The Week published Tuesday, the former majority leader of the Senate writes that both parties should support the insurance exchanges, noting that they were originally a “Republican idea.” A doctor, Frist says that he “sees little advantage” for Republican governors to refuse to set up exchanges in their own states and “default to the federally designed, one-size-fits-all exchange when they can design and run their own.”
From the piece:

State exchanges are the solution. They represent the federalist ideal of states as “laboratories for democracy.” We are seeing 50 states each designing a model that is right for them, empowered to take into account their individual cultures, politics, economies, and demographics. While much planning has yet to be done, we are already seeing a huge range in state models. I love the diversity and the innovation.

Reported by Tom Kludt

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$800 Million And Rising Tar Sands Spill In Michigan

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$800 Million Tar Sands Oil Spill in Michigan Blamed on Corporate Neglect and Weak Federal Regulations

Stephen Lacey

Climate Progress / News Report

Published: Wednesday 11 July 2012

“The cost of the spill has reached $800 million and is rising, the NTSB said, making the pipeline rupture the most expensive on-shore oil spill in U.S. history.”

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The National Transportation Safety Board blamed multiple corrosion cracks and “pervasive organizational failures” at the Calgary-based Enbridge pipeline company for a more-than-20,000-barrel oil spill two years ago near Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. [Washington Post]

The cost of the spill has reached $800 million and is rising, the NTSB said, making the pipeline rupture the most expensive on-shore oil spill in U.S. history. The pipeline’s contents — heavy crude oil from Canada’s oil sands — have made the spill a closely watched case with implications for other pipelines carrying such crude.

The NTSB also blamed “weak federal regulations” by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for the accident, which spilled at least 843,444 gallons of oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo in Marshall, Mich. The oil spread into a 40-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo and a nearby wetlands area.

Corn prices soared toward new highs on Monday amid growing fears that the drought scorching the U.S. Midwest will prove to be the harshest in decades. [Wall Street Journal]

Climate change researchers have been able to attribute recent examples of extreme weather to the effects of human activity on the planet’s climate systems for the first time, marking a major step forward in climate research. [Guardian]

The influence of manmade global warming on the climate system continues to grow, with human fingerprints identified in more than two dozen climate “indicators” examined by an international research team — from air temperatures to ocean acidity — for a comprehensive annual “State of the Climate” report released Tuesday. [Climate Central]

The ultra-conservative American Tradition Institute has expanded its legal pursuit of climate scientists, using transparency laws to try to flush out potentially damaging emails. [Guardian]

The renewable fuel standard (RFS) for transportation fuel is becoming another proxy battleground between Republicans and Democrats in the renewable energy debate, as the parties demonstrated Tuesday during a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Energy and Power hearing. [The Hill]

The world is warming, incomes are rising, and smaller families are living in larger houses in hotter places. One result is a booming market for air conditioning — world sales in 2011 were up 13 percent over 2010, and that growth is expected to accelerate in coming decades. [Guardian]

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