Recovery Bill Gets Final Approval

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: February 13, 2009, NY Times

WASHINGTON — Congress on Friday approved a $787 billion economic stimulus measure, meeting the crushing mid-February deadline that Democrats had set for adopting the centerpiece of President Obama’s early agenda but without quelling partisan divisions in Washington. Not a single House Republican voted for the bill.

The House vote was 246 to 183, with just 7 Democrats joining all 176 Republicans in opposition. In the Senate, the vote, 60 to 38, was similarly partisan. Only 3 centrist Republicans joined 55 Democrats and 2 independents in favor.

The Senate finally adopted the bill at 10:47 p.m. after what appeared to be the longest Congressional vote in history. The peculiar 5-hour 17-minute process was required because Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, had to return to Washington from his home state after attending a funeral home visitation for his mother, who died Feb. 2.

Under a procedural deal between the parties, the bill needed 60 votes to pass. The vote began at 5:30 p.m., but from 7:07 p.m., when Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, cast his “aye,” the tally hung at 59 to 38, until Mr. Brown arrived.

Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill on Monday.

Among the senators voting against it was Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, who withdrew this week as the president’s nominee for commerce secretary.

Despite the bill’s promise of increased unemployment benefits and new health care subsidies, as well as more than $100 billion in aid for states, House Republicans did not break rank. Even those from states hit hardest by the recession opposed the bill, in a rebuke of the new president.

During the debate, the Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, angrily dropped the 1,073-page bill text to the floor with a thump, as he accused Democrats of failing to read the legislation.

“The president made clear when we started this process that this was about jobs,” Mr. Boehner said after the vote. “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. And what it’s turned into is nothing more than spending, spending and more spending.”

The $787 billion plan — a combination of fast-acting tax cuts and longer-term government spending on public works projects, education, health care, energy and technology — was smaller than Democrats first proposed. But, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, more than 74 percent of the money will be spent within the next 18 months, a relatively rapid pace that could determine whether the plan succeeds.

The House voted in the afternoon, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fellow Democrats cheered on the floor. Ms. Pelosi handed out chocolate bars to her committee chairmen. The label showed a picture of the Capitol and read, “A stimulus package we can all sink our teeth into.”

At a news conference, Ms. Pelosi and her top lieutenants praised Mr. Obama for completing the legislation so quickly.

“The president requested swift, bold action,” Ms. Pelosi said. “The American people are feeling a great deal of pain. They have uncertainty about their jobs, about health care, about the ability to pay for the education of their children, and sad to say in our great country, even to put food on the table. And today we have passed legislation that does take that swift, bold action on their behalf.”

Just four weeks into Mr. Obama’s presidency, the Democrats boasted that they had already approved three major bills: a measure to curb pay-discrimination against women in the workplace, a broad expansion of the state children’s health insurance program and the stimulus.

“We have yet to pass the 30th day of this administration,” said the House majority leader, Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland. “And we have passed historic legislation.”

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

NYC's Middle-class Exodus Seen Accelerating

Posted: Crain's NY, February 05, 2009 11:37 AM
By: Daniel Massey
Photographs: A. Golden, eyewash design, c. 2008.

New study cites NYC’s soaring cost of living and flattened wages for “outmigration” of moderate-income families.

The rising cost of living in the five boroughs, combined with a city economy that has been unable to create enough well-paying jobs, has led tens of thousands of middle class New Yorkers to leave the city in recent years and kept others stuck among the ranks of the working poor, a new report shows.

The city, which for much of its history thrived as a place where people from poorer backgrounds could climb into the middle class, is in danger of losing that piece of its identity, the report says.

“New York has long been a city that has groomed a middle class, but that’s a more arduous job today,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan-based think tank dedicated to independent research on cities, and one of the report’s authors. “There’s a tremendous amount of positives about the city, yet so many middle class families seem to be stretched to their limits.”

More residents moved out of the five boroughs in each of the years between 2002 and 2006 than in 1993, when the city was far less inviting, the report says. In 2006, 151,441 residents left the city, a 7% increase over 2002. The overall population increased as a result of natural births and immigration.

“The extraordinarily high levels of those relocating through much of the decade — even as crime rates remained at record lows and the city economy was booming — suggests that growing numbers of New Yorkers simply couldn’t prosper here,” the report argues.

The number of New Yorkers with bachelor’s degrees who left the city rose to 29,370 in 2006, up 127% from a year earlier. But they weren’t the only ones leaving. Families with children concerned about the quality of schools and small business owners seeking lower costs and new markets have also left. The number of New Yorkers moving to such places as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, for instance, doubled and even tripled during the period studied.

Joe Salvo, director of the New York City Department of Planning’s population division, questioned the report’s findings. He said the study looked at too narrow a time period and examined people leaving the city without looking at those coming in.

“What they’re doing in the report is looking at domestic outflow by itself,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

He said people have moved away from the city throughout history, but that immigrants have always come to replace them.

“We have a dynamic operating here,” he said. “People who come and people who leave, they come from everywhere and they go everywhere.”

He said if outmigration were a problem, it would be visible in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

“If you go to the Bronx, if you go to Brooklyn, neighborhoods of modest means, you will see that these neighborhoods are growing,” he said. “If we had substantial rates of outmigration, you would see it in neighborhoods from Marine Park in Brooklyn to Morris Park in the Bronx.”

The sky-high cost of living in the city is the lead driving force behind the squeeze on the middle class, the report argues. City residents pay among the highest prices in the nation for electricity, telephone service, auto insurance, home heating oil, parking and milk—and those prices continue to rise. Combined state and local taxes are tops among major cities, and housing is the most expensive. In the third quarter of 2008, only 10.6% of all housing in New York City was deemed affordable to people earning the median area income. And average rents in the fourth quarter were $2,801, or 53% higher than in San Francisco, the city with the second-highest figure, the report shows.

Manhattan is by far the most expensive urban area in the United States, according to the report, but the escalating cost of living isn’t the only factor hurting the middle class in New York, the report says. The city’s job mix has shifted away from positions that provide middle-income wages and benefits. The city has lost a far greater share of blue collar jobs than Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and other major cities. More than 150,000 goods-producing jobs have been lost since 1990, including 66,500 in the past decade.

While manufacturing accounts for about 3% of private sector jobs in the city, it employs a much larger share in other cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte. The city also fares poorly in other blue collar sectors like wholesale trade, while much of its job growth has come in traditionally low-paying areas like health care and social assistance. Those two industries together accounted for 17.4% of all private sector jobs in 2007, up 12.7% from 1990.

The result, the report argues, is that large numbers of people are working, but they’re not earning enough to live comfortably. Citywide, 31.1% of workers over the age of 18 are employed in low-wage jobs, the report says. Between 1975 and 2007, average weekly wages, when adjusted for inflation, barely increased in the boroughs outside Manhattan. Wages in Manhattan increased exponentially because of the boom in Wall Street salaries, but job growth in high-end sectors has not been strong enough to make up for the losses of middle-income jobs.

And things are not looking any brighter. The jobs expected to grow the most during the decade ahead typically pay low wages, including retail, home health aides, child care workers and janitors, the report says.

“The city, probably going back to Mayor [John] Lindsay really hasn’t focused on the middle class,” said Joel Kotkin, an urban historian and the report’s coauthor. “It’s becoming increasingly addicted to a ‘Masters of the Universe’ economy, which has now completely fallen apart.”

The report defines a middle class New Yorker loosely as someone who has enough money to pay the bills, have health insurance, own a computer with Internet connection, live in a safe neighborhood and take a vacation once a year.

Action is needed to make that lifestyle a possibility for future generations of New Yorkers, the report says. The authors urge the city to focus more attention on diversifying its economy. That was also a major theme of Crain’s Future of New York City conference, held earlier this week.

The report said such diversification could be achieved through a focus on the city’s ports, educational services, niche manufacturing and so-called “green-collar” industries and by nurturing entrepreneurs and freelancers.

More support for community colleges and stronger workforce development programs could help better prepare young people for fields that pay middle-income salaries, the report argues. Improving schools, parks and transportation in the outer boroughs could also make the areas more attractive to middle-class families.

“A New York inhospitable to middle class aspirations,” the report concludes, “will lose population, character and ultimately even its economic pre-eminence.”

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Unemployment rose in 363 out of 369 U.S. cities in 2008.

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FROM COUNTERSPINYC: UPDATE! NOTICE FOR ALL NY STATE UNEMPLOYED WORKERS:

Important Information about Extended Emergency Unemployment Compensation, from the NY state Department of Labor:

Due to the high unemployment rate in New York State, an additional 13 weeks of emergency benefits will be available on February 22, 2009, for a total of 33 week of emergency benefits. These additional weekly benefits may be claimed in the usual manner starting on Sunday, February 22, 2009. Check our website weekly for updates. click here for further information.

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Published: UPI.com, Feb. 4, 2009 at 6:22 PM
Photograph: A. Golden, eyewash design, c. 2009.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Unemployment rose in 363 out of 369 U.S. cities in 2008, the Labor Department announced Wednesday.

As the recession sunk its teeth into the labor market, 40 cities reported jobless rates above 10 percent. Two reported rates under 3 percent, the report said.

In December, the nation's unemployment rate hit 7.1 percent, compared with December 2007, when it was 4.8 percent.

In one year, Elkhart-Goshen, Ind., beset by manufacturing sector layoffs, found its unemployment rate jump 10.6 percentage points, the largest leap in the country. The second highest jump was recorded in Dalton, Ga., where the unemployment rate grew by 6.2 percentage points.

In total, 27 cities saw their unemployment rate jump by 4 percentage points or more, the report said.

Among larger cities in December, the greater Detroit area recorded the highest jobless rate with unemployment reaching 10.6 percent, the Labor Department said.

The lowest unemployment rates among cities with a population of 1 million or more in the 2000 census was in Oklahoma City, Okla. -- at 4.6 percent in December.

The highest rate in December among all cities was in El Centro, Calif. at 22.6 percent; the lowest was in Morgantown, W. Va. -- 2.7 percent.

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Health Benefits For Unemployed Stripped From Stimulus.

Post: Huffington Post, February 4, 2009 05:28 PM

Reading even a single page of a Senate bill is often no simple task, with legislative-ese obscuring the purpose behind the language. Reading 736 pages of the stuff is like mountain climbing in a wheelchair.

So we outsourced the work to Huffington Post readers: 367 people responded to the call and signed up to read portions of the Senate stimulus bill, compare it to the House bill passed earlier, and look for anything else interesting or newsworthy in it. Hundreds more posted their finds in the comments section below the full text of the bill. Responses that came in earlier are featured here.

The readers who signed up brought varying degrees of expertise to the project. One reader, who wanted to stay anonymous, is a consultant who works with the Department of Defense doing facilities and infrastructure assessments to determine the need for just the kinds of projects included in the section of the bill he read. Another, Tim Dickinson, is a politics reporter for Rolling Stone. Dickinson quickly found that the Senate had increased funding for STD prevention to $400 million. (Senate Republicans found that appalling and have succeeded in stripping it from the bill.)

Citizen journalism is still in its infancy and there will be many more opportunities around budget time to dig through congressional and presidential products. If you were one of the hundreds of people who contributed -- or signed up to, but didn't end up having time - let us know where the kinks are. How could it have been smoother?

The sifters found some noteworthy nuggets in the bill. Combing through his section of the bill, law professor and health care author Timothy Jost noticed that the Senate had removed the House provision that would allow people 55 and over who are laid off to continue COBRA coverage at a subsidized rate until they're 65 and eligible for Medicare. The House version also made folks who were laid off temporarily eligible for Medicaid; the Senate version strips that out, Jost found. Every one percent increase in unemployment throws more than a million people into the ranks of the uninsured.

Our Pentagon consultant broke the spending differences into a spreadsheet and also found a nugget in the bill giving Filipino World War II veterans $198 million. His find highlights what citizen journalists are capable of. His item had yet to be reported when he e-mailed it Tuesday evening; between then and now, the L.A. Times broke the story. So we cost our guy a scoop. Our apologies. We'll get it next time.

Still, his analysis is worth sharing. He said that his "pork-o-meter went off" and he did some rough math. "For U.S. citizens, [the payment is] $15,000 a head and for non-citizens it's $9,000 a head. Considering that there are only 1.6 million Filipinos in the U.S. and only 30 percent of those are over the age of 55, and to qualify you would have to be at least 78 years old, the lion's share of this money would be going to non-citizens. This will not create jobs or stimulate the economy," he wrote.

Diane Szilagy, whose expertise is in the energy and information technology fields, broke her section into a comparison chart you can see here.

Jost, the law professor, noticed that a crucial word had been added to the Senate bill's health care section. The House had appropriated $700 million for health care "comparative effectiveness research." Finding what health care approaches are most cost effective is a key to reducing those costs, but opponents of such research see it is a first step toward rationing care -- not that we don't ration care already, in a different way -- and health care companies oppose it because it could cut into profits.

Jost noticed that the word "clinical" was inserted into the Senate package so that the money would only go to study the clinical effectiveness of treatment, not cost effectiveness.

The website Medical Devices Today, the voice of the medical device industry, had been pushing for the change. "We need a clear statement in the language of the bill that it would fund clinical comparative effectiveness, not cost comparative effectiveness, and that the studies will not be used for national coverage determinations," it quoted AdvaMed Senior Executive VP David Nexon as saying last week.

To join the team for the next round of research, sign up here.

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Sign the Petition to Increase funding to the NEA

Friends,

In a swift victory for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House approved a historically huge $819 billion Economic Stimulus bill last night - filled with new spending and tax cuts at the core of the young adminstration's revival plan for the desperately ailing economy. The vote was 244-188.

I'm writing to urge you to consider signing this petition to increase the proposed $50 million funding to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the $825 billion Economic Stimulus Plan, being voted on by the Senate next week.

The NEA has been underfunded since the Newt Gingrich budget assault following the 1994 Congressional elections, and fifteen years later has surpassed critical point. The NEA's current budget is around $144 million or, just 50 cents for each American. If the NEA budget were doubled, half of all additional funding over $175 million will go directly to Arts Education. President Obama has also announced his intention to beef up arts education in the Dept. of Education, and I hope you will support his efforts.

We are grateful that this small percentage of the $819 Billion Economic Stimulus Plan has been earmarked for the Arts - primarily through the administration of the NEA and the NEH. However, as Arts and economic development go hand-in-hand, and considering the Arts brings more money to cities than does professional sports, the argument that this money is really "pork" and doesn't stimulate the economy, is plain false. In fact, it has been pointed out by the NEA that the very small amount of money, when compared to the overall $819 billion, is actually placed more efficiently into the economy and will establish over 6,000 jobs. While the arts organizations financed by NEA grants may have only 2, 10, or 25 employees, there are hundreds of organizations and they add up to the same kind of impact as a large corporations such as airlines or banks.

Roosevelt carved a niche for artists in his New Deal. These programs not only created jobs, put money into the economy, and improved education / lives in general, they also placed the USA in a cultural leadership position in the world which exists today. Indeed, the Federal Art Project - along with several other WPA-backed programs, created well over 5,000 jobs for American artists. These artists created over 2,500 murals, over 17,700 sculptures, 108,000 paintings, and 240,000 prints. The project's legacy lives on, supporting artists like Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and many other abstract expressionists whose work helped shift the most dynamic center of the art world from its traditional location in Europe, to where it now resides - in the largest American cities.

The FSA photography project was also most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the U.S. Many of the images appeared in popular magazines. The photographers were under instruction from Washington as to what overall impression the New Deal wanted to give. Director Roy Stryker's agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among cotton tenant farmers, and the very poor conditions among migrant farm workers. Above all, he was committed to social reform through New Deal intervention in people's lives. New Deal era films such as Citizen Kane ridiculed so-called "great men", while class warfare appeared in numerous movies, such as Meet John Doe and The Grapes of Wrath.

Established on July 27, 1935, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) additionally created over 6,600 jobs for writers, editors, researchers, and many others who exemplified a given level of literary expertise. Compiling local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, children's books and other works, these writers created over 1,200 books and pamphlets. They also produced some of the first U.S. guides for states, major cities, and roadways. Responsible for recording folklore and oral histories, the FWP most notably wrote the 2,300 plus first-person accounts of slavery now existing as an invaluable collection in the Library of Congress. As with the Federal Art Project, the FWP's contributions to American literature were both significant and long-lasting, giving authors like John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, and many others the opportunity to continue their work in a time of difficult economic circumstances.

Not everyone is an athlete, an accountant, a scholar, a scientist, a finance expert, a teacher, or a politician, but most artists must embody all these characteristics to survive in a culture not valuing them. All great nations not only revered the Arts, but made certain artisans held court in the very highest echelons of society. Giving the arts the respectable place in our current society it deserves will better our future as a strong nation, and send a message not only to our fellow countrymen, but also to the rest of the world that real change is underway in America.

By signing this petition, you're telling your representative to support the arts by increasing the $50 million earmarked for the NEA. Your action will be the first critical step toward addressing the unmet need for all struggling artists. Passing this on to every contact you have would be most appreciated! Time is of the utmost importance. To find your representative, check here.

Sincerely,

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!
Thanks for all you do!

Live your values. Love your country.

And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.