ITA w/Digby and think Democrats need to make this a national story; something they failed to do with unemployment insurance which they screwed up.
TheGOP is blocking Sen. Dodd's bill to freeze credit card rates during the holidays - the credit card companies are gouging people and the GOP is siding with them.
Moments ago, Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic proposal to freeze credit card rates on existing balances through the holiday season. The bill, sponsored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), would prevent credit card companies from hiking rates and fees on existing balances until the industry reforms passed by Congress earlier this year take effect. Although a few provisions of that law took hold in August, most don’t launch until February or August of 2010. In the meantime, many card companies are hiking rates and fees to beat the law.
"The industry has tried to make one last grab at their customers’ pocketbooks," Dodd said, just before asking for the consent of Republicans to pass the bill unanimously.
No dice. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) objected "on behalf of several senators on this side of the aisle." There’s no word yet which other lawmakers he was referring to.
House Democratic leaders have already passed even stronger legislation that would expedite all the credit card reforms in the previously passed bill — not just the ban on hiking rates for existing balances. Dodd hasn’t signed on to the Senate version of the bill.
It’s worth mentioning that the Democrats — folding to pressure from the banks — were themselves responsible for delaying those reforms, which were initially proposed to go into effect much earlier this year.
They should take this moment and tie it to the Republicans denying Americans unemployment insurance.In the haste to block the Republican filibuster a mistake was made that will affect millions of people; and given how hard it's been to get to the first vote it might be difficult to correct this mistake.
Nancy E. Dunphy, deputy commissioner for employment security with the New York State Department of Labor, said that officials in New York and other states "were taken by surprise by this."
"It makes no sense," Ms. Dunphy said. "You had the president and others saying that the intent was to add 20 weeks of benefits, and now we have this glitch."
For people suffering long-term unemployment, a gap of several weeks in aid — let alone a premature, permanent end — can be cataclysmic. Alexandra Jarrin, 48, was laid off in March 2008 from her job in New York as a director of client services. As she searched widely for a job, moving back and forth between New York and Tennessee, she received aid of more than $400 a month that, she said, just barely "kept my head at the waterline."
But her extensions ran out early last month and in subsequent weeks, as Congress deliberated, her life fell apart. She has just started receiving what will be 14 extra weeks of aid under the new law, but faces eviction from her apartment in Brentwood, Tenn. "There’s no way I can recover now, I’m too far behind," she said.
In ordinary times, unemployed workers in most states receive 26 weeks of benefits, averaging just over $300 a week, paid from state insurance funds. Many find jobs before exhausting the aid, but unemployment has been particularly tenacious in the current recession and recovery. Under temporary measures, workers are currently eligible for a series of federally paid extensions, awarded in stages often lasting 13 or 14 weeks at a time.
Some nine million people now receive unemployment benefits, five million on the initial state programs and four million through federal extensions.
Without renewal of the programs for 2010, at the turn of the year recipients will continue receiving benefits to the end of their current stage but will no longer jump to the next stage. Thus Ms. Jarrin, if she fails to find work, will finish out the new 14-week period but will not receive the additional six weeks that Congress promised. She said she had sent out 2,000 résumés and had only a handful of interviews, without success.
According to projections released Wednesday by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group that worked with state officials to develop the numbers, 474,111 unemployed workers will exhaust their state benefits in January and, in the absence of Congressional action, not receive any extensions.
An additional 581,000 workers will see their federal benefits end in January, the study said.
Ms. Dunphy of New York said that without a federal renewal, 685,000 New Yorkers would not receive expected benefits in 2010. While economic growth has resumed, economists say that job growth will be sluggish, with high unemployment, now at 10.2 percent, persisting through most of the coming year.
In addition to renewing the benefit extension, Congress must decide whether to extend aid for Cobra health insurance payments for the unemployed, a tax break on unemployment payments and a $25 a week increase in benefits, all adopted in the stimulus act in early 2009.
The primary in 2007 and the election in 2008 were the first that I closely followed. I voted for Gore and Kerry and I donated some money; but this was the first election I followed because it seemed to me the Democrats did a kick ass job telling a story about what was happening in this country and how to fix it. The President has stopped telling that story. I know a lot of people noticed it in his speeches; from Grant Park onward they haven't been poetic but prosaic. And I know, we govern in prose. But poets tell stories and that is what brought Barack Obama the presidency and what made 2008 a blockbuster year. Similarly, Democrats told a story in 2006 about where this country was.
Right now, the only stories I hear in the news are Republican stories. They're Neo-Hoover nightmares about how we need to cut government spending and that is why the economy is in the mess it is. Bailouts caused all your problems. And then the hard news, deficit at 12 trillion, comes and reinforces that message. No one is telling the stories about the deregulation and repeal of Glass-Stegall that caused this mess. No one is talking about how Government is the only actor in the economy right now and we need to spend, deficits be damned, if you want a job and you want health care and you want to keep enjoying the quality of life you have come to expect. No one is telling the story about how workers have been living off of credit because the Republicans cut taxes for the rich, kept interest rates low, gutted OSHA and Labor, and left the workers to the mercy of the market. No one is talking about capitalistic welfare and how that is what happened over the last eight years. No one is talking about how two wars and massive tax cuts and unfunded entitlement spending has caused these deficits.
If we want to make our way out of this mess, if we want to win in 2010, if we want to become a better nation and solve our problems we need to tell a story.
That's what we needed to do for health care.
It's what should happen to get a jobs bill, financial reform, and climate legislation.
After the last eight years, the public WANTS to hear a story. They want to have a sense of direction and goals. They want to see their leaders say they're standing with them, stand with them, and punish those who have nearly ruined this economy.
Mr. President. You are storyteller. You and David Axelrod know how to do this. So please, get it done. Because the future of this country is going to be written and it can be written by you or by your political opponents.
It's like any other political fight. You either define yourself or you get defined. And frankly, the Democrat are watching as government gets blamed for this Great Recession and liberalism is defined as the problem and conservatism the solution. That ain't a good look.