Posts by Elana Levin

...your huddled masses yearning to maximize earnings during each two-year window
Posted by Elana Levin on May 23, 2007 at 12:31 PM.

(by Amy Traub from DMIBlog) The most recent immigration compromise bill (large pdf) in the Senate is coming up for criticism from almost every angle, from business interests to the immigrant advocates, labor unions, and the anti-immigrant right.

It appears there's no one who likes the bill in its current form but President Bush.

Well, the President and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

In yesterday's column, Brooks argues that, rather than an incoherent hodge-podge of contradictory provisions, the bill somehow appropriately establishes a system of tough but fair incentives for immigrants.

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Why 400 Years of Knowledge is Better Than 20
Posted by Elana Levin on May 9, 2007 at 1:09 PM.

Michael Townes Watson of DMI's blog TortDeform.com has a great post today in light of the current rash of Reagan worship and Jamestown's anniversary. (He wrote the following)

***

Being, as I am proud to admit, an addict of the history of our American history, I have visited Jamestown, Virginia on multiple occasions. Consequently, I am on the mailing list for promotional information from their public relations department. I have recently received news of the planned events for the weekends of May 4-6 and May 11-13, when Colonial Williamsburg will host “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and His Royal Highness Prince Philip” to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown’s founding. The reason for the timing of these spectacles is that this year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown.

If you have ever spent any time in Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown, Virginia, you have undoubtedly stood on that ground and pondered where we would be if it were not for the perseverance, strength of purpose and desire for liberty displayed by those settlers, by the colonists who first met at the House of Burgesses to declare our independence, and by the citizen delegates who later demanded the ten Constitutional Amendments that we know as the Bill of Rights. How can one ponder those events and not wonder at the same time whether we have the will, perseverance and dedication to resist the influence of the forces that are now attempting to whittle away at the very rights for which the settlers, colonists and delegates died and fought.

At the same time as I am celebrating the news of the 400th anniversary of our nation, I am lamenting the hype of the debate being held among the ten Republican Presidential hopefuls at the Ronald Reagan library in California. Although the media commentators are regaling Reagan as the libertarian whom all the candidates should emulate, it was Reagan who, twenty years ago, began the intentional and contrived decimation of one of the precious liberties for which our colonists fought--the right to a jury of one’s peers in a court of law. Reagan began the assault which has endured for 20 years when he proclaimed that the “excesses of the courts have taken their toll.”

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Earth to Politicians: Americans Support Taxing the Rich
Posted by Elana Levin on April 23, 2007 at 10:55 AM.

Editor's note: this is a guest post by Amy Traub.

Last month, I discussed a new poll by the Pew Center for People and the Press which found growing public support for progressive policy. This week another public opinion survey, the April Gallup Poll, lends support to the findings as they relate to wealth, inequality, and taxation.

Their headline for these Gallup poll results? "Americans More in Favor of Heavily Taxing Rich Now Than in 1939" The poll found:

* growing support for progressive taxation

* two-thirds of Americans believe wealth should be more evenly distributed

* a significant majority of Americans feel the wealthy currently pay too little in taxes

These results also complement the conclusions of DMI's own, more local survey of 101 New York City leaders, which revealed strong support for progressive taxation.

The accumulation of findings like these should continue to chip away at the conventional wisdom in politics which still insists that raising taxes -- including taxes on the wealthy -- is always unpopular and politically risky.

Nor is this just government-by-opinion poll. We already know that progressive taxation is good policy.

A recent article by economist Robert H. Frank reinforced the point: we can afford such vital public services as universal health coverage only if top income earners pay more taxes. What's more, both economic theory and empircal evidence demonstrate that trickle-down economics, the archaic argument against taxing the wealthy, is unsound and "ripe for abandonment."

Politicians take note.

Alert! A jobs program that actually leads to jobs!
Posted by Elana Levin on March 19, 2007 at 10:07 AM.

{by my co-worker Sarah Solon} The New York Times runs an editorial today that makes a very important argument: government programs that aim to funnel people into jobs need to include training that will actually make people employable, and hopefully employable in the long term.

Sounds simple. Jobs programs should train people for jobs. Better still: jobs programs should train people for jobs that are in demand.

But somewhere along the way this straightforward logic is abandoned.

"Too often," the editorial says, "the government treats such [job training programs] like arbitrary hoops for the unemployed to jump through if they expect to receive unemployment benefits." What results is a cyclical trap, people going through job programs without gaining any new training, and thus unable to land the jobs that will allow them to leave poverty and unemployment benefits behind. Instead, these people are left jumping through hoops.

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Dem aims fiery speech at Republicans for Union bill [VIDEO]
Posted by Elana Levin on March 6, 2007 at 7:51 AM.

Got Union?

A lot of American workers may soon be able to answer "yes" to that question because the Employee Free Choice Act Bill has just passed the House. The bill would help workers unionize without being subject to as much intimidation from their bosses as they are right now. A study by The Center for Economic and Policy Research showed that one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign. That's probably why 60 million U.S. workers say they would join a union if they could.

The Employee Free Choice Act would:

*Establish stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations.
*Provide mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes.
*Allow employees to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation.

Nathan Newman clarifies some myths about the EFCA being circulated by anti-worker groups.

The action on the House floor was very exciting. Speaker Pelosi's staff compiled some of the hottest video clips from the speeches on the House floor (yes I just said the words "hot" and "congress" in the same sentence - watch them and you will too).

One of my favorite lines was delivered by Chairman George Miller.

"We're here today to talk about whether or not workers will simply have the choice to exercise a right that has been in the law for 70 years … A right that is part of the National Labor Relations Act but is revoked by employers arbitrarily with out reason and without purpose. "

MissLaura on Daily Kos has a nice summary of the bill's passage and its implications for workers. And DMI wrote a statement about the Employee Free Choice Act which you can read here.

Fixing our Democracy requires knowing how it works...
Posted by Elana Levin on February 20, 2007 at 3:23 PM.

Blame it on reading too much Alan Moore in high school but to paraphrase one of his characters, I've always subscribed to the belief that in a functioning democracy, people should not be afraid of their government -- government should be afraid of its people. Ok, not afraid per say but "on notice" that government exists to serve the people and not the other way around.

As a progressive it goes without saying that I also believe that government has a positive role to play in peoples lives (as opposed to Grover Norquist's followers who don't believe in government and therefore governments under their leadership tend to play a negative role in people's lives). However, progressive governance is only achievable when the government knows that the public is watching and that it is ultimately accountable to the people.

But it is nigh impossible to make the government serve the public when the public doesn't even know what the government does or what government can do. And beyond knowing facts like how long a congressional term is and various interpertations of the Equal Protection Clause, the public has to also know how to turn awareness into action. To make government use its powers for good, not evil the public has to know how to impact the government, becoming personally engaged in politics at the local and national level.

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The Quiet Plan to Kill Medicare
Posted by Elana Levin on February 6, 2007 at 11:34 AM.

(My esteemed colleague Amy Traub wrote this post for us so I can't take credit). President Bush's new health care proposals have so many destructive features it took DMI nine pages to outline them all in our State of the Union rapid response last month. And we were really trying to brief. But it appears that the President didn't even mention all of the harmful plans he has in store for the nation's health care system. Like getting rid of Medicare as we know it.

You read that correctly. The President's proposed 2008 budget includes a plan to do away with Medicare.

Why haven't you heard this before? On his blog, "Beat the Press" economist Dean Baker takes the media to task for failing to report on the plan to phase out one of the nation's most crucial -- and treasured -- public programs even as he cogently explains just how the President aims to drive guaranteed health care for our nation's seniors into the sunset. The plan involves means-testing many Medicare benefits so they won't be available to anyone making over $80,000 a year. That income level isn't indexed to inflation, so over the years the income threshhold will drop in real terms, reducing Medicare to a program for only the poor, then only the very poor... and Medicare is gone as a vital support for all seniors.

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In State of the Union, Bush Pursues Ideological Agenda at Expense of Middle Class
Posted by Elana Levin on January 24, 2007 at 11:41 AM.

The think tank I work for - the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy was up late last night working on our annual " Rapid Response" to Bush's the State of the Union address. Let me tell you- on the domestic front (which is the area we work on) President Bush's State of the Union address attempted to sell America on a full scale political philosophy; the philosophy that privatization is the answer to everything. Bush is promoting a failed ideological experiment on the backs of struggling Americans. The President's highly ideological "solutions" refuse to address the core cause of the problems the middle class is facing. I'm thinking that has something to do with how Bush's friends in the oil industry and the healthcare lobby are a huge part of why we have these problems in the first place.

Our response to the State of the Union analyzes the speech from the perspective of what is in the best interest of America’s middle class and those struggling to become middle class. We highlight specific lines from Bush's address and offer policy information, stats and facts providing an analytic counterpoint to his proposals.

Here's some highlights that show how the President's proposals fail to solve problems and if enacted would probably make things worse.

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2006 Injustice By the Numbers:
Posted by Elana Levin on December 28, 2006 at 1:53 PM.

Every year the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy pulls together some stats and facts we think represent the real state of the union. We call it the Injustice Index.

You read AlterNet so I'm sure you've read about Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and his $53 million dollar Christmas bonus but that's just one illustration of the state of inequality in America. Here's some more:

DMI's 2006 Injustice Index:

Wages that an average CEO earns before lunchtime: more than a full-time minimum wage worker makes in a year

Ratio of the average U.S. CEO's annual pay to a minimum wage worker's: 821:1

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