Democracy for Cecil County

Reid Pulls Rabbit Out Of His Hat
by David Kurtz

Talking Points Memo link

It looked for a time like even Harry Reid’s stripped-down jobs bill might stall with less than the required 60 votes, but at least two Republicans — Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe of Maine — have joined with the Democrats, which should be enough to advance the bill through this key procedural vote.

Late Update: The final vote was 62-30. The Dems lost Ben Nelson (D-NE), who voted against the bill; and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) is undergoing cancer treatment and did not vote. So that knocked the Dems from 59 votes down to 57, but they picked up five Republicans, Brown and Snowe, as I mention above, plus Susan Collins (R-ME), Kit Bond (R-MO) and George Voinovich (R-OH).

Commercial Real Estate Collapse Bigger than Subprime Implosion – Why is the Market Ignoring the $3.5 Trillion Commercial Real Estate Market Implosion?

Posted by mybudget360

Most people that follow real estate even at a cursory level have heard of the problems in commercial real estate. The enormous $3.5 trillion market in commercial real estate (CRE) has deep and profound problems. At the peak CRE was estimated to be valued at $6.5 trillion. Today the value is closer to $3.5 trillion or closer to the loan amount outstanding. This market is now sitting in a zero equity position. In fact from market trends it is very likely that much of CRE bought during the last few years is significantly underwater. This trend is a few years behind the residential housing bust that shocked the markets into record declines. Why is the market not reacting as negatively to the bust in CRE as it did to residential housing?

Commercial and construction loans combined are bigger than the entire subprime market and CRE values have now fallen by 43 percent from their peak across multi-family units, hotels, and retail space. And with the CRE collapse there is a harder time selling off this space if there is no economic demand for certain spaces. You also have a smaller pool of borrowers looking for retail space. Take for example retail space near empty suburban housing divisions. With the busted homes if you lower prices enough, there will be a market created at a certain point. Yet this takes time. But with commercial real estate you may have no market at any price. Much of the CRE space is used as a business. With no business there is no need for CRE. So we have a giant $3.5 trillion market of loans that are largely toxic but the market seems to be ignoring this. Take a look at the combined CRE collapse from data collected by MIT: …..

read more at http://www.mybudget360.com/commercial-real-estate-collapse-bigger-than-subprime-implosion-%e2%80%93-why-is-the-market-ignoring-the-3-5-trillion-commercial-real-estate-market-implosion-pricing-in-another-bailout/

Debt-Collection Industry Helped Pave the Way for Scott Brown’s Victory in Massachusetts

Debt collectors are near the top of our list of public enemies here at Legal Schnauzer. And they should be near the top of all progressives’ lists now that we know debt collectors played a prominent role in Republican Scott Brown’s victory for Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts.

We have written extensively about the dirtbags that seem to run rampant in the debt-collection field. My wife and I have filed a lawsuit against unethical debt collectors, and that case almost certainly caused someone with connections to the debt-collection business to cheat my wife out of her job at Infinity Property & Casualty. Evidence increasingly suggests that debt collectors played a role in my unlawful termination at UAB.

But now we learn that debt collectors don’t just try to defraud individual consumers. They also are fighting against consumer-protection initiatives–and health-care reform–across the country. That’s why they pulled out all the stops to help elect Scott Brown.

An article at Democratunity.com provides insight into the role debt collectors played in Brown’s victory:

We often hear about the role that the pharmaceutical industry, for-profit health care companies, and big banks have in influencing and corrupting elections and elected officials. But there is another group to add to this list: Debt Collectors. This is a billion dollar industry, and its political agenda goes far beyond the day-to-day regulation of collecting debts. The debt collection industry opposes any number of financial reforms as well as access to health care. Why? Predatory lending and huge health care bills keep people in debt. The more people that are in debt, in turn, the more profitable the industry.

In essence, debt collectors are the bottom-feeders that get rich digging and feeding on the garbage produced by our current system.

Regular Legal Schnauzer readers already know about the bottom-feeding ways of unscrupulous debt collectors. Our personal battle has been against a Pennsylvania-based outfit called NCO and a Birmingham-based law firm called Ingram & Associates.

We’ve operated under the assumption that some debt collectors behave in an honorable fashion. After all, there is nothing wrong with trying to collect a legitimate debt. But a law called the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) must be followed. Unfortunately, the FDCPA is weak, and many debt collectors violate it with impunity. That is the basis of our lawsuit against NCO and Ingram & Associates.

The recent article from Democratunity.com makes us think the entire field is filled with lowlifes. Let’s revisit the statement about why debt collectors oppose health-care reform. It’s because large health-care bills are one of the prime reasons consumers get into debt, and the debt-collection industry fears that reform would help regular Americans stay out of debt. That, of course, would put a crimp in the bottom lines of businesses like NCO and Ingram & Associates.

Disgusting, isn’t it? These people actually want as many Americans as possible to be saddled with burdensome debt. And a press release from the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals (ACA) makes this clear. ACA crows about its role in Scott Brown’s victory and makes it clear why it opposes consumer-protection and health-care reforms:

Read more at http://legalschnauzer.blogspot.com/2010/02/debt-collection-industry-helped-pave.html

Shareholders Forced Political Spending

When we make an investment by buying shares in a corporation are we endorsing the political goals of corporate CEO’s or other corporate executives? For most American citizens, the answer is clearly “NO!”

The recent Supreme Court ruling stating that corporations have the right to spend the shareholders’ money to influence federal elections seems designed to trample on the property rights of individual shareholders, empower the international corporate executive class and distort the electoral process in favor of the pro-corporate Republican Party. It completely fails to protect the property rights of shareholders against politically-motivated abuse by corporate executives.

While the ruling was both bad law and bad for American democracy, as most commentators have stated publicly, few editorialists or pundits have examined how badly the ruling tramples on the property rights of shareholders. I might want to buy shares to fund my retirement or meet unexpected future financial demands. I want my money used in the core missions and functions of the business. I did not invest my money to have it misused by corporate executives to fund their political goals or agenda instead of mine.

Why did this radically activist Supreme Court empower corporate executives to use my money for politics instead of for the legitimate business purposes that are the reasons shareholders bought shares in the first place?

Every member of Congress should support a new federal law that would require all shareholders agree before any corporate money can be spent to influence elections. This does not violate the premise of the Supreme Court ruling that states (incorrectly in my opinion) that corporations have the right to spend corporate funds on elections. Such a law would not require a Constitutional Amendment.

Shareholders should never be forced to make a political contribution to a candidate or campaign that the individual shareholder does not support. These forced contributions are unjust. In fact, corporate executives who spend corporate funds on influencing elections are frankly stealing from the shareholders.

Even before the new federal law is passed, shareholders should consider suing any corporate executives who misuse corporate funds to influence election outcomes directly or indirectly. The lawsuits should seek both to injunction the corporation from using shareholders money without universal approval from all shareholders and to fire the corporate executive involved “with cause” so that any “golden parachute” provisions (where more shareholder money gets stolen by executives) might get blocked.

Any officeholder who fails to support a new federal law restricting corporate executive power and empowering individual shareholders to veto spending corporate money on elections is helping in the politically-motivated theft of shareholder property! We need to identify these officeholders regardless of political party and vote them out of office. They are corrupt!

While corporations are not people, shareholders and corporate executives are people. The corporate executives should not overrule shareholders when it comes to political spending of corporate funds. The corporate executives work for the shareholders and never should be legally permitted to forget this basic fact.

Written by: Stephen Crockett (Host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com ). Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702. Phone: 443-907-2367. Email: midsouthcm@aol.com.

Feel free to publish at no charge without prior approval.

They Still Don’t Get It

By BOB HERBERT

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/opinion/23herbert.html?ref=opinion

How loud do the alarms have to get? There is an economic emergency in the country with millions upon millions of Americans riddled with fear and anxiety as they struggle with long-term joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children.

The door is being slammed on the American dream and the politicians, including the president and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many.

While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

The public interest? Forget about it.

With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.

A new study from the Brookings Institution tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs. You don’t hear about this from the politicians who are always so anxious to tell you, in between fund-raisers and photo-ops, what a great job they’re doing. From 2000 to 2008, the number of poor people in the U.S. grew by 5.2 million, reaching nearly 40 million. That represented an increase of 15.4 percent in the poor population, which was more than twice the increase in the population as a whole during that period.

The study does not include data from 2009, when so many millions of families were just hammered by the recession. So the reality is worse than the Brookings figures would indicate.

Job losses, stagnant or reduced wages over the past decade, and the loss of home equity when the housing bubble burst have combined to take a horrendous toll on families who thought they had done all the right things and were living the dream. A great deal of that bleeding is in the suburbs. The study, compiled by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, said, “Suburbs gained more than 2.5 million poor individuals, accounting for almost half of the total increase in the nation’s poor population since 2000.”

Democrats in search of clues as to why voters are unhappy may want to take a look at the report. In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people — more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population — fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.

The question for Democrats is whether there is anything that will wake them up to their obligation to extend a powerful hand to ordinary Americans and help them take the government, including the Supreme Court, back from the big banks, the giant corporations and the myriad other predatory interests that put the value of a dollar high above the value of human beings.

The Democrats still hold the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress. The idea that they are not spending every waking hour trying to fix the broken economic system and put suffering Americans back to work is beyond pathetic. Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely.

What we’ll get instead is rhetoric. It’s cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.

Those at the bottom of the economic heap seem all but doomed in this environment. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston put the matter in stark perspective after analyzing the employment challenges facing young people in Chicago: “Labor market conditions for 16-19 and 20-24-year-olds in the city of Chicago in 2009 are the equivalent of a Great Depression-era, especially for young black men.”

The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation’s biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it’s not a serious party. That leaves only the Democrats, a party that once championed working people and the poor, but has long since lost its way.

Grayson: Court’s Campaign Finance Decision “Worst Since Dred Scott”

By Nick Baumann

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/grayson-courts-campaign-finance-decision-worst-dredd-scott

Alan Grayson, the first-term Democratic congressman from central Florida, really didn’t like Thursday’s Supreme Court decision legalizing unlimited corporate spending in election campaigns. “It’s the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case,” he told me last night. In Dred Scott, Grayson explained, the Supreme Court decided that neither slaves nor the children of slaves could ever be US citizens. In Citizens United v. FEC, decided Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled “that only huge corporations have any constitutional rights,” Grayson said. “They have the right to bribe, the right to buy elections, the right to reward their elected toadies, and the right to punish the elected representatives who take a stab at doing what’s right.”

I wrote a profile of Grayson for the most recent issue of Mother Jones. You can read the whole thing here.

Like independent campaign finance reform groups, Grayson saw this decision coming. Last week, he filed five bills that he hopes will help counteract the effects of the Court’s decision. On Wednesday night, he launched a website, savedemocracy.net, to rally support for these measures. On Thursday morning, he delivered over 10,000 signatures from a web-based petition to the Supreme Court. After the court issued its decision, he introduced a sixth campaign finance reform bill.

The Court’s decision creates serious problems for the Fair Elections Now Act (FENA), a bill that Grayson co-sponsored that would institute publicly financed elections. “The funding from FENA is a drop in the bucket compared to what the oil companies might spend to defeat representatives who don’t want to drill everywhere,” Grayson warned. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to what Wall Street’s prepared to spend to reward those who vote for bailouts and punish those who won’t.” The Supreme Court has “created a whole new problem…. that really isn’t addressed by that bill,” Grayson said, while emphasizing that he still supported FENA because it is “a step in the right direction, but not sufficient.”

Via Grayson’s website, here are the six bills “and what they aim to accomplish,”:

The Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act (H.R. 4431): Implements a 500% excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees, and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns.

The fifth measure has already gained the support of Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the chair of the House Judiciary committee, Grayson said. Grayson hopes the committee might hold a hearing on that bill sometime in the next 30 days. Grayson circulated his proposals among his colleagues on Thursday. He has a decent record with winning support for populist ideas— last year he signed up over 100 cosponsors for Texas Republican Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Federal Reserve.

Still, what Grayson could really use is the support of President Barack Obama, who has slammed the Supreme Court decision and promised a “forceful” legislative response. Grayson’s bills would certainly qualify. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder has reported that the White House and other Hill Democrats are seriously considering three options for responding to the decision, including one that bears a resemblance to Grayson’s sixth bill—requiring shareholders to approve of independent political expenditures. When we spoke, Grayson also voiced support to another idea Ambinder says is under consideration—a “Stand by Your Ad” requirement. As Ambinder describes it, “The head of an insurance company would be forced to say, ‘I’m Honus Wagner, the CEO of Acme, and I stand by this ad.’” Grayson emphasized that such a move would be consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision today, which explicitly allowed Congress to pass tough disclosure requirements.

Nine-Million-Member Union Coalition Calls For Defeat Of Cadillac Tax

by Sam Stein

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/12/nine-million-member-union_n_420524.html

A coalition of federal and postal employees, numbering nearly nine million members, sent a letter to congressional leaders on Tuesday insisting that the final health care bill not include an excise tax on high-end insurance plans.

Sixteen unions penned the letter amidst increasingly tense negotiations between House and Senate leaders over how to structure the pay-for provision in the final health care bill. The Senate favors the tax, citing its benefits in reeling in health care costs. Approximately 190 House Democrats have signaled that they will oppose it out of concerns that it will unfairly hit working-class families.

The letter from the federal and postal employees frames the tax as both inequitable and potentially damaging to the prospects of recruiting future government employees. The groups write:

“While the excise tax is slated to be imposed on the insurers on so-called high cost plans, the tax will be passed on to enrollees in the form of higher premiums, co-pays or reduced benefits. [Blue Cross blue Shield] plans cover approximately 48 % of [Federal Employees Health Benefits Program] enrollees, or nearly 3.8 million Americans. Single enrollees would be subject to the effects of the tax in 2013, while families are hit in the third year. Including other, non-BC/BS plans, more than one-half of active and retired enrollees will face the effects of these taxes that accumulate to thousands of dollars in the middle to out years of the Senate-passed bill. Because we understand the value of all health care is counted towards the threshold amounts, enrollees with dental or vision coverage, or a Flexible Spending account, could reach the thresholds even sooner and feel the effects of this tax earlier.

Characterizing this tax proposal as a “Cadillac tax” is a misnomer. It hits the average blue collar and white collar employee or annuitant. FEHBP insurers will simply reduce coverage and, as the taxes increase, a downward spiral towards less coverage will ensue, which is antithetical to health care reform’s states purpose. Penalizing FEHBP enrollees with this tax is a huge disincentive to qualified applicants seeking federal or postal employment. It is bad for the government and bad policy overall.

The note to congressional leaders is the latest lobbying salvo by the labor community in opposition to the excise tax. Also on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) hosted several major union leaders to discuss their opposition to the provision.

The unions signing the letter are as follows:

American Federation of Government Employees
American Foreign Service Association
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
American Postal Workers Union
Federal Managers Association
Laborers’ International Union of North America
National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association
National Air Traffic Controller Association
National Association of Letter Carriers
National Association of Postal Supervisors
National Association of Postmasters of the United States
National League of Postmasters of the United States
National Postal Mail Handlers Union
National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association
National Treasury Employees Union
Professional Aviation Safety Specialists

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EDITOR’S NOTE: If you click over to Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com you will find articles where the International Associations of Machinists (IAM) and the Fire Fighters union (IAFF) both came out firmly against this terrible tax provision.

My Congressman Frank Kratovil better get behind the House version of healthcare reform if he wants to get a second term. So far, he has been less than helpful. My vote is nothing he can count on in the Fall at this point as a result.

Jan. 11, 2010

Greetings everyone,

As many of you know, last year the Cecil County Young Democrats organized a team for the MS walk that was held at the University of Delaware. In our first effort, the group raised over $500 for the MS Society. This year we are doing it again, and hope to raise $1,000 for this cause.
Here’s what we want from you:

1) Contribute. There will be a link in this e-mail that will allow you to contribute to the group as a whole, or to an individual participant.

2) Join! We would love to make this a far reaching event for the YDs. We’d love to have some other faces to hang out with on the day of the walk. Also, your added efforts to raise funds will certainly help toward our overall goal

3) Spread the word! Anyone, no matter whether they are in Cecil County or not can contribute to this cause. Even if they do not contribute to our team, or an individual on our team, the MS Society is a great cause and needs the help.

Here is the Cecil County Young Democrats MS Walk Site, which will allow you to donate or join as a participant.

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR/Walk/DEDWalkEvents?pg=team&fr_id=13381&team_id=186245

Thanks to all, and hope to see you at the Young Dems meeting tomorrow night!

Jobeth Bowers

The Other Plot to Wreck America

by Frank Rick, New York Times

THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.

The window for change is rapidly closing. Health care, Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have exhausted Washington’s already limited capacity for heavy lifting, especially in an election year. The White House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has repeatedly announced that “everybody agrees that the recession is over” — which is technically true from an economist’s perspective and certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs, homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political system where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.

It’s against this backdrop that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical. This is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who is the inquiry’s chairman, told me in interviews late last year that he has been busy deploying a tough investigative staff and will not allow the proceedings to devolve into a typical blue-ribbon Beltway exercise in toothless bloviation.

He wants to examine the financial sector’s “greed, stupidity, hubris and outright corruption” — from traders on the ground to the board room. “It’s important that we deliver new information,” he said. “We can’t just rehash what we’ve known to date.” He understands that if he fails to make news or to tell the story in a way that is comprehensible and compelling enough to arouse Americans to demand action, Wall Street and Washington will both keep moving on, unchallenged and unchastened……

(Click on link below to read the rest of this article)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10rich.html

Obama is totally wrong in backing the tax provisions of the Senate version of the healthcare reform bill. Taxing health insurance benefits (like the Senate bill does) is a tax on the middle class. The House bill taxes the very, very wealthy.

Obama promised not to push for middle class tax increases.

I am considering not voting for Obama in the future and publicly pushing for real economic populist Democratic primary challengers for Obama and all corporatist Senate or House Democrats. We need real Democrats in office from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. We need pro-working class, pro-middle class, pro-labor Democrats!

In solidarity,

Stephen Crockett