The Retiree Advocate

Will the legislature raise new revenue?

2011-12-30T17:52:00.000-08:00

By Jeff Johnson

As 2011 draws to a close, the effects of what is a really a second “Great Depression” continue to ravage the Washington State economy, our public budgets, our critical social services, and our safety net. Unfortunately the legislature was able to do little in December to help.

On December 14, after sending the Governor an administrative savings bill that reduces the $2 billion budget deficit by 24 percent, the legislature adjourned. While many expected more from the Special Session because of pressure from advocacy groups and the occupy movement both in Olympia and in legislative districts, no new revenues were raised and no jobs bills were passed. The real showdown over jobs, revenue and services will confront us in January.

It came as no surprise that the legislature was unable to solve a $2 billion revenue problem in an end-of-the-year Special Session. In November, Governor Gregoire put out a set of austerity options to cut $2 billion from the budget. Then just before the start of the Special Session she announced a willingness to support a temporary one-half cent sales tax increase. But no path to resolution was worked out between the Governor’s office and the House and Senate. And apparently there was no magic wand either.

The legislature can now do three things to increase revenue and create jobs. The question remains: What are they willing to take on, and how hard are they willing to fight?

First, a joint Senate and House proposal for an infrastructure bonding proposal could be passed with a 60% vote in the legislature. The House and the Senate differ in magnitude of the proposed bond offering and types of projects it would fund. But the common goal is to dedicate a portion of a capital revenue stream from which to bond in order to build or repair needed projects now to help lift us out of this depressed economy.

With $2 billion in infrastructure bonding we could create 15,000 construction jobs in storm water clean-up projects, energy retrofits, repair of bridges and state park infrastructures, etc.; create another 15,000 induced jobs in other sectors; and generate $30 million in sales taxes for our operating budget.

Thirty thousand jobs would lower our overall unemployment by more than 10 percent and our unemployment rate by 1%. Now this is something to write home about. At this writing the House is considering about $ 1.8 billion and the Senate somewhere between $850 million and $1 billion in infrastructure bonds. We encourage both houses to consider $2 billion.

Second, the legislature can securitize a small portion of operating funds through a simple majority vote (though there is still a legal question over whether it requires a 50% or 60% vote) allowing the legislature to borrow money from the future to pay for healthcare services and jobs now. This would be bridge financing until the federal Affordable Care Act and associated funding takes effect in 2014.

Finally, the legislature needs to raise new revenue. During the past three years $15 billion in budget deficits have been closed through $10 billion in service cuts and jobs cuts and approximately $5 billion in federal stimulus money. Now it’s time to raise revenue. Although the legislature could raise revenue by creating new taxes, raising existing tax rates, or by closing tax loopholes, it is unlikely that they will be able to meet the supermajority requirement imposed by I-1053. With supermajorities, politics and ideology trump good policies.

So the question is: Will the legislature put a comprehensive revenue package out to the public for a spring vote? A comprehensive package could close tax loopholes benefiting banks and corporations that have not paid their fair share over the years, create a wealth tax on our state’s highest income residents, create a state capital gains tax, and fund a working families tax rebate, returning a large portion of sales tax payments to workers in low-income employment. Any of these ways of raising or adjusting revenue would address both the grievances and the needs of the 99%.

The Governor and many senators are talking about raising the sales tax by ½ cent over the next three years. This is the simplest and quickest way to raise revenue. But since it is primarily the working class that will have to foot the bill, will the people vote for it?

Finally we need to watch out for any trades the Governor and legislative leadership are willing to make to send a revenue package of any sort to the people for a vote. Demonizing state employees, privatizing government functions, and attacking collective bargaining rights are all shortsighted and unacceptable.

The 2012 legislative session and political season will test the mettle of the 99%.
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Jeff Johnson is president of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, and a member of PSARA.

Socialism for the rich:

2011-12-30T17:49:00.000-08:00

Socialism for the rich:
The Fed’s secret bailout of the world’s banks

By Mike Andrew

If you were outraged by the $800 billion TARP bailout of US banks and investment houses, hold on to your hat – you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

A GAO (General Accounting Office) audit of the Federal Reserve has revealed that between 2007 and 2010 the Fed bailed out US and foreign banks to the tune of $16 trillion. Some independent estimates put the total as high as $29 trillion.

The money was handed out at near zero interest, and some of it has reportedly been loaned back to the US government. In other words, the Fed not only “saved” the world’s biggest banks, but also created an opportunity for them to make money at the expense of US taxpayers.

According to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

To put this huge sum into perspective, remember that the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning the whole of its 223-year history is only $14.5 trillion.

The budget that is being publicly debated with so much sound and fury in Congress only amounts to $3.5 trillion, yet the bailouts authorized by the Fed were never publicly debated by anyone in any venue.

Some of the Fed’s transactions were already known – the so-called “Maiden Lane Transactions” whereby the Fed created a new financial vehicle to purchase the assets of Bear Stearns and AIG, for example.

Many of the Fed’s deals remained secret, however, until the first-ever GAO audit was completed in December.

Since the global financial crisis began in 2007, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has worked overtime to save Wall Street's biggest banks while concealing his actions from Congress behind an alphabet soup of special facilities designed to transfer funds to Wall Street.

It literally took an act of Congress to get Bernanke to release information detailing the Fed's actions. Progressive Democrat Alan Grayson (D-FL) joined with Libertarian Republican Ron Paul (R-TX) to amend the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act to require an audit of the Federal Reserve.

Bloomberg News also filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to acquire documentation of the Fed’s lending.

Based on those documents, economics professor and Bloomberg contributor Randall Wray estimated that even the GAO’s $16 trillion figure is far too low. According to Wray, the real amount distributed by the Fed is closer to $29 trillion.

As you might expect, the biggest US banks and investment houses took away the biggest haul, with Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch (now a division of Bank of America), and Bank of America leading the pack.

However, British, Swiss, German, French, Belgian, and South Korean banks also got a piece of the action.

Besides the sheer volume of money the Fed handed out, the GAO report also revealed that the Fed helped many financial institutions to make money off the bailout.
According to the GAO report, the Fed outsourced most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors, many of which were also getting extremely low-interest secret loans.

The Fed outsourced virtually all the operations of their emergency lending programs to huge financial corporations like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, while giving the same firms trillions of dollars in loans at near zero interest rates.

Altogether about two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley, for example, got the largest no-bid contract to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG – a contract worth $108.4 million – while it received more than $2 trillion in bailout money.
Another appalling fact revealed by the GAO is that the Fed has no system to deal with conflicts of interest, despite the serious potential for abuse.

According to the GAO report, the Fed even provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the very same banks and investment houses that were given emergency loans.

“Many Americans are struggling to understand why banks deserve such preferential treatment while millions of homeowners are being denied assistance and are at increasing risk of foreclosure,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a letter to Bloomberg News.

We welcome three to the Board!

2011-12-30T17:46:00.001-08:00

The following three new members were elected to the Executive Board at the December meeting of the Board:

Susan Levy is a retired professor of economics and labor relations at Shoreline Community College and former president of AFT Washington. She currently serves as vice president of the Retiree Chapter of AFT WA and as their representative to the Social Security Works WA Coalition.

Tom Lux, a 35-year member of the Machinists Union, was on the union staff for eight years. He currently serves as a member of the Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Committee. He is on the visiting committee of the Harry Bridges Chair at the U.W. and is the WA state vice president of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association.

Mark McDermott is a 40-year activist in labor, anti-poverty, economic justice, immigrant rights and faith-based social justice movements. He currently serves on the board of One America and on the Advisory Committee of the Faith Action Network. He is doing popular justice education with a number of unions and community-based organizations.

Reed Wacker, our new webmaster

2011-12-30T17:45:00.001-08:00

Reed Wacker, a recent graduate of the Web Design program at Seattle Central Community College and a 1998 graduate of Seattle’s Roosevelt High, becomes PSARA’s new web master this month.

Lorraine Pozzi, who brought us into the 21st Century by creating PSARA’s excellent web page, has requested to be relieved of her duties. She has been a stalwart volunteer, whose skills and insights have been a superb resource for our organization.

“Reed brings skill, enthusiasm and commitment to this important assignment,” PSARA President Robby Stern said. “He is creating a new web page design, which will be posted in March. Until then, our web page will continue in its present form.”

In addition to his design skills, Reed has had media experience as a writer for the Huffington Post and as a radio host for 99.9 KISW FM.

New target for growth in 2012

2011-12-30T17:43:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! We wish for all our members good health – and an abundance of political activity throughout Election Year 2012!

Election activity – and adding new members to PSARA – now there’s a marriage made in heaven!

If you were with us for our Membership Meeting and Holiday Party, you know that we set for ourselves an ambitious goal for growth in 2012. Two hundred and seventy-five new members – a significant step up from the 250 we added in 2011. Ambitious – but achievable in the context of working throughout 2012 for candidates and campaigns that will make a difference.

As you read each new issue of The Retiree Advocate, make a mental note of the articles your friends and political associates will find stimulating. Then stick the newsletter in your purse or pocket. Keep it with you all month long!

Use The Retiree Advocate as a conversation opener – then invite your new friend to join PSARA, the activist, leading-edge organization for retirees – and for all who hope to retire.

Recruiting new PSARA members of all ages. Building PSARA’s membership strength even as you engage in election activity. On to 275 new members! On to a people’s victory in November

Recapturing the revolutionary spirit of MLK Jr.

2011-12-30T17:39:00.000-08:00

By Larry Gossett

This year will mark the thirtieth year the MLK Jr. Celebration Committee has organized a broad based, grassroots community salute to the legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the greater Seattle area. We are involving hundreds of people from the Black, Latino, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islander, labor, faith based, environmental and progressive white neighborhoods located in every part of the Puget Sound Region.

In order to celebrate and focus most accurately on what Dr. King was fighting for in the last three years of his life, our committee has selected the theme “Recapturing Martin Luther King’s Revolutionary Spirit!”

During the years 1966-68, Dr. King significantly expanded his dream for America. He was organizing a Poor People’s March with the aim of closing down the United States Congress until legislation was passed to eliminate poverty in our nation. He spoke out uncompromisingly against the war in Vietnam. And, he was brutally murdered standing up for sanitation workers in Memphis.

Dr. King was killed because he was advocating for a radical political and economic democracy in our country.

We will highlight this more truthful reflection of Dr. King’s legacy as we mobilize thousands of people to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday at Garfield High School on Monday, January 16th, 2012. Check out the website at www.mlkseattle.org

As usual we have organized a great array of workshops, covering such topics as “Mass Incarceration in a Color Blind Society, “How to Redistribute Wealth in a Corporate Economy,” “Closing the Achievement Gap in the Public Schools,” and many more. These workshops will take place from 9:30a.m. until 11:00a.m. in classrooms inside Garfield school. At 11:00a.m., we will host a community rally inside the Garfield gymnasium. At 12:30p.m., we will begin our annual march from Garfield to the Federal Building on 2nd and Madison.

Please join us.

Ryan-Wyden scheme would wreck Medicare

2011-12-30T17:38:00.000-08:00

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has joined one of the bitterest foes of Medicare, Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), to propose “bipartisan” legislation that would give private, for-profit insurance companies entry into the program. The Ryan-Wyden proposal was hailed by GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, and condemned by liberal Democrats, including California Representative Pete Stark, who said the proposal “ends Medicare as we know it, pure and simple.”

Here’s AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka’s assessment:

By Rich Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

The Ryan-Wyden proposal cripples Medicare in order to give the Republican Party a political boost and to earn Senator Wyden praise from powerful people who care more about the appearance of bipartisanship and insurance industry profits than the health of America's seniors.

The basic idea is to have private for-profit insurance companies compete with traditional Medicare. But we already know this does not work since Medicare is more cost-effective than private plans and for-profit insurance companies "compete" by cherry-picking healthier patients and making it harder for their sicker patients to get the care they need.

This zombie idea has already been tried and has already failed. We tried it before with Medicare Advantage, which failed to reduce costs or deliver quality care. Medicare Advantage's costs were 13 percent higher than traditional Medicare.

Rep. Ryan spent 2011 on the defensive, defending his politically deadly proposal to replace traditional Medicare with vouchers for private insurance. The Congressional Budget Office already found that plan would increase overall health care costs by $34 trillion over 75 years and increase out-of-pocket costs by $6,000 per senior per year.

Ryan-Wyden is not about cost containment, and even its authors admit that vouchers would not be more cost-effective than traditional Medicare. So as a fallback they propose a budget cap, but they neglect to provide the necessary details about how their failsafe mechanism would work or who would pay the price for failure.

The Ryan-Wyden plan betrays a fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem of health care cost growth. We agree that if America fails to bring health care cost growth under control, health care costs will eventually bankrupt families, private businesses, state governments, and the federal government. But Medicare, which is more cost-effective than private insurance, is not the problem, it is the solution to runaway health care costs.

It is the height of irony that the Ryan-Wyden plan destabilizes the most effective tool we have to control health care cost growth, which is Medicare. Under Ryan-Wyden, private for-profit insurance companies will cherry pick the healthiest seniors and stick Medicare with sicker and more costly seniors, driving up costs for Medicare, fragmenting and destabilizing the Medicare risk pool, and leaving traditional Medicare to wither on the vine.

In the end, the answer to the problem of health care cost growth is for more people to use Medicare, not fewer. The Ryan-Wyden zombie proposal takes us in exactly the wrong direction.

Say NO to Social Security office closure!

2011-12-30T17:35:00.000-08:00

By Steve Kofahl and Robby Stern

PSARA will participate in a community meeting to oppose the neighborhood Social Security field office closures being planned by the Social Security Administration (SSA).

At 1:30 p.m. Friday, January 13, we will gather at the Chinatown/International District Community Center at 719 8th Avenue in Seattle, to demonstrate our opposition to SSA’s harsh, bureaucratic decision to close its long-established International District and Belltown community field offices, in favor of a new “Metro” office in the Jackson Federal Building.

SSA Regional Commissioner, Stanley Friendship met with community representatives December 19 to hear their concerns about his decision. Meeting with PSARA President Robby Stern; Minority Executive Directors Coalition Co-Chair Sharyne Shiu Thornton; Seattle NOW representative Thalia Syracopoulos; and Seattle Community Law Center Executive Director Alex Doolittle, Commissioner Friendship made it clear his decision is “set in stone.” The commissioner said SSA’s main motive was to save money in the face of shrinking budgets.

The delegation learned that a search for space for a consolidated office was limited to Seattle’s Downtown core between Yesler Street and Lake Union. Confining the search in this way excludes the International District and South Seattle, exactly the areas where an accessible neighborhood office is most acutely needed.

Friendship suggested that if they could meet the needs of 90 percent of their clients at the new location, the needs for personal service of the other 10 percent could be sacrificed.

The Agency is determined to compel Social Security beneficiaries to rely more on telephones and computers and less on person-to-person service. But many beneficiaries cannot use internet self service, and many, for language and other reasons, cannot communicate effectively by telephone.

Many poor and homeless persons lack photo ID and can’t afford to pay for it. They should not be turned away. Disabled individuals should have adequate disabled parking available. Language should not be a barrier to service.

Commissioner Friendship asserted that security would be improved at the new site. He denied that SSA’s office move would be out of compliance with Department of Justice guidelines that recommend against co-location of high security (ATF, IRS, FBI) and low security (like SSA) agencies.

In fact, the new Seattle Federal Building office would not necessarily be more secure. The 1995 Murrah Building bombing in a comparable facility in Oklahoma City cost the lives of 16 SSA employees and 24 of their clients. That bombing was a major reason for the establishment of the Justice Department guidelines.

To reverse this decision will require pressure from elected officials and from the impacted communities. Populations that require face-to-face service are concentrated in central and south Seattle. To make their access more difficult, or impossible, is to deny equitable service. This is simply unacceptable.

Does $160,000 a year in budget savings justify singling out the most vulnerable in our society for denial of government services? How do you put a price on denying service to 30 people a day?

Please call your elected representatives to register your objections. Please join us at the public meeting in the International District on January 13.

Confronting the need for long-term care

2011-12-30T17:33:00.000-08:00

PSARA members are invited to participate with the broader community at the Seattle Care Congress from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, February 11, at the Greenwood Community Senior Center, 525 N. 85th Street in Seattle. Lunch will be provided.

Our country and region are facing a severe and growing “care gap.” The number of persons needing long-term care services is expected to reach 27 million by 2050, while the current direct care workforce is only 3 million. PSARA has joined a national campaign to address this ticking time bomb. No one wants to age in an institution if it is possible to receive the necessary care in one’s own home.

Today individuals and families across the country are struggling to find dependable, affordable quality care that meets the full range of their needs. That goal will not be achieved until the direct care workforce is protected by labor laws that assure them they can achieve a decent living for themselves and their families.

Today, nearly half the direct care workforce earns less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. In addition, there are neither uniform training standards nor a meaningful career ladder to provide opportunities for advancement.

Moreover, many direct care givers are immigrants who lack documentation. Without a pathway to citizenship, these care givers are pushed into the underground economy, where they live in constant fear of deportation.

The Caring Across Generations campaign is based on the principle that all members of our society deserve a dignified quality of life and dignified quality jobs. To achieve that goal, we must:

• Create sufficient jobs to meet the growing demand for direct care.

• Transform the quality of today’s direct care jobs by ensuring fair wages, access to health insurance, and protection of health and safety.

• Create a rewarding career path and linguistically and culturally relevant training programs for undocumented care workers and their families.

• Create training and certification programs that provide a path to legal status and citizenship for undocumented care workers and their families.

• Support individuals and families who hire direct care workers by providing access to Medicaid/Medicare and by creating tax credits to assist with the costs of direct care.

• Support individuals and families who are providing unpaid kin care by establishing Social Security care-giving credits, paid family leave, and childcare subsidies.

This multi-year national campaign recognizes that caring for the aging and for people with disabilities is a national responsibility. Please join us on February 11 as we launch this campaign in the Puget Sound region.

-- Robby Stern

Massey GUILTY! in Upper Big Branch tragedy

2011-12-30T17:31:00.000-08:00

By Will Parry

The verdict is in. Massey Energy and its parent company are guilty of multiple violations of mine safety regulations that caused the horrific underground deaths of 29 miners at Massey’s non-union Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia on April 5, 2010.

For these corporate murders, not a single Massey honcho faces prison. The company bought its way out of criminal prosecution and prison terms with a $209 million settlement. How many such ghastly tragedies must the nation endure before simple justice is done?

The explosion apparently occurred when a spark from the friction caused by cutting coal ignited an explosive accumulation of methane, causing a fireball. The fireball in turn ignited coal dust that had been allowed to build up. The coal dust explosion raged throughout more than two miles of mine passages. And 29 men died.

A 972-page Labor Department report confirmed that “unlawful policies and practices” were the “root cause of the tragedy.” The report identified 369 violations of the federal Mine Safety and Health Act (MSHA), including twelve flagrant violations that contributed directly to the fatal explosion.

Massey even kept two sets of books – one logging safety hazards, the other, for the eyes of mine inspectors, with the hazards edited out. The company also illegally warned their supervisors of impending inspections, and created an environment of fear to prevent whistleblowers from reporting violations.

The Labor Department’s findings were basically confirmed by a team of experts in coal mining, mining law and occupational safety who conducted a six-month independent study ordered by West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin.

Responsibility for the explosion “lies with the management of Massey Energy,” Manchin’s experts reported. “By frequently and knowingly violating the law and blatantly disregarding known safety practices, Massey exhibited a corporate mentality that placed the drive to produce coal above worker safety.”

Despite the size of the fine, the families of the men killed in the accident consider the settlement to be justice denied. They want the responsible executives tried and convicted. But weak mining laws give prosecutors a steep uphill battle to convict. And legislation to toughen the act has thus far been blocked by the coal industry’s intense lobbying.

“Even though you have the biggest mine disaster in 40 years, there’s been absolutely no federal legislation flowing from it,” said Tony Oppegard, a Kentucky attorney who represents miners.

“Until someone goes to jail, there will be no justice done here,” said Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers.

The statistics are cruel: Three hundred and sixty-nine safety violations. Twenty-nine working miners hurled, choked or crushed to death in the airless dark a thousand feet down.

We need to feel, even if only vicariously, the searing anguish of the families. The report from Governor Manchin’s team quotes Leo Long, an elderly retired miner testifying at a Congressional field hearing one month after the explosion. Long’s grandson, 31-year-old Ronald Lee Maynor, the father of two, was one of the 29 who lost their lives.

“It just tore us apart, broke our hearts,” Long said. “I cry every day and every night. I can’t help it.” He then pleaded with the members of the committee. “I beg you. Please do something.”

Pipeline jobs are pipe dreams

2011-12-30T17:29:00.001-08:00

The Keystone XL pipeline “will put tens of thousands of Americans to work immediately.” So says House Speaker John Boehner, to thunderous applause from Big Oil. The Wall Street Journal, no friend of labor, promises 13,000 union jobs. The website of the American Petroleum Institute proclaims: “Jobs for the 99 percent!” Not to be outdone, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce foresees the creation of “more than 250,000 permanent jobs!”

The U.S. State Department sings a different tune: Its sober estimate found that at most, the project would create 6,000 temporary construction jobs, very few of which would go to local hires. Similarly, a detailed study by the Cornell University Global Labor Institute, which had no axe to grind, concluded that the project would temporarily employ between 2,500 and 4,650 construction workers.

Working with data provided by TransCanada, the company with the pipeline contract, the Cornell institute said most jobs would be temporary and non-local. Workers capable of performing sophisticated pipeline tasks would be brought in from outside the region, the Cornell study predicted.

Even Robert Jones, TransCanada’s vice president for pipelines, could offer only a muted forecast of “hundreds” of permanent jobs.

The bottom line: The Cornell economists found that overall, the pipeline project would be a job killer, because it would kick down the road the infrastructure investment urgently needed to switch to clean and economical renewable energy. That’s where the real jobs are: Carpenters weatherizing homes in Ohio, steelworkers building wind turbines in Indiana, tool and die makers manufacturing parts for electric cars in Michigan, etc.

Let’s give the Cornell researchers the last word: “Keystone XL will not be a major source of U.S. jobs, nor will it play any substantial role at all in putting Americans back to work.”

Amen. And all the wind from Speaker Boehner won’t turn a single energy-producing turbine.

-- Rap Lewis

Bring war billions home, mayors urge

2011-12-30T17:28:00.000-08:00

The nation’s mayors have called on President Obama and the Congress to stop squandering human lives and $126 billion a year in Iraq and Afghanistan and “bring those war dollars home to meet vital human needs.”

Overwhelmingly approved at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Baltimore, a resolution introduced by Mayor Kitty Piercy of Eugene, Oregon, called for the billions being spent in the two wars to be used instead to “rebuild our infrastructure, aid municipal and state governments, develop a new economy based upon renewable, sustainable energy, and reduce the national debt.”

“Mayors call on our country to turn war dollars back into peace dollars, to bring our loved ones home and to focus our national resources on building security and prosperity here at home,” Mayor Piercy said. “Our children and families long for and call for real investment in the future of America. It is past due.”

Being in daily contact with the sentiments of their constituents, the nation’s mayors, as a group, are often politically in advance of their representatives at the federal level. In 1971, for example, they called for an end to the Vietnam War. And at their 2009 meeting, they unanimously endorsed the enactment of a single-payer health care system.

Speaking in support of this year’s resolution, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said “that we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kanduhar and not in Baltimore and Kansas City boggles the mind.”

Mayor Dave Norris of Charlottesville, Virginia, noted that “it is our citizens who are being asked to fund these wars with their tax dollars. And it is our communities that struggle when huge sums of money are being diverted from local priorities to military adventurism and ‘nation-building’ activities abroad.”

-- Rap Lewis

The nation’s mayors have called on President Obama and the Congress to stop squandering human lives and $126 billion a year in Iraq and Afghanistan and “bring those war dollars home to meet vital human needs.”

Overwhelmingly approved at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Baltimore, a resolution introduced by Mayor Kitty Piercy of Eugene, Oregon, called for the billions being spent in the two wars to be used instead to “rebuild our infrastructure, aid municipal and state governments, develop a new economy based upon renewable, sustainable energy, and reduce the national debt.”

“Mayors call on our country to turn war dollars back into peace dollars, to bring our loved ones home and to focus our national resources on building security and prosperity here at home,” Mayor Piercy said. “Our children and families long for and call for real investment in the future of America. It is past due.”

Being in daily contact with the sentiments of their constituents, the nation’s mayors, as a group, are often politically in advance of their representatives at the federal level. In 1971, for example, they called for an end to the Vietnam War. And at their 2009 meeting, they unanimously endorsed the enactment of a single-payer health care system.

Speaking in support of this year’s resolution, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said “that we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kanduhar and not in Baltimore and Kansas City boggles the mind.”

Mayor Dave Norris of Charlottesville, Virginia, noted that “it is our citizens who are being asked to fund these wars with their tax dollars. And it is our communities that struggle when huge sums of money are being diverted from local priorities to military adventurism and ‘nation-building’ activities abroad.”

Toward national long-term care insurance

2011-12-30T17:25:00.001-08:00

By Will Parry

The late Senator Edward Kennedy recognized the need for an insurance program that would provide services and supports for those Americans, millions in number, who become functionally disabled.

Kennedy directed his staff to work on the issue. The result was legislation that became the CLASS Act – for “Community Living Assistance Services and Supports.”

When President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, the CLASS program was established as a national, voluntary insurance program for the purchase of long-term services and supports.

As the name indicates, the intent of the legislation is to enable persons with disabilities to live out their lives in their own homes, or in another community setting, rather than in a nursing home.

The program would be open to any working adult who makes voluntary premium payments every month for at least five years.

Eligible adults would receive a cash benefit of no less than $50 a day. The actual daily amount would depend on the degree of impairment or disability. The money could be used to purchase non-medical services and supports – in-home care, for example – needed to maintain residence in the community.

The program would be financed entirely by premiums paid voluntarily by those persons who elected to enroll. The law specifically prohibits any taxpayer subsidy.

Unfortunately, the voluntary nature of enrollment has sidetracked the program in its present form. Healthy individuals would be unlikely to enroll. Those who elected to pay the monthly premiums would be persons most likely to incur a major and costly long-term disability.

Either mandatory enrollment by all working adults or a substantial tax subsidy would solve the funding problem. Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, says the law clearly gives her the authority to make the necessary changes without Congressional intervention.

Republicans are seeking repeal of the CLASS Act in pursuit of their goal of destroying the Affordable Care Act piece by piece.

Senior and disability advocates are calling on Congress to place the program on hold while workable funding mechanisms are explored. The program is urgently needed now. As the population ages, the need for the program will explode.

The White House opposes repeal. Obama’s 2012 budget seeks $93.5 million for a vast “information and education” campaign with the goal of having 7.7 million people in the program by 2015.

More than 50 senior and disability rights groups, unions and other advocacy organizations have sent a joint letter to House and Senate leaders calling on them not to repeal the legislation.

“We urge continued dialogue and development of a viable path forward,” the groups wrote. Their letter states that 70 percent of persons older than 65 will need long-term care services, which are not covered by Medicare.

Modest as it is, CLASS provides a framework for a universal insurance program that could protect every American against being impoverished by the costs of long-term care. It could stand alongside Social Security and Medicare as one of the nation’s hallmark social programs.

Senator Kennedy’s foresight has placed affordable, community-based long-term care on the national agenda. Clearing away the obstacles to implementation of the CLASS Act would make his vision a reality.

Dems win payroll tax cut as Republicans cave

2011-12-30T17:24:00.000-08:00

By Mike Andrew

Congressional Republicans caved to political pressure and passed the two-month payroll tax cut extension favored by Democrats on December 23. Pres. Obama signed the bill into law the same day.

Very similar to the plan passed by a bipartisan 89-10 vote in the Senate on December 17, the measure Obama signed extends the 4.2% payroll tax, continues expanded unemployment benefits, and heads off a reduction in Medicare payments to doctors through February.

Without a deal, the current tax cut would have expired December 31, reducing take-home pay for 160 million workers by an average of $1000 per year.

“This is some good news, just in the nick of time for the holidays,” Obama said. “When Congress returns I urge them to keep working without drama, without delay, to reach an agreement” on extending the tax cut for all of 2012.
It was a political victory for the president and his party, but the success was tempered by the compromises built into the legislation.

The deal calls on Obama to decide within 60 days whether to approve or reject the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. The President will be under intense pressure both from the oil lobby and from the environmental community.

No one really wanted a mere two month extension. Both parties agreed that if the payroll tax was going to be cut at all, it should have been cut for the entire year of 2012.

The sticking point was the “pay-fors” – how to increase revenues and/or cut other spending to offset the estimated $200 billion cost of a year-long payroll tax cut.

Pres. Obama proposed to cover the costs by imposing a surtax on those earning more than $1 million annually. Republicans wanted to use the payroll tax cut as an excuse to cut social safety net programs.

Rather than tackle this issue, the Senate voted for a two-month extension that could be paid for with relatively minor cuts around the edges of the federal budget.

Although House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) had previously agreed to pass the Senate compromise bill, he backed out of the deal at the last minute under pressure from Tea Party supporters in his own caucus who hoped for a showdown on budget issues.

Republicans once again found themselves in the position of defending low taxes for the rich, high taxes for working people, and cuts to programs benefiting seniors and low income workers.

Even the Wall Street Journal warned them that their position was politically untenable.

“[W]e wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest,” the WSJ wrote in an editorial.

In the end, the political pressure forced House Republicans to reach a compromise.

Tea Party Republicans weren’t the only ones opposing the payroll tax cut, however.

Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was skeptical of using money intended to fund Social Security for tax relief, no matter how welcome it might be.

"My concern is diverting hundreds of billions of dollars from the Social Security trust fund into that immediate tax relief," Sanders said. "So I would love to see tax relief, but done in a different way."

Sanders had previously announced he would introduce a bill to “scrap the cap” – in other words, to apply the same payroll tax already paid by more than nine out of 10 Americans to those with incomes over $250,000 a year.

This, he said, would guarantee that Social Security would remain solvent for the foreseeable future and that the tax used to pay for it would be fair.

More drilling, despite BP disaster

2011-12-30T17:22:00.000-08:00

Ignoring the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, House Republicans are calling for a massive expansion of offshore oil-and-gas leasing, including opening the way for drilling rigs in the fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio) has a plan to open areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts for drilling, and to lift the congressional ban on oil-and-gas leasing in most of the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Washington State’s own Rep. Doc Hastings, Fourth District Republican, has introduced legislation that would authorize drilling for oil and gas in the ANWR. Hastings chairs the House Natural Resources Committee.

The Republicans argue that expanded energy production will create jobs, reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil and generate revenue for improving the infrastructure. Democrats too want the infrastructure restored, but want the improvements funded by higher taxes on the wealthy.

Strengthen Social Security in 2012

2011-12-30T17:19:00.000-08:00

By Robby Stern

At its final 2011 coalition meeting, the Social Security Works Washington Coalition adopted priorities for protecting and strengthening Social Security in 2012. PSARA has embraced these priorities as our priorities for Social Security.

Over the past year, the Coalition successfully fought efforts to weaken Social Security through the application of the chained CPI formula that would reduce the annual cost of living increases and the proposal to raise the age of eligibility. We have been unsuccessful in our efforts to stop the cutting of the payroll deduction that is likely to be extended into 2012.

Also in 2011, the Coalition embarked on an educational campaign and particularly made efforts to reach out to young people with the goal of fighting the propaganda that Social Security will not be there for them when they are ready to retire. Besides releasing the video “Just Scrap the Cap” which has been viewed by more than 63,000 people, we held well-attended educational events at Everett Community College and University of Washington.

At the event at Everett Community College, Rep. Rick Larsen committed to supporting the elimination of the cap when it comes before the House for a vote. We now have that commitment from Rep. McDermott and Rep. Larsen but we can and must do better.
This year, our Congressional allies introduced in the House and the Senate legislation to eliminate the cap on contributions. The 2012 elections will be very important in determining whether this goal can be achieved in the near term.

In 2012, PSARA will work with our Coalition partners to make elimination of the cap a major election issue. We will tie scrapping the cap to the interests of the 99% rather than the 1%, pointing out that the elimination of the cap should result in much needed improvements in Social Security. These improvements include raising the benefits received by low income earners, increasing survivor benefits, restoring funding for child survivors up to age 22 to assist them in paying for higher education and expanding survivor benefits to include domestic partners.

Our local coalition is urging the national campaign, led by the Strengthen Social Security Coalition, to adopt a similar program around the country.

Social Security Works WA will also expand our educational outreach with plans presently in the works for an educational event at Highline Community College in early 2012.

We anticipate further attacks on Social Security and will be responding as necessary.

Be on the look out for “Scrap the Cap” buttons as we work to popularize this effort. Wear them proudly and explain to people when they ask, what we are doing and why!

Home-like care? Or a nursing home?

2011-12-30T17:17:00.001-08:00

Economic status is compelling many elderly persons in the Latino, African American and Asian communities to exhaust what resources they have and end their lives in often inferior Medicaid-supported nursing homes.

Between 1999 and 2008, the number of elderly Latinos living in U.S. nursing homes increased by 54.9 percent; Asians increased by 54.1 percent; and African Americans increased by 10.8 percent. Over the same decade, the number of white nursing home residents decreased by 10.2 percent.

Research has shown that in communities of color, nursing homes are often of lower quality and are more likely to close. In predominantly white areas, where residents have higher incomes, home-like assisted living facilities are more likely to be available.

“We know those alternatives are not equally available, accessible or affordable to everybody, certainly not to many minority elders,” said Zhanlian Feng, assistant professor of community health at Brown University, who published a study on the issue.

As policymakers work to shift the emphasis in long-term care facilities from nursing homes to home and community-based services, they should address the existing racial and economic disparities, Feng said.

Meetings and Events

2011-12-30T17:16:00.000-08:00

PSARA Government Relations Committee: 12 noon – 1:30 p.m., Tuesday, January 10, Room 226, Seattle Labor Temple, 2800 First Avenue. Help plan PSARA’s participation in the 2012 legislative session. All PSARA members welcome.

Community Meeting to Fight Closure & Consolidation of Social Security Field Offices: 1:30 p.m.– 3 p.m., Friday, January 13, Chinatown/International District Community Center, 719 8th Avenue South, Seattle. Join with diverse communities as we organize to fight the consolidation of the Seattle Social Security Field Offices into the Jackson Federal Building.

30th Anniversary Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration: Join with PSARA on Monday, January 16, at Garfield High School, 23rd Avenue at East Jefferson, Seattle. Workshops at 9:30 a.m., rally at 11 a.m. and march at 12:30 pm.. The theme: "Recapturing MLK Jr.’s Revolutionary Spirit!"

PSARA Executive Board Meeting: 1p.m. – 3 p.m., Thursday, January 19, Central Area Senior Center, 500 30th Avenue S., Seattle. All PSARA members are welcome.

Seattle Care Congress: Join with PSARA and other allies as we launch the local version of the national Caring Across Generations campaign, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, February 11, at the Greenwood Community Senior Center. Lunch will be provided.

Senior Lobby Day: 8a.m. registration, 9 a.m. program begins, Thursday, February 23, United Churches, 110 11th Ave. SE, Olympia. Join with PSARA members and others from across the state to make our priorities known to our legislators. PSARA will be organizing car pools for our members. Please contact Chuck Richards, legaffairs@psara.org or call the PSARA office if you can drive or if you need a ride.

Back Page

2011-12-30T17:14:00.000-08:00

As we tackle this newest revenue shortfall, instead of telling 6,000 elderly and disabled people to buck up and take care of their own needs, thousands of poor people to endure their dental pain, thousands of school children to learn as best they can in larger and larger classes, and thousands of workers to apply for unemployment benefits, we should first look at repealing a long list of tax breaks that have been won by the powerful in Olympia.
-- Jerry Reilly, Eldercare Alliance

Overheard
A riot is the language of the unheard.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.

Membership Meeting…and Holiday Party!

2011-11-30T19:02:00.000-08:00

Thursday, Dec. 15th, 12:30 p.m., at UFCW 21,
5030 First Avenue South,
we will feast, enjoy each others’ company, and do the necessary business of PSARA!

Bring a small (or big) bag of food to donate to the King County Labor Agency Food Bank. Bring your own favorite dish or drink to share at our potluck.

Come to listen to and question Congressman Jay Inslee (provided Congress is not in session) as he returns from the 2011 Congress and makes his case as to why he should be the next Governor of Washington. Hear a report on the 2011 Special Session and PSARA’s proposed legislative agenda for the 2012 Legislative session. Let us know if you approve.

Learn about a new resolution supporting the Caring Across Generations campaign we will be asking the Seattle City Council to pass.

Help us elect our President and Administrative Vice President for the next two years. Also hear about the proposal to expand our Executive Board and elect new and/or returning members to the Executive Board.

The Executive Board has proposed some By – Law changes necessary for our IRS application for 501c4 status. We will need the approval of our members for these changes to the By – Laws.

Please join us on December 15th. Help us build PSARA as we celebrate and prepare ourselves for the work that lies ahead.

More cuts won't work: revenue needed now!

2011-11-30T18:58:00.000-08:00

By Lynne Dodson

For the past two legislative sessions we have seen all-cuts budgets. Over the last three sessions $10 billion of cuts have been made. As we head into the special session on November 28, the state is deeper in debt (to the tune of more than $2 billion), unemployment still hovers over 9%, our classrooms are overcrowded, our most vulnerable citizens have lost services, small businesses are suffering, Boeing probably still isn’t paying federal taxes, and we’ve got Occupy groups in cities and towns from Aberdeen to Moses Lake, Bellingham to Vancouver, Seattle to Richland. Across the state the populace is demanding change.

Something isn’t working. Deep cuts, continued tax exemptions, no new revenue… clearly, these policy decisions aren’t actually doing anything to spur the economy. As we head into the special session, any legislator who is talking about following the same, old “no-new revenue, let’s cut our way out of this deficit” is using the same tools that haven’t worked so far. What’s different? Why would they work now?

But there is talk of new revenue in Olympia. Unfortunately, because Tim Eyman’s Initiative 1053 requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature to raise revenue, making it nearly impossible for the legislature to solve our revenue/budget crisis, our elected representatives and senators will need to put a revenue package on the ballot for a citizen vote in order to raise money to protect our basic and essential services.

We urge them to do so. The sooner the better because while they dither, cuts will be made and the hole we’re in will deepen. But there are better and worse ways to raise revenue for the state. The best ways are those that not only fill budget holes, but also stimulate the economy by creating jobs. When people don’t have jobs, when their wages stagnate, when they are worried about losing their jobs, they don’t spend money in their communities. They cut back, eat out less, vacation less, spend less money at their local restaurants, retailers, garden shops. And stuff doesn’t get done. Our schools, public health clinics, roads, bridges—our infrastructure falls into disrepair.

Revenue options that increase jobs are possible and smart. For example, our legislators could put a state general obligation bond on the ballot. The bond could be specifically for building infrastructure – improving our schools, public buildings, roads. This not only would put people back to work, with 20% of our retail sales tax coming from the construction industry, we could actually help grow the economy when we most need it.

Billions of dollars in tax giveaways in our state means billions of dollars that aren’t available to meet the needs of Washington residents. Last year, over $4.5 billion a year in cuts were made to education, health care, human services and other programs. People were hurt. Yet, only two tax breaks were ended, bringing in about $10 million each per year.

Worse yet, tax expenditures (loopholes) are not even considered part of the budget. Yet they are revenues that the state chooses not to collect and therefore ought to be part of budget decisions. Exposing tax giveaways, sun-setting those that don’t actually result in the creation of jobs, evaluating the actual benefit of those dollars to the state, and eliminating wasteful exemptions would restore that money to the state for rebuilding our economy.

Working people, the vast numbers of unemployed, our most vulnerable, disabled, mentally ill, our state’s children, our young women and men who worked and studied hard only now to find the American dream out of reach, those who were born here and those who came here looking for a better life, small businesses struggling to survive… we all need solutions that will enrich our lives here in Washington, not further degrade them. More cuts won’t work. We can, and we must see solutions that create jobs and build the economy. For all of us.

(Lynne Dodson is Secretary-Treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. She’s also a member of PSARA.)

I-502 reforms marijuana law

2011-11-30T18:56:00.000-08:00

Initiative 502, a proposal for marijuana law reform, is currently being circulated for signatures by New Approach Washington. The goal is 241, 153 valid signatures by December 30, when it would be submitted to the legislature. Unless the legislature passes it, I-502 will go to the general election ballot in November of next year.

The Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans Executive Board has endorsed I-502. We encourage our members to sign the petition and support the campaign. The measure has also been endorsed by prominent legal, medical and civic leaders.

The measure replaces the prohibition of marijuana with a public health approach that allows adults 21 and older to purchase limited quantities from stand-alone stores that would be privately owned and operated, but licensed and regulated by the state.

The initiative taxes marijuana and directs the new revenue -- estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually – to drug abuse prevention, research and education, as well as to the state general fund and local governments.

For petitions, call the campaign headquarters at (206) 633-2012.

Shopping simplified

2011-11-30T18:52:00.000-08:00

You don’t have to don muffler and gloves and go out in the snow…

You don’t have to battle the holiday shopping crowds…

You don’t even have to gift-wrap it…unless you want to…

And you’ll be sending a monthly gift, January through December, twelve big newsletters, crammed with news, comment and analysis on the issues that concern us all.

If you’ve already guessed we’re suggesting a year’s gift membership in PSARA for someone close to you – aren’t you the quick study!

Talk about easy holiday shopping! Just clip the coupon on the inside back page of this newsletter, enter the name and address of that friend, neighbor, relative or workmate. Then send the coupon with your $15 check to PSARA, Room 208, 1800 First Avenue, Seattle, WA 98121

By good old US Mail – long may it flourish!.

You’ll do that person a great favor. You’ll be adding to PSARA’s political muscle as we enter a critical Election Year.

And how proud you’ll be, as you sit there, sipping your holiday eggnog!

Keep those offices open!

2011-11-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

By Sharon Maeda

The Social Security Administration intends to close its heavily-used Seattle neighborhood offices and require persons seeking any of the agency’s many services to go instead to a single office in the Federal Building.

The move is strongly opposed by community organizations and by 7th District Congressman Jim McDermott. Their concerns about the forbidding requirements to even get into the Federal Building have yet to be addressed by Social Security.

The existing Belltown office at Ninth Avenue and Lenora Street and the International District office at 675 South Lane Street serve about 300 persons per day. Both offices are readily accessible to a clientele that includes immigrants, the elderly, people with disabilities, troubled veterans and the mentally ill. Interpreter services are available.

The Federal Building is a whole other thing.

Can you imagine immigrants, people with disabilities, and folks with PTSD even entering this Level IV high security facility? Valid state or federal identification is demanded. All who enter must pass through a magnetometer. All must pass their belongings though an X-ray machine. Security guards are ever present.

The guards presumably speak only English – a serious problem for elderly immigrants being asked to put their purses, backpacks or wallets on the conveyor belt, or to submit to an electric wand being run all around their bodies. If it’s intimidating to us, what about our elders?

How would innocent persons, seeking only information about their benefits, respond to having an electric want run all around their bodies?

On the streets outside there are just two handicapped parking spaces. Commercial parking is expensive. Even when a friend or family member offers to drive, there’s no place to park!

At the long-established neighborhood offices, valid identification is not needed. There are no magnetometers or x-ray machines. Employees can interpret for non-English speaking visitors in several languages. Telephone interpreter service is also available. There is plenty of free or low-cost parking nearby.

Low-income visitors who can’t afford a state identification card, clients with disabilities and those with limited or no ability to speak English deserve to be served in their communities.

The change in offices would guarantee that many innocent persons, fearful of running the Federal Building gauntlet, would forfeit not only the information they need, but the benefits they may be entitled to.

PSARA is strongly opposing the move to the Federal Building. There’s still time to rescind this harsh, bureaucratic decision. Call Social Security Regional Commissioner Stanley Friendship at 206-615-2100. Urge that low-income visitors who cannot afford to purchase a state ID card, clients with disabilities, and those with limited or no English continue to be served in their own communities.

It’s simple justice.

As 2012 Approaches

2011-11-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

by Robby Stern

The last half of 2011 is a precursor to what promises to be a very challenging and potentially exciting 2012. This morning I watched a dramatic video of the Chancellor of U.C. Davis walking through a phalanx of students sitting in absolute silence on the ground as she exited a meeting to walk to her car. Their silence was a powerful condemnation of the immorality of the Chancellor and her campus police force that attacked nonviolent sit in protestors on the U.C. Davis campus over the weekend. The shocking film of two campus policemen spraying students as they sat on the ground has been broadcast worldwide.

Also broadcast worldwide is the picture of 84 year old PSARA member Dorli Rainey, as the pepper spray drips from her hair and face. One must ask why the Seattle police chose to pepper spray Dorli and the others with her. If the police believed that the street needed to be cleared, then the appropriate action was to arrest these nonviolent activists who were acting in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, which had also been subjected to a brutal attack. To Dorli’s credit, she used the opportunity presented by the national and international media to focus on the issue of the 1 % and the 99% rather than allowing the discussion to be about police tactics. We send our thanks and admiration to Dorli for her bravery and determination.

It is impossible to miss that the level of physical violence being exerted on Occupiers and their supporters has escalated. There is now coordination among local officials around the country to contain and perhaps eliminate the Occupy movement. At the same time, there is talk of escalating economic activity by the grassroots. Occupy Oakland have called for a total west coast port shutdown on December 12th. This is a tall order and may not come to fruition, but the fact that it can even be discussed in realistic terms suggests the economic power that may be building at the grassroots level. As the labor song says, “We Do the Work” and we create the wealth.

Meanwhile, another unprecedented event has occurred in Washington. To quote from “The Stand”, the online news service of the Washington State Labor Council, “After consulting with its affiliated unions and community allies, the Washington State Labor Council will try something new in the special legislative session that begins Nov. 28 and the 2012 session. The WSLC will pursue a budget agenda in coordination with community, religious and small business groups that share labor’s concerns about all-cuts budgets harming our families and Washington’s economic future, and that agree that significant investment in public infrastructure is needed to create jobs now.”

The article goes on to say, “The Wall Street Recession continues to decimate Washington state’s economy and harm families. Our state budget has been slashed by $10 billion in the past three years — eliminating thousands of jobs, costing families their health care coverage, increasing school class sizes, sending college tuitions skyrocketing, and shredding our social safety net. Unemployment remains high; near 9% statewide and up to 60% in certain construction trades. And state economists say we are only halfway through this ‘Second Great Depression.’”

Labor is joining with these other forces to demand that the state protect our communities by investing in jobs and public necessities, like education and health care. They have agreed on the following common agenda:

“1. Substantially increase revenue and utilize revenue bonding to protect critical services and jobs in education, health care and public safety.
2. Create 30,000 direct jobs, and many more indirectly, by building and repairing community assets — including public buildings, bridges, state parks, water and irrigation systems, and college campuses — with a $2 billion general obligation bond on the spring ballot.
3. End unjustified tax breaks that don’t create jobs, and reform our tax break system to make it more transparent and accountable.”

In the past, these organizations enter the legislative session with their own legislative agendas. While cooperation on agreed upon proposals happens frequently, never, to my knowledge, has there been an agreement before hand to enter a legislative session with an agreed upon common agenda. This level of engagement between organized labor and other sectors could presage a very powerful force in our state. PSARA strongly endorses this legislative program.

Finally, we can all celebrate the failure of the Super Committee to come to an agreement. It is horrifying, if it is true, that the Democrats were prepared to make cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in order to reach an agreement with the Republicans. Evidently, the Republicans were trying to drive a deal the Democrats could not stomach. Thank goodness no agreement was reached. We need to make our voices heard that the cut in the Social Security payroll tax must be allowed to expire and not be renewed at the end of December, 2011. It imperils Social Security.

In addition, we will insist that the debate around the 2012 election be about who will be served, the 1 % or the 99%. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy must be allowed to expire at the end of 2012, and besides government job creation, the payroll cap on Social Security contributions must be scrapped so we can create an even better and stronger Social Security system for our children and grandchildren.

OWS: Where do we go from here?

2011-11-30T18:34:00.000-08:00

By Michael Moore

This past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. The discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement's "vision statement" to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:

We Envision:
[1] a truly free, democratic, and just society;
[2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus;
[3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making;
[4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others;
[5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments;
[6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few;
[7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings;
[8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible;
[9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.

The next step will be to develop a specific list of goals and demands. I would like to respectfully offer my suggestions of what we can all get behind now to wrestle the control of our country out of the hands of the 1% and place it squarely with the 99% majority.

Here is what I will propose to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:

1. Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street (where they currently pay 0%).

2. Assess a penalty tax on any corporation that moves American jobs to other countries when that company is already making profits in America. Our jobs are the most important national treasure and they cannot be removed from the country simply because someone wants to make more money.

3. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all of their earnings (Normally, the middle class pays about 6% of their income to Social Security; someone making $1 million a year pays about 0.6% (or 90% less than the average person). This law would simply make the rich pay what everyone else pays.

4. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, placing serious regulations on how business is conducted by Wall Street and the banks.

5. Investigate the Crash of 2008, and bring to justice those who committed any crimes.

6. Reorder our nation's spending priorities (including the ending of all foreign wars and their cost of over $2 billion a week). This will re-open libraries, reinstate band and art and civics classes in our schools, fix our roads and bridges and infrastructure, wire the entire country for 21st century internet, and support scientific research that improves our lives.

7. Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time.

8. Immediately reduce carbon emissions that are destroying the planet and discover ways to live without the oil that will be depleted and gone by the end of this century.

9. Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company’s workers. We can never have a real democracy as long as most people have no say in what happens at the place they spend most of their time: their job. Germany has a law like this and it has helped to make Germany the world’s leading manufacturing exporter.)

10. We, the people, must pass three constitutional amendments that will go a long way toward fixing the core problems we now have:

a) A constitutional amendment that fixes our broken electoral system by 1) completely removing campaign contributions from the political process; 2) requiring all elections to be publicly financed; 3) moving election day to the weekend to increase voter turnout; 4) making all Americans registered voters at the moment of their birth; 5) banning computerized voting and requiring that all elections take place on paper ballots.

b) A constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and do not have the constitutional rights of citizens. This amendment should also state that the interests of the general public and society must always come before the interests of corporations.

c) A constitutional amendment that will act as a "second bill of rights" as proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: that every American has a human right to employment, to health care, to a free and full education, to breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat safe food, and to be cared for with dignity and respect in their old age.

Occupy Wall Street enjoys the support of millions. It is a movement that cannot be stopped. Become part of it by sharing your thoughts with me or online (at OccupyWallSt.org). Get involved in (or start!) your own local Occupy movement. Make some noise. You don't have to pitch a tent in lower Manhattan to be an Occupier. You are one just by saying you are. This movement has no singular leader or spokesperson; every participant is a leader in their neighborhood, their school, their place of work. Each of you is a spokesperson to those whom you encounter. There are no dues to pay, no permission to seek in order to create an action.

We are but ten weeks old, yet we have already changed the national conversation. This is our moment, the one we've been hoping for, waiting for. If it's going to happen it has to happen now. Don't sit this one out. This is the real deal. This is it.

KEYSTONE XL: The pipeline from Hades

2011-11-30T18:28:00.000-08:00

By Will Parry

The determined intervention of scientists, public figures and rank-and-file environmentalists has delayed for a full year a decision on the horrific Keystone XL pipeline, intended to run its oily 1,700-mile course from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, across sensitive U.S. aquifers to the Gulf of Mexico.

On November 6, the activists, twelve thousand strong, took the pipeline issue directly to the White House. In possibly the largest civil disobedience in U.S. history, 1,250 were arrested. President Obama, who will make the ultimate decision, then announced that he will defer action until early 2013.

The best scientific opinion says Obama’s decision could well determine whether our planet survives as a viable habitat for most living creatures.

Among those arrested at the White House was James Hanson, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hanson, who has focused his work for decades on the impact of fossil fuels on the environment, is considered a foremost authority on global warming.

Hanson has a blunt two-word summary for the significance of the campaign to block the Keystone XL pipeline: If the pipeline is built, it’s “Game over” for the environment, he says.

Obama’s one-year delay was a major victory, said Bill McKibben, the legendary founder of the grassroots campaign “350.org,” which has coordinated 15,000 “save the planet” rallies in 189 countries over the past three years. The “350” refers to the maximum number of parts per million of carbon dioxide a breathable atmosphere may tolerate.

McKibben cited an October poll of “energy insiders,” conducted by the National Journal, that found “virtually all” of those polled expected easy approval of the pipeline. TransCanada, the would-be builder, was moving huge quantities of pipe across the border and seizing land by eminent domain. The mighty propaganda engine of the petroleum industry was in high gear. The fix was in. The deal was done.

Except it wasn’t. Not yet. A year of titanic struggle is in prospect, with the environmentalist legions arrayed against the riches of the petroleum industry and its vast network of stooges in Congress, the media and the regulatory agencies.

The industry is transfixed by the gleam of gold in the tar sands of Alberta. To seize it, they must build the pipeline from Hades.

The U.S. Department of Energy reports that in 2010 humanity (especially the U.S., China and onrushing India) pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution – 564 million tons more than in 2009.

That’s more CO2 than in the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

“We’re talking more greenhouse gases than have entered the Earth’s atmosphere in tens of millions of years,” says McKibben.

Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, says that without an effective international agreement to staunch greenhouse gases within five years, the door will close on preventing a potentially disastrous rise in the planet’s temperature.

To keep that door open, ministers and mothers will lie down in the path of bulldozers. Earth’s children are at risk. We’ll have more –- much more – to say on this subject. Our next article will deal with the tragic downstream effects of BP’s Gulf oil spill.

Distributing the dollars up!

2011-11-30T18:11:00.000-08:00

By Mike Andrew

Income inequality in the United States is at its highest level since the “Gilded Age” of trusts, monopolies, and Robber Barons.
The numbers are staggering.

In 1915, a time when the likes of John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan dominated the US economy, the richest 1% of Americans pulled in roughly 18% of all income. Today, the top 1% account for 24% of all income.

A CBO study in 2011 found that the top 1% increased their incomes 275% over the period 1979-2007. During that same period, the incomes of the bottom 80% actually declined.

In 1980, top-paid US CEOs made 42 times more than the average worker. By 2007 they made 531 times more.

As of 2006, the US had one of the highest levels of income inequality among similar high-income, developed countries. It is one of only a few developed countries where inequality has increased since 1980.

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, income inequality in the US was very high from 1870 to sometime around 1937. In part as a result of the New Deal – and also because government spending on World War II acted as a massive stimulus package – inequality dropped dramatically between 1937 and 1947.
The level of inequality remained fairly steady for about three decades until the late 1970s when income again began to become more concentrated in the hands of the richest Americans.

Inequality increased during the 1980s – the Reagan era – decreased slightly during the late 1990s, and has since continued its overall increasing trend.

The productivity of US workers continues to be one of the economic wonders of the world, increasing steadily year by year.

Real wages, on the other hand, have stagnated during the same period. By some measures, they have actually declined.

The steadily increasing gap between the “productivity” line and the “real wage” line represents, in graphic form, wealth flowing from working people to corporate employers.

Part of that stream of wealth goes to pay CEOs more and more lavish wages and bonuses, increasing income inequality even as workers produce more than ever.

“Real compensation,” by the way, includes benefits as well as wages, and much of the increase in that category can be accounted for by increases in healthcare premiums. In other words, insurance companies and healthcare providers benefit from increases in “real compensation” but workers might not.

All of this amounts to a huge redistribution of income – but a redistribution upwards, favoring the richest Americans at the expense of working families.

Along with this redistribution of wealth has come a dramatic shift in the structure of the US economy.

In 1950, 70% of US workers were employed in manufacturing, generally high-paid jobs. Some 20% were employed in generally low-paid service industries. One-third of US workers at that time were union members.

Within the space of a single lifetime, the situation has been reversed. Today, only 21% of the workforce is in the manufacturing sector while 70% work in service industries.

In the same period, union membership has declined to a mere 11%, and less than 9% in the private sector. In other words, workers are losing both their fair share of the national wealth, and their ability to fight back against income inequality.

No wonder the Occupy movement has struck such a chord!

Greece: Bankers bailed out, workers sold out

2011-11-30T18:09:00.000-08:00

By Mike Andrew

Greece’s debt crisis came to a head on November 11, when socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou resigned to make way for a coalition “national unity government.”

The new Prime Minister, Lucas Papademos, is a former Vice President of the European Central Bank committed to pushing ahead with the package of austerity measures demanded by European bankers in return for a “bailout” of Greek debts.

This “bailout” properly speaking is not a bailout of Greece, still less a bailout of Greek workers, but a bailout of the German and French banks which invested in Greek bonds and now stand to lose substantial assets if Greece defaults on its debts.

Some 20% of the bailout money Greece receives is slated to go to recapitalize Greek banks, and another 20% must be invested in top-rated AAA bonds that can be used as collateral in future debt-swap deals with lenders.

The austerity program the EU has imposed on Greece is not designed to help Greece repay its debts – or if it is, it is sadly misdirected. In fact, their austerity program is designed to impose the EU economic model which views inflation as the main economic risk.

In an effort to reduce Greece’s deficits and keep inflation below the EU-sanctioned maximum of 2%, the Greek government was compelled to cut wages and pensions, eliminate COLAs, and reduce the number of public sector workers by one-third.

Last year unemployment hit almost 19%, with the rate for workers under 30 going to almost 40%. The Greek economy as a whole contracted by 4.5% in 2010.
If the goal was to reduce Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio, the austerity program was clearly misdirected.

Papandreou was elected Prime Minister in 2009 on an anti-austerity platform, when the debt crisis was only just breaking.

The right-wing New Democracy Party, which held power from 2004 to 2009, precipitated the debt crisis by cutting income and social security taxes and then cooking the books to conceal the real dimensions of the resulting budget deficit.
Instead of the EU-approved 3% deficit, or the rumored 6% “real” deficit, Papandreou found the deficit was almost 13% when he took office. Unemployment at that time was over 10%.

What made Greece’s situation even worse was that it had joined the Eurozone in 2001, and therefore no longer controlled its own money supply.

Papandreou’s father, the late Andreas Papandreou, who was Prime Minister in 1981-1989 and again in 1993-1996, had brought his country an unprecedented period of economic prosperity by an admittedly inflationary policy – financing public works projects, and wage and pension increases by increasing the money supply.

That option was no longer open in the current crisis, and George Papandreou realized he had no choice but to ask for a restructuring of Greece’s debt, the consequence of which was the austerity package demanded by European bankers.
Papandreou’s seemingly reasonable proposal to put the austerity policy up for a vote was vetoed by Greece’s creditors, including the United States.

The referendum proposal did have one positive result, however. It forced the right-wing opposition into entering a national unity government and accepting shared responsibility for the austerity measures.

The long term future for the Greek economy remains in doubt, as does the issue of whether Greece will retain the Euro or try to return to the drachma, its former national currency.

Super committee not so super

2011-11-30T18:03:00.000-08:00

The so-called Super Committee that was supposed to come up with a bipartisan $1.5 trillion deficit reduction package announced on November 21 that they had failed to cut a deal.

No one expected them to fail until they did, and then it became perfectly obvious to everyone why they had to fail.

The assumption behind the Super Committee was that both Democrats and Republicans would be willing and able to put political differences aside in the interests of deficit reduction.

That was the biggest weakness of the whole concept, and the fundamental reason that the Super Committee would fail.

Both sides did, in fact, make concessions. Democrats put social spending cuts on the table. Republicans indicated they were willing to raise revenues.

The problem, however, is that deficit reduction will do nothing to help the sagging economy or put a single unemployed worker back to work. In fact, further cuts in government spending would certainly lead to reduced economic activity and increased unemployment.

In other words, it’s not hard to think of ways to cut the deficit, if that’s your only goal. But it’s impossible to cut the deficit and – at the same time – pull the country out of the Great Recession.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) put the problem very simply.

"The American people want an end to this gridlock with a balanced approach to reducing the debt that creates jobs, protects the Medicare guarantee, and brings shared sacrifice from the ultra wealthy and Big Oil," he said in a statement. "Voters have a chance to end this gridlock in November 2012."

You can’t create jobs and guarantee Medicare to all eligible seniors without spending money, and that means – in the short term – you really can’t cut the deficit until the country has recovered from the recession.

But once the country has recovered, it will be much easier to pay down the deficit because employed workers pay taxes, and they don’t need unemployment or other government-financed benefits.

Republicans, of course, still adhere to the old Reagan-style supply-side economics, and believe – against all the evidence – that economic austerity will revive the economy.

Too many Democrats believe this as well, and it was only because the Super Committee negotiations were being conducted against the background of the Occupy movement that the political issues of income inequality and economic justice came to the fore at all.

"After Occupy Wall Street, a month later, you were getting a lot more attention to income inequality, and that's a tremendous change in the politics of the country," said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), whose district includes Wall Street.

The failure of the Super Committee is not entirely good news, however.

Assuming that nothing else happens, $1.2 trillion of automatic across-the-board spending cuts will kick-in on October 1, 2012. These will include cuts to the defense department as well as social safety net programs.

The so-called Bush tax cuts will expire for everyone at the end of that year. In addition, the temporary cuts in the payroll tax and the extension of unemployment benefits may not be continued.

This result will undoubtedly be challenging not only to individual working families, but also to the entire national economy, as people pay more in taxes, have less to spend on goods and services, and – if they are still unemployed – see their benefits at risk.

Fair Trade or ‘Free Trade’ Where is our Congressional delegation?

2011-11-30T17:53:00.000-08:00

By Kristen Beifus

Early in 2011, Kim Kyung-Ran of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions met with staff members of Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Representatives Adam Smith, Jay Inslee and Jim McDermott. She advised them that in Korea hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in opposition to the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement.

Over the months that followed, members of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, including PSARA members and trade justice allies, met with our elected leaders in Washington State and in the District of Columbia, wrote letters as individuals and organizations, made numerous phone calls, attended cyber-town hall meetings, called into radio programs, attended coffees and events with our elected leaders, held rallies, bannered and circulated self-produced educational media.

We worked to educate and activate. We know they heard us. They said as much.
And then on October 12, with the single exception of McDermott's vote against the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, the entire Congressional delegation voted for Free Trade Agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.

We appreciate Rep. McDermott's lone “No” vote. However his “Yes” votes on South Korea and Panama indicates his support for Free Trade.

So-called “Free Trade” is opposed by organized labor and environmental and human rights activists, as well as by millions of people around the world. It makes little sense that elected leaders who are progressive on such issues as health care and Social Security, continue to vote in favor of trade policy that hurts their constituents.

At the moment the views on trade policy of the majority in our state are unrepresented.. With big money dominating politics and an election year on the horizon, it is clear that our state elected leaders are at the mercy of corporate lobbyists when it comes to trade. Campaign finance reform is urgently needed to level the debate on trade policy.

This year, both nationally and in our State, unions have begun to withhold endorsements and contributions from elected officials who do not represent them. In our State, Machinists Local 751 un-invited Senator Cantwell and Rep. Inslee to their political gala after their support of trade deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, which directly threaten jobs of their members. IBEW locals, hurt by the reduction in manufacturing jobs, are also withholding contributions because of trade votes.

As Greg Paulson of the Association of Western Pulp and Paper explains: 'It doesn't matter if it is a Republican or a Democrat off-shoring jobs. It is still a lost job and an unemployed worker. Actually it hurts more when it is Democrat because we elected them into office to represent us.'

A 2012 goal for the Washington Fair Trade Coalition is to make is to make fair trade an election year issue.

We are also monitoring the emerging Trans Pacific Free Trade Agreement (TP-FTA), involving the US and 8 other countries: Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Vietnam.

As this complex agreement moves through rounds of negotiations with the potential for many more countries to join, one concern is access to generic drugs. Many pharmaceutical corporations are demanding strong investor protections in the TP-FTA. That threatens the public health systems of countries and communities that rely on generics.

The fight for fair trade is an important opportunity to defend our values: the health of our communities, the rights of workers, protection of our natural resources and the rights of indigenous communities. Until those values are incorporated in our trade agreements, those agreements will enable corporations to win while many of us will continue to lose.

(Kristen Beifus is executive director of the Washington Fair Trade Council and a member of PSARA.)

The Special Session: A Call to Action

2011-11-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

An Editorial

Governor Gregoire has called the Legislature into a Special Session starting November 28. Her goal: To make up for declining revenues with an additional $2 billion in cuts from state programs. The Legislature has already carved a cruel $10 billion from health care, education and other essential services in the past three years. We cannot hold still for even more drastic cuts.

In the next weeks, every PSARA member will be needed in this struggle that will shape our future as a state. You will be asked to call and write your legislators/ To testify about the impact on your life of specific cuts. If possible, to come to Olympia with thousands of others to create a human wall of protest. With our allies from the labor movement and the community, we must make it clear to our legislators that business as usual is a thing of the past.

Plainly, the life-and-death need of the hour is substantial new revenue.
And hidden in hundreds of special-interest tax exemptions, the needed revenue is there to be tapped. The Washington State Budget and Policy Center has identified these tax breaks. They drain $6.5 billion in revenue annually, year after year. They are never examined to see whether they fulfill a useful purpose.

The alternative to new revenue is unthinkable. The governor’s approach, to look for $2 billion in additional cuts, will lay waste to programs that meet fundamental human needs.

The proposals currently on the table would wipe out long term care services for more than 17,000 people, a 29 percent cut from the current case- load. Here’s who would lose the services they depend upon, as reported in the Senior Scene for October:

• 11,700 who would lose homecare assistance
• 1,000 now living in Adult Family Homes
• 2,700 living in assisted living facilities
• 1,000 living in boarding homes
• 450 living in nursing homes

And that’s just one aspect of the reductions in human services, that impacting long-term care. Other proposals include the elimination of the Basic Health Plan, the Disability Lifeline, interpretive services, health care coverage for immigrant children, maternity support services, adult pharmacy benefits – and the list goes on.

In the budget adopted in the 2011 session, funding for long term care was cut by $98.1 million, translating into a 10 percent reduction in personal care hours per patient per month. Many in long term care need assistance around the clock and have nowhere else to turn. No one, least of all elderly men and women, should have to worry about being deprived of the care they need.

In the current economy, the state’s modest safety net programs are needed more than ever. Families and communities are struggling to get by. Unemployment is rampant, people are losing health insurance, homes are heavily mortgaged or are being foreclosed.

Confronted with these multiple challenges, an all-cuts budget is simply indefensible. It shifts the burden of the budget deficit still more oppressively onto the backs of the most vulnerable.

The Legislature must hear from the people.

Occupy Wall Street:: It's spontaneously explosive

2011-11-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

By Will Parry

Occupy Wall Street presents an unprecedented challenge to the corporations and financiers who oppress and exploit people the world over.

It is bigger than big. It is incredibly complex. Now well into its second month, it continues to develop daily and hourly.

This article is an initial appraisal of a dynamic movement whose ultimate impact, though uncertain, carries within it the hopes of humanity. Believe me, it is a subject to be approached with humility.

One report says ongoing demonstrations are taking place in more than 1,500 cities globally. Another report tells of actions in 951 cities in 82 countries. Still another tells of meetings in 1,383 cities in the U.S. alone.

In our own state, 600 in Tacoma took their protest to major banks. Other activists are occupying the streets of Bellingham, Olympia, Spokane, Tri-Cities, Wenatchee and Yakima, as well as Seattle. In Portland, organizers estimated a protest crowd at 10,000. In his monthly column (page 4), PSARA President Robby Stern tells of a meeting of 600 in modest Sequim, Washington.

At least since the Great Depression, nothing as spontaneously explosive as this has come along to shake up the masters of the universe.

The millions who are with the marchers do not have a five-point program. They are not united around a single political demand. What they do share is a common, bone deep anger at an unjust economy, where profit is God, and where 99 percent of the people are bled day in and day out by the wealthiest 1 percent.

“The movement doesn’t need a policy or legislative agenda to send its message,” wrote Katrina Vanden Heuvel in The Nation. “The thrust of what it seeks – fueled both by anger and by deep principles – has moral clarity. It wants corporate money out of politics. It wants the widening gap of income inequality to be narrowed substantially. And it wants meaningful solutions to the jobless crisis. In short, it wants a system that works for the 99 percent.”

“Everybody has different grievances, but we all feel the country is being lost,” said Frank Bader, 44, an unemployed Portland real estate title examiner.

In every major city, the authorities are responding to the non-violent occupations with a police presence. In response, there have been repeated examples of civil disobedience by heroic men and women, in the tradition of those who went to jail over Viet Nam and during the civil rights struggles.

In Oakland, the police were especially ugly, using tear gas and firing “non-lethal” rubber bullets indiscriminately. One victim was hospitalized in serious condition. The next morning the occupiers were back on the street – and the mayor apologized.

In New York, more than 700 were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. On another occasion, a police motorcycle ran over the leg of an attorney and video showed police wildly beating protesters with their batons and even charging horses into the crowd.

Also in New York, police strung orange netting across streets to trap protesting groups like schools of fish, a tactic described as “kettling.”

“They put up orange nets and tried to kettle us and we started running and they started tackling random people and handcuffing them. They were herding us like cattle,” said Kelly Brannon, 27.

Everywhere the occupiers’ cameras documented each confrontation.

In Seattle, in New York, everywhere, youth responded in numbers to the call to occupy parks and city squares and other public spaces. Many, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, were jobless and broke. Others were college graduates, over their heads in debt and unable to find a job. At one protest, Nate Smith carried a sign that read, “Seventeen and no future.”

“People want their voices to be heard,” said Peter Kass, 26, who works in a residential treatment facility. “You get strength in numbers. I’ll be a number.”

On October 5, in an organized expression of support, students at 90 U.S. colleges and universities walked out of class and held rallies and teach-ins.

Organized labor, which had already planned a week of intensive lobbying for jobs in the nation’s capital, noted the power of street protests to get the attention of the politicians.

“I think being in the streets and calling attention to issues is sometimes the only recourse you have because, God only knows, you can go to the Hill (Congress) and you can talk to a lot of people and see nothing ever happen,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka..

The occupiers have the attention of those in power. And they plan to stay through a winter that looms raw as a second Valley Forge. This is not a “come to a demonstration and then go home” kind of operation.

We need to do all we can to see that it has staying power. If you can, join the nearest occupation in person. Listed on page ___ are other ways you can help. Young, middle-aged and old, men and women, the occupiers are out there for all of us.

Indeed, “we all have different grievances, but we all feel the country is being lost.”

We are the 99%

2011-11-03T15:58:00.000-07:00

One reason the Occupy Movement continues to inspire people and gain support in this country and around the world is that it’s based on truth.

There’s a vast gulf between the 1% who control the world’s wealth and the 99% who produce it.

Even if we’ve never studied political economy, we feel instinctively that we’re part of the 99% and we want to stand with them.

And even if we, personally, can’t camp out in Westlake Plaza or Zucotti Park, we can “occupy” where we actually are – our jobs, our unions, our community centers, our churches – and speak out for our needs, the needs of the 99%.

We have plenty of work that needs doing in this country and millions looking for full-time work. We could use the money being made on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms across the country to put people back to work, and to strengthen our social safety net for those who can’t work or have retired.

The Retiree Advocate has a role to play. Every month we provide news and hard-hitting analysis to clarify the needs of the 99% and expose the machinations of the 1%.

Will you help us?

If you’re not yet a PSARA member, please join us! Help us give PSARA a strong voice.

If you are a member, please renew your membership. And invite your neighbors and friends to join us as well.

After all, we are the 99%. If we’re informed and organized, no one can stop us.

‘Something’s happening here’

2011-11-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

By Robby Stern

Recently I was invited to speak in Sequim, Washington to a forum sponsored by the Move On Councils in Clallam, Jefferson and Island counties. The event was to be held in the auditorium at Sequim High School. I anticipated an audience of 50 to 60 residents. To my total astonishment, 600 people attended and heard David Korten, publisher and editor of Yes Magazine and Katherine Ottaway, a Port Townsend family practice doctor and a member of “Mad As Hell Doctors”.

The program also included video taping audience comments directed to the Congressional Super Committee whose names and pictures were prominently featured on stage. The message from the audience to the Super Committee was clear: “Don’t you dare cut the safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.” Additionally, they demanded a genuine political democracy rather than control by corporations and wealthy interests. They demanded an economy that works for the majority (the 99%) rather than for the wealthy few and the corporations. When I mentioned the Occupy movement, they literally clapped and cheered…in Sequim, Washington.

Clearly something is happening and it might be big. It is difficult to predict but PSARA will do all we can to encourage activism, insurgency and the demand for a more progressive and humane country, state, county and city. We will support the demand for an economy that serves the needs of the 99% and a decision-making process that is democratic and not controlled by wealthy corporate interests . We have a long way to go but the opportunities to participate abound.

That brings us to the deliberations of the “Super Committee” at the federal level and the upcoming Special Session that begins November 28 in Olympia. While the “Super Committee” contemplates cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the legislature, in special session, will consider cuts to meet the additional $2 billion decline in revenue at the state level. At both the state and federal level, the cuts that are being proposed are devastating and immoral.

There will be significant job losses from these cuts, with a resulting decline in revenue for federal and state governments. There will be deeper cuts by local government. The downward spiral will be unchecked for the foreseeable future.

With other forces in our communities, we are demanding that those responsible for this economic crisis must be made to pay for the tragedy they have brought into the lives of poor people, the vulnerable and working people.

At the federal level, end the tax breaks for the rich and the tax breaks for the corporations. Stop these wars that are literally wasting billions and even trillions of taxpayer dollars.

At the state level, the legislature and Governor must place a halt to the tax breaks they have been handing out like candy over the past decade and a half. While the poor, the vulnerable and the working class suffer mightily, the corporate interests go along their merry way paying huge salaries to their executives while they pretend to cry out for the pain but show a willingness to sacrifice nothing.

Our Congress members and state legislators tell us there is nothing they can do other than make cuts. They argue that in the Congress, the Senate filibuster and the Republican control of the House leaves no alternatives to cuts to our vital safety net programs.

Well, it’s time for some backbone. The Super Committee failing to reach agreement at least assures that 50% of the cuts will be from the defense budget. The defense industry is squealing like stuffed pigs and telling their Congress people why this (sequestration) cannot be allowed to happen. Bull malarkey! They should not have cut the deal in the first place, and now that they cut this “deficit deal” the Democrats had better be accountable. They absolutely must not allow the vital safety net programs to be cut just when they are most needed. They’d better stand their ground or they will pay a huge price (along with the rest of us) in 2012.

At the state level, here’s what they can do:
1. Pass a referendum to the people in the Special Session to raise revenue.
2. It takes a simple majority vote (not two thirds) to issue General Obligation bonds to help fund education and heath care and Revenue Bonds to rebuild our infrastructure and create jobs.

Legislators will protest that the state should not assume additional debt. Our response: If this is not a time to assume increased debt, when is the time? They can create additional revenues to pay off the General Obligation bonds by closing the tax loopholes either in the legislature or by sending a referendum to the people.

Our demands will be clear. They have cut $10 billion dollars over the course of the last three years. It is time to raise revenue to plug this hole. This is not a deficit crisis; it is a revenue crisis created by giving away billions of dollars in tax breaks and Wall Street turning our economy into their private casino. It is time to make a correction.

PSARA will be calling on our members to do everything you can to put pressure on the President, the Congress, state legislators and governor to do the right thing.

Caring across generations

2011-11-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

By Hilary Stern

Love is not a word you hear much when talking about politics and policy. But in the Caring Across Generations Campaign, love is a four letter word that comes up often and shamelessly.

The Caring Across Generations Campaign is a bold visionary campaign based on love and caring and led by domestic workers who believes that we are all interdependent. A healthy society, like a healthy family, is one that cares for each other and treats those that need care and those that give care with respect and dignity.

I am part of the baby boomer generation, the generation that shook up society with its youthful energy and rebellion in the 60’s and 70’s. Now I am part of the age wave. Every eight seconds someone in this country turns 65. And in 10 years, every eight seconds someone will be turning 75, and ten years later they will be turning 85 and then …. well, you get the picture.

In fact, as we baby boomers age, the number of people needing long-term care is projected to grow from 13 million in 2000 to 27 million by 2050. But now there are only about 3 million long-term care workers. The gap between what we have and what we will soon need is called the Care Gap.

At the same time, direct care and domestic workers filling these care roles are often immigrant workers making poverty wages and working in strenuous conditions with limited support, rights, and training.

We need to take better care of each other. That’s why PSARA has joined with Casa Latina, Washington Community Action Network, and SEIU 775 NW, and others to bring a visionary national campaign, Caring Across Generations, here to Seattle, Washington.
The Caring Across Generations Campaign seeks to provide dignity to our elderly and their caregivers with the “Five Fingers of the Caring Hand”:

1) The creation of new, quality jobs to meet the growing need,
2) Labor standards and improved job quality for existing and new jobs,
3) Training and career ladders for home care workers,
4) A new visa category and path to citizenship for immigrant care workers,
5) Support for individuals and families in need, including a tax credit for people paying out of pocket for care.

Since the campaign began, the limited safety net we have now is being threatened by budget cuts. The rallying cry of the Campaign has become, “Protect what we have and build what we need.” Protect Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Build up training and support for care workers, as well as for individuals and families that need care.

On October 5, 2011 the Seattle Care Council, our growing local coalition, had its first planning meeting where student groups and community organizations joined PSARA, Casa Latina, SEIU 775 and Washington CAN in envisioning this new campaign. The Seattle Care Council will continue to meet monthly to plan the Seattle Care Congress, a large, town-hall style event at the Greenwood Senior Center, as well as organizing around a local strategy to engage city elected officials around the values of Care.

If you are interested in getting more involved in the Care Council, please contact Robby Stern, who is organizing an internal committee for PSARA. Please also mark your calendars for our Seattle Care Congress on Saturday, February 11 at the Greenwood Senior Center.

In the spirit of the campaign, we extend to the PSARA membership our love and solidarity.

(Hilary Stern is Executive Director of Casa Latina and a PSARA member.)

Nurses blitz 61 Congress offices

2011-11-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

By Rap Lewis

Aiming squarely at Wall Street greed, an estimated ten thousand nurses and their labor and community allies organized simultaneous demonstrations at 61 Congressional offices in 21 states on September 1.

At each event, they called on senators and representatives to pledge to “support a Wall Street transaction tax that will raise sufficient revenue to make Wall Street pay fos the devastation it has caused on Main Street.”

On the initiative of the 170,000-member National Nurses United (NNU), the demonstrators organized street theater, community speakouts, soup kitchens and old-fashioned picketlines at Congress members’ offices in Boston, San Francisco and Chicago; Corpus Christi, Texa; Marquette, Michigan; Dayton, Ohio, and many other cities.

“America’s nurses every day see broad declines in health and living standards that are a direct result of patients and families struggling with lack of jobs, un-payable medical bills, hunger and homelessness,“ said NNU Co-President Karen Higgins, RN, at a picketline outside the Richmond, Virginia, office of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Wall Street trade in stocks, derivatives, currencies, credit default swaps, and futures/

Because of the great number of Wall Street transactions, even a modest tax on each would generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year to address the social damage for which Wall Street bears the responsibility, the nurses union says.

Terry O’Neil to speak at U.W. forum on Social Security

2011-11-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

Terry O’Neil, the highly respected national president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), will address “The Threat to Social Security: An Issue for All Generations” at a forum from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday,. November 21, at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. (See flyer insert.)

Ms. O’Neil will discuss recent Washington D.C. developments concerning Social Security and the steps we can take to protect and improve this vital program.
Ms. O’Neil will headline a trio of speakers at the forum, sponsored by the Social Security Works Washington, a broad coalition of community and labor groups representing people across the state.

Also on the program is Congressman Jim McDermott, co-sponsor of HR 539, a bill to “scrap the cap” on payroll taxes so that high-income earners pay their fair share to keep Social Security fully solvent for the next 75 years. Representative McDermott is knowledgeable, both about how Social Security operates and also about its impact on the lives of everyday people.

A third speaker is Ron Sims, former King County Executive and retired deputy director of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs. He will discuss the critical role Social Security plays in the lives of people in our communities.

A recent similar forum at Everett Community College drew an audience of 200 persons, about one-third of them under the age of 30. The forum was co-sponsored by Social Security Works WA, the Everett Community College Department of Political Science, and the Snohomish County Labor Council.

The Social Security Works WA Coalition has targeted outreach to three populations: young people, women and seniors. Young people are targeted because many of them know very little about Social Security and have been led to believe it will not be there for them when they get older. The coalition seeks to dispel that myth, and to persuade them to join the fight to preserve and strengthen Social Security so it will be there when they need it.

The coalition seeks to reach women because women live longer, and therefore rely longer on Social Security. In addition, women suffer wage disparities, leading to lower Social Security benefits. They also suffer a significant loss of income with the death of a spouse. Additionally, women heads of household more frequently rely on survivor benefits as a result of a spouse dying.

All these disparity problems could be addressed if the “earnings cap” were eliminated.

Note also that because women vote in greater numbers, they can strongly influence the positions taken by elected representatives.

Finally, seniors as a group are fully aware of the critical role of Social Security in their lives. They are a huge and growing voting block. Politicians are playing with fire if they mess around with Social Security benefits of seniors. Our goal is to rally the senior generation to tell the politicians, “Don’t you dare mess around with Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.”

Hey, look at Argentina!

2011-11-03T15:31:00.001-07:00

By Mike Andrew

“You can’t spend your way out of a recession!”

So say Republicans and all economic conservatives.

And yet Argentina did just that, bouncing back not just from mere recession but from national bankruptcy, in less than 10 years.

In 2001 Argentina defaulted on $100 billion of sovereign debt. Its banks were collapsing like a house of cards. Its people were occupying shut down factories.

In the four years between 1998 and 2002, Argentina’s economy shrank by almost 20%.

The problem was easy to see. Argentina was the victim of a series of right-wing military dictatorships trying one supply-side economic experiment after another, all of them failures.

The solution was a brave gamble by the Argentine government.

First, the government intervened in the currency market to keep the value of its own currency low. This in turn boosted local industry by making Argentina’s exports cheap, while keeping foreign imports expensive.

It then taxed imports and exports, and spent the revenue on a series of public works projects. Today, Argentine government spending is 25% of GDP, compared with only 14% in 2003.

As a result of the government-financed construction projects, the country has 400,000 new low-income housing units, and a new 235-mile highway between the northern cities of Rosario and Córdoba.

The Argentine government also strengthened its social safety net.

The Universal Child Allowance gives 1.9 million low-income families a monthly stipend of about $42 per child, which helps increase consumption. The Allowance began in 2009 with bipartisan support from both the ruling party and the opposition,

Because the amount of the stipend depends in part on the child’s school attendance, the allowance is also a measure to promote public education.

The Argentine economy has grown by over 6% a year for seven of the last eight years, unemployment has been cut to under 8% today from a whopping 20% in 2002, and the poverty level has fallen by almost half over the last decade.

Argentines are expected to buy some 800,000 new vehicles this year. Plasma TVs and BlackBerrys have become common among Argentina’s growing middle class.

Obviously, this policy is inflationary, with the inflation rate now well over 20%. It remains to be seen how well Argentina’s working people will be able to cope with that.

Nevertheless, Argentina is another example that runs counter to the all-cuts austerity response to economic crisis.

The Koch brothers hate Social Security

2011-11-03T15:30:00.000-07:00

By Mike Andrew

Charles and David Koch, the right-wing billionaires who financed the Tea Party, have poured millions of dollars into destroying Social Security.

They learned to hate Social Security quite literally at their daddy’s knee. Their father, Fred Koch, was one of the founders and the principal financial backer of the John Birch Society, the secretive ultra-right organization of the Fifties and Sixties.

David and Charles have surpassed their father’s efforts by far, however.

According to Brave New Foundation, a social justice research group, the Koch brothers have spent more than $28 million to create what amounts to an entire anti-Social Security industry.

Koch-financed spokespeople, front groups, think tanks, and academics have produced no fewer than 297 commentaries, 200 reports, 56 studies, and 6 full-length books full of distortions of Social Security’s record of effective service.

The Brave New Foundation investigation reveals Koch-supported policies – and even specific language – repeated in each document they studied, raising the retirement age or eliminating cost of living adjustments, for example.

All of this adds up to “a self-sustaining echo chamber to transform fringe ideas into popular mainstream public policy arguments,” Brave New Foundation says.

This “echo chamber” includes think tanks like the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and Mercatus Centre at George Mason University and the Reason Foundation, which owe their existence to Koch backing.

Their distorted message is then reported as fact on TV shows like Fox News’s Hannity, with 3.3 million viewers per episode, or CNBC's Kudlow Report, with 300,000 viewers per episode, night after night after night.

As an article in The Nation magazine points out, when Texas Governor Rick Perry calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” that phrase comes directly from the Koch propaganda machine.

The Koch brothers have even been able to influence the messaging for the AARP. which recently opened the door to cutting Social Security benefits.

Koch Industries spent $857,000 on lobbyists in 2004, the year before George W Bush tried and failed to privatise social security. They also donated $104,660 to his campaign.

While their attacks on Social Security were not successful in 2004, they have not retreated.

Just the opposite, in fact. They have used the country’s economic crisis as an excuse to increase their attacks.

In the first two years of the Obama administration, the Koch brothers spent $20 million on lobbying, according to the Centre for Public Integrity.

"The Koch brothers fund organizations, and you have economists and political scientists working there, and they are very, very good at getting on television," Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said. "They are very effective in getting their positions out into the media."

The brothers have diversified their donations to Republican leaders, and also to strategic Democrats who oppose revenue increases like Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY).

Traditional lobbying has now given way to a larger, more insidious propaganda campaign aimed at changing the terms of debate not only on Social Security, but on the role of government and social spending in general.

"The Koch brothers’ job is to do everything they can to dismember government in general," Sen. Sanders says. "If you can destroy social security, you will have gone a long way forward in that effort."

2011-11-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

All across the country, unions and their members are supporting the Occupy movement in individual cities.

Locally, the Martin Luther King County Labor Council, the Teamsters, and the Seattle Building & Construction Trades Council are teaming up to collect supplies for the Occupy Seattle movement.

If you can donate something, or better yet, if you can get your local, your church, your community organization to help out, here’s what to do…
First check with Max Brown at the Labor Temple (206-963-6195 or 206-441-8510) to see what is needed. Then, bring it to one of the drop-off locations listed here.

DROP-OFF LOCATIONS:
M. L. King County Labor Council, 2800 First Avenue, Suite 206, Seattle, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays only. Contact: Max Brown 206-963-6195 or 206-441-8510.

Seattle/King County Building & Construction Trades Council, 6770 E. Marginal Way S., Building E, Suite 360, Seattle. 9 a/m/ to 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays only. Contact: Keith Weir 206-795-2993.

Teamsters Hall.\, 14675 Interurban Ave. S., Lobby, Tukwila, 9 am. To 5 p.m. weekdays only. Contact Lily Wilson-Codega 206-794-2606.

November Calendar of Events

2011-11-03T15:20:00.000-07:00

Monday, Nov. 14, 1:00 p.m.
“The 99% Economy: Getting the Economy Back on Track”:
IAM 751 Hall, 9125 15th Pl. S., Seattle, 98108.
Presentations and discussions about how we respond to the economic crisis and create an economy that serves the majority of people in our country. Sponsored by the WA State Labor Council and WA Community Action Network.

Tuesday, November 15, 5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Healthy Washington Coalition Meeting:
UFCW 21, 5030 First Avenue S., Seattle.
The Healthy WA Coalition, of which PSARA is a member, will be leading the fight in Washington state to stop cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and to improve and expand these programs as part of the overall effort to achieve health care for all.

Thursday, November 17th, 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
PSARA Executive Board Meeting:
Central Area Senior Center, 500 30th Avenue S., Seattle.
All PSARA members are welcome.

Monday, November 21, 4:30 p.m.
The Threat to Social Security; An Issue for All Generations:
Kane Hall, Room 210, University of Washington
Featuring Terry O’Neill, national President, National Organization for Women, Congressman Jim McDermott and former King County Executive Ron Sims, retired Deputy Director of the Department of Housing & Urban Development.
Sponsored by Social Security Works WA.

Monday, November 28th, 10 a.m.
Special session of Washington State Legislature: Beginning of Occupation of the Capitol demanding that the legislature and Governor raise revenue and make no further cuts. PSARA will be mobilizing our members to participate. Further information will be available on the website and via emails to the list serve.

Thursday, December 15th, 12:30 p.m.
PSARA General Membership Meeting and Holiday Pot Luck:
UFCW 21, Joe Crump Hall, 5030 First Ave South, Seattle.
Great food, featured speaker, Congressman & Gubernatorial Candidate Jay Inslee (contingent on Congress being out of session), PSARA elections and more. Mark your calendars! Bring non perishable food for King County Labor Agency Food Bank.

Meetings and Events

2011-10-05T15:04:00.000-07:00

For a calendar of events, go to http://www.psara.org/events.htm
Updates will be posted to this link on the PSARA webpage.

Nancy Altman keynoter at Everett forum

2011-10-05T14:58:00.001-07:00

Nancy J. Altman, a nationally-recognized expert on Social Security, will keynote a forum on that subject from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday, October 18, at the Jackson Event Center on the campus of Everett Community College.

Sponsored by a coalition of community, labor and retiree organizations, the forum is entitled, “The Threat to Social Security: An Issue for All Generations.”

Altman has a 30-year background in private pensions and Social Security. She chairs the board of the Pension Rights Center, and was a member of the faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of many reports, editorials and opinion pieces, and of a new book, The Battle for Social Security.

Altman will puncture myths and misinformation circulating about Social Security, intensified by the rhetoric of the campaign season. She will also discuss possible ways to strengthen the program’s benefits, and will emphasize its importance to all generations of Americans – from children of the Great Depression to those born in the current Great Recession.

She will be joined in the speaking program by Jeff Johnson, president of the Washington State Labor Council, whose family were early recipients of Social Security survivor benefits.

A second forum, at 2 p.m. Monday, November 21, on the University of Washington campus, will feature as a keynote speaker Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women.

Both forums are free and open to the public. Events at other Puget Sound communities are being planned.

Obama Jobs Bill: Pass it – then do more!

2011-10-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

By Mike Andrew

With more than 14 million Americans unemployed, President Obama had his work cut out for him when he announced the American Jobs Act in a speech on September 8.

Republican leaders rejected the president’s plan even before he gave the speech, but no one really expected a party committed to “making Obama a one-term president” to sign on to anything he proposed, no matter how good it might be.

President Obama’s real task was to convince the people who supported him in 2008, and are now increasingly skeptical of his leadership, that he is willing and able to lead the country out of economic crisis.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, who has criticized the president’s economic policies in the past, pronounced himself “favorably surprised” by the American Jobs Act.

It was “significantly bolder and better than I expected,” Krugman said, and if enacted “it would probably make a significant dent in unemployment.”

Almost every important labor leader, from AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka to SEIU president Mary Kay Henry, called on Congress to pass the bill.

The president called for some $200 billion in new federal spending – most of it on infrastructure projects like repairing roads, bridges, and schools – with some additional money going to help retain currently employed teachers.

Obama’s plan also calls for $240 billion in tax cuts. Some of them might actually help create more jobs – incentives for businesses hiring new employees, for example.

However, the experience of the first stimulus package shows that on the whole temporary tax cuts do not result in new economic activity, and therefore new hiring, instead they result in debt reduction or in savings, which do not increase demand for labor.

Two hundred billion of spending sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not – not when compared to the $1 trillion hole in the US economy created by the collapse of the housing bubble and the resulting overhang of household debt.

The president’s plan will obviously fill only part of that hole.

There is a deeper problem, however, and that problem is structural and can’t be solved by stopgap stimulus bills, even good ones.

Since the end of World War II, domestic consumption accounted for some 62-63% of GDP.

In other words, almost two-thirds of all economic activity in the US came from people buying things – as opposed to investments in infrastructure, or new manufacturing opportunities, for example.

That means ordinary working families going about their day-to-day business are the real “jobs creators” in the US economy, not the corporate CEOs.

Starting in the 1980s, domestic consumption rose to 70% of GDP, and that’s where it was before the 2008 crash.

The problem is that the increase in domestic consumption did not come from an increase in the real incomes of working families. Just the opposite. Real incomes have been declining since the Reagan period.

Rather than being financed by an increase in real wealth, the increase in consumption was financed by easy credit,

Since the collapse of the housing bubble, easy credit is a thing of the past, but nothing has replaced it as the motor of consumption.

The credit scheme at least gave working people the illusion that they were participating in a period of national prosperity, but it also led to our present problem – working people saddled with personal debt, without the ability to repay it, and for 14 million working people, without a job at all.

The way out of our economic crisis is not just to create more jobs, but to find a way to create real wealth for the real jobs creators – America’s working people.

Holiday feast…and Jay Inslee, too!

2011-10-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

Hear our special guest, Congressman Jay Inslee (he will be with us unless Congress is in session)….enjoy a sumptuous holiday potluck …help elect two PSARA officers and several Executive Board members.

It all happens at the General Membership Meeting from 12:30 to 3 p.m. Thursday, December 15, at Joe Crump Hall at UFCW Local 21, 5030 First Ave. S. Seattle.

Like to serve on PSARA’s lively Executive Board? Please contact Bette Reed, our Nominating Committee chair, at outreachvp@psara.org or call PSARA at (206) 448-9646. Leave a message if no one answers.

PSARA Needs a Webmaster

2011-10-05T14:52:00.000-07:00

Our wonderful volunteer webmaster, Lorraine Pozzi. has indicated that she needs to move on to other worthy involvements. We are deeply grateful to Lorraine for her stellar work and want to relieve her as soon as we find a good replacement. If you are interested in serving as PSARA’s webmaster and have the requisite skills, please contact Robby at president@psara.org.

Help us archive our newsletters

2011-10-05T14:51:00.001-07:00

We are preparing PSARA and Puget Sound Council of Senior Citizens (PSCSC) files for archiving in the University of Washington Special Collections to preserve our history, especially Will Parry’s writing. Because we are missing many issues, we turn to our long-time members who may be able to help us complete our collection. Please contact Maureen Bo by leaving a message at the office, (206) 448-9646, or by e-mail at adminvp@psara.org if you have any of the following issues that we can copy for the archives:

PSARA RETIREE ADVOCATE: July, 2006; August, 2003; July, 2001; October and June, 2000.

PSCSC SENIOR NEWS: January, 1998; June and December, 1997; February and December, 1995; January, 1990;; and any issues from 1985 sthsrough 1989. We have no issues for those years.

If you have any missing issues, we’d appreciate hearing from you as soon s possible. We hope to complete the current archiving soon.

‘We’ll see that day come ‘round!’

2011-10-05T14:49:00.000-07:00

There’s an old song that speaks a basic truth about organizing. “One man’s hands,” the song tells us, “can’t tear a prison down.” Nor can two men’s hands.

But listen to the old song’s ringing affirmation: “But if two and two and fifty make a million, we’ll see that day come round!”

In our monthly page 2 column we’ve emphasized again and again the importance of each and every new member we can sign up. And our members are responding. Our membership is now growing at an impressive 250 a year.

Yes, indeed, “two and two” are figuratively beginning to “make fifty.”
In the process, as the song tells us, we’re building a solid base for more explosive growth in the future.

Well, maybe not a million, but for sure in time we can enroll new members in the thousands. Those thousands are out there, and they need our action-oriented, sharp-edged politics.

We simply have to find them, one by one and two by two, and introduce them to The Retiree Advocate and invite them to join us. Every new member has a circle of family and friends in his or her community. That makes every new member a potential organizer. Drop the pebble in the pool, and the circles widen!

And this is how we multiply our strength. This is how “two and two and fifty make a million.” And this is how “we’ll see that day come ‘round!”

Paid Sick Days ordinance a model for the nation

2011-10-05T14:47:00.001-07:00

By Marilyn Watkins

Almost everyone working in Seattle will be guaranteed a few days of sick leave each year starting next September. Mayor McGinn signed Seattle’s Paid Sick and Safe Leave ordinance into law on September 23 in a lively ceremony at Plum Bistro, following an 8-to-1 vote by the City Council.

In addition to improving daily lives in Seattle and surrounding communities, this ordinance will have a powerful impact around the country. People in other cities and states want to use our ordinance as a model for their own. They also want to know how we won council passage despite intense opposition.

The Ordinance is great news for the 190,000 workers who don’t get any paid sick leave now, and for the many additional workers who are penalized if they take the leave they’ve earned. It’s good news for all of us who shop, eat out, or ride the bus – and now risk exposure to illness from people who can’t afford to stay home when sick. It’s good news for all the children whose health and schooling have suffered because their parents can’t get off work to take them to the pediatrician or nurse them through illness.

Paid sick days will help restore economic security to working families, reclaim the dignity of labor, and rebuild the middle class.

PSARA members helped win this historic victory. Without the outpouring of e-mails and phone calls, and the standing-room only crowds at hearings and forums, the City Council would have followed the road urged by the Chamber of Commerce – delaying action until we just gave up.

Seattle’s ordinance covers most of the half million workers within the city limits. Starting in September 2012, companies with the equivalent of 5 to 49 full-time workers must allow workers to earn up to 5 paid sick days, firms with 50 to 249 must provide 7 days, and larger firms 9 days. Companies are free to provide leave as flexible-use paid time off (PTO), so long as the leave can be used as needed for the health needs of the worker or close family members, or to deal with consequences of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking. Large firms, if they do use PTO, must provide at least 13.5 days.

Key to our success was collaborating from the beginning with small business owners on designing the policy. People like Makini Howell, owner of Plum Bistro and Jody Hall, owner of Cupcake Royale, became vocal advocates. These small employers and many others like them are organized into the Main Street Alliance, a new, more progressive association of small business owners. While the Main Street Alliance did not take a position on the Paid Sick Days ordinance, a number of the small business owners within the Alliance supported the ordinance.

Working people and seniors also turned out in force and spoke about the real cost of being forced to choose between taking care of health needs or paying the bills. And we had staunch champions on the City Council, especially in Nick Licata and Jean Godden. In the end, only Richard Conlin voted no.

We succeeded because we listened to each other and worked together – and because people who usually don’t have much say in policymaking had a chance to participate here. We can all be proud both of passing good groundbreaking policy and of demonstrating democracy at its best.

Three Initiatives and a Special Session

2011-10-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

By Robby Stern

Our ballots will arrive in the mail within several weeks. PSARA has taken a position on three important initiatives on the ballot. The fate of these initiatives will have an impact on our future and the future of our state. For those of you who do not want to read more, we recommend:

NO on I-1125. NO on I-1183. YES on I-1163.

Tim Eyman’s newest broadside is Initiative 1125. The bulk of the contributions to I-1125, over $1 million, come from Kemper Freeman, a Bellevue developer. According to Eyman, I - 1125 is intended to block the voter-approved construction of light rail on I–90 across the Lake Washington Bridge. I–1125 also threatens the Evergreen Point floating bridge replacement, Clark County’s Columbia River Crossing, the Alaska Way Viaduct replacement and multiple other projects around the state. It also threatens thousands of much-needed good-paying jobs.

The vehicle Eyman uses to achieve his purposes is to remove the setting of toll rates from an independent nonpartisan commission and instead require the legislature to set toll rates. Every other state in the country has an independent commission setting toll rates to avoid the political gridlock that frequently occurs when elected politicians make these decisions. According to an independent analysis for the State Treasurer, the initiative will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in increased bond costs to pay for transportation projects.

PSARA recommends we vote NO on I-1125.

In 2008, voters overwhelmingly passed I–1029, which required criminal background checks and increased training for long-term care workers who assist vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities. In the 2010 legislative session, the legislature reduced the training requirements and delayed the criminal background checks. Initiative 1163, on the ballot this year, restores the training requirements and criminal background checks for long-term care workers.

Hairdressers must have 1000 hours of training and nail technicians 600 hours of training. Home care workers do difficult and important work visiting seriously ill seniors and people with disabilities. They help them dress, bathe, clean, get out of bed and cook so they can stay in their own homes. Under present law, they will not be getting the training and certification they need. Nursing home caregivers must have 85 hours of training while home care workers who provide the same kind of care in a more isolated setting get no similar level of training.

I have not yet met a senior who has told me they want to age in a nursing home. All of us aspire to age in our own homes where we feel more connected to our families and communities. Without qualified and trained caregivers who can help us live safely in our own homes, the most vulnerable among us will be forced into nursing homes. Requiring training and background checks is a common sense approach to the growing need for home care workers.

PSARA members at our membership meeting voted to endorse I-1163 and to recommend a YES vote.

Last November, Washington voters said NO to privatization of liquor sales. Costco and other large retailers have returned with I-1183, which will create five times as many hard liquor retailers. The Centers for Disease Control says that will likely lead to more than a 50 percent increase in consumption. It is predicted that one of every four minors attempting to buy alcohol from private retailers will succeed. When big corporations spend large amounts of money to pass an initiative like I-1183, you can bet it is not for the public good.

PSARA recommends a NO vote on I-1183.

* * * * * * * * * * * *
The Upcoming Special Session

The damage that Wall Street and the banks have done to our economy is just astonishing. The suffering they caused is growing worse and worse. Those who created this recession/depression continue to do very well. The wealth gap continues to grow to historic proportions.

Revenue to the state has declined even more than had been anticipated in the 2010 legislative session. The September revenue forecast predicted an additional $1.4 billion decline in revenue and Gov. Gregoire indicated the need for a special session after the November forecast to address the reduced revenue.

PSARA believes that cuts to education, healthcare and other essential services undermine any hope for an economic recovery. After billions and billions in cuts, our communities cannot afford any more cuts to jobs, our future and our quality of life. We will not be able to cut ourselves out of this crisis. Revenue must be part of the solution. Our elected leaders should pass a referendum to the people (if they cannot muster the required 60% vote) ending unfair tax breaks. Let voters decide whether we end unfair tax breaks -- or make deeper budget cuts.

Staff and budget cuts jeopardize Social Security

2011-10-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

By Steve Kofahl

George W. Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, and we fought off those efforts during his second term. The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction will soon consider benefit cuts in the name of deficit reduction, and we are gearing up to defeat those proposals as well. But a more insidious attack has been underway for more than a quarter century. Deep cuts have been made in the spending and staffing needed to properly run the Social Security Administration (SSA), and bad management decisions have harmed service delivery.

In spite of these problems, the public has been generally well-served due to the commitment and dedication of front-line SSA employees. However, proposals from Congress, and decisions being made by the SSA Commissioner and his subordinates, may soon rob the employees of the capacity to continue that proud tradition. If the public loses confidence in SSA's ability to deliver quality service, Social Security itself becomes far more vulnerable to attack from the program's enemies. Recent surveys by the Agency show that the public is already becoming less satisfied.

Between1985 and 1989, President Reagan and SSA Commissioner Dorcas Hardy cut staff through attrition, from about 83,000 to 62,000 positions. A hostile labor-management relationship was established in the Agency at the same time. Pressure from Congress and the public led Reagan to replace Ms. Hardy with Gwendolyn King, who stopped the staff cuts and healed SSA's relationship with AFGE.

With the arrival of George W. Bush, an adversarial labor-management relationship was again established, while thousands of front-line positions were chopped through attrition. President Obama restored those lost positions, but ignored recommendations made by his transition team, and by the AFL-CIO (including the Washington State Labor Council) to replace Bush's SSA Commissioner, Michael J. Astrue. It isn't just labor that has problems with Astrue's oligarchic management style. Well-respected senior Agency officials at Headquarters who dared to express views different than his have been fired, or threatened with firing.

Current year funding of SSA operations is nearly $1 billion less than the President requested, and there has been a near-total hiring freeze for most of the past year. Republican proposals have been made to gut staffing and spending at all Federal agencies, including SSA.

Using spending constraints as an excuse, Astrue stopped sending annual Personal Earnings and Benefit Estimate (PEBES) statements to workers early this year. That means that wage posting errors are not revealed in time for them to be easily corrected. AFGE and the Alliance for Retired Americans are considering legal action in response to this suspension of PEBES, since the issuance of the statements is required by law.

The Commissioner has mounted an aggressive campaign in recent years to steer the public toward Internet self-service when they apply for benefits, and to encourage and train third parties (some of whom charge fees) to perform the work traditionally done by the Agency's Claims Representatives. SSA employees find that numerous errors are made when the public uses these alternate service methods. Early this year, Astrue closed 300 contact stations where SSA employees made themselves available to serve clients who had difficulty getting to field offices, and reportedly told Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown that he intends to close as many as one-half of the Agency's 1300 field offices.

Since that time, dozens of offices have been targeted for closure (see the July Retiree Advocate regarding Seattle office closures). A few weeks ago, hours of service were cut by 30 minutes at the end of the day in each of the Agency's field offices, to reduce the need to pay employees overtime for late interviews.

New leadership is needed that would repair the damaged labor-management relationship, so that SSA employees would again have a voice at work, with their ideas considered when the Agency makes decisions about how to save money. Elimination of unnecessary middle management Headquarters and Regional Office positions that do nothing to improve service might be a good place to start.

Because just 0.9% of income is used to administer the program, and because the Trust Funds continue to receive more money than is paid out in benefits, there is enough money to restore quality public service delivery by trained SSA employees. Administrative funding should be taken off-budget, and not be subject to arbitrary spending caps, since Social Security is self-funded and workers already have paid for the quality service delivery that they need and deserve.

Please contact your Senators, and ask them to be our champions on these issues!

(Steve Kofahl is president of Local 3937 of the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO and a member of the PSARA Executive Board.)

A bank of, by and for the people

2011-10-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

By Will Parry

The developing campaign to establish a publicly-owned bank in Washington State will bring Ellen Brown, a nationally-recognized authority on the subject, to speak in Seattle at 7 p.m. Wednesday, October 26, in 120 Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus.

State Representative Bob Hasegawa, the prime sponsor of the State Bank bill in Washington, will share the podium to speak about the campaign in our state.

The State Bank concept has caught fire in Washington and other states because of the remarkable economic achievements of North Dakota, which since 1919 has had the nation’s only publicly-owned bank.

Hasegawa’s bill, House Bill 2040, called for a bank patterned after North Dakota’s. HB 2040 didn’t pass in the 2011 session, but drew strong support from House Democrats and some support from House Republicans as well, Hasegawa reported.

“Speaker of the House Frank Chopp, who has been very supportive of this concept, initiated an Infrastructure Financing Task Force to work in the interim between sessions,” Hasegawa said. Its mission is to recommend, for consideration by the 2012 legislature, ways to establish “a financial institution to be owned by the public.”

Washington’s state funds are currently deposited with Bank of America, one of the four banking giants that dominate the industry and that have earned the nation’s contempt, both for their failure to make the loans that could revive the economy, and for the unvarnished greed of their executives.

The state-owned Bank of North Dakota, in contrast, partners with small and medium-sized banks in that state to finance farms, start-up businesses, and business expansions, spurring economic growth.

North Dakota also has the nation’s fastest growth in payrolls, 3.2 percent in the last year. It has the nation’s lowest foreclosure rate. And it is the only state to be in continuous budget surplus since the banking crisis of 2008. Its balance sheet is so strong that it recently reduced individual income taxes and property taxes by a combined $400 million.

The author of eleven books, Ellen Brown is about to release a twelfth, Web of Debt, tracing the evolution of the existing privately-owned banking system. She has also written nearly one hundred articles on issues related to public banking.

Her Seattle appearance is being sponsored by Keep Our Money in Washington and by Just Sustainable Economy. The Puget Sound ARA has signed on as a co-sponsor. A $5 admission fee will be charged at the October 26 Kane Hall event. Students with ID will be admitted free.

Medicare: Playing games and causing pain

2011-10-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

By Will Parry

President Obama has drawn up a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit by another $3 trillion over ten years, including $320 billion in cuts in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. His proposal will go to the Congressional “super committee” for their consideration.

The White House admitted the plan would impose “a lot of pain,” and Robert Pear, writing in the New York Times, said the pain is certainly there in the Medicare and Medicaid cuts.

“Mr. Obama proposed higher premiums and deductibles for many Medicare beneficiaries” and would “start charging co-payments to frail homebound older people who receive home health services,” Pear said.

The Center for Medicare Advocacy (CMA) judged the Obama plan as an improvement over the Republican voucher proposal but found some aspects of it “troubling,” including “increased cost-sharing for beneficiaries – especially for people with long-term conditions.”

The Obama plan would require new beneficiaries to pay higher deductibles before Medicare’s excellent coverage kicks in. It would sock new beneficiaries who buy private Medigap policies with a 30 percent premium increase. It would charge higher premiums to higher-income beneficiaries. And starting in 2017, the plan would saddle new beneficiaries with a co-payment for home health care.

Such co-payments would “significantly increase out-of-pocket costs for many low-income widows with multiple chronic conditions,” said Howard J. Bedlin, vice president of the National Council on Aging.

On the positive side, the President would maintain the present eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare; would not tamper with the provision for annual cost-of-living adjustments; and would reduce drug costs for low-income beneficiaries.

CMA offered an alternative Medicare proposal that would reduce the federal deficit substantially without shifting the cost to the program’s beneficiaries. Here is CMA’s “Six-Point Solution”:

• Negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies. The industry picked up 47 million customers with the enactment of Medicare drug coverage in 2003, but ever since has adjusted the prices of its products only in one direction -- upwards.

• Stop paying private Medicare plans more than traditional Medicare.

• Include a drug benefit in traditional Medicare.

• Extend Medicaid drug rebates to Medicare dual eligibles. People eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid make up one fourth of all Medicare drug users. Rebates already available to those on Medicaid should be extended to all dual eligibles.

•Lower the age of Medicare eligibility. Lowering the age of eligibility to 55 would add revenue from people likely to need less care than older enrollees. And it would provide Medicare’s excellent coverage for millions aged 55 to 64 who are now unable to afford private insurance.

• Let the Affordable Care Act do its job. Beat back all efforts to repeal or defund health care reform. Many provisions in the new law will reduce health care costs for all Americans.

Judith Stein, Executive Director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, is appealing for citizen pressure on President Obama and the Congress.

“Tell them that shifting costs from the federal government to beneficiaries and their families – whether through a voucher program or increased cost-sharing – is a perversion of Medicare’s original intent to protect older people and their families from illness and financial ruin due to health care costs,” Stein said, adding:

“Plus it’s not needed for deficit reduction!”

‘Tax Wall Street!’ union nurses say

2011-10-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

By Rap Lewis

Aiming squarely at Wall Street greed, an estimated ten thousand nurses and their labor and community allies organized simultaneous demonstrations at 61 Congressional offices in 21 states on September 1.

At each event, they called on senators and representatives to pledge to “support a Wall Street transaction tax that will raise sufficient revenue to make Wall Street pay for the devastation it has caused on Main Street.”

On the initiative of the 170,000-member National Nurses United (NNU), the demonstrators organized street theater, community speakouts, soup kitchens and old-fashioned picketlines at Congressmembers’ offices in Boston, San Francisco and Chicago; Corpus Christi, Texas; Marquette, Michigan; Dayton, Ohio, and many other cities.

“America’s nurses every day see broad declines in health and living standards that are a direct result of patients and families struggling with lack of jobs, un-payable medical bills, hunger and homelessness, said NNU Co-President Karen Higgins, RN, at a picketline outside the Richmond, Virginia, office of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

The single demand uniting the demonstrators was for Congress to enact a “transaction tax” to be imposed for each Wall Street trade in stocks, derivatives, currencies, credit default swaps, and futures.

Because of the great number of such Wall Street transactions, even a modest tax on each would generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year to address the social damage for which Wall Street bears the responsibility, the nurses union says.

Hey, look at Argentina!

2011-10-05T14:37:00.000-07:00

By Mike Andrew

“You can’t spend your way out of a recession!”

So say Republicans and all economic conservatives.

And yet Argentina did just that, bouncing back not just from mere recession but from national bankruptcy, in less than 10 years.

In 2001 Argentina defaulted on $100 billion of sovereign debt. Its banks were collapsing like a house of cards. Its people were occupying shut-down factories.

In the four years between 1998 and 2002, Argentina’s economy shrank by almost 20%.

The problem was easy to see. Argentina was the victim of a series of right-wing military dictatorships trying one supply-side economic experiment after another, all of them failures.

The solution was a brave gamble by the Argentine government.

First, the government intervened in the currency market to keep the value of its own currency low. This in turn boosted local industry by making Argentina’s exports cheap, while keeping foreign imports expensive.

It then taxed imports and exports, and spent the revenue on a series of public works projects. Today, Argentine government spending is 25% of GDP, compared with only 14% in 2003.

As a result of the government-financed construction projects, the country has 400,000 new low-income housing units, and a new 235-mile highway between the northern cities of Rosario and Córdoba.

The Argentine government also strengthened its social safety net.

The Universal Child Allowance gives 1.9 million low-income families a monthly stipend of about $42 per child, which helps increase consumption. The Allowance began in 2009 with bipartisan support from both the ruling party and the opposition. Because the amount of the stipend depends in part on the child’s school attendance, the allowance is also a measure to promote public education.

The Argentine economy has grown by over 6% a year for seven of the last eight years, unemployment has been cut to under 8% today from a whopping 20% in 2002, and the poverty level has fallen by almost half over the last decade.

Argentines are expected to buy some 800,000 new vehicles this year. Plasma TVs and BlackBerrys have become common among Argentina’s growing middle class.

Obviously, this policy is inflationary, with the inflation rate now well over 20%. It remains to be seen how well Argentina’s working people will be able to cope with that.

Nevertheless, Argentina is another example that runs counter to the all-cuts austerity response to economic crisis.

Toothache

2011-10-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

by Rap Lewis

For the story of Kyle Willis, we are indebted to Matthew Yglesias, who blogs for The American Prospect.

Like 15 million other Americans, Willis was unemployed. Like many more millions, he had no health insurance. Therefore, when Willis’ wisdom tooth started hurting, he toughed it out for two weeks. When dentists told him it should be pulled, he held off because he had no way of paying for the procedure.

When his face stated swelling and his head began to ache, he went to a hospital emergency room. There he received prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medication. He couldn’t afford both, so he chose the pain medication.

The tooth infection spread, causing his brain to swell. On August 30, at the age of 24, Kyle Willis died.

The United States of America can pay for two wars, bail out the biggest banks, and dish out billions in tax “relief” to corporations and millionaires. All that wealth, swollen like an infected tooth -- yet it cannot provide, at modest cost, the most basic health services to Kyle Willis and millions like him.

Our country has a toothache and needs some radical dentistry.

Paid sick days: Their time has come

2011-09-02T18:25:00.000-07:00

By Aaron Keating

Imagine waking up with the flu and choosing between going to work sick, or staying home and losing a day’s pay – or worse, your job.

For 190,000 people working in Seattle without paid sick days – many in restaurants and hotels, medical centers and long-term care facilities, even grocery stores – that’s a daily reality.

When a child is sick at school, parents shouldn’t have to worry about getting a negative performance review for leaving work to take them home. Nor should someone lose half a day’s pay to take their elderly parent to the doctor. That’s why I’m proud the Seattle City Council is considering a paid sick days ordinance to ensure people have paid sick days on the job.

More than 30 local businesses and 75+ community organizations worked together to get the ordinance introduced and passed unanimously out of committee. But now, a handful of corporate interests have emerged to oppose this common sense public health and family measure. They’re working to water down it with special exemptions and administrative barriers.

Help make sure every Seattle City Council member gets the message: “Paid sick days mean healthy, responsible prevention – don’t water it down!” Meet on the plaza outside City Hall at 1:45 p.m. on Monday, September 12; we’ll walk up the stairs together to Council Chambers for the 2 p.m. meeting and vote (600 Fourth Ave. 2nd Floor, Seattle, WA 98104). We’ll have signs and stickers – we just need you!

I have a personal reason to support this ordinance: I’m the proud father of a 12-week old baby girl. You can guess I’ve had my share of sleepless nights – but it’s helped me realize how lucky I am.

Growing up, while my father worked full-time as an elementary school teacher, my mother did part-time accounting work, often from home. So when I got pneumonia and missed a week of kindergarten, she could stay home with me. Same when my brother got the chickenpox.

Like a lot of families today, my wife and I can’t afford to work part-time. But we’re lucky: both of our employers provide paid sick days. So when one of us takes our daughter to see our pediatrician, we don’t risk losing part of our paycheck – or worse, our job.

But the way I see it, luck shouldn’t determine whether you can take responsibility for your own and your family’s health. The flu and other illnesses spread quickly in our schools, workplaces, and retirement facilities. And if Seattleites can build software and airplanes for the world, we can certainly ensure everyone can work healthy and care for their families.

If you can’t come to the Council meeting to support the paid sick days ordinance, please email council@seattle.gov or send your letter of support to: Seattle City Council, PO Box 34025, Seattle, WA 98124-4025. Learn more at www.seattlehealthyworkforce.org.

Aaron Keating is a PSARA member and is Operations Director at the Economic Opportunity Institute

Program cuts bleed the nation

2011-09-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

By Will Parry

Here’s what we’re up against, and it’s not pretty.

We’ve got a new law on the books, the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011. The BCA cuts the discretionary programs people need by nearly one trillion dollars over ten years, but leaves untouched the massive wealth of giant corporations and the nation’s millionaires.

Those cuts are only the beginning. BCA has created a new “super committee” of six Republican and six Democratic members of Congress, and given it until November 23 to seek majority agreement on any combination of spending cuts and increased revenue that produces an additional $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.

If seven or more members of the 12-member committee can agree, their deficit reduction package will be submitted to Congress for an up-or-down vote, with no amendments allowed. If the plan is not adopted, or if it fails to reduce the deficit by at least another $1.2 trillion, the BCA requires even deeper automatic cuts in federal programs to take effect beginning in 2013.

The deficit hawks have effectively cut the regular committees of Congress out of the action. And they have narrowed the focus of the national discussion to: “How can we cut our way to a balanced budget?”

Progressive Democrats and respected economists say flatly it can’t be done, that slashing the funding for government programs is exactly the wrong medicine. With the economy mired in a long-term recession, with 25 million unemployed Americans, they are calling for a jobs program that’s big and bold, commensurate with the seriousness of the crisis.

The same Republicans who won’t slap so much as a five-cent tax on millionaires are ready to make the millions who depend upon Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid pay for a deficit caused by two wars, multi-billion dollar tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and the worst recession since the 1930s.

The threat to the integrity of those basic social programs is ominous. House Majority Leader John Boehner wants the age for full retirement benefits bumped up to 69 or 70. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), co-chair of the Supercommittee, derides the three programs as “cruel ponzi schemes.”

And all six Republicans on the Super Committee advocate deep cuts in Social Security, ending the Medicare protections seniors rely upon, and cutting $1.4 trillion from Medicaid, the sole health care resource of millions of the frail, impoverished elderly.

It does not help that President Obama supports a revision of the Social Security COLA formula that would cruelly tighten the screws on the income of retirees as they grow older, cutting benefits by $560 a year at age 75 and by a full $1,000 a year at age 85.

The grim reality is that the six Republicans on the Supercommittee are not about to be swayed by appeals to bipartisanship. The danger is that they will pick up the vote of one defecting Democrat to create majority support for a proposal laden with still deeper cuts in the programs people depend upon. With seven votes from the committee, the proposal would then go to the full Congress for an up-or-down vote with no amendments.

President Obama is preparing to address the jobs issue as we go to press. Thus far, he has proposed small-bore initiatives that don’t measure up to the deepening crisis created by unemployment on this scale.

“Right now, the old booster rockets are gone,” says the economist Robert Reich. “The original stimulus is over….Combine the budget cuts state and local governments continue to make with the slowdown in consumer spending, the reluctance of businesses to expand or hire, and the magnitude of unemployment and under-employment, and you need a big new booster rocket.”

Reich then outlines his own bold 10-point “booster rocket.” He’d exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes for two years and make up the shortfall by “scrapping the cap” so that the wealthy pay their full share of the Social Security payroll tax.

Reich would also recreate the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to put the long-term unemployed directly to work. He’d create an infrastructure bank to fund the repair and upgrading of everything from roads to schools to sewer systems.

He’d provide relief for homeowners on their mortgage loans and make low-interest loans to cash-starved states and cities. He’d impose a “severance fee” on any big company that lays off an American worker and outsources the job abroad.

“A bold jobs plan is also good politics,” Reich says. “With more than 25 million Americans looking for full-time jobs, the wages of people with jobs falling, and an economy on the verge of a double dip, the President has to come out fighting on the side of average people.”

PSARA’s Frank Irigon seeks Newcastle Council post

2011-09-02T18:18:00.000-07:00

PSARA Executive Board member Frank Irigon, a candidate for the Newcastle city Council Position #4, succeeded in winning a slot in the November general election. Three candidates competed and Frank was the second highest vote getter.

The November election will be tough. While the position is an open seat, the other candidate in the race is a former city council member.

Newcastle faces daunting financial challenges. There is no commercial tax base for the community and the primary sources of support for city services are property tax and sales tax revenues as well as development fees.

Frank has expressed enthusiasm for taking on the financial challenges faced by the small city. We know Frank to be a committed, progressive activist and wish him well in the upcoming election.

For more information about Frank’s campaign please email irigonforcouncil@gmail.com, or call 425-235-4795.

‘Be the change you want to see…’

2011-09-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

by Maureen Bo, Administrative Vice President

Those were the words of Mahatma Gandhi. He didn’t say, “Just sit there and blame the big guys in the suits, the poobahs, and then go back to your TV program.” Nor did he tell us to do the heroic deeds that cost him his life.

He did give us an example of how one person can initiate change. We don’t need to give our lives, but we do have to take action for change to happen. Here are some ways to make change happen:

1) Use the Retiree Advocate to tell the truth about the political situation that the corporate media suppresses.

2) Invite friends or neighbors to get acquainted with PSARA at one of our meetings or demonstrations.

3) Give that friend or family member a PSARA membership and a year’s worth of political news and insight for just $15.

Movements grow one member at a time. We are building a movement. Each of us can apply the wise words of Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see.”

Let Senator Murray hear from you

2011-09-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

The appointment of Washington Senator Patty Murray to co-chair the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction gives PSARA members, as her constituents, a special opportunity to influence the outcome of the committee’s crucial deliberations.

Senator Murray has invited our “input and thoughts.” She should hear from each of us, urging her to stand fast for the integrity of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and to insist that big corporations and the wealthiest among us bear their rightful share of whatever sacrifice may be required.
\
Write Senator Murray at Ste. 2988 Jackson Federal Bldg., Seattle 98174.

Phone Senator Murray at (206) 553-5545.

Email Senator Murray at www.murray.senate.gov.

Vacation musings

2011-09-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

By Robby Stern

During my August vacation break I had time to think about some issues that are weighing on my mind.

In recent conversations I heard people ask why there hasn’t been more organized collective anger expressed at the decline in the standard of living and quality of life for the people of our country. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations use their dollars to buy the government that serves their interests. At the same time, safety net programs, access to education and health care, environmental protection and other basic needs are under greater and greater attack. In addition, the ability to make a family living wage is becoming more and more difficult.

So why isn’t there more of a popular uprising against what is clearly an intolerable situation? Is it, as some say, because not enough people are feeling the pain?

I have several thoughts – and a prediction.

Much of the energy of the discontented went into the 2008 presidential election. Many believed that Barack Obama would attack the economic disparities we were facing. Much faith and enthusiasm went into the election. There is widespread disappointment.. Determining how to move forward from the disappointment and how to organize without turning over the reigns of government to the crazy Republican politician is not an easy task.

In addition, the organizations that can provide the infrastructure for mass action have been weakened by membership decline and are also on the defensive against attacks.

The leadership of these organizations is struggling to determine how to respond to a new reality…i.e., that the very wealthy (with a few notable exceptions), the multinational corporations and their allies are forcefully moving to destroy or neutralize any progressive insurgency in our country. Many of these progressive leaders walk the slender thread between working with traditional allies who are no longer reliable while helping to build a new insurgency that will be very uncomfortable and perhaps even opposed by the traditional political allies.

The mass media has shrunk and has also, in large part, taken a turn to the right. While we may see stories about unemployment, about the growing inequalities in our society, about winners and losers in the new economic order, we hardly ever see or hear coverage of protests and movements to change the present reality.

This lack of reporting leads to a feeling of isolation on the part of those who are acting against the unacceptable political and economic reality. A progressive alternative media is developing through the Internet nd social media, but it has not yet matured into a source that has broad public appeal.

One ruling class strategy in response to the progressive challenges of the 1960s and early 1970s was to promote and fund the idea that happiness comes from consumption of consumer goods and that mass culture needed to be purged of values of progressive social change. The forces of reaction recognized that the media they own, the sports teams they own, and the culture they fund and control should be used to divert the mass population from the critical issues of the day to a more “me first” ethos. At the same time, think tanks were generously funded to lay the groundwork for the attack on the idea that the role of government is to make the lives of the majority better and to create more opportunity for all.

So how do we counter all these bad developments and build a better, more progressive political and economic reality?

1. We have to individually support one another so we do not give in to pessimism. Pessimism will paralyze us. We need to consciously encourage each other to take on the challenges and give emotional and material support to each other.

2. Build organization. It is through organizations that we can reach out, chart a path for progressive change, and unite with other like-minded people.

3. Develop a permanent progressive coalition of organizations, including labor, community groups like PSARA, women’s groups, people of color organizations, religious groups, immigrant groups, etc. We need to do the hard work of arriving at a common vision for our communities and a strategy for achieving that vision. Each organization will have to develop an organizing strategy for their target population. Organizations within such a permanent political coalition will need to be accountable to each other and respectful of each other.

Now for the prediction: We are probably going to get our butts kicked for a while. (We will put up a heck of a fight.) But we are the majority and if we stick to our long-term effort, we will win the day.

Labor Day 2011: Honor those who built the nation

2011-09-02T18:08:00.000-07:00

By Jeff Johnson

Labor Day is a time to celebrate the work that we do that has created the economic and social fabric of America.

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joined the striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, he proclaimed that “all labor has dignity” and should be afforded the means to achieve the “American Dream.”

That “American Dream” has been rapidly unraveling during the current “Great Recession” and is under full scale attack by corporate America that won’t invest, banks that won’t lend, and politicians who would rather fight over fake political crises, like the debt ceiling, than create jobs.

As austerity budgets are imposed across our country, the great irony is that workers, the elderly, students, immigrants, the poor and the vulnerable, the ones who most suffer under these budget cuts, are being blamed for deficits they did not create.

Wall Street banks caused the immediate economic crisis by treating the economy as if it were their private casino and credit default swaps were their chips – and now these same banks sit on over a trillion dollars of assets and continue to dole out obscene bonuses to the very people who brought us the recession.

But the collapse of the U.S. economy and the world economy has had devastating impacts on working people. In the U.S. and in our state the unemployment rate remains above 9%. It’s twice that if you count those who have dropped off the unemployment rolls without finding work and those working part-time involuntarily. It’s three times 9 percent in the building and construction trades. And it’s higher still for youth and workers of color.

Not since the 1920s has there been such a gross disparity of income and wealth in our country. Workers and the poor simply don’t have the purchasing power to give the economy a boost.

Faced with plunging revenues and increasing demand for social services, state and local governments lack the resources to invest in the social, physical and public infrastructure needed to help strengthen the private economy. Some states are using their deficits in an attempt to crush public employee unions and devastate state and local safety nets.

For several decades our economy has been weakened through policies that have accelerated the concentration of wealth at the top: Deregulation of the financial industry and a tax policy that coddles the wealthy and rewards employers for off-shoring U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Free trade agreements have deindustrialized the U.S. economy through the loss of 50,000 manufacturing plants over the last ten years, have run up huge U.S. trade deficits; and have failed to protect the workers’ most basic labor, environmental, and human rights.

Wisconsin, Ohio and other states have exploited their deficits to eviscerate the collective bargaining rights of public employees. Their public employee unions had grown too influential, it was argued, created too strong a voice for working people and the social safety net, and were therefore responsible for the deficits.

The community response was that Governors Walker and Kasich had severely overreached. People understood that the recession, and not the unions, had caused the deficits.

The popular uprising in Wisconsin has led to the recall of two Republican state senators. In Ohio, citizens have gathered 1.3 million signatures to refer that state’s anti-collective bargaining law to this November’s ballot.

At the federal level we have the manufactured debt ceiling crisis and the resulting “super committee” that will determine our country’s spending and revenue direction. Are the deficits we face as a nation the result of overly generous Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, too many workplace health and safety inspections, and too much spending on monitoring clean water and air? Or are they the result of an unfair tax system, a financial industry out of control, trade policies that weaken our overall economy, and the financing of two wars?

We in labor believe the question answers itself. We believe that as a nation, and as a state, we need to confront the real crises facing us –The burning need for jobs, for revenue and for the restoration of moral leadership.

We need to create public jobs programs on the scale of the Works Projects Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps pf the 1930s. Every state has failing transportation infrastructure – roads, bridges, transit - that we can invest in. We could energy retrofit public buildings creating tens of thousands of jobs, creating demand in the clean energy sector, and reducing our carbon footprint. We could invest in smart energy grids and broadband expansion creating tremendous common good and creating demand for privately produced products. All these investments would create employment, income, and consumer demand.
We need to oppose “Free Trade Agreements” that create substantial net job losses and tax policies that reward the off-shoring of U.S. jobs.

We need to enhance income support and safety net programs -- Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Trade Adjustment Assistance and mortgage relief for homeowners. These policies, too, will increase consumer demand.
In the short run the federal government needs to provide the funds for state and local governments to cover their recession-induced budget deficits. Providing strong state services, state and local employment, investing in our educational, health care, and transportation infrastructures helps create employment and demand and strengthens the private economy as well.

State and local governments need to use their procurement policies to purchase goods and services from local employers employing local workers wherever possible. Similarly, state and local governments can invest their tax receipt accounts, social insurance trust funds, and pension funds in banks that are committed to injecting credit into local communities to finance job-generating investments.

We need a fair tax system that provides the revenue to maintain healthy communities. In our state, we need to place a moratorium for several years on many of the 567 tax exemptions that choke off the revenue we need.

Above all, we need to remove the requirement that any measure to raise revenue or remove tax exemptions must have the support of two-thirds of the legislators. This undemocratic requirement gives a minority of legislators a choke-hold on state revenue and frustrates the will of the majority.

Dr. King used to say, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” To bend that arc will take courage and moral leadership. Join us in bending that arc toward justice!

(Jeff Johnson is President of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, and a PSARA member.)

The Advocate interviews Congressman Jim McDermott:

2011-09-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

“We need to fix our tax system, which heavily favors the rich…”

By Mike Andrew

When the debt ceiling bill passed Congress in August, half the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted No. One of them was Seattle’s Congressman Jim McDermott.

McDermott talked with The Retiree Advocate to explain why.

Unlike Tea Party Republicans, who actually wanted the US government to default on its debts, McDermott agreed with raising the debt ceiling, but had serious reservations about cost-cutting provisions added to the bill at the last minute to attract enough Republican votes to pass it.

“I voted No in protest of the deficit-reduction provisions,” McDermott said. “We never held a single Congressional hearing on the programs that were being cut in the bill, and I thought it was irresponsible that the Republicans waited until the eleventh hour to work out a deal.”

One of the key provisions of the bill is the creation of a so-called “super-commission” of six Republicans and six Democrats who are charged with working out a long-term deficit-reduction plan.

McDermott says he is skeptical about the commission’s ability to come to agreement on a deficit-reduction package that will be fair and balanced.

“At this point, I am not optimistic given who the Republicans appointed,” McDermott told The Advocate.

Asked if he foresaw cuts to Medicare and Social Security, McDermott replied that he couldn’t rule that out.

“Based on what Republicans have said and proposed thus far, I think the prospects are high for Medicare cuts and changes to Social Security,” he said.

“At this point, I can’t say what exactly what changes will be made to Social Security or Medicare, but one thing that is troubling is the fact that the Republicans appointed to the super committee – the entity empowered to make these decisions – have all signed the pledge to not raise taxes. If taxes are completely off the table, we’re going to have to find alternative revenue sources or make drastic changes to our entitlement programs.”

One change that McDermott completely rejects is the Medicare voucher system proposed by Tea Party darling Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

“Seniors, like all Americans, deserve health security, and the idea of sending a senior out into the marketplace to shop around for health insurance is just something that is inconceivable,” McDermott insists.

“Medicare is an important program, greatly valued among seniors, and there is no reason to replace it with a voucher system when we could just make changes to the program so that it can continue to provide benefits for decades to come.”

Asked how to solve the country’s long-term deficit problem if cuts to Medicare and Social Security are off the table, McDermott immediately brought up the idea of a fairer tax system.

“We can’t reduce the federal debt by simply cutting,” he said. “It isn’t possible and it isn’t fair.

“I think we need to fix our tax system, which heavily favors the rich, as things stand. In doing so, we need to ensure that the millionaires and billionaires, as well as America’s corporations, are paying their fair share when it comes to taxes.”

Fading Retirement Prospects Explain Why We’re So Glum

2011-09-02T17:58:00.000-07:00

By DAVID GROVES

A new statewide Elway Poll finds that more of us are worried about the future than ever, or at least since he began asking that question 20 years ago.

"What troubles me right now is I'm pushing 50 years old, and the market is pretty dead," Ron Ross told the Seattle Times. "I'm nervous for my future and my retirement because I don't think Social Security is going to be around. And I'm just watching my 401(k) do nothing except get smaller."

That neatly sums up the anxieties being faced by all Americans.

This summer, dramatic market fluctuations have become the norm as stocks plummet on the latest crisis in Europe or worries about whether Congress will pay America’s bills. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 500 points in a day three different times in August. So far, the market has mostly rebounded from these rapid declines, but we all remember the Great Recession’s October 2008 crash when the Dow lost nearly 20% of its value in one week.

These wild market gyrations cause more than just heartburn, they wreak havoc on Americans’ hopes and dreams for the future.

With the decline of defined-benefit pension plans and the shift to 401(k)-style savings plans invested in company stock or mutual funds, many Americans have become part of the “investor class” George W. Bush envisioned. In the process, we have lost our retirement security.

Down markets postpone or ruin retirement plans. They wreak havoc for existing retirees whose fixed incomes depend on modest earnings from their lifetime of savings. And they harm job prospects for our youngest workers, as stock fluctuations create waves in the labor market as older workers are suddenly unable to leave the workforce and create vacancies for the next generation.

A recent special report in the San Jose Mercury News concluded: “Many older workers are responding to the economic downturn by postponing retirement, but even so, it will be a struggle to make up for market losses in their retirement plans. Some were counting on their houses as a post-work financial cushion, but now their homes are worth less. They can't depend on dividends and interest on savings -- that income has nearly vanished. They also face layoffs and difficulties getting rehired.”

Glum yet?

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, certain politicians in Washington, D.C., insist on actively undermining public faith and confidence in Social Security and Medicare, the pillars of American retirement security, and are proposing to cut their benefits rather than take the modest steps necessary to preserve and enhance both programs.

It’s no wonder this generation has never been so gloomy. If we can find work, we face the prospect of working until we die.

Our gloom is the result of decades of economic policies that put profits before people, and will take decades to correct. But let’s start by fighting to protect, preserve and strengthen our Social Security and Medicare safety nets.

Making it tough to get help

2011-09-02T17:47:00.000-07:00

By Maureen Bo

“Face-to-face service could become a thing of the past for many clients when the agency moves into the Jackson Federal Building next year.”

That was the warning issued by the American Federation of Government Workers, the union representing Social Security staff, when the regional administrators overrode protests about their plan to close two easily accessible offices and require Social Security beneficiaries to go to an office in the high-security federal office building.

To enter the Jackson Federal Building, a Level 4 Security building, requires a current official picture ID and electronic scan of any packages brought by the person seeking entry. Social Security has many clients who are either disabled, homeless, mentally ill or some combination of the three. Many have all their belongings in a shopping cart or backpack.

For many clients, the effect of the consolidation would be to deny them the many kinds of help they need and have always been able to get.

On August 12, local union leaders, congressional staff, and advocates for the elderly, homeless and disabled, including the Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans, met with Eileen McSherry, Communications Director for the regional Social Security Administration, to protest the consolidation.

McSherry defended the move as a budget-cutting measure, and said the decision, made by the General Services Administration, was final.

Thalia Syracopoulis, a leader in the National Organization for Women and a PSARA member, asked why the consolidated office could not be in the Columbia Tower, wich already houses about 300 Social Security employees, and which has no security requirements. McSherry responded that there was no more room in the Columbia Tower.

Advocates followed up the unsatisfactory session with McSherry with a meeting with staff of Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Representative Jim McDermott, where it was agreed to seek an appropriate office in other federal property.

Our members are urged to contact Regional Commissioner Stanley Friendship at stanley.c.friendship@SSA.gov, phone 206-615-2107 calling on him to reconsider this bureaucratic decision. Calling our two senators and your federal representative would also help.

PSARA represented at DC Care Congress

2011-09-02T17:44:00.000-07:00

By Mike Andrew

PSARA Board members Vivian Lee and Bonny Oborn represented us at the national Care Congress on July 12 in Washington DC.

Some 700 people representing more than 150 organizations attended the meeting to develop plans for the “Caring Across Generations” campaign, to improve the lives of elderly and disabled people and their caregivers.

“There are what we call the ‘five fingers of the caring hand,’” Lee explained. “Job creation, job quality, training and a career ladder, a pathway to citizenship, and support for individuals and families who need care.”

After a Plenary Session featuring what both Lee and Oborn agreed were “excellent speakers,” including White House advisor Valerie Jarrett and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, the two split up.

Lee attended a workshop on organizing and building local organizations.

Oborn met with members of Congress, including Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), to discuss protecting funding for Medicare and Medicaid in the current round of deficit reduction negotiations.

“We need to continue to fund Medicaid,” Oborn said. “That’s a big part of the [Caring Across Generations] campaign, because that’s the way caretakers are getting paid.”

“Unfortunately,” she continued, “they say that’s ‘on the table.’ It’s still unresolved.”

One goal of the Caring Congress is to create local groups to organize around specific local initiatives and to push legislation. Lee and Oborn say that a Seattle core group is already coming together around Casa Latina, Service Employees Local 775NW, and Washington Citizen Action Network.

At PSARA’s August membership meeting, Lee and Oborn reported on the Congress and the members voted to join the local Care Council.

“There are many reasons PSARA would get involved,” Lee pointed out. “Social security, Medicare, Medicaid – those are our core issues. This [campaign] is the only way to get the caretakers paid decently.

Changing demographics make the Caring Across Generations campaign particularly timely, both Lee and Oborn said.

“The Baby Boomers are starting to retire and many of them will need care,” Lee said. “Plus there are many veterans who are returning with injuries and disabilities.”

“It’s a developing labor market,” she pointed out. “You want to create jobs? I noted this down from the Congress – every 8 minutes someone turns 65, 10,000 people turn 65 every week.”

Greece, Part II: A different economic model

2011-09-02T17:42:00.000-07:00

By Mike Andrew

Last month in Part I of this article, we saw that the economic “reforms” forced on Greece by the EU harmed the country’s working families and caused its economy to contract.

In this article, we’ll look at an alternative economic model actually implemented in Greece by the socialist PASOK party in the 1980s.

Since modern Greece was recognized as an independent country in 1832, it has had to contend with very weak growth in its domestic economy.

This in turn led to twin economic problems.

First, there were more Greek workers than the job market could accommodate, and some way had to be found to cope with the large number of unemployed workers.

Second, the country was particularly vulnerable to global economic trends, to penetration by foreign capital, and to political control by richer countries.

The military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974 was the last gasp of the old system of political intervention by ambitious army officers.

It was also the first gasp of a new neo-liberal approach to economic growth.

The dictatorship promoted foreign investments in Greece, especially in the tourism industry, borrowed heavily from foreign banks to finance public-private construction projects, and cracked down brutally on Greece’s labor unions.

When Andreas Papandreou – the father of the present prime minister – became prime minister in 1981, he adopted measures to stimulate internal markets.

A socialist and an economist of international standing, one-time chair of the Economics Department at UC Berkeley, Andreas scorned the supply-side economics promoted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Instead, he believed that demand for Greek products, and therefore Greek labor, inside Greece itself would be the driver for economic growth and national prosperity.

Andreas raised wages for public employees and also raised pensions for retirees, and he introduced COLAs for both wage-earners and pensioners, giving Greeks more money to spend.

By lowering the retirement age, he also made room for younger workers to enter the job market.

And he substantially increased spending in the public sector with a variety of construction projects, including restoration of the Parthenon and other historical sites.

Andreas financed this economic stimulus program not mainly by borrowing and not mainly by raising taxes, although he did both, but by increasing the money supply – “printing more money” as conservative economists put it.

This policy was inflationary, and required a devaluation of the drachma, Greece’s national currency at the time, in October 1985, but it produced a period of economic prosperity unparalleled in modern Greek history.

Inflation harms banks, which lend money at fixed interest rates, and it harms people with substantial cash assets in the bank, who see the value of their deposits erode.

On the other hand, inflation doesn’t necessarily harm wage-earners or pensioners who live pay check to pay check, as long as they get COLAs that help keep income ahead of the rate of inflation.

Greeks saw their real incomes, adjusted for inflation, rise by 26% during Andreas’s first two terms as prime minister in 1981-1989.

To give an idea how significant this is, let’s look at US incomes. The median household income in the US in 2009 was $50,221. A 26% increase would bring that household’s income to $62,776.25.

Would that extra $12,555.25 make a difference to a working family? You bet it would!

Andreas’s economic policies were not completely successful, however.

Unemployment went up during his administration, in part because increased social benefits and general economic prosperity made unemployed Greeks want to stay at home rather than emigrate.

Andreas also believed that his go-it-alone foreign policy – which included withdrawing Greek troops from NATO command – required continued high military spending, which led to borrowing to finance weapons purchases, and ultimately increased indebtedness to US and European banks.

The devaluation of the drachma stimulated growth in the tourist industry, which meant that Greece continued to be vulnerable to global economic trends.

Nevertheless, when Andreas Papandreou retired in 1996 and died soon after, Greece was in the best economic position it had ever been in its modern history.

“This senator is going to fight back”

2011-08-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

By Sen. Bernie Sanders, July 21, 2011

If there was ever a time in the modern history of America that the American people should become engaged in what's going on here in Washing¬ton, now is that time. Decisions are being made that will impact not only our generation but the lives of our children and our grandchildren for decades to come, and I fear very much that the decisions being contemplated are not good decisions, are not fair decisions.
There is increased understanding that defaulting for the first time in our history on our debts would be a disaster for the American economy and for the world's economy. We should not do that.

There also is increased discussion about long-term deficit reduction and how we address the crisis which we face today of a record-breaking deficit of $1.4 trillion and a $14 trillion-plus national debt.

One of the long-term deficit reduction plans came from the so-called Gang of Six. We do not know all of the details of that proposal. In fact, we never will know because a lot of the decisions are booted to committees to work out the details.
It is fair to say, however, that Senators Coburn, Crapo and Chambliss deserve congratulations. Clearly, they have won this debate in a very significant way. My guess is that they will probably get 80 percent or 90 percent of what they wanted. In this town, that is quite an achievement, but they have stood firm in their desire to represent the wealthy and the powerful and multinational corporations. They have threatened. They have been smart. They have been determined. And at the end of the day, they will get almost all of what they want. That is their victory, and I congratulate them.

Unfortunately, their victory will be a disaster for working families in this country, for the elderly, for the sick, for the children and for low-income people.
Based on the limited information that we have, I think it is important to highlight some of what is in this so-called Gang of Six proposal that the corporate media, among others, are enthralled about.

Some may remember that for a number of years, leading Democrats said that we will do everything that we can to protect Social Security, that Social Security has been an extraordinary success in our country, that for 75 years, with such volatility in the economy, Social Security has paid out every nickel owed to every eligible American. I heard Democrats say that Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. That is right because Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, not by the US Treasury. Social Security has a $2.6 trillion surplus today. It can pay out every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 25 years. It is an enormously popular program. Poll after poll from the American people says don't cut Social Security. Two and a half years ago when Barack Obama, then a senator from Illinois, ran for president of the United States, he made it very clear if you voted for him there would be no cuts in Social Security.

What Senators Coburn, Crapo and Chambliss have managed to do in the Gang of Six is reach an agreement where there will be major cuts in Social Security. Don't let anybody kid you about this being some minor thing. It is not. What we are talking about is that Social Security cuts would go into effect virtually immediately. Ten years from now, the typical 75-year-old person will see their Social Security benefits cut by $560 a year. The average 85-year-old will see a cut of $1,000 a year. Now, for some people here in Washington, maybe the big lobbyists who make hundreds of thousands a year, $560 a year or $1,000 a year may not seem like a lot of money, but if you are a senior trying to get by on $14,000, $15,000, $18,000 a year and you're 85 years old, the end of your life, you're totally vulnerable, you're sick - a $1,000 per year cut in what you otherwise would have received is a major, major blow.

So I congratulate Senator Coburn, Senator Crapo, Senator Chambliss for doing what President Obama said would not happen under his watch, what the Democrats have said would not happen under their watch.

But it's not just Social Security. We have 50 million Americans today who have no health insurance at all. Under the Gang of Six proposals, there will be cuts in Medicare over a 10-year period of almost $300 billion. There will be massive cuts in Medicaid and other health care programs. There will be caps on spending, which means that there will be major cuts in education. If you are a working-class family, hoping that you're going to be able to send your kid to college and thinking that you will be eligible for a Pell grant, think twice about that. Pell grants may not be there. If you're a senior who relies on a nutrition program, that nutrition program may not be there. If you think it's a good idea that we enforce clean air and clean water provisions so that our kids can be healthy, those provisions may not be there because there will be major cuts in environmental protection.

Some people think that's not so good, but at least our Republican friends are saying we need revenue and we're going to get $1 trillion in revenue. But wait a minute, if you read the proposal, there are very, very clear provisions making sure that we are going to make massive cuts in programs for working families, for the elderly, for the children. Those cuts are written in black and white. What about the revenue? Well, it's kind of vague. The projection is that we would raise over a 10-year period $100 billion in revenue. Where is that going to come from? Is it necessarily going to come from the wealthiest people in this economy? Is it going to come from large corporations who are enjoying huge tax breaks? That is not clear at all. I want middle-class families to understand that when we talk about increased revenues, do you know where that comes from? It may come from cutbacks in the home mortgage interest deduction program, which is so very important to millions and millions of families. It may mean that if you have a health care program today, that health care program may be taxed. That's a way to raise revenue. It may be that there will be increased taxes on your retirement programs, your IRA's, your 401(k)'s. But we don't have the details for that. All we have is some kind of vague promise that we're going to raise $1 trillion over the next 10 years, no enforcement mechanism and no clarity as to where that revenue will come from.

That is why it is so terribly important that the American people become engaged in this debate which will have a huge impact on them, on their parents and on their children. The American people must fight for a fair deal. At a time when the wealthiest people in this country are doing phenomenally well and their effective tax rate is the lowest on record; at a time when the top 400 individuals in this country own more wealth than 150 million Americans; at a time when corporate profits are soaring and in many instances corporations, these same corporations pay nothing in taxes; at a time when we have tripled military spending since 1997, there are fair ways to move toward deficit reduction which do not slash programs that working families and children and the elderly desperately depend upon.

Medicaid cuts: A very bad idea

2011-08-04T16:13:00.000-07:00

by Jeanette Wenzl

Federal budget battles threaten the livelihood of millions of Americans by placing our most vital programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – at risk. While Medicare and Social Security get most of the public attention, it is Medicaid that is more likely to be slashed and burned. We should all be frightened of this possibility, and take action in defense of Medicaid.

There are 1.25 million Medicaid enrollees in Washington State, one in five residents. Since without Medicaid these enrollees would be uninsured, there are 1.25 million good reasons to save Medicaid in our state alone. But beyond the numbers, there are at least four major reasons why proposed budget cuts are dangerous for Medicaid, and why the pro¬gram needs and deserves our protection.
First, any cuts to Medicaid are ex¬treme cuts. Medicaid is far more efficient than private insurance programs, with very little administrative overhead from which to extract savings. There is simply no way to cut billions in Medicaid fund¬ing without dramatically impacting access to needed health care.

Proposals to cut come in many shapes and sizes – Paul Ryan’s House Republican Budget proposes block grants, the Obama Administration suggests “blended rates”, Senate Republicans have offered spending cap proposals, House Republicans have advanced balanced budget amendments – they all have the same effect. Low-income people will suffer more, live sicker, and die younger.

A second reason why we must not cut Medicaid is its impact on seniors and people with disabilities. Millions of seniors receive nursing home care thanks to Medicaid. Many Medicaid beneficiaries already have limited access to physician care, particularly from specialists, due largely to Medicaid’s already low reim¬bursement rates. Dual-eligibles (Medicare/Medicaid) are now being required to pay cost-sharing for their medications despite having income of only $674 per month. Many seniors and people with disabilities are already on the edge. Further cuts will push them off the cliff.

We need to preserve Medicaid for its importance to people of color and for racial equity. Racial disparities in health coverage are severe in this country, but they could become worse - if not for Medicaid, an additional 25 million people of color would likely be uninsured.

Finally, Medicaid is the building block for the Affordable Care Act – the signature health care legislation enacted by President Obama and a hard-fought progressive victory. The promise of the ACA was to make quality, affordable health care accessible to everyone in the U.S., and the ACA relies on the expansion of Medicaid to cover the most vulnerable of the uninsured. Cuts to the program not only reduce the ability of our state to enroll uninsured low-income people in health coverage, but undermine the very foundation on which health care reform rests.

Jeanette Wenzl is a PSARA member and on the Executive Board of Washington Community Action Network

New Executive Board Members

2011-08-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

At our summer membership meeting, three new members to the PSARA Executive Board were confirmed by the membership.

Jim Grayson is a retired business owner. Previously, he served as the NW Regional VP of American Library Ass. Trustee Assn. He also was a King County Library System Trustee and President of the Washington State Library Trustee Association. Jim is an activist in the 30th Democratic Legislative District and an ardent progressive activist.

Anita Nath is the youngest member of the PSARA Executive Board and the chief administrator of the excellent PSARA Facebook page. She is a graduate from Florida International University with a Bachelors degree in English. She is an organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 21 and volunteer with Seattle nonprofit organizations. She has also contributed writing to the Retiree Advocate.

Magdaleno Rose-Avila, better known as Leno, has been a civil and human rights activist all his adult life. He was an organizer with Cesar Chavez, Peace Corps Country Director, Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and has worked for a wide variety of non-profits. He is a gifted speaker and author.

PSARA Resolutions

2011-08-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

PSARA’s affiliation with several larger organizations and coalitions provides us the opportunity to impact the policy discussions and advocacy priorities of these organizations.

At our summer membership meeting, three resolutions were passed and then forwarded to the Washington State Labor Council, AFL/CIO (WSLC) convention and the Washington Alliance for Retired Americans (WASHARA) convention. Adoption means these organizations will advocate for the policies embodied in the resolutions.
Resolution on Tax Expenditures.

One resolution addresses tax exemptions and tax loopholes. Washington has 567 tax exemptions many of which favor narrow special interests. These exemptions commonly continue unexamined session after session while regular budget items receive regular scrutiny. In the last decade, 116 new tax breaks were enacted, costing the taxpayers $1.6 billion over the next two years.

The PSARA resolution supports legislation mandating that each tax expenditure carry an expiration date so that each may be reviewed and renewed or not renewed on a regular basis, that fiscal management be improved by allowing any tax expenditure to be modified or eliminated by a simple majority vote and, in the interest of accountability, minimum reporting requirements be established for any business receiving a tax subsidy.

Resolution on Retirement Security

The number of persons 65 and older will reach 70 million by 2040. These millions are entitled to retirement years marked by economic security and quality, affordable health care. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the programs most critical in providing a foundation for a secure retirement. The integrity of these programs is under unceasing assault.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be strengthened, not undermined. The PSARA resolution calls for establishing a more substantial basic benefit; changing the cost-of-living formula to more accurately reflect retiree expenditures; and changing the benefit formula to compensate primarily women workers for their years out of the work force caring for children or elders.

The resolution commits these organizations to advocate that Congress and the Obama administration reject all proposals that undermine existing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and instead enact legislation strengthening these program to enhance the security and quality of life of our millions of retirees and future retirees.

Resolution on State Investment Trust

The state-owned Bank of North Dakota, created in 1919, has for more than 90 years helped to stabilize the economy of North Dakota. During the current severe economic recession, while Washington and other states experience revenue shortages, North Dakota alone of the 50 states has been an island of economic stability. Over the last decade, the Bank of North Dakota, in a state of 600,000 population, has provided a third of a billion dollars to the state’s general fund.

In the 2011 session of the Washington State Legislature, legislation was introduced calling for the establishment of a State Investment Trust patterned after that of the State Bank of North Dakota. This Resolution endorses and calls for active support for legislation to create a State Investment Trust.

CALLING ON CONGRESS TO ADOPT NEW PRIORITIES TO CREATE JOBS, MEET DOMESTIC NEEDS, AND PUT THE NATION ON COURSE TO A MORE JUST, EQUITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

The economic crisis we are experiencing is the worst in eighty years and has had a disproportionate impact on working and poor people and communities of color.

Adopted by PSARA’s Executive Board, this resolution states that the crisis in the U.S. can be directly traced to (1) $3.8 trillion in tax cuts given over ten years to investors, large corporations and the wealthiest households; tax loopholes that allow the rich and many corporations to avoid paying taxes. (2) deregulation of the financial system that allowed greedy reckless banks and Wall Street to take irresponsible risks that produced an economic catastrophe; (3) bailouts to Wall St. and giant corporations paid for by taxpayers; (4) run-away military spending that supports a bloated Pentagon bureaucracy and profiteering military contractors
Taxpayers will pay approximately $172 billion dollars to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and hundreds of millions more for military actions in Libya. Over one trillion tax payer dollars go to the national security budget (60% increase to the Pentagon since 2001), including a $180 billion ten-year commitment to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal. Additionally, the human cost of these wars to both the U.S. armed forces and to hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan has been enormous.

The Resolution states “The severity of the economic crisis has created budget shortfalls at all levels of government that call for a re-examination of the allocation of resources and national spending priorities.” The wars need to be brought to a speedy end and the U.S. Congress should bring these war dollars home and make substantial reductions in overall military spending. These dollars should be used to meet vital human needs, promote job creation, rebuild our infrastructure, aid municipal and state governments, and develop a new economy based upon renewable, sustainable energy and technologies.

Congress must radically reform the tax code so that the burden of taxation is fully progressive, removing loopholes and preventing schemes by which the rich and multinational corporations avoid and evade taxes.

The Resolution calls for the organizations to communicate with their members, actively informing and educating about these issues.

These resolutions will be discussed and debated by organizations with which we are affiliated and if passed, will impact their policies over the years to come. To read the resolutions go to www.psara.org.

ILWU Fights For Jobs & Respect in Longview

2011-08-04T16:02:00.000-07:00

By David Groves

A major labor dispute at the Port of Longview, which has included more than 100 arrests and citations and hundreds of union dockworkers blocking a mile-long train to prevent grain shipments, has escalated even more after the terminal operator, EGT Development, began escorting workers from another union to work at the facility.

In the company’s attempt to become the first grain export terminal in Washington to use non-union labor, EGT has sued the Port in federal court to avoid hiring members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21, which has a contract for all longshore work on Port property. ILWU 21 responded with major protests at the company’s headquarters and the Port terminal to get EGT to drop the suit and return to the bargaining table. Those protests escalated as the company made good on its threat to use non-union labor during the testing phase of the new $200 million facility.

Then, in a surprise announcement last week, EGT said it has signed an agreement with Federal Way-based General Construction Co., a subsidiary of Kiewit, to operate the terminal with union members from the Portland-based International Union of Operating Engineers Local 701. Mark Holliday, IUOE 701 Business Manager, sent out a statement saying, “Local 701′s members are trained to operate and maintain the EGT facility.”

On Sunday, ILWU hosted a barbecue for about 200 supporters from around Western Washington to discuss the latest developments in their efforts to retain their jobs and jurisdiction at the Port of Longview. ILWU 21 President Dan Coffman and Washington State Labor Council President Jeff Johnson both told the crowd that organized labor must come together to fight EGT.

“EGT, a Japanese multinational corporation that has received tax breaks from our state to build this grain elevator, has thumbed its nose at the members of ILWU Local 21 and is trying to pit workers against workers, local unions against local unions. This is unacceptable,” Johnson said “The work at the Port of Longview is longshore work and we need to come together as community and labor and say ‘no’ to EGT — ‘you will not disrespect labor in Longview or anywhere else in our state’.”
“Union longshore workers have made the Northwest one of the most productive grain exporting regions in the world,” Coffman said. “This new grain terminal stands to gain by playing by the same rules as the other grain operators that are making lots of money with productive union workers.”

EGT Development, a joint venture of Japan-based Itochu Corp, South Korea’s STX Pan Ocean and St. Louis-based Bunge North America, got a special tax exemption from the State of Washington to build the Longview terminal entitling them to a “remittance equal to one hundred percent of the amount of tax paid for qualifying construction, materials, service, and labor.” But the company built and is trying to operate its new facility on the cheap. Despite high unemployment in Cowlitz County and the availability of hundreds of skilled union building trades workers, the Northwest Labor Press reports that EGT imported the vast majority of its construction crews from low-wage communities out-of-state and did not pay area standard wages.

Bunge CEO Alberto Weisser was paid nearly $10 million in 2010. Bunge and his company have been accused of profiting from slave labor in Brazil.

David Groves is a member of PSARA & Publications Director with the Washington State Labor Council. You can find his work daily at “The Stand” on the WSLC website.

Downtown Low Income Housing Preserved

2011-08-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

by Sharon Maeda

When I joined the UFCW 21 staff three years ago, I had no idea that I would be able to continue my longtime work around low income housing. Visionary leaders in the Retail Store Employees Union Local 1001 (now part of UFCW 21) launched a plan in 1979 to create housing for their retirees. They acquired land in Seattle’s Denny Regrade near their union hall and the Labor Temple, and walking distance to the downtown stores where 3,000 of their members worked.

By 1981, they had created a nonprofit housing development association, constructed an 82 unit apartment building and called it Sunset House after the stunning sunsets seen from the west side of the building. They received a HUD Section 8 designation which supplements the residents’ rent; residents pay one third of their income, no matter how low that income might be.

Over the years, the union moved away from the neighborhood, and the downtown retail core diminished. By 2008, there was only one union retiree still living at Sunset House and the building was in need of a lot of maintenance and renovation. While UFCW 21 wanted to remain engaged in supporting affordable housing, it is clearly not its core business and downtown Seattle is no longer a base for its membership.

The union’s bottom line was to preserve the 82 units of low income elderly and disabled housing. When I walked developers through the building, they talked about new granite counter tops and creating balconies on the west side of the building. It became clear that offers were tied to the fact that the HUD contract would expire in early 2011, thus allowing a new owner to drop HUD and evict the existing residents. The last thing Seattle needs is 82 more low income folks in need of affordable housing. So, we focused our marketing to nonprofit developers.

We developed a partnership with the Housing Resources Group (HRG) that already owns and operates some 40 low income buildings as their sole mission. During 2010, HRG served as Sunset House property managers, while putting together the financing package for purchase. The residents were brought along on the transition and have already begun their temporary moves to allow the renovation to begin the minute the sale closes.

It is a total win situation: We were able to ensure the preservation of low income housing, HRG was given a year to put together the complex financing strategy, and most importantly, the residents will have a renovated home in downtown Seattle. With the HUD renewal for another 20 years, this partnership is guaranteeing 598,600 bed nights for elderly and disabled Seattleites. And, with HRG’s multimillion dollar renovation, the life of the building will be extended well beyond these next two decades.

UFCW 21 is proud of its predecessor union’s visionary leadership and 30 years of providing housing for many of Seattle’s most vulnerable citizens. Selling Sunset House to HRG will ensure that the legacy will continue.

Sharon Maeda is a PSARA member and Special Projects Director at UFCW 21. She is a former HUD official in the Clinton Administration and was a member of the Retail Store Employees Local 1001 while a UW student.

Is Greece the future of the US?

2011-08-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

Maybe, but not in the way conservatives think.

By Mike Andrew

“Greece is the future of the US,” conservatives warn, meaning that this country is headed for a similar economic and social melt-down unless our government slashes social spending, cuts taxes, lays off public sector workers, and balances its budget.

Riots in Athens and general strikes that have paralyzed Greece underscore exactly how serious all this is. Is this really the future of the US?

This is the first installment of a two-part article that will look at Greece’s economic crisis and what lessons the US can learn from it.

In Part I, we’ll see if the austerity measures forced on Greece by European banks have helped or hurt the Greek economy.

In Part II, we’ll look at a completely different approach to Greek economic development, one that was tried by the socialist PASOK party in the 1980s

When George Papandreou led PASOK back into power in 2009, after five years of right-wing government, he faced three very real problems.

First, the previous PASOK administration led by Kosta Simitis (1996-2004) had joined the Eurozone – a move opposed by the left wing of PASOK.

Second, the Simitis government took advantage of the easy credit opened up by participation in the Eurozone to borrow heavily from European banks.

Thus, when Papandreou came into office, his country was no longer in control of its own money supply and owed a lot of money to foreign banks.

To make matters worse, the right-wing New Democracy government that preceded Papandreou had cut income and social security taxes to benefit its base, and then cooked the books to conceal the real level of Greece’s budget deficit.

Instead of the official 3% of GDP budget deficit allowed by the EU, or the rumored “real” deficit of 6%, the actual rate turned out to be almost 13%.

Finally, the Greek economy suffered from persistently slow growth and high unemployment rates, especially among younger workers.

Greek workers work harder than most. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Greek workers work some 2,120 hours every year, compared to 1,760 for US workers, and a mere 1,430 a year for Germans.

The problem is that there are more Greeks who want to work these long hours than there are jobs available. That’s one of the reasons emigration has always been part of Greek life, as Greeks left for the US or Australia to find work.

One of the promises made by the EU to small and relatively poor countries like Greece was that with EU membership would help in growing their economies.

Nevertheless, when Papandreou went to the EU for a bailout, he found that the EU’s economic agenda was not a growth agenda at all, but a contraction agenda.

The EU demanded a program of spending cuts very similar to what Republicans demand here in the US.

The “size of government” is to be reduced by failing to replace government workers as they retire.

Wages of workers in state-owned industries are to be cut by 30% and there will be a cap on wages and bonuses.

Just to show how damaging this will be, the median household income in the US in 2009 was $50,221. A 30% cut in pay would be more than $15,000 cut out of that family’s budget.

The retirement age in Greece has already been increased from 52 to 59, and it will be raised to 65.

These measures have not yet been fully implemented but unemployment already hit new record highs.

The Greek jobless rate went to 16.2% in March from 15.9% in February. Among workers under 30, the unemployment rate is more than 36%.

The social safety net is also on the chopping block, starting with pensions and benefits for retirees, and COLAs will be eliminated.

While these so-called “reforms” are still being implemented, Greece’s GDP declined by more than 4% in 2010. It will certainly decline even further this year.

While we can feel sorry for Greek workers and their families, the thing to take away from the Greek case is that the EU’s austerity program is not much different from the one proposed by fiscal conservatives in the US.

Do they want this be the future of the US?

(Mike Andrew is the Associate Editor of The Retiree Advocate)

Demanding Respect From Walmart

2011-08-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

By Anita Nath

A fundamental right of workers should be to work in a safe environment and to be treated with respect. Unfortunately, there are many retail employers – including the largest, Walmart – who do not always provide such a workplace, particularly in regard to the treatment of older employees.

Of the 1.4 million Walmart workers in the US, 300,000 are 55 and older. Many are hired on a part-time basis and paid a low wage.

Despite many older employees being cashiers and door greeters, they are repeatedly required to perform physical work outside of their job duties, including washing toilets, cleaning windows, and lifting heavy items. When refusing to complete these tasks, the employees are often reprimanded or fired.

It is reported by older workers that Walmart regularly violates their own policy of providing 15 minute breaks at regular intervals. These older workers report that their breaks, when they get them, are often not spread out over the shift but rather put at the end of their work day.

These are just some of the issues that older employees have with the retail Goliath that made billions in profit last year.

Change is clearly needed at Walmart for workers to get fair and respectful treatment.

OUR Walmart is a new organization made up of current and former Walmart “associates” who care deeply about providing good customer service and making Walmart better. The lack of respect of workers by Walmart led to the creation of OUR Walmart. There are currently 201 local OUR Walmart members in the Puget Sound area, 11 of whom recently went to Bentonville, Arkansas to corporate headquarters to demand respect on the job. OUR Walmart asserts that the treatment of older workers, in particular, has deteriorated at Walmart.

After launching their organization just last month, OUR Walmart is growing. It has served to empower Walmart employees to stand together. They are already seeing an impact. Some recent accomplishments include returning wrongfully fired employees to work, protecting employees from harassment from management, and being a resource when employees experience disrespect.

In order to support the local efforts to change Walmart, PSARA members voted to join the Making Change at Walmart coalition at PSARA’s July 7th membership meeting. The goal of that coalition is to hold Walmart accountable to local workplace and community standards. That means supporting OUR Walmart workers in the Puget Sound area as they organize for respect at their stores, and also support local communities as they organize for standards that promote good jobs and healthy communities.

If you would like to be more involved in the coalition work in your area, please contact Elena Perez at eperez@ufcw21.org, 206.436.6544.

(Anita Nath is a member of the PSARA Executive Board)

‘OUR Walmart’ launched

2011-06-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

By Will Parry

PSARA Vice President Bette Reed and I witnessed labor history in the making on the evening of Tuesday, June 7.

The setting: A modest hall at Highline Community College. PSARA was one of an impressive array of faith and social action organizations gathered to support the launch of OUR Walmart – shorthand for Organization United for Respect at Walmart.

The stars of the evening were a group of courageous women and men who actually work – or have worked – at Walmart. One after another, each “associate” -- the company term for its workers –- spoke of life under the soulless merchandising behemoth: Poverty-level wages. Too few hours for a decent paycheck. Arbitrary discipline. Above all, lack of respect.

A heroic special guest, Kalpona Akter, gave a first-hand account of the plight of workers in the Asian sweatshops that make the products Walmart sells. A leader in the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, Akter is the victim of employer-fabricated charges. Currently out on bail, she faces life in prison or possibly the death penalty if convicted.

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21 brought the Walmart workers and the community leaders together as part of a nationwide campaign to persuade Walmart to become a decent corporate citizen that respects its workers and its suppliers. The Highline Community College meeting is being replicated in other cities as the campaign picks up momentum.

“At the UFCW, we know what makes our union strong: members standing together for respect and dignity in the workplace,” said Elena Perez, Local 21 community organizer. “In the grocery industry, union contracts guarantee protections and a voice on the job. But at the company with the most grocery sales in America, our fellow workers are not receiving the respect they deserve.

“We are making change at Walmart,” Perez said. “We are making change by working directly with Walmart Associates to claim the respect on the job they deserve. We are making change by holding Walmart corporate managers accountable to hourly employees and the public for their practices.”

Norm Schut, 89

2011-06-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

Norm Schut, the respected founder of both the Retired Public Employees Council of Washington and the Senior Citizens Lobby, died March 18 at the age of 89.

During his seven years as president and chief lobbyist for the Senior Citizens Lobby, Schut applied his mastery of pension issues and of the legislative process to establish and maintain the system of retirement benefits enjoyed by Washington’s retired public employees today.

Recognizing that seniors were a largely untapped political resource, Schut encouraged his union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, to build its strong national retiree organization, which continues today to support the legislative programs of AFSCME and the broader labor movement.

SO MUCH GOING ON!

2011-06-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

Because of our terrific activist membership, PSARA is being asked by organizations from many different corners of our community to assist them in their efforts. Much, but not all of what we do is reflected in articles in this newsletter.

Besides actively and continuously working to preserve and improve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we are participating in many other important struggles to improve the lives of people in our communities, our state, our nation and our world. PSARA volunteer activists fan out throughout our community doing the work to ‘repair the world’.

All of you make this possible! Thank you for your volunteer time, your financial support and for being members of PSARA. We welcome your participation at whatever level works for you.

PSARA has a new email program to communicate with our members who have email addresses and are willing to hear from us. These emails will ask you to take various actions from sending emails to attending meetings to participating in “street heat”. We will give you the information you need and if you can participate…great!

Just know that by helping to support this newsletter and our organization you are helping PSARA be a progressive community force in the larger struggle for social and economic justice.

Our chance to be heard

2011-06-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

Here’s our chance to help Congress address the nation’s crisis of unemployment.

Starting at noon Saturday, July 23, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus will open up a mike at the South Seattle Community College’s Brockey Conference Center.

The Congressional delegation is touring the nation to listen to the people – to hear first-hand the gritty details of what unemployment does to workers, their families and their communities – and to hear the ideas of the people on measures the government can take to create living-wage jobs.

Neighborhood activists throughout the Seattle area are spreading the word to build a turnout that reflects the severity of the crisis.

Sponsored by ProgressiveCongress.org, the forum will hear from Representative Jim McDermott and members of the touring delegation.

But the emphasis will be on hearing from their constituents – their experience and their ideas for a serious Congressional jobs program.

So line up at the mike on July 23 – or write your ideas on the postcards that will be available at the hearing. It’s our chance to speak out – and to be heard!

Caring Across Generations

2011-06-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

By Hilary Stern

As my parents age, I find myself constantly worrying about the care and support they receive. I know that someday, my children will be doing the same for me. For many, maintaining a quality life in old age means staying at home with a caretaker. Yet we question, are there enough care workers? Are they trained? Do they feel respected in their jobs?

As a nation, we are on the brink of a crisis in care. As we baby boomers age, the number of people needing long-term care is projected to grow from 13 million in 2000 to 27 million by 2050. There are currently only about 3 million long-term care workers. Families already face the challenge of finding quality care for their loved ones.

Currently, direct care workers and domestic workers filling these roles often work in strenuous and exploitative conditions with limited support or rights. These workers are providing a vital service to our families and communities, yet often lack access to training, career growth, and pathways to citizenship.

All of us - retirees, baby boomers, family members, and workers, have a stake in the issue.

Nationally, we are taking bold action to solve the problem. A visionary campaign, Caring Across Generations, seeks to provide dignity and respect to our elderly, and their caregivers. The values driven campaign brings together care providers, care recipients and their families to address the care gap, uplift our caregivers, and ultimately transform long-term care in the United States.

The campaign is being led by a national coalition of organizations representing women, older adults, people with disabilities, domestic workers, community organizations, students, labor and the faith community.

The national campaign has five core policy goals, the “Five Fingers of the Caring Hand”:
1) The creation of new, quality jobs in home care to meet the rapidly growing need for care,
2) Labor standards and improved job quality for the existing jobs and new jobs,
3) Training and career ladders for home care workers, to bring recognition to the work and improve the quality of care,
4) A new visa category and path to citizenship for immigrant care workers,
5) Support for individuals and families in need of support and access to quality care, including a tax credit for people paying out of pocket for care.

On July 12, I will join others from Seattle and from across the country in Washington DC for the Care Congress, uniting a diverse cross section of the community for a national dialogue about the future of care. We plan to bring that energy and dialogue back to Seattle.

We invite you to join us in shaping the effort and defining what care could look like here in Washington State. Your participation and voice as members of PSARA is essential for making change. I look forward to working together to create the support, care, and dignified jobs that will strengthen our families, our economy, and our community.

(Hilary Stern is Executive Director of Casa Latina and a member of PSARA.)

Our readers come through for us…again!

2011-06-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

Here they are! Our wonderful supporters! The following members had generously responded to our fund appeal through June 22. We’ll acknowledge those who contribute after that date in our August newsletter.

Patricia Agostino, Gerald Alexander, Max Applebaum, Sally Ashford, Arne Auvinen, Maureen Bo, Sarah Bogar, Forbes Bottomly, David Brennan, Tim Burns, Mordy & Chaya Burstein, Patricia Ceis, Lawrence & Hideko Coghill, Orabelle Connally, Cordy Cooke, Mark Dalton, Charles Davis, Dr. Ronald Dear, Gene & Marilyn Derig, Woodrow Ditlefsen, Bill Dodds, Edward Erickson, Bill & Brigitte Farris, Dianne Fehl, Robert Fletcher, Richard Forester, Jeanette Franks, Beatrice Fritts, Larry Gabrielson,
Steve Garey, Richard Grassl, Phyllis & George Haas, R. E. Hallowell, Sharon Harris,

Rick Horner, Don Houtchens, Randy Joseph, Nancy Juneby, Lawrence Kenney, Tim Klima, Edie Koch, Dvorah Kost, Vivian Lee, Margaret Lemberg, Nydia Levick, Rachael Levine, Owen Linch, Lawrence Lowther, Tim Lynch, Christine Martin, Renee Maurel, Kathy McElhaney, Vanette Molson-Turner, Gerald Mongrain, Shelby Mooney, Don Moreland, Bruce Morris, Bob & Nina Murano, Clarence Opland, Eleanor Owen, Alice Owens, Donnamarie Palermo, Naomi Parry, Will Parry, Henry Pemberton, Donald & Norma Petersen, Herbert & Muriel Pfeiffer, Patricia Prince, Gwen Rench, Marilyn Ring-Nelson,

Nancy Rising, Laurel Robel, Mary Lee Robinson, Randy Rowland, Gladys Russell, Janet Salomone, John Saul, Carl Schwartz, LeRoy Scott, Randy Scott, Chris Sharpe, Oliver Simonson, Jean Slocum, Walter Smith, James & Diane Snell, Millie & Jack Sosne, Robby Stern, Karen Stevenson, Alex Stone, Violet Storm, Tak Takamura, Mason Taylor, Barbara Wenzl, Trudy White, Gordon Wilson, Mary Wood, Elizabeth Yates, Stella Zahn

Aero Machinists Dist. Lodge 751, I.F.P.T.E Local 17, Laborers Local 440, Pacific NW Newspaper Guild.

Is AARP ready to cut a deal on Social Security

2011-06-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

By Will Parry

Is AARP’s national leadership ready to cut a deal at the expense of the millions who rely on Social Security for their daily bread?

A story in the Wall Street Journal on June 17 reported that AARP, after a “wrenching” internal debate, “is dropping its long-standing opposition to cutting Social Security benefits.”

CEO A. Barry Rand initially denied that the AARP’s position had changed. But Rand’s “clarifying” follow-up statement did nothing to insulate his organization from the outrage of Social Security’s defenders.

“AARP has now concluded that change is inevitable and wants to be at the table to minimize the pain,” the Journal reported. It quoted AARP Policy Director John Rother: “The ship was sailing. I wanted to be at the wheel when that happens.”

“Everybody knows we need to look at a package of different changes to Social Security to make it stronger for the long term,” said David Certner, AARP legislative policy director. “And we’re certainly willing to talk about a package of changes that will keep Social Security strong.”

The AARP readiness to open Social Security to troubling revisions triggered a firestorm of protest from the many advocates who have been fighting both to preserve the integrity of Social Security and to strengthen its role as the nation’s prime social insurance program. AARP’s own switchboard was reportedly deluged with protest calls from its members.

The New York Times said AARP’s stance “could provide added ammunition to fiscal conservatives who have sought unsuccessfully to restructure Social Security and chip away at the benefits it promises older Americans.”

CNN reported that the AARP’s change in posture “has already sent shock waves through the Beltway’s large and influential entitlement reform community. It’s prompted calls from lawmakers and centrist and conservative groups for Congress to seize the initiative and agree to cut benefits.”

One such centrist group, the think tank “Third Way,” immediately welcomed the news.

“Today marks a watershed moment in American politics,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way. “Now that they (AARP) have opened the door to reform, it is time for lawmakers to walk through it.”

Significantly, ex-Senator Alan Simpson, an archenemy of Social Security, welcomed the AARP position. “If they come around and say they are ready to do something, it will be like the Arctic icecap cracking,” Simpson said.

AARP’s stance gives cover to those in Congress, Democrat as well as Republican, who are looking for an excuse to rob Social Security in the name of attacking the budget deficit.

“The timing of AARP’s statements was particularly bad,” said Max Richtman, executive vice president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, “because it came in the midst of deliberations between the Obama administration and Congressional Republicans about the debt ceiling and overall deficit reduction.

“AARP is the 800-pound gorilla, but they do not speak for seniors,” Richtman said.

The Alliance for Retired Americans immediately rejected AARP’s policy of compromise and retreat.
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“There is no ambiguity on where the Alliance for Retired Americans stands on Social Security,” said ARA Executive Director Ed Coyle. “Never has been, never will be. We are against Social Security cuts for seniors.”

That fighting position is shared by the broad Strengthen Social Security coalition, whose 300 affiliated organizations include ARA. In recent months, as the deficit hawks stepped up their assault on the integrity of the program, AARP declined an invitation to join the coalition.

“AARP does not speak for all seniors,” Coyle said. “And on this topic, probably not for many of their own members.”

Over the years as advocates fought to defend and strengthen Social Security and Medicare, AARP has largely gone its own way. In 2003, the organization lent critical support to the enactment of a version of Medicare Part D that provided drugs to seniors, but enriched the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in the process.

In Washington State, AARP representatives play a constructive and cooperative role in the Senior Lobby. But no state-level activity can offset failure to defend the integrity of Social Security.

President Robby Stern of the Puget Sound ARA said the AARP stance “has opened the door for the enemies of Social Security and created cover for weak-kneed Congressional representatives and senators to do real damage.”

From AARP CEO Rand’s statement, Stern said, “we really do not know where they stand on such critical proposals as (1) raising the retirement age; (2) changing the COLA to one less advantageous to beneficiaries; (3) reducing benefits for some Social Security recipients; (4) eliminating or raising the cap to fully fund Social Security for the next century; (5) allowing the FICA holiday for wage earners to lapse at the end of the year; or (5) opposing any tax holiday for employer FICA contributions.”

“It is time for AARP to be specific on where they stand on specific proposals, both positive and negative,” Stern said. “It is not enough to state that they are against privatization.”

A very bad decision: What are they thinking!

2011-06-29T15:27:00.000-07:00

By Robby Stern

We recently received notice that the Social Security Administration plans to close their Seattle offices at 9th & Lenora and in the Rainier Valley and consolidate these offices at the Jackson Federal Building in downtown Seattle. They pose it as a cost saving measure.

By closing these two field offices and relocating to the Jackson Federal Building, the Agency is denying access to face-to-face services to individuals without current valid state or federal ID which is required to enter the Jackson Federal Building. Individuals who lose their ID or have it stolen will often make the Social Security office one of their first stops as they try to recreate their essential documents.

Those most heavily impacted are the poor, the homeless, and those living on Social Security Disability. They are the least likely to have the essential ID to enter the Jackson Federal Building. Those who carry all their possessions with them will have enormous difficulty getting their possessions into the building. They will not be able to leave it outside the Federal Building because unattended stuff is viewed as a potential security hazard.

When we discussed the issue at the last PSARA Executive Board meeting, it turns out one of PSARAs Executive Board members would be unable to access the Social Security office if it is relocated as planned.

Recently I heard from a wonderful and compassionate attorney who represents Social Security Disability clients. She stated that the Jackson Federal Building “is an impossible barrier to accessing the local SSA office for many of our clients who are homeless and have had their IDs stolen. This does not touch upon the problem of numerous Social Security disability recipients that deal with active anxiety, personality disorders, or paranoid schizophrenia every day and will not come near such a building.”

We need to persuade the Social Security Administration to back away from this insensitive and unacceptable relocation. We have contacted Rep, McDermott’s office and will also be discussing it with Senators Cantwell and Murray. Rep. McDermott has sent an inquiry to the Social Security Administration and is awaiting a response.

In the meanwhile, I want to urge all of you to email Regional Commissioner Stanley Friendship at stanley.c.friendship@SSA.gov, phone # (206) 615-2107, stating your grave concern with the proposed consolidation in the Jackson Federal Building. It would also be very helpful if you were to contact your Congressional Representative and our two Senators asking them to step in and stop this terrible decision from being implemented.

Healthy send-off for paid sick days measure

2011-06-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

Following months of collaboration, the Seattle Coalition for a Healthy Workforce and local business leaders have presented a new, common-ground paid sick days proposal to the Seattle City Council.

Introduced by Councilmember Nick Licata at a press conference June 21, the proposed ordinance has the support of more than 70 organizations and a growing list of local businesses. Also on hand to endorse the proposal were Mayor Mike McGinn and Councilmembers Sally Clark and Jean Godden.

“Everyone gets sick at some point,” Licata said. “We don’t want a situation where people feel they have to stay home and lose a paycheck, or go to work and spread their disease.”

The proposal would apply to all Seattle workers: Food service workers, grocery workers, health care workers, and more. It would allow up to five days’ paid sick leave for businesses with fewer than 50 employees; up to seven days for businesses between 50 and 249 employees; and up to nine days for businesses with more than 250 employees. Part-time and contract workers in businesses of every size could also earn paid sick days.

The proposal was the fruit of collaborative discussions between Seattle business leaders and the Seattle Coalition. “Everyone around the table was committed to the shared goal of creating a healthier Seattle,” said Marilyn Watkins of the coalition. “This innovative proposal was the result. It is a responsible way to protect Seattle workers, children and public health, while giving small business the flexibility they need to provide paid sick leave for their employees.”

“Introduction of the ordinance is the first step in the legislative process,” said PSARA President Robby Stern. “Our members are sure to be active in working for its enactment. The city council needs to know that paid sick days are important to you, your family, friends and neighbors.

“Please take time to spread the word, to phone or e-mail council members, and to turn out for the public hearing from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. July 6 at City Hall.“

To learn more contact Gabriela at 206-529-6363 or Gabriela@eoionline.org or visit the website: www.seattlehealthyworkforce.org.

How legislature dealt with health care needs

2011-06-29T15:21:00.000-07:00

(Content for the following report was provided by citizen lobbyists affiliated with the Healthy Washington Coalition.)

Washington’s legislature fell well short of dealing effectively with critical health care needs during the 2011 regular and special sessions.

Because legislators failed to offset a multi-billion dollar revenue shortfall by closing any of a multitude of existing tax loopholes, deep cuts in essential services were inevitable to balance the biennial budget.

Legislators wrestled with agonizing decisions about funding for human services in the third year of a grinding recession marked by long-term double-digit unemployment.

Among the programs that felt the budget ax to one degree or another were the Basic Health Plan, Apple Health for Kids, Maternity Support Services for low-income women, Family Planning services, Public Health departments, and Primary Care and Clinic services.

The legislature also confronted the challenge of maintaining a viable healthcare safety net while preparing for the establishment of a state health care exchange in 2014, as mandated by the federal Affordable Care Act.

The health care exchange bill signed by Governor Christine Gregoire provides for the mandated exchange, but advocates were disappointed by its failure either to provide a public option, or to require the exchange to function as an active purchaser of care.

Passage of the bill was essential to maintain the state’s eligibility for federal funding to implement the new exchange.

Here’s the good news/bad news breakdown of legislative action on specific health care programs:

Basic Health Plan: The governor had proposed its elimination. The legislature tempered that drastic proposal, but froze out new enrollees for two years, shrinking BHP coverage to 34,000 by 2013. Some 150,000 uninsured men, women and children are already stuck on the waiting list.

Apple Health for Kids: The governor’s proposal to end coverage of 27,000 undocumented children was shelved, as was a state senate proposal to end the state’s commitment to cover all eligible children. The budget as adopted raises premiums for undocumented children in families whose income is above 200 percent of the poverty level.

Regulating Insurance Companies: A bill requested by the insurance commissioner and signed into law requires that the reasons for any insurance rate increase request be available for public inspection.

Guaranteed Health Care for Children: The federal law requires that children be covered regardless of any pre-existing condition. The legislature enacted a bill requiring private insurers to make any individual insurance plans available to all children under age 19.

Maternity Support Services: Low-income women with high-risk pregnancies will be served by a program whose budget has been cut by 30 percent.

Family Planning: On the plus side, women will have more access to Medicaid family planning services as a result of legislative action. However, funding for Department of Health family planning for low-income women is cut by $2.25 million, a cut that’s likely to generate $9 million in new costs for unintended pregnancies. Funding was maintained for cancer screenings, for HIV/AIDS services, and for screening for most sexually transmitted infection.

Public Health Departments: After the governor’s across-the-board cuts last December, the legislature imposed an additional $10 million cut in flexible funds for these agencies. This will lessen the ability of health departments to implement programs for food safety, safe drinking water, and the control of communicable disease.

Primary Health Care and Clinics: The legislature moderated the cuts originally proposed for community health centers, and it fully funded Disability Lifeline medical services. However, the funding cuts in other health care programs will add thousands to the state’s uninsured ranks. The safety net will be severely strained.

High court rules 1.4 million women are not a class

2011-06-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

By Will Parry

With its 5-4 decision in the historic, decade-long Walmart discrimination case, the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has gravely weakened the people’s right to address corporate injustice with a class-action lawsuit.

The court’s ruling was limited to the finding that Walmart women workers’ circumstances did not have enough in common to make them a class for the purposes of a lawsuit. The court did not address the charge of raw, corporation-wide gender discrimination.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, cited Walmart’s formal policy forbidding discrimination and its practice of granting local managers substantial discretion, which he argued resulted in varied pay and promotion practices in the company’s 4,500 stores.

The right of 1.5 million present and former women Walmart workers to back pay and to a gender-free opportunity for promotions was at stake in the case originally filed in the name of Walmart greeter Betty Dukes, a modest and courageous African American woman.

Having been denied the right to file a class action, it will now be difficult for the company’s female employees to pursue individual claims. The average wages lost for a member of the rejected class – around $1,100 a year – is too small a sum to give lawyers an incentive to prepare and pursue individual suits against a corporate behemoth.

Despite the difficulties, attorneys for the women predicted that many individual claims would be filed and that efforts would be made to construct one or more smaller groups that might meet the Supreme Court majority’s definition of a class.

The plaintiffs presented 130 sworn statements from women employees documenting specific instances of discrimination in pay, in promotions and in the work environment. Since the case was originally filed in 1999, more than 12,000 women Walmart employees have contacted the plaintiffs’ attorneys with issues arising from company practices.

This mass of evidence supported the conclusion, expressed by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion, that “gender bias suffused Walmart’s corporate culture.” Ginsburg’s dissent was joined by the other two women justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elia Kagan, as well as by Justice Stephen Breyer.

The outpouring of corporate support for Walmart during the court case is proof of its watershed importance. More than 20 major corporations, including Bank of America, Microsoft and GE, filed amicus briefs on the company’s behalf – in other words, in support of a corporation’s sovereign right to treat its women employees like second-class citizens

While legal action on behalf of Walmart’s women workers is expected to continue on a smaller scale, company labor relations policies are also being challenged by a growing movement within the ranks of the “associates,” as Walmart calls its employees.

At the company’s stores in many parts of the country, including the Puget Sound area, a movement is taking shape called “OUR Walmart,” which stands for “Organized and United for Respect at Walmart.” Demonstrating their seriousness, more than one hundred workers and supporters marched on the company’s Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters June 20 to demand better treatment.

Karen Casey, a company senior vice president for labor relations, having met with the delegation and listened to their grievances, replied that “our cornerstone at Walmart is respect for the individual.”

“Well then,” responded Misty Tanner, an “associate” who had traveled from Seattle to take part in the protest, “that needs to drain down to the stores, because your store managers lost it.”

The OUR Walmart delegation said that if they don’t see results from their action they will be back.

Reacting to the Supreme Court decision, the National Organization for Women called on Congress to enact the Paycheck Fairness Act, “which would provide more effective remedies to victims of sex-based wage discrimination.”

“NOW also calls on Walmart to end its unconscionable resistance to employees’ efforts to form unions and bargain collectively over pay, benefits and other conditions of employment,” the statement added.

Indeed, if Walmart’s workers and their labor and community supporters can crack this brutal stronghold of anti-unionism, it could inspire a rebirth of militant unionism across the entire working class.

From coal to clean energy

2011-06-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

The transition from fossil fuels to clean energy in Washington State has been significantly advanced with an agreement to phase out the state’s only coal-fired power plant in Centralia.

“Over the next 14 years, we’ll scrub the last of the coal from our in-state power production, while working to reduce imports of coal power,” said K. C. Golden, policy director for the environmental organization Climate Solutions.

Opposition to coal is no longer confined to organizations like the Sierra Club, Golden reported. Readiness to “power past coal” has been expressed by the Centralia Economic Development Council, by organized labor, by Transalta (which owns the Centralia plant) and by Governor Chris Gregoire.

“Steady progress in making the clean-energy economy real in the Northwest is a big part of what makes the coal transition possible,” Golden said. “Energy conservation programs are saving energy and money hand over fist, squeezing more value out of the region’s hydropower. Wind power is online. Solar, geothermal, cogeneration, smart grid and tidal energy initiatives are under way.”

At the same time, Golden warned that “coal giants Arch and Peabody have targeted the region for coal export facilities so they can ship the coal we don’t burn – and a whole lot more – to Asia. If they succeed, we’ll be sending a big Northwest thumbs up for huge coal plant investments in Asia that will lock humanity in to catastrophic climate disruption.”

Clearly, major battles lie ahead, but the phasing out of the Centralia plant suggests that clean energy is the wave of the future.

An elephant is prowling the Capitol

2011-06-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

By James Hauser and Kate Hunter

Our leaders are debating the federal budget in the marbled hearing rooms and mahogany chambers of Congress, in the cubicles of the White House West Wing, and in the Oval Office itself.

And in each of these rooms is an elephant; an elephant called the U.S. Defense Budget. The national media urges you to follow our leaders: Don’t think of the Elephant.

• Don’t think about the defense budget having doubled during the past ten years.

• Don’t think that the U.S. spends almost as much on the military (this year alone about $780 billion) as the entire rest of the world combined.

• Don’t think about the Pentagon never having completed an audit, nor about the General Accountability Office finding $300 billion in cost overruns in the past five years.

• Don’t think that here in Washington State we have paid $28 billion just for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; nor that our state legislators and governor have proposed drastic cuts in our safety net to fill a $5 billion shortfall projected over the next two years. Don’t divide 5 into 28.

• Don’t think of the dead – nearly one million soldiers and civilians dead as a direct result of military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Iraq Body Count).

• Don’t think that with Osama bin Laden dead, there is no justification for remaining in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In fact, to follow our leaders, perhaps we should not think at all.

Luckily for us some in Congress HAVE been thinking and have drafted “The Peoples’ Budget.” Presented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it would:

• End the wars in Iraq and Afghani¬stan and bring home the troops.

• End overseas military emergency supplemental funding starting in Fiscal Year 2013.

• Reduce baseline defense spending.

It would also:

Allow the Bush-era tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012, but extend marriage relief, credits, and incentives for children, families, and education.

• Immediately rescind the upper-income tax cuts in December’s tax deal.

• Increase millionaire tax rates (add¬ing 45%, 46%, 47%, 48%, and 49% top rates).

• Tax all capital gains and qualified dividends as ordinary income.

• Tax U.S. corporate foreign income as it is earned.

• Eliminate corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal companies.

• Add a financial speculation tax (derivatives, foreign exchange)

• Reinstate Superfund taxes.

• Negotiate costs of pharmaceuticals with companies.

These major shifts in government policy would allow Congress to:

• Enact a public health care option.

• Raise the taxable Social Security maximum on the employee side to 90% of earnings and eliminate the taxable maximum on the employer side.

• Increase Social Security benefits based on higher contributions on the employee side.

• Search out and punish Medicare and Medicaid provider fraud.

• Prevent a cut in Medicare physician payments for a decade.

• Invest $1.45 trillion in job creation, education, clean energy and broadband infrastructure, housing, and R&D.

It’s time we urged our leaders to cut military spending to free up money for states’ needs. According to a University of Massachusetts-Amherst study, military dollars spent in a state yield the least number of jobs, compared to public investments in health, education, transportation and even tax cuts.

The elephant in Washington, D.C. tramples the grass in every state.

Strengthen Social Security...don’t cut it!

2011-06-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

By Steve Kofahl

We’re advocating for improvements in benefit adequacy and equity, not just pushing back hard against the forces determined to cut payments and deform Social Security. By scrapping the $106,800 cap on earnings subject to payroll and self-employment taxes, we would gain revenue to fund program enhancements, while laying to rest any concerns about Trust Fund solvency.

At the Social Security implementation strategy session at the December 2005 White House Conference on Aging, the delegation from the Puget Sound Alliance made important recommendations, and got all of them approved. We suggested raising the surviving spouse benefit to 75% of the combined amount formerly paid to the couple, recognizing that the remaining individual needs more than one- half of the couple’s prior income to meet basic needs.

For workers who care for young children, we called for dropping their years with little or no earnings from the calculation of lifetime average earnings. Average indexed monthly earnings over the best 35 years are the basis for computing payment amounts, and this would allow fewer years to be averaged. A guaranteed minimum benefit would be established to keep low income workers out of poverty.

These changes would be gender neutral, but would primarily benefit women, who generally spend fewer years than men in the workforce, and continue to earn less for comparable work. For the disabled, we recommended an end to the five-month waiting period before benefits are paid following disability onset, and elimination of the 29-month waiting period for Medicare.

The national Strengthen Social Security coalition supports increased revenue from those most able to pay, as well as benefit improvements. Seattle’s Economic Opportunity Institute (EOI) is on the Steering Committee, and serves with PSARA and 18 other member organizations in Social Security Works Washington.

EOI calls for expiration of the 2% payroll tax “holiday” at the end of the year; for scrapping the cap; for a more progressive benefit computation formula; and for a drop in computation years from 35 to 30 in order to raise payments for those who must temporarily leave the workforce to provide childcare and eldercare.

Senator Maria Cantwell will introduce a bill to raise cost of living adjustments by pegging them to a modified Consumer Price Index that measures costs of a “market basket” of goods and services required by seniors and other beneficiaries. We really need to get behind this one, because our opponents are pushing for a reduced COLA for current and future beneficiaries. The costs of health care, food, and housing represent a greater portion of what is spend by beneficiaries than by the general population, and they are growing much faster than the standard CPI.

The October 2009 National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) report, “Fixing Social Security: Adequate Benefits, Adequate Financing,” prepared for the Senate Select Committee on Aging, describes a menu of Social Security financing and benefit improvement options, including many of those described above.

The Congressional Budget Office followed NASI with “Social Security Policy Options.” NASI and CBO are non-partisan, and not advocacy organizations, so the choices are presented in a neutral and objective manner. If you want more information, check them out! It’s time we played offense, as well as defense, when it comes to Social Security.

(Steve Kofahl is president of Local 3937 of the American Federation of Government Employees and a member of the PSARA Executive Board.)

Brockey hearing : Our chance to be heard

2011-06-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

SENIOR PROGRAMS SLASHED IN FINAL STATE BUDGET

2011-06-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

By Jerry Reilly

Services and programs important to older people are severely slashed in the budget adopted by the Legislature for the next two years. Nearly one half billion dollars in state and federal funds have been cut from the budget for services vital to seniors

Home care hours have been cut by 10% for people who get help from home care workers in order to remain in their own homes. Additional training for home care workers approved by Initiative 1029 has been postponed once again.

Enrollment in the Basic Health Plan (BHP) program will continue to decline. Approximately one third of BHP enrollees are between 50 and 65 years old.
The state will no longer pay the prescription co-pay for low income seniors enrolled in the Medicare Part D Pharmacy program. There is some hope that the federal government will end the co-pay requirement for these people in January, 2012.

Changes in the Adult Day Health program may force as many as 700 people living with developmental disabilities out of the program. Some Adult Day Health Centers will likely close.

The Senior Citizens Services Act will have reductions to the Meals on Wheels and other services provided through the Area Agencies on Aging.

Dental coverage for Adults on Medicaid will be severely restricted to only emergency services. Services will still be available for people who receive long term care services.

Eyeglasses and hearing aids will no longer be available to adults on Medicaid.
One positive step taken by the Legislature was to enact a Safety Net Assessment Fee on nursing homes that will provide funds to generate additional federal Medicaid dollars. This program avoided about $80 million in cuts that would otherwise have been imposed on the funding for the care of about 11,000 Medicaid residents in nursing homes.

The sweep and severity of the cuts to senior programs is difficult to comprehend. Without doubt this is the worse budget we have ever seen. Senior programs are not alone. There were harmful cuts throughout the safety net programs that affect children, people with disabilities, mentally ill people and all low income people. Education programs, especially higher education, have also been deeply cut.

How did things get this bad? The twin drivers of this sad situation were the steep decline in state revenues driven by the great recession and the straightjacket the voters imposed on the legislature when they overwhelmingly passed Tim Eyman’s Initiative 1053 last November. This initiative re-imposed a two-thirds requirement for the legislature to pass any revenue measure or to close any tax loophole.
Once it became the accepted conventional wisdom in Olympia that the voters wanted an “all-cuts” budget, the legislature set about the task of delivering what they believed the public wanted. Some tried to make the cuts in the most responsible way available to them. Some seemed to enjoy the prospect of shrinking the footprint of state services and keeping taxes as low as possible. But almost no one argued for any real alternative to an “all-cuts” approach. Toward the end of the session, there was some attention paid to a set of notoriously outrageous tax loopholes, but in the end nothing was done to change our regressive, preference ridden, and inadequate tax structure.

Most discouraging of all was that nothing was done to lay the groundwork for a legal challenge to Eyman’s Initiative 1053 on grounds that it violates the state Constitution. So instead of a sharing of the burden of replacing the revenue lost through the recession, the old, the sick, the poor and the children were asked to shoulder a grossly disproportionate share of the load.

We now await the next revenue forecast that is due around mid-June. Hopefully, revenue will be stable and we can begin to plan getting through the next two years without further reductions.

We need also to develop a plan to convince the public that we can no longer operate a prosperous, decent, and progressive state based upon a tax structure that cannot keep pace with the needs of our people.

Jerry Reilly is Chair of the ElderCare Alliance and former Assistant Secretary of the Department of Social and Health Services. He can be reached at jerryreilly@msn.com.

‘Don’t mess with Medicare!’ voters say

2011-06-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

By Will Parry

Politicians mess with Medicare at their peril.

Republican Congressional candidate Jane Corwin ran into that rock-hard reality May 24, when her widely expected victory in an ultra-conservative upstate New York district was upended over her stance – and her party’s – on Medicare.

Democrat Kathy Hochul won 48 percent of the vote to Corwin’s 42 percent. Tea Party candidate Jack Davis trailed with 8 percent. The district had sent Republicans to Congress for 40 years.

At the outset of the campaign, Hochul honed in on Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal to wreck Medicare by turning it into a voucher system – and she never let up. Post-election surveys confirmed that voters of both parties had chosen Hochul because they trusted her to protect Medicare.

“The results set off elation among Democrats and soul-searching among Republicans,” The New York Times reported. The results were a blow to Ryan’s proposed restructuring of Medicare, crafted to save money by sharply reducing coverage for seniors.

The Ryan proposal was incorporated in a budget adopted on a party-line vote in the Republican-controlled House.

Meanwhile, advocates warned that the integrity of Medicare was in jeopardy in bipartisan debt-reduction talks initiated by President Obama and presided over by Vice President Joseph Biden. Referring to these talks, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat, declared that “I have said it over and over again, everything needs to be on the table. Medicare is one of the things that needs to be on the table.”

Medicaid a major GOP target

After encountering a firestorm of voter anger over their scheme to destroy Medicare by turning it into a voucher program, House Republicans are training their Congressional gun sights instead on a program that serves children and the poorest Americans: Medicaid.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee was expected to move a bill that would repeal the vital “maintenance of effort” (MOE) requirement in the health care reform law. The MOE provision blocks the states from cutting their Medicaid rolls before the establishment of health care exchanges in 2014.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that eliminating the MOE requirement would cut about 300,000 beneficiaries --- mostly children -- from the program.
The Hill, a news service that summarizes activity in Congress, quoted both Bruce Lesley, president of the children’s advocacy group First Focus, and Director Ron Pollack of Families USA, as expressing deep concern over the threat to Medicaid. “I’ve always worried that Medicare and Social Security would go off the table and Medicaid would the only thing left standing,” Lesley said.
“More than $1.3 trillion of the savings in Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposal would come from Medicaid,” The Hill reported. “So far, those plans haven’t attracted the same political furor as the budget’s Medicare components. Some Democrats have been blunt about the reason: Seniors vote in large numbers, whereas Medicaid primarily serves children and the poor.”

Medicaid advocates are also concerned about a second proposal in the GOP budget, to convert federal Medicaid funding into block grants for the states. Either Republican proposal would be “all about rationing care and cutting people off of coverage,” Lesley, the children’s advocate, told The Hill.

But Medicaid also benefits legions of seniors. About 70 percent of the nation’s 1.4 million nursing home residents are dependent on Medicaid, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports. Medicaid also helps fill the infamous “donut hole” in Medicare’s prescription drug coverage. Democrats who support deep cuts in Medicaid as a deficit reduction measure could find themselves in serious trouble.

Becoming a “friend” of Facebook.

2011-06-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

By Anita Nath

The age of social media is upon us. For many, this extreme change can be overwhelming and very confusing. Facebook is a great tool to keep you connected, once you get the hang of it. Even for us so-called “Facebook kids,” some things are just downright confusing.

Facebook is a free online networking and connection site. You create a profile and can control how much information other Facebook members can see about you. To get started, all you need is an e-mail address.

Head to www.facebook .com. It is pretty simple to sign up and all that is essentially required is a name and e-mail address. Once you begin the sign-up process, Facebook guides you through setting up your Profile. You can provide as much information as you want. You can also choose to add a picture of yourself or a picture of anything you wish to post to your page.

Once you have set up your profile, you can search for people and organizations to become “friends” with. Use the search bar at the top of your Facebook page. To find someone, simply type in their name or e-mail address and click search. Then once you find the person or organization, simple click “Add as friend” or “Like.” This will send a personal request to that person or organization to be connected to your page.

Once connected, you can communicate by posting and commenting on what is known as the “wall.” With a Facebook page, you have a “wall” area and also a “news feed" area. On your “wall,” you can post a comment about anything, post a link to another website, or post pictures and information that is important to you. On the “news feed” your friends will be able to see what you posted on your “wall.” You will also be able to see the postings of your friends and of the organizations you have become connected with, on your personal “news feed.”

If you run into any kind of trouble, the Facebook Help section is very user-friendly and searchable. You could type in a question in the help section, such as “How do I post a Link?” and it will give you great directions.

Facebook is a another tool when it comes to staying informed. Many organizations and groups (including PSARA!) post about important topics and upcoming events. Once you have a Facebook account, you will be able to see all of these posts on your news feed. Even if you only log into your Facebook account once a week, you will still be able to see many of the past updates. Also, when someone wants to become friends with you, you will get an e-mail notification sent to the e-mail address you provide. This is helpful if you do not frequent the Facebook site.
Privacy is always a concern when being active on the internet. Facebook has many privacy options that you can utilize. To work with your privacy settings, simply login to Facebook and click on “account” in the upper right corner. This will allow you to access your personal privacy settings where you can determine how much to share.

If you are interested in Facebook, use the instructions in this article to get you started. Once you have a Facebook account , be sure to add PSARA by searching for “Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans” in the search bar and give it a thum

bs up once you go to the page. Give it a try. It sure helped the Egyptian people!

Remembering Silme and Gene

2011-06-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

By Frank Irigon

Thirty years ago, on June 1, 1981, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes were murdered in the office of Alaska Cannery Workers Local 37 of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) near Pioneer Square in Seattle.

Silme and Gene were both the anchor and rudder that gave meaning and direction to those who followed them in reforming Local 37, and in building the anti-Marcos movement in Seattle. They were murdered because of their determined and successful efforts to restore democracy within their union and because of their efforts to expose and resist the corrupt regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philipines.

Gene died at the scene, but Silme lived another 24 hours -- long enough to identify the gunmen. The murderers were Pompeyo Benito Guloy Jr. and Jimmy Bulosan Ramil, two cannery workers and members of the Tulisan, a Filipino street gang. On September 24, 1981, Guloy and Ramil were found guilty of aggravated first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. On May 12, 1982, their leader, Tony Dictado, was convicted of ordering the murders. In 1990, Tony Baruso, the former president of Local 37 who had ties to the Marcos regime, was convicted for the two murders. Both Dictado and Baruso were sentenced to life in prison.

A subsequent civil law suit brought against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and their co-conspirators established the ties between the murderers of these two union leaders and the corrupt and murderous Marcos regime.

Thirty years have now passed since their deaths. The Alaskero Foundation; the International Longshore and Warehouse Union; the Inlandboatmen’s Union; and the University of Washington Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies are jointly sponsoring a Memorial Anniversary of the assassination of Silme and Gene on Saturday, June 4, at the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture.

From June 29 to July 4, other 30th Anniversary events will be scheduled. The theme of these events is “Global Activism and the Struggle for Philippine Democracy,” To find out more about these events, go to www.lelo.org.

The work that Silme and Gene led, both in the struggle to win union democracy and in the struggle to overthrow the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines will be remembered and honored. The contribution of these two men will not be forgotten.

Building power

2011-06-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

Our banner and members have taken to the streets at one demonstration after another, for labor rights, for taxing the rich, for social justice. No two ways about it. People respect PSARA!

Our bold activities have everything to do with our membership growth. Good people support organizations that get into the action. “Older and Bolder” is more than just a slogan for us.

We’re going to continue to grow. The times demand it, and we’re responding. We’re shooting for 250 new members in calendar 2011. Our mission is to work with others to build a stable, ongoing movement strong enough to challenge the corporate powers that today dominate the economics and politics of our country. Adding 250 new members this year brings us an important stride closer to establishing that mighty movement.

That new member you’re going to sign up is an indispensable contribution toward political power.

Millions are in motion, here and across the country. Across the world, for that matter! The times are ripe for growth. We don’t have to do it all. Just our share

PAID SICK DAYS, A PSARA ISSUE

2011-06-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

By Robby Stern

PSARA strongly supports the enactment of an ordinance mandating a minimum standard for paid sick days in Seattle. Here are the reasons why.

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the key public health message was “stay home when you’re sick.” Some were able to heed that message, but many others were not. The H1N1 virus spread in work places and schools as children were sent to school sick because their parents could not afford to take time off work without pay.

The Economic Opportunity Institute (EOI), reports that four in ten Seattle workers get no sick leave, among them thousands of restaurant, grocery, and health care workers who are on the front lines of food safety and public health. In all, an estimated 190,000 Seattle workers have no paid sick days.

Quoting from the EOI Report:
“Food borne illness has a major impact on health and the economy in the United States. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), every year one out of six Americans gets sick from food, resulting in 125,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. About 20 percent of cases can be traced to an ill food worker. Elderly people are particularly vulnerable to food borne illnesses such as norovirus … The CDC estimates there are more than 21 million annual cases of norovirus, and half of all cases of food-borne illness in the U.S. can be attributed to norovirus infection. Norovirus symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, cramping and fever…Of the cases analyzed by the CDC from July 1997 to June 2000, 57% were caused by food, which most often became contaminated by an infected food handler immediately prior to consumption.”

The CDC advises that the measures most likely to significantly reduce the incidence of norovirus are “correct handling of cold foods, frequent hand washing, and provision of paid sick leave...” The King County Public Health Department strongly supports a paid sick days ordinance.

Since most restaurants do not offer paid sick time, ill employees are forced to choose between taking unpaid leave or going to work sick. A recent report in the Journal of Food Protection found that, in the past year, 19.8 percent had worked while experiencing vomiting or diarrhea. Another survey of more than 4,300 U.S. restaurant workers in eight metropolitan regions of the U.S. found that 88 percent did not receive paid sick time and that 63 percent had worked serving or preparing food while sick.

Access to paid sick days is unequal. Eighty percent of people earning above the median hourly wage get paid sick days; only 19 percent of the bottom 10 percent wage earners receive paid sick days. Women are far more likely than men not to have paid sick days. Latinos and African Americans are also less likely to have paid sick days.

My wife is a school nurse in a school with a high percentage of lower income families. She frequently tells me of children being sent to school with fevers, or children getting sick at school. When she calls the parents, all too often they are unable to pick up their children. Another frequent phenomenon is older siblings missing a day of school because they have to stay home with a younger sister or brother who is too sick to go to school.

Elderly people are particularly vulnerable to the spread of viruses and infections. The well-publicized growth in resistance of infections to antibiotics makes the spread of diseases even more dangerous for all of us, but particularly for seniors. The realization that people who handle our food in the grocery stores and people who help us care for ourselves often do not have access to paid sick days makes the need for a minimum standard even more apparent.

Although some employers support the establishment of a paid sick days standard, very powerful forces are lined up against it. The same business associations who declared the sky was falling when they opposed the 1998 minimum wage standard are now contending that a paid sick days standard will ruin businesses in Seattle. The Seattle Times, using the term “nanny government,” has announced its opposition. Opponents’ economic arguments are countered by the fact that San Francisco has had a similar standard for four years and has seen an increase in employment.

Several Seattle City Council members who greeted the proponents of the ordinance with expressions of support may now be getting cold feet and seeking to delay consideration of the ordinance.

Kudos go to Councilmembers (and PSARA members) Nick Licata, sponsor of the ordinance, and Jean Godden, co-sponsor. Councilmember Bruce Harrell (not yet a PSARA member) has also agreed to co-sponsor the ordinance. These councilmembers are supporting immediate consideration and passage of the ordinance.

Some have said this should not be a “campaign” issue. Well, it IS a campaign issue. We’ll be calling on our members to attend various actions and hearings to express your support for a minimum paid sick days standard. We will also let you know where all council members and Mayor McGinn stand on the issue.

This ordinance will protect our parents, children and grandchildren. It is good for our community. We’ll be calling on you for help to establish paid sick days in the city of Seattle.

Selling out injured workers

2011-06-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

By Jeff Johnson

Just a month after celebrating the 100th anniversary of Washington’s workers’ compensation system, Governor Christine Gregoire, along with Senate Democrat and Republican leadership and House Democrat leadership, passed HB 2123, undermining the security of the safety net for injured workers by approving “structured settlement agreements” (compromise and release agreements) whereby workers will receive less than what they are entitled to under the law.

Injured workers 55 years of age or older, ratcheting down to those 50 or older by 2016, will be able to settle their claims at less than their statutory amount. You might ask why workers would agree to lower their benefits. For many workers it won’t be a choice. Strapped financially from receiving only partial wage replacement benefits, many injured workers will accept a lump-sum payment paid out over several months to meet family needs. And once the money is gone, they are just out of luck.

And it will happen. The Department of Labor and Industries assumes that the workers’ compensation state fund will save $335 million in fiscal year 2012 and over half a billion dollars by 2015. Most of these so-called savings will be in the form of lower benefits to injured workers.

Even worse, these settlement agreements are a lure for private insurers. After Initiative 1082, that would have allowed private insurance into our comp system, was defeated by nearly 60% and was voted down in every county, HB 2123 lays out a welcome mat for the private insurance industry. Denying claims and reaching settlement agreements are the means by which private insurers profit in the workers’ compnsation arena. Until now, Washington’s workers’ compensation market has not been all that attractive to private insurers. HB 2123 changes that.

HB 2123 also places a one-year cost of living freeze on injured workers’ time-loss and pension benefits, and offsets the value of a permanent partial disability award against an injured worker’s pension award – both these provisions will lower benefits for our most disabled workers.

The bill includes a positive program modeled after the Oregon “stay at work” program. This measure incentivizes small and medium size employers to bring their injured workers back to employment through offering wage, equipment, and training subsidies to the employer for 66 days. If this works, it will return workers to the job more quickly and reduce long term disability and costs.

The bill also sets up three studies which will look at occupational disease, structured settlement agreements, and the claims management process. Finally the bill continues some funding for health and safety grants that focus on workplace safety training.

While labor could have lived with many portions of the bill, the radical change to compromise and release is a huge and grotesque corporate give-away at the expense of our older and most disabled workers. Shame on the Democrats for selling out injured workers.

(Jeff Johnson is president of the Washington State Labor Council and a PSARA member.)

Bankers grow fat as teachers are laid off

2011-06-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

By Mike Andrew

Seventy-five people – including Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich – protested in front of the Chase Bank in Seattle’s Wallingford district May 21.

The protest was called by the Seattle Education Association, Social Equality Educators, and Martin Luther King County Jobs with Justice. It was supported by the Service Employees’ State Council, Working Washington, Washington Citizen Action Network, US Uncut, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and SNOW.

Chase was targeted because corporate tax loopholes exempt it from many state taxes at a time when the state legislature is cutting essential services to close a $5 billion revenue shortfall. Chase pays no state taxes whatsoever on its mortgage interest income thanks to a loophole that allows banks based in Washington to avoid these taxes.

Chase is based in New York, but Washington Mutual, which Chase acquired in September 2008,was Washington-based, enabling Chase to apply their tax credit to its earnings. Had Chase paid its fair share, it would have added nearly $100 million per year to the state’s revenue.

As part of the federal bailout, Chase was loaned billions of dollars at zero percent interest, money that they are now loaning back to the federal government at 5% interest – actually making money off taxpayers.

Last year, Chase compensated CEO Jamie Dimon with a $1 million base salary, a $5 million bonus, over $6 million in options, and nearly $8 million worth of stock. The $20.8 million total was a 1,500 percent increase over his 2009 income. The average U.S. household income for 2010, in contrast, was just $49,777

On April 16, Bank of America was also the target of a protest picketline. For 2008 and 2009, the banking giant paid no federal income taxes at all and actually received tax refunds of $3 billion. Its CEO, Brian Moynihan, lost money in 2010, when his pay was cut to $1.9 million. Early this year he did get a $9 million bonus, however.

Bonuses paid to executives at the nation's six largest banks totaled $140 billion in 2009, a sum equivalent to the total of all state budget deficits combined.

Meanwhile, 70 Seattle teachers in Seattle are facing layoff as the state tries to fill the $5 billion hole in its budget with cuts rather than raising new revenue.

The legislature is also considering an across-the-board pay freeze for teachers. Funding to reduce class size in schools has taken a 70 percent cut, college tuition has increased, and public library hours are being reduced. Some 40,000 people have lost their Basic Health coverage. More cuts are projected for city, county, and state services.

This is not a spending crisis. It’s a revenue crisis, caused when corporations like Chase pay little to no taxes on their huge earnings. Working people who had no part in creating the crisis are being made to pay for it.

The money to pay for social services is there, enriching banks and bankers. It just needs to be tapped to meet the needs of the people.