Arizona Sens. Jon Kyl (R) and John McCain (R) have vehemently opposed President Obama’s recovery package, both voting against the legislation today. McCain called the bill “generational theft, and in a Senate GOP press conference today, Kyl claimed that there are “a lot of earmarks and a lot of wasteful Washington spending in this bill.” As two of the most vocal opponents of the bill, Kyl and McCain need to better understand the “recessionreality” facing their constituents. Watch it:
As the video above portrays, Arizona is plagued by an all-time high unemployment rate. “I’m just optimistic…that I’ll get something” from the stimulus, said job-seeker Eduardo Vivanco. Roughly 74,000 jobs could be created or preserved by the recovery package. Furthermore, the state legislature’s budget director says that the recovery plan’s “health and education money…could help close the state’s budget shortfalls.”
Now that the Senate has passed its version of the recovery and reinvestment bill, the conference committee will have to work out the discrepencies between the House and Senate bills. One big difference is funds for school construction, which were completely stripped by the Senate. During his town hall meeting in Florida today, Obama twice touted the school construction funds, calling education funding “the highest priority.” Watch it:
Speaking yesterday to a town hall audience in Indiana, Obama was even more blunt: “Now, I’ll be honest with you, the Senate version cut a lot of these education dollars. I would like to see some of it restored.”
Update
A Center for American Progress analysis finds that the Senate version of the bill creates “9 to 12 percent fewer jobs created or saved than the House-passed legislation despite costing $16 billion more.” The House bill would create between 343,000 and 444,000 more jobs than the Senate compromise.
Here at The Wonk Room, we’vebeenarguing that building new highways with stimulus dollars would be a counterproductive use of the funding. Today, President Barack Obama agreed:
I’d like to see high-speed rail where it can be constructed. I would like for us to invest in mass transit because, potentially, that’s energy efficient, and I think people are a lot more open now to thinking regionally in terms of how we plan our transportation infrastructure. The day’s where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to design communities.
Watch it:
Not everybody recognizes it, though. The Senate trimmed $3.6 billion — almost a third — of the mass transit funding out of the stimulus bill, relative to the House’s version. Of course, the House started by pairing $30 billion for highways with just $12 for transit. While some of this could be legitimately used to fix old and imperiled roads, it shows the extent to which Congress has equated “job” with “highway construction worker.”
The press release from the office of Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Chair of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, reads:
The legislation contains significant investment in areas critical to the development of clean, efficient, made-in-America energy, which will save consumers money and create millions of jobs.
Chairman : “We tried to hit the sweet spot of helping our economy recover while promoting clean energy. This bill does both.”
Here are the details of the green spending and tax provisions:
Our guest blogger is Bertha Lewis, CEO and Chief Organizer for ACORN.
Last Wednesday, a miracle happened. More than 30 people showed up at 6AM in front of a neighbor’s house to do one thing: save it from foreclosure. Martha and Eddie Daniels, tenants in the house in Oakland, California, were about to be evicted because their landlord had been taking their rent, but not paying the mortgage. The sheriff was coming to put them out, and the Daniels were in danger of joining the millions of families who have lost their homes in this crisis. But the community, working with ACORN members and staff, came together to say, “Not this time. Not here. Not now.”
ACORN members rallied their neighbors, spoke with local media, including one radio station that broadcast live from the home, and flooded the Sheriff’s office with calls urging compassion and forbearance of the scheduled eviction. Meanwhile, ACORN Housing Corporation worked furiously behind the scenes with the lender to negotiate a stay on the eviction, which successfully came through.
This is one story from the front lines of America’s economic meltdown, a crisis which contains one issue above all others at its heart: foreclosures. Watch this Brave New Films video highlighting the problem:
In 2008, more families faced foreclosure (2.3 million) than at any time since the Great Depression at a cost to the economy of at least $156 billion. If we do nothing, this cost could rise as high as $850 billion by 2012. ACORN members do not intend to let that happen. Building on the success in Oakland, ACORN’s campaign to address the foreclosure crisis is entering a new stage. In cities across the country, we are creating teams of community residents willing to stand with families in crisis.
Called the Home Defenders, this program is designed to help keep families in their homes and pressure elected officials to address this root cause of the economic collapse. It responds to the desperate calls for help found in the grim foreclosure statistics, and echoes the sentiments of leaders like Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who recently said, “Stay in your homes. If the American people, anybody out there is being foreclosed, don’t leave.”
The Home Defenders program will kick off in cities across the country this coming weekend. For people who live in areas that will not have local organizers helping drive this program, ACORN is creating Home Defender Tool-Kits that help you fight back against the crisis in your neighborhood. We’re also partnering with Brave New Foundation to launch a new website called Fighting For Our Homes this week, which will enable people who face foreclosure all across the country to tell their stories and make their voices heard.
By showing that communities are refusing to participate in their own decimation, we will force elected officials to finally shift their emphasis from bailing out Wall Street to bailing out Main Street. Stand with us.
“The question is not what the polls say. The question is what the reality is. From this day on, the right wing bloc rises to an absolute majority in the Knesset,” the Likud chair went on to say. [...] “The rise of the right-wing camp and the Likud can only mean one thing, the people want change,” Netanyahu exclaimed. “The people want one path. Our path won and it will lead the people.”
This would be an interesting (albeit, perhaps, in the Chinese curse sense) experiment in Israel really thumbing its nose in the face of the sensibilities of the American political leadership.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today set aside the Bush administration’s midnight timetable for a vast expansion of offshore drilling. Salazar sharply rebuked the “headlong rush of the worst kind” put in place in Bush’s final week in office. Announcing that “the time for reform has arrived,” Salazar explained that he “will extend the public comment period by 180 days, get a report on offshore energy resources, hold regional conferences, and expedite rulemaking for offshore renewable energy resources“:
I intend to do what the Bush Administration refused to do: build a framework for offshore renewable energy development, so that we incorporate the great potential for wind, wave, and ocean current energy into our offshore energy strategy. The Bush Administration was so intent on opening new areas for oil and gas offshore that it torpedoed offshore renewable energy efforts.
Despite the fact that Bush has left office, the federal government’s energy exploration apparatus is still living up to its Bush-era pro-industry reputation. Indeed, new documents released by the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) today show that Professor Rick Steiner, a marine scientist at the University of Alaska, is set to lose his federal funding for opposing the Bush administration’s industry-friendly policies.
In March 2008, Steiner wrote an open letter calling attention to what he said was a “pro-business slant” in the supposedly neutral North Aleutian Basin Energy-Fisheries Initiative, an oil exploration public relations program funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Sea Grant.
As Steiner explained, the Energy-Fisheries initiative is “primarily concerned with fostering a dialogue on an offshore oil and gas lease sale scheduled by the Minerals Management Service.” Steiner, whose salary was also partially paid by Sea Grant, said that the Initiative was biased toward energy industry interests and “based on the premise that offshore oil and gas development will occur”:
UAF and Sea Grant, however, have failed to take the steps necessary for creating a neutral, objective, and participatory dialogue on the issue of offshore oil and gas leasing in Bristol Bay. The North Aleutian Basin Energy-Fisheries Initiative is highly biased towards the interests most supportive of offshore oil and gas development in the region and has minimized the opportunity for participation by others, especially by those who live in the Bristol Bay region.
Ironically, NOAA then pushed to strip Steiner of his funding for not acting as a “neutral broker of information.” At a May 2008 meeting with a University of Alaska representative, the National Sea Grant Deputy Director Jim Murray said that NOAA had an “issue with Rick Steiner” and his “advocacy” letter. PEER’s new documents show that in July 2008, at NOAA’s request, the university decided to remove Steiner from future Sea Grant funding requests.
In a press release today, PEER supported Steiner’s position, writing, “Under Bush, NOAA programs, including Sea Grant, were ordered to lubricate oil company initiatives.” Steiner disparaged NOAA’s actions and warned, “Instead of responding to the ocean crisis, this new de facto gag order from NOAA Sea Grant will have a chilling effect on scientists who want to advocate for greater ocean protection and restoration.”
Like everyone else, Paul Krugman can’t quite tell what it is Timothy Geithner’s “plan” is supposed to be. But he agrees that there seems to be some chance that there’s backdoor nationalization in the scheme:
Stress test: everything depends on how this is actually implemented. What happens if, or more likely when, a major money center bank is stress-tested and found to have negative net worth? One possibility is that the auditors are told to come up with a different answer; that’s a big concern. The other is that the bank is effectively nationalized; as I read the language that could be achieved as part of the public capital injection.
So what is the plan? I really don’t know, at least based on what we’ve seen today. But maybe, maybe, it’s a Trojan horse that smuggles the right policy into place.
My read of the situation is that this isn’t an epistemic problem where we don’t know what the real plan is; rather the plan is just undefined. What was announced today leaves the door open to handling this the right way. Unfortunately, it also leaves the money open to the dread zombie bank scenario.
Announcing that “the time for reform has arrived,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar set aside the Bush administration’s “midnight timetable” for offshore drilling. “On Friday, January 16, its last business day in office,” Salazar explained in today’s press conference, “the Bush Administration proposed a new five year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing.” The Bush plan called for the completion of meetings and hearings by March 23. Salazar decried this “broken process”:
It was a headlong rush of the worst kind. It was a process rigged to force hurried decisions based on bad information. It was a process tilted toward the usual energy players while renewable energy companies and the interests of American consumers and taxpayers were overlooked.
Salazar announced he “will extend the public comment period by 180 days, get a report on offshore energy resources, hold regional conferences and expedite rulemaking for offshore renewable energy resources.”
Salazar made it clear that his definition of “energy independence” does not mean a “drill only” future. He rebuked the “oil and gas or nothing” approach of the Bush administration, who ignored the Energy Policy Act of 2005′s mandate to develop regulations for offshore renewables:
I intend to do what the Bush Administration refused to do: build a framework for offshore renewable energy development, so that we incorporate the great potential for wind, wave, and ocean current energy into our offshore energy strategy. The Bush Administration was so intent on opening new areas for oil and gas offshore that it torpedoed offshore renewable energy efforts.
Salazar, who comes from a long line of Colorado ranchers, is famed for wearing a cowboy hat as often as possible. Now it’s clear why he always wears a cowboy hat — Salazar’s the new sheriff in town.
Despite the fact that Bush has left office, the federal government’s energy exploration apparatus is still living up to its 
Announcing that “
