This year, the federal deficit will exceed 11 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), which is higher than at any point in the country’s post-war history. The Office of Management and Budget, meanwhile, has “projected a cumulative $9 trillion deficit between 2010 and 2019.” While it would be folly to try and rein in deficits now — with the economy still in incredibly weak shape — the deficit is something that will have to be addressed eventually.

As CAP’s Michael Linden and Michael Ettlinger pointed out in a new report explaining how to deal with the deficits and debt, “there is little dispute that deficits do harm if they are large enough and sustained long enough.” High government debt levels that result from sustained deficits can “leave a nation unable to go further into debt in a time of crisis,” and also mean “high interest payments on that debt in the future, reducing government’s capacity to make important public investments and provide needed services,” they wrote.

To that end, the Center for American Progress and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities convened a conference today to look at when and how the deficits should be addressed. And of course, one of the most pressing budget problems we’re facing is getting health care spending under control. The Wonk Room caught up with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) — one of the conference panelists — who laid out in stark terms the reality of never-ending increases in health care costs, and lamented that Republicans have, thus far, been unwilling to cooperate on getting those costs under control:

If we think we’re going to continue to have health care inflation at the rate we’re having it, if we simply expand coverage and we don’t, I hate to use the phrase drive down the cost curve, but unless we can limit the rate of health care spending increases, we’re cooked. Game over. Because it will explode the deficit, it will make us financially non-competitive in the global economy, it’ll rob middle-class Americans of their disposable income.

That’s the missing part, where my colleagues on the other side, I wish would meet us more halfway. The Baucus plan — they requested no public option, deficit neutral, no money for undocumented folks, no money for abortions. Baucus presented that plan, and as somebody who’s spent years doing deals, you meet your objectives and many of them still walk away. I wish they would put aside the politics and say, let’s actually get in gear and find a way to drive down these costs.

Watch it:

When asked about ways to raise revenue to address the deficit, Warner responded, “the lesson that we learned in Virginia is that you’ve got to show an ability to cut, to reform, before you can even begin — at least in my experience — even bring up the question about revenue.” That may be true in terms of voter psychology, but in terms of practicality, something will have to be done on the revenue side to get the budget back into balance. As Linden and Ettlinger noted:

Much is said about the economic effect of tax increases, but it is worth noting that there is little risk of the United States becoming economically disadvantaged relative to other advanced economic nations by raising its aggregate tax levels. We have the fifth lowest taxes as a share of GDP among economically developed nations (counting all federal, state, and local taxes). If we raised taxes in aggregate to a level that would safely balance the budget, the United States would still be in the bottom 10 out of 30.

Not that balancing the budget solely on tax increases is a desirable way to do things, but those numbers should put in perspective what we’re talking about when we talk about tax increases. A sustainable fiscal path will require both cost-cutting and new sources of revenue — and of course, a political system that can make and support those difficult choices.

Energy companies are abandoning the sinking ship of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in droves over its opposition to clean energy action, whether by the EPA or by Congress.

Under pressure, Chamber president Tom Donohue today claimed the Chamber “continues to support strong federal legislation and a binding international agreement to reduce carbon emissions and address climate change.” And spokesman Eric Wohlschlegel recently argued that the Chamber respects the science of climate change:

We’ve never questioned the science behind global warming.

This is a blatant falsehood, by any definition. Just last month, the Chamber’s Senior Vice President William Kovacs called for the “Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” to put “the science of climate change on trial.” The Chamber, dominated by pollution-industry skeptics such as Don Blankenship, Harry Alford, and Fred Palmer, has questioned climate science since at least 1992:

2008: Chamber President Tom Donohue Says ‘Scientific Inquiry’ Into Climate Change ‘Should Continue’ Because Of ‘Cooling Trend.’ [U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 3/4/08]

2001: Chamber Claims Global Warming ‘About One Percent From Human Activity,’ Says ‘Things Just Change.’ [CNNFN, 7/16/01]

1992: Chamber Sponsors Global Warming Denier Pat Michaels To ‘Refute The Global Warming Warnings.’ [Chicago Sun-Times, 5/13/92]

In addition to being the Chamber of Commerce president, Tom Donohue works for Union Pacific, a company opposed to climate regulation.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) has ruffled some feathers in both the GOP and the banking industry by suggesting a regulatory reform package that consolidates all of the existing banking regulators into one super-regulator. The financial services industry roundly panned the idea, claiming that “the checks and balances under the current system are pretty good.” “The dual banking system has served this country exceedingly well for 150 years or more,” said Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf

During a Senate Banking Committee hearing today, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) agreed, and added that the regulators shouldn’t be consolidated because it brings him great personal enjoyment to watch them blame each other for regulatory failures:

You mentioned having an alphabet soup of [regulators] coming to talk to us, and it’s not unlike witnesses coming before our committee with differing points of view in many ways. I have to tell you, I have enjoyed that. Each of the regulators — sometimes gleefully, sometimes not — points out the deficiencies of the other regulators. And I have to tell you, there’s some merit in that, just for what it’s worth. To have a captive regulator, much like we had with the GSE’s, which would be the case with all banks, to me, could be very problematic.

Watch it:

Contrary to Corker, warring regulators is absolutely unlike witnesses coming before a committee, because the regulators are also responsible for, well, ensuring the safety of the banking system. It’s not purely academic, and having regulators snipe at each other undermines faith in the regulatory system and prevents a proper level of accountability when that system fails.

As Felix Salmon has opined, “we need a powerful single regulator with teeth, not a council of bickering sub-regulators.” Indeed, a patchwork of regulators — particularly in a system in which the agencies are funded by fees paid by the very banks they regulate — encourages a race-to-the-bottom and regulator shopping. And that’s assuming an institution doesn’t simply slip through the cracks, with no one paying it enough attention.

Having one super-regulator would bring its own set of challenges and doesn’t ensure that all problems disappear. After all, Great Britain has just one regulator (with the Bank of England responsible for monitoring systemic risk), and still faced a financial shock. But consolidation would, at least, prevent banks from playing regulators off each other, and stop the completely nonsensical practice of making regulatory agencies compete for the “right” to regulate a particular institution.

As the New York Times reported, Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair have been “at each other’s throats” on a whole host of issues since the economic meltdown, and refusing to consolidate the regulators “could intensify their turf battles.” While that may be great in terms of providing Corker with an afternoon’s entertainment, it does not help create a regulatory environment that is efficient and holds regulators accountable.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Census Bureau released poverty data for 2008, which showed that the poverty rate has risen to an eleven-year high of 13.2 percent, with 39.8 million people in poverty (including 14 million children). This the highest number of people living below the poverty line since 1960. (And for those keeping score, in 2008, the poverty line for a family of two adults and two children was $21,834; for a family of two adults and one child, it was $17,330.)

Yesterday, the Census Bureau put out more detailed data on poverty and incomes, which showed that the economic downturn has widened the gap between the richest and poorest Americans:

The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans — those making more than $138,000 each year — earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living near or below the poverty line in 2008, according to newly released census figures. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007 and the previous high of 11.22 in 2003.

Of course, this gap will likely narrow again in the next few years, as the richest Americans likely lost quite a bit of their income in 2009 (in terms of absolute dollars). But even before the economic crash, income inequality was at its highest level since 1928, showing that there is more than the recession causing such a disparity.

Thanks to the income hit that low- and moderate-income Americans have had to endure (in the form of layoffs or reduced hours), use of food stamps has jumped 13 percent, to nearly 9.8 million U.S. households, the data shows. And the increase “was most evident in households with two or more workers, highlighting the impact of the recession on both working families and unemployed single people.”

“There are lots of people who are using food stamps for the first time, because they don’t have any other options,” said Mark Mather, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research group in Washington. And if nothing else, one thing these numbers do is make the case for a stronger social safety net, as it’s abundantly clear onto whom the brunt of the recession is falling. And this means not just upping the dollar amount, but modernizing the system to ensure that it’s accessible.

For instance, the Houston Chronicle pointed out that “Texas isn’t coming close to meeting federal requirements to process food stamp applications within a month.” “Last month, about 38,000 new applicants were left awaiting approval even though the federal deadline had passed. About one in six applications is processed incorrectly,” the Chronicle found. This is inexcusable at the best of times, and unforgivable in the recession we’ve been dealing with. The entire social safety net — unemployment benefits, Food Stamps, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — needs to be open to the people it is meant to serve, it it’s going to have a wide effect on mitigating economic downturns.

National Journal noted over the weekend that a new coalition of business groups — which includes the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — is starting to criticize the Obama administration’s plans to regulate the vast, unregulated derivatives market, “much to the relief of several big Wall Street banks that had been waging a lonely and uphill lobbying effort.”

The group is calling itself the Coalition of Derivatives End Users, and Wall Street derivatives dealers reportedly “appreciate all the help they can get from corporate end users to ease new curbs.” “End users are very important,” one banking lobbyist said, “because they have the most credibility.”

There are, of course, absolutely legitimate reasons to use derivatives to hedge against fluctuations in various markets. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the world of derivatives is almost exclusively dominated by a few big Wall Street banks, who are dealing in derivatives as an end, not a means. In fact, 97 percent of the derivatives held by U.S. commercial banks are in the hands of just five banking behemoths — JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — who are not using them the way an airline does.

Felix Salmon today pointed to this data from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which shows that while end-users have reduced their derivative exposure to a seven-year low of $2.4 trillion, Wall Street dealers have upped theirs to an all-time high of $187.6 trillion:

As Salmon wrote, “what has happened in recent years that derivatives dealers now need $78 in nominal derivatives exposure for every $1 in end-user exposure? When Adair Turner talks about ‘profitable activities so unlikely to have a social benefit, direct or indirect, that [banks] should voluntarily walk away from them’, this is surely a prime example of what he has in mind.” BNET’s Alain Sherter, meanwhile, put it this way:

Bankers will say, as they have for years, that derivatives help financial firms manage risks. So they do. But they also help companies make money. The issue isn’t whether derivatives have constructive uses, such as in hedging risk — it’s whether derivatives are more useful in generating profits. If so (and it is so), that can lead to banks acting recklessly, especially when they’re under enormous pressure to boost their financial results.

Michael Greenberger, an adviser for Americans for Financial Reform, said that he believes the end-user complaints are “inspired by banks emphasizing the small, short-term costs of new regulations to their customers against the long-term financial interests of the public at large.” And allowing a huge market to remain in the shadows can only work against that long-term interest.

Last week, House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank released a scaled-back proposal for creating a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), which was reportedly meant to address the concerns of some Democrats on the committee. Among other changes, the bill will no longer mandate that financial firms offer consumer “plain vanilla” products before moving on to more complex products.

While the changes may have been necessary to win support on the committee, the financial services industry now sees an opening, and is “turning up the pressure on moderate Democrats on the panel to push for more concessions.” And as The Hill reported today, “lobbyists are tailoring their efforts to rewrite specific provisions in the bill,” particularly that giving states the right to impose regulations that are stricter than the national standard set by the CFPA:

The financial industry believes that will create a patchwork quilt of different state regulations that increases the cost to firms. Those costs might then be passed on to consumers. “What’s going to happen to a customer who moves from one part of the metro area of D.C. to another? Will they have different rules just depending on geography?” said Tracey Mills, spokeswoman for the Consumer Bankers Association.

Roll Call reported that “industry groups are largely relying on the 15 members of the New Democrat Coalition to carry their water to ensure that federal pre-emption remains part of the package.” Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) is reportedly working on a preemption amendment that could be offered in committee.

As I’ve pointed out before, preemption is a failed policy choice that contributed to the housing bubble by preventing states from going after national banks engaged in predatory subprime lending. That this lesson has been forgotten so quickly is a testament to the financial services industry’s influence over the regulatory reform debate.

As for the Consumer Bankers Association’s (CBA) specific question regarding whether rules will differ “depending on geography,” the short answer is “yes, they will.” But that’s not the huge worry that CBA makes it out to be. After all, differing state regulations in terms of health insurance requirements have not eviscerated the health insurance industry. And a consumer moving within the Metro DC area (from Virginia to Maryland, maybe?) will presumably not bring his mortgage with him, rendering this concern over different terms overblown.

In the past, Democrats have viewed preemption as a “compromise” to be made with the industry, and the classic example of this is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). After a media exposé revealed that many Americans’ pension funds were disasterously mismanaged, Congress enacted ERISA to protect employee health and retirement benefits. But thanks to a preemption provision and a Supreme Court decision gutting the federal remedy that Congress intended to replace state law, ERISA became a boon for corporations looking to avoid state regulations. As the late Justice Byron White put it, ERISA resulted in the “perverse anomaly of leaving those Congress set out to protect with less protection than they enjoyed before ERISA was enacted.”

“Preemption doctrine often serves business interests at the expense of taxpayers…and also should offend lovers of local democracy,” wrote Tim Fernholz. “Why should the feds limit your ability to make rules?” And as long as the CFPA sets a strong minimum level of regulation, there will be no worries about a race to the bottom, in terms of states trying to coax business to their state by eliminating regulations. So hopefully, Frank will stand tall against the push to include preemption in the final regulatory reform package.

Editor’s note: The Wonk Room is reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative conference this week. This is our fifth post.

In the wake of an economic crash caused in large part by financial wizards passing paper back and forth without creating anything, panelists at the Clinton Global Initiative today discussed how to make banking more socially useful. The discussion inevitably wound its way to the regulatory reform package currently before Congress, at which point JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon seized the opportunity to attack the idea of creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA):

We need to simplify and strengthen our system, not add. We’re trying to just add multiple layers of regulation. I tell people, if our legal department didn’t do a good job, we would fix our legal department. The government would create another legal department. [laughter] And all you’re doing is replicating the same thing in a different form.

Listen here:

However, the CFPA is not meant to replicate existing agencies, but to fill a void that currently exists, as no agency is solely responsible for consumer protection. It will also remove the consumer financial protection responsibilities from the other regulators, such as the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Trade Commission, in a sense providing some of the simplification that Dimon says is necessary.

“I think clearly you have had a lot of abuses, and whatever was on the books wasn’t being enforced,” said Morris Goldstein, a former top official at the International Monetary Fund and a researcher for the Peterson Institute of International Economics. “I think it makes sense to try to wrap it together and give someone the responsibility to deal with the great bulk of it.”

With his choice of language disparaging the CFPA, Dimon is channeling the Chamber of Commerce, which is circulating ads warning against the CFPA proposal that read “maybe instead of making government bigger, we should focus on making government better.” Plus, as CAP’s Andrew Jakabovics and Jeff Chapman found, JP Morgan was no angel during the subprime boom:

JP Morgan Chase, like other major banks in 2006, was much more likely to charge higher prices to African-American and Hispanic borrowers than whites and Asians, even among high-income borrowers. Over two-thirds of JP Morgan Chase’s higher-priced lending was done through a subprime arm—Chase Manhattan Bank.

As David Lazarus put it in the Los Angeles Times, “if banks play fair and keep their noses clean, they’ll have nothing to fear. So why are they so fiercely opposed to having a new cop patrolling the neighborhood?” Indeed, the banks look like they are using the spectre of big government to defend their right to rip-off and deceive consumers.

Editor’s note: The Wonk Room is reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative conference this week. This is our fourth post.

Echoing the comments made by former President Bill Clinton, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis took to the Clinton Global Initiative stage today to talk about America’s need — and apparent inability — to make enough investments in human capital. She pointed towards the Obama administration’s commitment to community colleges, which she called the “rapid, ready-response institutions” of America, but said that the real problem is tuition at four-year colleges:

The fact of the matter is, there are a lot of young people, young adults, that don’t have the financial ability to enter into a four-year university or, say, a tailored program that could take them even out of poverty. The President just recently talked about making an investment, $12 billion, in community colleges. And community colleges are kind of the rapid, ready-response institutions that allow for a broader group of people to enter into, say, very specified business training that they need. [...]

That’s one step in the right direction, but we need to also continue that and allow for four-year universities to make their tuition more available so that more people can go…I think we miss the boat if we don’t really talk about trying to spread that wealth, that educational opportunity.

Listen here:

The ever-increasing cost of tuition at higher education institutions is a serious problem, with a serious detriment of ideas for how to deal with it. In addition to the average debt load of $23,186 that today’s typical student borrower accrues, the National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey shows that 47 percent of full-time students are now working more than 20 hours a week (which is the recommended maximum), a number which goes above 50 percent for most underrepresented racial or ethnic groups.

The Lumina Foundation estimates that the American economy will face a shortage of 16 million college educated workers by 2025, and “the United States may not only be losing ground compared to other countries, but also in relation to its own population,” as the projected 13 percent increase in college enrollment over the next ten years would occur at a time when the U.S. population is increasing by 14 percent.

The government can increase student aid each and every year, but it won’t mean much unless the rate of increase in tuition can be reined in, as it makes little sense to have aid simply spiral out of control alongside tuition. And in the end, our future economic competitiveness depends on us finding solutions to these problems.

Editor’s note: The Wonk Room is reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative conference this week. This is our third post.

Earlier this year, the American Society for Civil Engineers roundly panned America’s disintegrating infrastructure, giving it an overall D grade and estimating that “it would take a $2.2 trillion investment…over the next five years to bring it into a state of good repair.” One of today’s discussions at the Clinton Global Initiative focused on how to develop infrastructure in both the U.S. and the rest of the world, and the role that government plays in such development.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt — who has been critical of the business community for investing too much money in preserving America’s status quo — noted that successful infrastructure improvements, particularly in creating the capacity for clean energy, means coordinating government standards with private investment:

The thing about infrastructure is that it’s a systems problem, and by a systems problem I mean you have to align technology, government policy, capital markets, execution skills — all have to be aligned to make it happen. And the government is a central part in how that goes, both in terms of the U.S., but also in terms of any country in the world.

Energy in this country, if we want to have a clean energy future, the investments are basically 40, 30, 20 year investments…I think, one of the key roles the government has to play is what are the standards? How should the capital markets work? How do you risk-share some of the key technology evolutions? And so, if you want to have effective infrastructure, you really do have to have a good public-private partnership.

Listen here:

In Immelt’s world, the government would set the standards, and then let the private sector loose to achieve them, or, as in China, lay out five-year plans for infrastructure development. This is a distinctly different take from most of the rest of the business community, which recoils from standards, aided by conservatives who claim that if we just “let the free market work,” everything will take care of itself.

Of course, Immelt must see a way for GE to come out ahead under such a policy, but that doesn’t mean that his viewpoint doesn’t make sense. Smart standards, regulation, and a cohesive policy from the government would make energy investment — and infrastructure development as a whole — much less scattershot and much more effective.

NOTE: This is the fourth installment of our series — Meet Your Insurance Company Executive: An Interview with Wendell Potter.

Last week, ThinkProgress spoke with Wendell Potter, a former VP of communications at health insurance giant CIGNA, about how insurance companies deceive the public with vague promises of “being at the table” for reform. Earlier this year, Karen Ignagni, the chief lobbyist and leader for AHIP, the trade group representing the health insurance industry, came to the White House and pledged to President Obama, “You have our commitment to play, to contribute and to help pass healthcare reform this year.” This trope, repeated by other representatives for the insurance industry, achieved the goal of persuading many that this year would be “different” for reform and that insurers would not torpedo legislation like in previous efforts. But as Potter notes, lobbyists and public relations professionals like Ignagni can make broad promises without ever being accountable. Individual insurance companies are not on board with what Ignagni is selling:

– AHIP says the industry will end the immoral practice of rescinding coverage of sick customers. But when asked this summer — under oath — by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) if they would “commit” to stopping this practice, executives from UnitedHealth Group, Assurant, and WellPoint all refused.

– AHIP says the health insurance industry is fully supportive of the idea of covering everybody, regardless of medical condition. However, in conference call with investors last month, Aetna CEO Ron Williams bluntly stated that he would pursue profits rather than add or keep enrollment. “We have a clear bias toward profitability over growth,” said Williams.

Potter continues by arguing that the public should be examining the business practices of insurers, not blindly accepting the promises of lobbyists:

POTTER: But if those companies are under oath, three different companies, including one of the largest in the land, that they will continue those, that’s who you should believe. That’s what will be the policy going forward. The trade association doesn’t have power to change practices of the insurance industry at the insurance company level. It can’t change a business model or a way of doing business.

Watch it:

The friendly, positive statements by Ignagni and her colleagues are part of the “duplicitous” campaign by the insurance industry to charm the public while secretly working to kill and undermine reform. ThinkProgress has documented this campaign and produced this page explaining the insurance industry tactics.

Today at the Clinton Global Initiative conference, CNBC hosts Mark Haines and Maria Bartiromo interviewed WellPoint CEO Angela Braly on the current health reform debate. Bartiromo pressed Braly on the topic of rescissions, an extremely controversial practice where health insurers find reasons to cancel your coverage when you get sick. “Can you give us an understanding of what factors,” asked Baritomo, “go into denying coverage for a customer?” Rather than answering the question, Braly quickly dodged and started praising her own company for the percent of each premium dollar spent on healthcare (known as the medical loss ratio). But after listening to Braly compliment her company for spending 87 cents per a premium dollar for health “delivery,” CNBC host Haines called her out for essentially lying with “clever” language:

HAINES: I believe you just said very cleverly worded 87 cents of every premium dollar goes to the delivery of healthcare. But in fact why don’t we look at your, the amount of payments you make per dollar you take in. It’s more like 80 cents, is it not? You pay 80 cents in benefits for every dollar. [...]

BARTIROMO: According to your 10k, the number is more like 80 or 81 cents.

BRALY: Yeah I’m citing a Pricewaterhouse Coopers study for the industry overall. 87 cents on the dollar is going to healthcare costs, in the industry–

HAINES: Well there you go again, that’s too cleverly worded. Going to healthcare costs? [...]

BRALY: Relative to other margins in the healthcare industry — biotech’s at 18, pharma’s at 16 — you know really we’re a low cost, low margin provider in the healthcare equation.

Watch it:

Haines was correct in calling out Braly’s deceptive language: WellPoint certainly does not spend 87 cents of every premium dollar on actual healthcare. In their 2nd quarter disclosures, WellPoint reportedly spent only 82.9% of every premium dollar on benefits, the remainder went to administrative costs, executive compensation (Braly herself makes approximately $10 million a year) and profits. The amount of every premium dollar spent on healthcare for WellPoint has actually been decreasing, while WellPoint has signaled they plan to be “hiking” premiums to at least “6% to 8% annually.” Although Braly likes to pretend that private insurers currently are a “low margin provider,” the truth is traditional Medicare’s administrative costs are only about 2%.

It is also no wonder Braly would want to dodge the question about rescissions. Earlier this summer, an executive from WellPoint testifying under oath specifically refused to “commit” to ending this practice, despite lofty claims to the contrary by insurance industry public relations professionals.

Indeed, WellPoint is refusing to end this immoral practice because rescissions are built into its business model. WellPoint reportedly provides monetary rewards for employees who successfully rescind the coverage of its customers and lists about 1,400 conditions as reasons for rescinding care. Three insurers alone (WellPoint, UnitedHealth and Assurant) canceled more than 20,000 policies in the last five years, saving the companies $300 million.

Editor’s note: The Wonk Room is reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative conference this week. This is our second post.

As I noted yesterday, one of the main thrusts of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference is building up human capital. To that end, CGI brought together a rather eclectic group of individuals to discuss investing in women and girls as a way of bolstering human capital worldwide. The group included the CEO’s of both Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil, alongside Zainab Salbi, the CEO of Women for Women International, Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, and Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Women’s Issues at the U.S. State Department.

Prior to the panel, former President Bill Clinton explained that, globally, women do two-thirds of the work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn just ten percent of the income and own just one percent of the property. And when Exxon’s CEO Rex Tillerson asserted that “funding is not the issue” that keeps women and girls worldwide from gaining access to education and other opportunities that would boost their incomes, Salbi pointed out that less than one cent out of every dollar spent on development is being invested in girls:

But women still get very small, women and girls, get so very small, minuscule amount of funding…One cent of every development dollar, less than one cent goes to girls. So when you look at the larger scope of development money and how much is being invested in so many other things, women and girls get the least amount of funding. Money is not the problem in terms of if it’s available, but the political decision to say we need to invest much more in girls and women is not fully there yet.

Watch it:

That’s an awfully low percentage, especially considering the multiplier effect that investment in education for women can have. Plan International Australia found that “investing in girls is one of the best ways to end poverty, because women who are educated are likely to reinvest up to 90 per cent of their income in their family.” Plus, according to research from the World Bank, “economic growth is boosted by the number of girls who complete their secondary education and go on to earn higher wages,” which can be 10 to 20 percent higher with each year of secondary schooling.

As former President Jimmy Carter said, “the evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family. It is simply self-defeating for any community to discriminate against half its population.” And if, as Salbi says, it is just a matter of political will to get dollars to the right place, then pressure in the right places could work to turn the tide.

One of the biggest opponents of climate change legislation has been the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the “world’s largest business federation” that calls itself the “voice of business.” The Chamber has claimed the Obama administration is secretly hiding evidence that climate change isn’t a real threat, claimed that global warming regulations would “strangle the economy,” and even called for a new “Scopes trial” to call into question the science of global warming.

Today, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced that it is quitting the Chamber over its “extreme position” on climate change:

PG&E Corp. (PCG) said Tuesday it is leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over objections to what its top executive called the chamber’s “extreme position on climate change.”

In a letter to the U.S. Chamber published on PG&E’s blog, www.next100.com, PG& E Chairman and Chief Executive Peter Darbee wrote that company employees “find it dismaying that the Chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored.”

PG&E isn’t the only company the Chamber has angered with its global warming denialist views. Yesterday, Nike, one of the co-founders of the climate change action coalition Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP), circulated a statement denouncing the Chamber’s efforts to attack the science surrounding climate change:

Nike fundamentally disagrees with the US Chamber of Commerce’s position on climate change and is concerned and deeply disappointed with the US Chamber’s recently filed petition challenging the EPA’s administrative authority and action on this critically important issue.

Nike believes that climate change is an urgent issue affecting the world today and that businesses and their representative associations need to take an active role to invest in sustainable business practices and innovative solutions to address the issue. It is not a time for debate but instead a time for action and we believe the Chamber’s recent petition sets back important work currently being undertaken by EPA on this issue.

The right-wing trade organization National Association of Manufacturers has similarly experienced a disbandment of its membership over the climate change issue. It remains to be seen whether the discontent among their members will change these organizations’ extremist views on global warming.

Michael Moore’s next documentary is “Capitalism: A Love Story,” a film which attacks the U.S. economic system as fundamentally unjust and declares, “Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.”

Although the movie is not set to open nationwide until Oct. 2, Moore has been premiering a number of sneak preview screenings for Detroit residents in his home state of Michigan. But, as Michigan Live reports, Moore ran into problems when it turned out one of the theaters he rented for the screenings was owned by General Motors (GM) — which Moore famously skewered for its anti-worker policies in his 1989 film Roger & Me.

GM agreed to run the movie only if both Moore and the local press were locked out. Essentially, GM banned Moore from his own screening. A local Detroit news station interviewed Moore about the incident. He said GM should “get over” its grudge against him and be more accountable to citizens, especially in light of the billions of dollars the government has loaned it:

MOORE: General Motors said that I could not be on the premises doing any interviews or press. … I would get over it if I were them. … In the movie I actually try to attempt to see the new chairman to share my ideas about mass transit and other things that the General Motors factories could be building that would benefit about society. … We have 50 billion dollars of our money sitting over there. That is owned by us now. And the de facto CEO is President Barack Obama. I legally rented the four theaters to have my Detroit premiere, and yet somehow they’re able to ban me from my own premiere here? What country are we living in?

Watch it:

In addition to the over 1,000 theater opening Oct. 2, Moore plans to screen the film for free on Oct. 1 in some of the poorest parts of the country.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) has surprised a lot of people by proposing to consolidate all of the banking regulators into one new super-regulator, which is an idea that goes much further than any of the Obama administration’s proposed regulatory reforms. And it has the banks concerned:

“It’s the wrong way to go,” said Steve Verdier, senior vice president for the Independent Community Bankers of America [ICBA]. “We don’t think that as far as regulation of banks is concerned, that solves any problems we had. The checks and balances under the current system are pretty good.”

Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association, added that complete consolidation “hasn’t worked in other countries that have tried it and it faces plenty of opposition in Congress.” But it’s an idea worth exploring, as it would definitely cut down on one of the bigger problems with the current regulatory system — regulator shopping.

Far from having a system of “checks and balances,” as the ICBA described it, the current system pits regulators against each other, in an attempt to woo banks (and the lucrative fees that they pay to their regulators). This leads to a race to the bottom, which was most apparent in the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), which regulated the likes of AIG, Countrywide, Washington Mutual and IndyMac, all of which suffered from what Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner called a lack of “adult supervision.”

As Lucas Puentes put it, “with their future growth (or shrinkage) more or less tied to the number of banks they regulate, today’s regulators have an unmistakable incentive to provide a permissive regulatory environment that favors the banks. Under this perverse system, it’s simply not in their best interest to crack down on the banks they regulate.” With one super-regulator, this problem would effectively be done away with.

As Tim Fernholz pointed out, Dodd may just be “starting off with his maximal demands, intending to negotiate from there, rather than presenting a prepackaged compromise, the latter of which has become a White House standby in the past year and hasn’t seemed like the most effective legislative strategy.” And it’s not like a single regulator would be devoid of its own set of problems. The UK, for instance, has one single bank regulator, and it didn’t weather the economic crisis much better than the U.S. But the proposal should not be dismissed out of hand, and if nothing else, seriously considering the idea would send a message to the banks that serious reform is on the table.

Editor’s note: The Wonk Room is reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative conference this week. This is our first post.

This week, the fifth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) — a movement by former President Bill Clinton to bring together businesses, world leaders and a variety of NGO’s — is taking place in New York City. Prior to the meeting’s official kickoff today, I took part in a briefing with Clinton and ten or so other progressive bloggers, to discuss CGI and a wide range of policy questions — from the best way to encourage sustainable farming in Africa to besting China in electric car development.

One of the main thrusts of this year’s CGI conference is discussing ways to build up human capital through public and private investments. This is particularly important here in America, as our educational attainment has stagnated, and we have lost the competitive academic edge that we used to hold over the rest of the world. Clinton touched on this, lamenting our falling academic standing:

In the last eight years, we went from first to tenth in terms of the percentage of 25-34 year olds holding a bachelor’s degree. That’s the most important unknown statistic out there…We are headed into long-term economic decline if we don’t do something about it.

He added that prohibitive tuition at college is contributing toward this problem, as “higher education institutions are pricing themselves into America’s decline.” Indeed, this is a real problem. As Michael Mandel at Economics Unbound pointed out, “college costs are up by 23 percent since 2000. But real pay for young college grads is down 11% over the same period.” Meanwhile, two-thirds of today’s college students borrow to pay for tuition, and their average debt load is $23,186.

“We’re soon going to have to change the delivery system in higher education,” Clinton said, noting that 17 states have authorized community college to offer four-year college courses and credits. The Senate passing the student loan reform package that the House approved last week would also be helpful (although that doesn’t get at the root cause of the problem, which is the price increase in the colleges themselves, which consistently grows faster than the rate of inflation).

We currently have a higher education system that is delivering less and less, but costing more and more. And if that trend continues, America can only continue to lose ground on the rest of the world.

Just a couple days after Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) touted that his state was “recession proof” and callously suggested that Texas wasn’t even in a recession, Perry changed his tune in an interview with ThinkProgress at this weekend’s Value Voters Summit.

On Saturday, Perry acknowledged that Texas has been “absolutely” impacted by a recession that plagues the whole country and accuses Washington of pushing his state farther into it:

This whole country’s in a recession. You don’t lose the number of jobs that we’ve lost in this country — and Texas has been impacted too. But, there’s no doubt that the impact is substantially less on Texas because of the policies that we’ve put in place. You better believe it — every family, every person who’s lost a job is a reflection of some policy, generally speaking policies that have come out of Washington, DC…

But you ask any people in the country which state would you rather economically be in than any other one, they rather be in Texas. We balanced our budget, we gave 40,000 small businesses a tax cut and we’re working towards having 9 billion dollars in our rainy day fund. In anybody’s estimation, that’s good economic policy that’s been put in place. Are we worried about what Washington’s doing and the impact that it’s having on the state of Texas and the recession that it’s pushing Texas farther into? Absolutely.

Watch it:

Perry admitted that Texas has been “shedding jobs” in the oil and gas industries and pins the blame on federal decision-makers. And while he considered rejecting “burden[some]” stimulus money and continues slamming Washington’s response to the recession, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that Texas was only able to balance its budget and pad its rainy day fund because of “an infusion of about $12.1 billion in [federal] stimulus funds” which “saved the day.”

Cross-posted at Think Progress.

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Federal Reserve is crafting a proposal to significantly step-up its regulation of Wall Street compensation practices. According to the Journal, the proposal would allow the Fed to “reject any compensation policies” it believes encourage bankers to take too much risk. The Fed “wouldn’t set the pay of individuals, but would review and, if necessary, amend each bank’s salary and bonus policies to make sure they don’t create harmful incentives.”

Though the Fed’s proposal is still weeks away from being finalized, it has already provoked quite the reaction from the right-wing. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, was asked about the policy shift on CNBC today, and claimed that the very notion of regulating Wall Street pay means “abandoning a model that’s worked for America”:

We all know there were compensation practices that created incentives for executives to take outsized risk. Having said that, why are we abandoning a model that’s worked for America? We’ve got the largest economy in the world, it’s over three times larger than the Japanese economy and we didn’t get that by government micromanaging companies and setting compensation.

Watch it:

The notion that Wall Street’s reckless compensation structures, which incentivized short-term risk taking over long term financial viability, worked well is ridiculous. And even Bachus couldn’t really bring himself to defend Wall Street, spinning off into a defense of capitalism itself, as opposed to “so-called utopian society.” But James Hamilton at Econbrowser laid out exactly how Wall Street’s perverse pay structures cause systemic problems:

Suppose that in 2005, the individuals who were putting together securities derived from subprime and alt-A mortgage loans could have known, with perfect foresight, events that were going to unfold in 2008. Would they have still done the same things they did in 2005? My concern is that, for many individuals, the answer might be “yes”, insofar as they were richly rewarded personally in 2005 for making exactly the decisions they did. It was other parties (namely you and me) who later down the road were forced to absorb the downside of their gambles

As for this particular proposal from the Fed, I think it’s yet another instance of the Fed promising far too little, far too late, and expecting the last crisis to be water under the bridge so long as it vows to do better next time. As Yves Smith put it, “the ideas on the table suggest any moves will [be] directed at the most extreme practices, simply to curry the image that the Fed is Doing Something.” The Fed has already shown that many of its regulatory responsibilities get shunted down the list of priorities — or outright ignored — when times are good, so I’d prefer that something other than Fed promises be the basis for regulating Wall Street’s compensation.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed — by a vote of 253 to 171 — a bill reforming the Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) program, to cut out the senseless subsidies that the federal government has been giving private loan companies to originate loans. Instead of continuing to use the banks as middle-men, which drives up the cost of the loan program, the federal government would directly lend to students, saving $87 billion.

The bill was passed over the opposition of all but six Republicans, with the GOP claiming that eliminating the subsidies was proposed so that the government could “take over a successful portion of the private sector.” Of course, it’s hard to see how the government can be taking over a program that already has federal in its title, and as the New York Times pointed out, “the loans would be handled through colleges but serviced and collected by private companies and nonprofits that stand to make a tidy profit.”

With the bill out of the House, the focus for the private lenders lobbying against the change now moves to the Senate, where “their chances look distinctly better,” because “several Republican senators have already come out against the proposals, and not all Democrats can be counted on to back it.” The private lenders reportedly have their eyes on a handful of Senate Democrats, and are banking on a few more who have already expressed doubts about the bill. The financial analysis firm Height Analytics is advising student lenders to focus on these sets of senators:

Already Opposed	On The Fence
Sen. Ben Nelson (NE)	Sen. Robert Casey (PA)
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (AR)	Sen. Arlen Specter (PA)
Sen. Mark Begich (AK)	Sen. Ted Kaufman (DE)
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (NM)	Sen. Thomas Carper (DE)
Sen. Tom Udall (NM)	Sen. Evan Bayh (IN)
	Sen. Kent Conrad (ND)
	Sen. Byron Dorgan (ND)
	Sen. Bill Nelson (FL)

Not surprisingly, the states represented above are the epicenters of the private student lending industry. Ben Nelson, in particular, is staunchly opposed to the bill due to Nebraska being the home of the loan company Nelnet (which as the New Nebraska Network pointed out, is “infamous for manipulating the federal government’s student loan subsidies to swindle American taxpayers out of $278 million”). Nelson has flatly stated that he’s willing to continue the $87 billion subsidy boondoggle because eliminating it may result in the loss of 1,000 Nelnet jobs.

Fortunately, once a bill does emerge in the Senate, it can be passed via reconciliation (which removes the threat of a filibuster). However, it will still need the support of some of the industry’s targets if it is to ultimately become law.

NOTE: This is the third installment of our series — Meet Your Insurance Company Executive: An Interview with Wendell Potter.

This week, ThinkProgress spoke with Wendell Potter, a former VP of communications at health insurance giant CIGNA, about exactly how insurance companies derail reform and preserve the status quo. Working in public relations for CIGNA, Potter had a direct role in multiple campaigns in the past to minimize public outrage at insurance company abuses, defeat legislation aimed at regulating insurers, and the massive effort to discredit Michael Moore and his movie SiCKO. In addition to enormous amounts of money spent in direct lobbying and campaign contributions, Potter spelled out exactly how insurance companies have prepared to defeat meaningful reform.

Planned well before this year, insurance company CEOs, like Potter’s former boss at CIGNA (H. Edward Hadway), formed a group called the Strategic Communications Committee to develop effective messages and strategy for the industry. Organized through AHIP, the lobbying front for insurance companies, the committee would work with large public relations companies to devise a two-pronged, “duplicitous campaign.” Because insurance companies suffer from low public approval, Potter said, the industry would present itself as “for reform” to the public, yet at the same time label proponents of meaningful reform as “extreme.” The public campaign is for the most part positive, and largely delivered by industry representatives like AHIP chief lobbyist Karen Ignagni. Potter noted:

It’s really a duplicitous PR campaign. They will talk about, in broad terms, how supportive they are of health care reform, but they will be working behind the scenes to kill very, very crucial parts of reform legislation like the public option.

Potter then explained how insurers would use a variety of front groups, set up by PR companies like APCO, to advance a hidden attack campaign. The “dirty” campaign involved feeding talking points to right-wing media, like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. It also includes the creation of front groups to run negative advertisements about reform and mobilize anti-reform “grassroots” groups. Finally, insurers would coordinate with, and sometimes fund, conservative think-tanks to produce academic-appearing reports to advance their cause. Leaked memos from the insurance companies — regarding the campaign against Moore’s SiCKO movie — not only support Potter’s assertions, but specifically describe every step of this process.

Watch Potter explain how insurers control the debate to defeat reform:

To better illustrate the insurers’ two-faced campaign to kill reform, we have produced this chart. Click more to continue continue reading and to view the chart. Read more