During a campaign stop in Iowa about two weeks ago, 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann criticized the government’s regulatory “overkill” when it comes to food safety. “When they make it complicated, they make it expensive and so then you can no longer stay in business,” she said, while chopping beef at a Des Moines meatpacking plant.

In the weeks following Bachmann’s statement, an outbreak of listeria tied to some Colorado cantaloupes has killed sixteen people — making it the deadliest foodborne illness outbreak in the U.S. in more than a decade — while four children in the district of Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) were stricken with E. Coli from tainted meat. Today, in the Minnesapolis Star-Tribune, a mother from Bachmann’s home state of Minnesota whose daughter had a stroke due to E. Coli poisoning appealed to Bachmann to change her position:

I caught it on the news that you visited a meatpacking plant in Iowa last week and promised to reduce restrictions that ensure food safety, so that small businesses could create more jobs.

I am adamantly opposed to this idea.

According to CNN, the European outbreak of E. coli has killed 16 people; the New York Times reports an even higher number. To loosen rules for the meatpacking industry invites danger to innocent victims — like my 4-year-old daughter, Rachel.

Thanks to E. coli, my daughter has lived in a hospital since June 11. Thanks to E. coli, she experienced acute kidney failure.

Thanks to E. coli, she has also suffered a stroke, resulting in a brain injury on both hemispheres. She has lost her ability to walk, talk and move in a normal way.

Before E. coli, she was a perfectly healthy, active little girl.

The woman, Melissa Castino Reid, closed her letter by saying, “from one mother to another, I’m asking you to reverse your campaign promise and err on the side of safety. For my child. For your children. For everyone’s children. It’s just that simple.”

Every year, 3,000 people die from foodborne illness, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, while Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project has found that foodborne illness costs the U.S. $152 billion annually. This month, the Agriculture Department announced that it “will ban the sale of ground beef tainted with six toxic strains of E. coli bacteria that are increasingly showing up as the cause of severe illness from food.” It’d be nice if Bachmann could see through her deregulatory zeal for just a moment to support these common-sense rules that protect families from going through the situation with which the Reids are struggling.

(HT: @JenniferJJacobs)

It has been a busy year for Republican attacks on workers’ rights. Last spring, Republicans in Wisconsin and Ohio passed sweeping measures eliminating public sector unions, despite massive protests. More recently, Republicans have been attacking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for enforcing measures that protect workers against corporate retribution.

On Thursday, House Republicans, led by House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY), released their draft 2012 budget for labor, health, and education programs. In it, they proposed cutting funding for the NLRB by $49 million — a full 17 percent of the agency’s budget — and blocking regulations designed to make it easier for workers to exercise their collective bargaining rights. As Politico reported:

On the regulation front, the National Labor Relations Board, a favorite Republican target, would see its budget cut by $49 million — a 17 percent reduction — and the bill also adds multiple funding restrictions to block rulemaking related to union elections and organizing activities. [...]

The release of the draft Thursday — during a religious holiday in the middle of a recess — appeared calculated to be low key. Indeed, where the House Appropriations Committee intends to go next with the 150-page measure — the biggest of the annual domestic bills — is still very unclear given continued divisions in the GOP itself over the level of cuts.

The proposed cuts would likely be devastating. Similar cuts proposed in February would have forced the NLRB to furlough all employees for 55 days, leading to a major backlog in cases. In addition to the cuts, the Republicans’ draft budget includes several provisions that would make it more difficult for workers to join a union by blocking important NLRB regulations.

This is part of a broader campaign by Republicans to undermine the NLRB. Just last week, the House passed a bill that would prevent the NLRB from enforcing anti-union busting laws. During the debate on that bill, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) declared that enforcing longstanding labor law was the equivalent of the “economic death penalty.”

And many House Republicans not only want to weaken the NLRB, they want to eliminate it altogether. In February, 176 House Republicans voted for an amendment offered by Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) which would have defunded the NLRB entirely.

– Karl Singer

House Republicans yesterday released their draft budget proposal for labor, health, and human service, which in one fell swoop revives the assault on all their favorite bugaboos, including Planned Parenthood, National Public Radio, the National Labor Relations Board, and President Obama’s health care reform law. The GOP also targeted heat subsidies that prevent low-income families from freezing in the winter, and slashed education funding by $2.4 billion.

Perhaps most surprisingly for a party that claims to be focused on job creation, the GOP budget reduces funding for job training programs that give the unemployed the skills they need to find work in an ailing economy:

Employment Training Administration (ETA) – The legislation provides the ETA with $7.5 billion in new discretionary budget authority – $2.2 billion (-23%) below last year’s level and $2.1 billion (-22%) below the President’s request. Much of this reduction is due to the transition of employment and training programs to a federal fiscal year and the elimination of $2.4 billion in advance appropriations for the 2013 fiscal year.

Slashing funding for these training programs by nearly a quarter will deprive thousands of workers of a better chance to find employment. The bill also cuts the Department of Labor’s funding by $2.6 billion and “increases oversight” of job training programs by requiring the GAO to conduct a study on their cost-effectiveness — a transparent pretext for making future cuts. The budget also laughably claims to “foster a pro-job growth environment” through a number of anti-union measures.

The national unemployment rate remains above 9 percent and 25 million Americans are unemployed or can’t find full-time work. Yet this is not the first time congressional Republicans have tried to zero out job training programs.

In February the plan proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — and approved by almost the entire GOP caucus — gutted federal job training funding by nearly 50 percent. Republicans’ preoccupation with abolishing these programs illustrates that their talk about creating jobs is nothing more than empty rhetoric to conceal a pro-corporate agenda.

For 13 days, hundreds of demonstrators have encamped themselves on Wall Street in New York City, hoping to call attention to the financial sector’s greed and inequities in the American economic system.

This morning, while on local radio host John Gambling’s show, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was asked about the demonstrations on Wall Street. Bloomberg condemned the protests, claiming that the protesters are targeting people who making “$40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet.” He then went on to say people are focusing too much on the causes of the financial crisis and that we need to be nicer to the banking industry so that it starts lending again. He concluded by saying that we are “blaming the wrong people” by “blaming the banks” for the recession:

GAMBLING: Mr. Mayor, let’s talk about Zuccoti Park and the protesters. How do you end that thing?

BLOOMBERG: The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That’s the bottom line. Those are the people that work on Wall Street or on the finance sector. [...] People in this day and age need support for their employers. We need the banks, if the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economy problems, we will not have jobs. And so anything we can do to responsibly help the banks do that, encourage them to do that is waht we need. I think we spend much too much time worrying about how we got into problems as to how we go forward. [...] Also we always tend to blame the wrong people. We blame the banks. They were part of it, but so were Frddie Mac and Frannie Mae and Congress.

Listen to it:

Actually, the median salary for stockbrokers is approximately $88,000 a year. But that is besides the point. The demonstrators are not targeting the individuals who work on Wall Street, they are targeting the financial institutions and practices they represent.

Recall, the banks were the primary actors who set off the global recession, and that recession plunged 60 million people into extreme poverty worldwide. By protesting in favor things like a financial transactions tax, Americans can hope to get some of that wealth back from financial institutions that are anything but “struggling to make ends meet.”

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett appeared on CNBC today, where, of course, he was asked about the Obama administration’s “Buffett rule,” which stipulates that millionaires should not pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families. Buffett said he is happy to have lent his name to the administration’s push:

Q: Are you happy you said yes [to having your name on the Buffett rule]?

BUFFETT: Sure, I wrote about it.

Q: Are you happy with the way it’s been described? Is the program that the White House has presented — a million dollars and over — your program?

BUFFETT: Well, the precise program, I don’t know what their program will be. My program will be on the very high incomes that are taxed very low. Not just high incomes, some guy making $50 million a year playing baseball, his taxes won’t change. Make $50 million a year appearing on television, his income won’t change. But if they make a lot of money and they pay a very low tax rate, like me, it would be changed by a minimum tax that would only bring them up to what other people pay.

Watch it:

Somehow, the media (goaded by Republican misinformation?) have taken this to mean that Buffett does not support the Buffett rule, which is only a principle and not, at the moment, a specific proposal. But Buffett was asked repeatedly if he disagreed with the rule and never said that he did — he merely pointed out that the specific idea he has been promoting, from which the Buffett rule grew out of, is a minimum tax rate for the ultra-wealthy.

Some seem to be tripped up by Buffett’s saying that an athlete making $50 million wouldn’t see his or her taxes go up. But that’s entirely consistent with the Buffett rule, since wages that athletes earn are taxed as income (at 35 percent), not as an investment (and therefore at 15 percent) like much of Buffett’s income. It’s that break on investment income that, in large part, allows the wealthy to pay lower tax rates

Later in the interview, Buffett explained that he is not sure that he will support everything in the American Jobs Act, President Obama’s plan to spur job creation. But that was distinct from the question regarding the Buffett rule. When he was asked if he disagreed with the President’s plan to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year (which has nothing to do with the Buffett rule), Buffett said “no, no, no, no.”

Buffett also said he is “supportive of the action” Obama is trying to take to put people back to work. So for those trying to turn this into a “Buffett v. Obama” story, as Mitt Romney would say, “nice try.”

When the nation’s biggest banks were bailed out in 2008 via the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, the money came with a few (very loose) strings, including restrictions on executive compensation and some requirements for the amount of capital the banks would have to raise in order to escape from TARP.

But as a new report from the Special Inspector General for TARP shows, even these restrictions were too much for some of the nation’s biggest banks — including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC — who lobbied for easier payback requirements so that they could be freed from restrictions on paying bonuses. And Treasury obliged their requests:

Federal banking regulators relaxed the November 2009 repayment criteria only weeks after they were established, bowing at least in part to a desire to ramp back the Government’s stake in financial institutions and to pressure by institutions seeking a swift TARP exit to avoid executive compensation restrictions and the stigma associated with TARP participation. The large financial institutions seeking to exit TARP were notably persistent in their efforts to resist regulatory demands to issue common stock, seeking instead morecreative, cheaper, and less sturdy alternatives that provide less short- or long-term loss protection than new common stock. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC, for example, requested expedited repayment, but each institution balked at issuing the amount of common stock required by regulators.

The practical upshot of weakening standards and letting banks repay their bailout funds early is that several of them were likely too weak to confidently stand on their own. As CNN Money put it, “this report is the first in many months to raise new questions about the health of some of the biggest banks after they were allowed to stand on their own two feet.”

Not all regulators were on board with allowing the biggest banks to leave TARP. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Shelia Bair, for instance, said that the banks’ repayment plans were based on a “gimmick.” “That just mystified me. The point was if they’re not strong enough, they shouldn’t have been exiting TARP,” Bair said. But Treasury still saw fit to let banks repay TARP and get back to paying outsized bonuses. But hey, at least they’re cutting down on office foliage!