Bad Deeds for 7-2-2011

 

Republican Eric Cantor is Betting Against America – When Eric Cantor shut down debt ceiling negotiations last week, it did more than just rekindle fears that the U.S. government might soon default on its debt obligations — it also brought him closer to reaping a financial windfall from his investment in a mutual fund whose performance is directly affected by debt ceiling brinkmanship.

Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, had between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT. The fund aggressively “shorts” long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, meaning that it performs well when U.S. debt is undesirable. (A short is when the trader hopes to profit from the decline in the value of an asset.)

According to his latest financial disclosure statement, which covers the year 2010 and has been publicly available since this spring, Cantor still has up to $15,000 in the same fund. Contacted by Salon this week, Cantor’s office gave no indication that the Virginia Republican, who has played a leading role in the debt ceiling negotiations, has divested himself of these holdings since his last filing. Unless an agreement can be reached, the U.S. could begin defaulting on its debt payments on Aug. 2. If that happens and Cantor is still invested in the fund, the value of his holdings would skyrocket.

How many other Republicans have a similar vested personal interest in making America fail?

 

Republicans In Pennsylvania Protect Corporations But Not the Environment or People – The Republican-dominated Pennsylvania state house approved their new budget last night, and thanks to a lot of tricky last-minute bills, amendments and little public input, it looks like a right wing Christmas list — with Gov. Tom “I’m Owned by The Gas Industry” Corbett as Santa Claus. The budget displaces many, many costs to the local municipalities under the guise of “preventing” tax increases.

Corbett got most of what he wanted – deep spending cuts, no new taxes on natural gas or anything else – but only after his administration pushed through a last-minute Senate measure to shift control of billions in welfare funding from the legislature to his administration. The budget cuts public welfare spending by $400 million from what the governor proposed in March and leaves an anticipated $700 million state tax revenue surplus mostly untouched.

The House rejected a parliamentary move to add $34.5 million to the state Department of Environmental Protection’s budget and cut a similar amount from the Commonwealth Financing Authority, an economic development arm. The plan does not address the “Delaware loophole,” so named because it allows more than 70 percent of corporations doing business in Pennsylvania to evade state taxes. Instead, it lowers corporate taxes and contains no severance tax on the Marcellus Shale gas boom. It fails to adequately fund the state’s environmental agency so that gas fracking can go on unsupervised.

 

Minnesota Republicans Make Sure Millionaires Don’t Suffer, But Kids With Autism Suffering is Just Fine – A heart-wrenching story from a father of two autistic children about losing therapy for his kids to budget cuts while millionaires go untouched.

 

Republican Governor of New Jersey Hurts Regular People But Protects Millionaires – On Friday, NJ Governor Chris Christie line-item vetoed the following:

• $7.5 million for family planning centers and funding for women’s health
• $493 million in school aid
• $17 million in salaries for mental health services and programs
• $1.5 million in services to the blind and visually impaired
• $10 million for a program providing legal representation for the poor in non-criminal cases (perhaps the governor finds this hard to believe, but not every one in NJ is a millionaire)
• $5 million in from the Children’s Behavioral Health (meaning that thousands of children with disabilities, including autism, and mental health issues will lose — if they haven’t already — funding for the early intervention therapies that everyone agrees is crucial to helping kids with disabilities succeed)
• a bill to fund schools and providing low-wage earners with tax relief
• a bill that would impose a “millionaires’ tax on those making more than $1 million

 

Corporations Profit Greatly While Workers Suffer, New Study Shows – To date, through the first quarter of 2011, the nation’s recovery from the 2007-2009 recession is both a jobless and a wageless recovery. Real hourly and weekly wages have been flat to modestly negative. The only major beneficiaries of the recovery have been corporate profits and the stock market and its shareholders. The absence of any positive share of national income growth due to wages and salaries received by American workers during the current economic recovery is historically unprecedented. The lack of any net job growth in the current recovery combined with stagnant real hourly and weekly wages is responsible for this unique, devastating outcome.

We are not broke. There’s plenty of money to pay for the things that have made America great in the past, but most of it is now going to big corporations, hedge fund managers, CEOs, and other millionaires/billionaires. Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. The extraordinarily high share of national income (88%) received by corporate profits was by far the highest in the past five recoveries from national recessions.

Where is the shared sacrifice? It’s only being shared by the poor and middle class.

 

Please Sign This Letter About Shared Sacrifice – Tax breaks for millionaires got us into this mess and we won’t get out of it by tipping the scales even further in their favor. Our economy can’t prosper if the richest among us enjoy massive tax breaks while most American workers live paycheck to paycheck. It’s time to share the burden. It’s not sacrifice if it comes from their surplus wealth. Everyday Americans know the meaning of sacrifice when they have to reduce their food, clothing, heating and air conditioning, medical treatment and other items that millionaires don’t even think about.

Regards,

Jim