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Obama alert: Restore funding for small business

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As small business people know, the Obama administration has spent its capital largely on Wall Street and neglected the real job creation engine of the U.S. economy: small business and loans to small business.

Scott Hauge, president of Small Business California and the Paul Revere of small business, has put out the SOS for people to contact Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and push them to help restore the critical funding programs for small business.

He sent along this Portfolio.com article for explanation:

Sba Runs Out Of Gas On 7a And 504 Loans
Capital – Portfolio.com

By Kent Hoover

It’s a blue Monday for small businesses and the lenders that make SBA loans.

The Small Business Administration no longer has enough economic stimulus funds to continue its 90 percent guarantee on its flagship 7(a) loans. It also will have to raise its fees on its 7(a) and 504 loans, which primarily finance real estate. As a result, beginning today, borrowers face a choice: They can be put on a waiting list to get the higher guarantee and lower fees on their loans if additional money becomes available; or they can apply for a regular SBA loan.

Calvin Trillin: Deadline Poet

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GOP Candidate, pushed by right, ends upstate bid

–The New York Times

The GOP’s chief commissars had heard

That there was trouble in the 23rd:

Though every county chairman there had voted

For Dede Scozzafava, it was noted

That she, though certainly a high achiever,

Was not, in fact, a zealous true believer.

If any of the canon caused her doubt,

That justified their push to throw her out.

All commissars need neither rhyme nor reason.

They know that deviation’s always treason.

Economic snapshot for November 2009

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The Center for American Progress reports that weakness in the labor market is threatening the fledgling economic recovery. Policy should center on creating jobs to boost U.S. middle class economic security and help those who are most vulnerable.

Friday, November 20, 2009

By Christian E. Weller

(The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all.)

Lingering weakness in the labor market is threatening the fledgling economic recovery. Millions of jobs have been lost and unemployment has risen to the highest level in almost three decades. The labor market weakness will make it harder for families to repay their high levels of debt and thus will likely contribute to high foreclosures, credit card defaults, and bankruptcies.

Policy has shown what it can do to revive a depressed financial market and turn the corner for a shrinking economy. Policy attention should now lie squarely on job creation to ensure that the recent improvements are not short lived. Strong labor market gains are necessary to boost the American middle class’ economic security and help those who are economically most vulnerable. Extended unemployment benefits, increased health insurance coverage, and support for state and local government programs will all help achieve those goals.

1. The U.S. economy has turned the corner. Gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.5% in the third quarter of 2009, the first increase since the second quarter of 2008 and the largest gain since the third quarter of 2007. The economic stimulus legislation helped to increase consumer spending, home purchases, and federal government spending in the summer of 2009, which all contributed to faster growth.

Calvin Trillin: The Wall Street whiners

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U.S. WILL ORDER PAY CUTS AT

FIRMS WITH BAILOUT AID

–The New York Times

The government has moved to intervene

To make the pay scale slightly less obscene.

The Wall Street types consider this unfair.

Tney say they earned their money fair and square,

And 20 million, say, is only middling

For someone who’s so good at money fiddling.

Of course, if things again go not as planned,

They’re back to Washington with hat in hand.

These fiddlers do deserve some admiration:

They’ve found themselves a win-win situation. B3

Editorial: Fixing police discipline in San Francisco

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San Francisco has long operated under the proposition that civilians, not police officers, should conduct investigations of complaints against cops

Editorial: San Francisco’s new police chief wants more authority to discipline problem officers. He’s been talking about it since the day he arrived, and he’s getting some political traction. Sup. David Chiu has called for a hearing in the next few weeks, and it’s likely that the chief will seek a Charter Amendment next year to redefine how the top cop and Police Commission handle personnel issues.

We have no problem giving the chief the right to fire a bad cop. In fact, if George Gascón wants to quickly rid the force of the small number of violent and unprofessional officers who are responsible for most of the serious discipline problems, more power to him.

But Gascón isn’t stopping there — he wants to reduce the power of the commission and possibly the Office of Citizen Complaints. And that’s a very bad idea.

Police discipline is one of the biggest problems facing the force. The city has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements in police abuse cases. Rogue cops have beaten, harassed, intimidated, and sometimes killed innocent people. And because so few officers ever face serious penalties, the bad behavior goes on unabated.

Gascón recognizes that. He told us in an interview in October that he thinks there are 10 cops on the force who ought to be fired, right now. That would send a powerful message: in the past 20 years, fewer than five police officers have ever been fired for misconduct.

Right now only the Police Commission can terminate an officer; the most the chief can issue on his own is a 10-day suspension. And there’s a huge backlog of discipline cases. That’s partly the result of the system itself — commissioners are part-time appointees and discipline hearings are time-consuming. It’s also partly the fault of the department — previous chiefs have shown little interest in expediting discipline cases and have worked to thwart the ability of the Office of Citizen Complaints to complete investigations.

Dick Meister: The man who didn’t die

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Joe Hill told his IWW comrades just before he stepped in front of the firing squad, “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half century.)

It’s Nov. 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, who stands before them straight and stiff and proud.

“Fire!” he shouts defiantly.

The firing squad didn’t miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, “ain’t never died.” He lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of American symbols.

California Dems: Get out of Afghanistan

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California Democratic Party sends a clear message to President Obama. Stop making war in Afghanistan. Will he get the message?

By Norman Solomon

(Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”)

There’s a significant new straw in the political wind for President Obama to consider. The California Democratic Party has just sent him a formal and clear message: Stop making war in Afghanistan.

Overwhelmingly approved on Sunday (Nov. 15) by the California Democratic Party’s 300-member statewide executive board, the resolution is titled “End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan.”

Economic Snapshot for December 2009

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Center for American Progress

Economic Snapshot for December 2009

By Christian E. Weller


Download the snapshot with full graphs (pdf)

Financial markets have eased, the economy is in recovery, and job losses are shrinking. Economic policy now has two challenges: ensuring strong job growth and securing durable economic growth. These goals are intertwined. Millions of Americans need to find jobs that will allow them to repay their large debts and avoid high foreclosures, credit card defaults, and bankruptcies, which in turn will boost business investment and economic growth.

The successes of past economic policies are apparent. Credit markets have substantially eased from the panic of last year, and the recession ended more quickly than would have been the case without the stimulus. Public policy interventions now need to help bring back millions of jobs and create stronger long-term growth.

Dick Meister: A Czech miracle

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It was 20 years ago this month when the “Velvet Revolution” erupted in Czechoslovakia and
Eastern Europe

By Dick Meister

It’s a time of celebration in Prague this month. A time to mark the November day 20 years ago when the “Velvet Revolution” erupted. A time to mark the beginning of the end of the Soviet rule that had crushed democratic reform movements in Czechoslovakia and its eastern and central European neighbors.

For two decades, Soviet troops and Soviet-controlled political leaders had been in charge. But then, on that November day in 1989, hundreds of protesting university students marched through downtown Prague. Riot police moved in to club and beat the peaceful marchers, prompting widespread outrage and a month of peaceful demonstrations — the “Velvet Revolution” – that would soon lead to the end of Soviet domination.

It was a realization, at last, of the high hopes for liberation raised 20 years earlier. I was there in the hopeful summer of 1968, one of the journalists who had rushed over to record the miracle that was occurring throughout central and eastern Europe during what was known worldwide as ”The Prague Spring.”

Gorbachev: More walls to fall

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Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. Today, as the Founding President of Green Cross International, he is heading an international Climate Change Task Force. This column is part of the Project Syndicate news series.

To echo the demand made of me by my friend President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Obama, “tear down this wall.”

By Mikhail Gorbachev

MOSCOW – The German people, and the whole world alongside them, are celebrating a landmark date in history, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not many events remain in the collective memory as a watershed that divides two distinct periods. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall – that stark, concrete symbol of a world divided into hostile camps – is such a defining moment.

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought hope and opportunity to people everywhere, and provided the 1980’s with a truly jubilant finale. That is something to think about as this decade draws to a close – and as the chance for humanity to take another momentous leap forward appears to be slipping away.

Editorial: Newsom: support just-cause eviction law

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For the roughly 20,000 renters living in newer units, evictions can happen on a landlord’s whim.

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, reeling from criticism of his disappearing act last week and his failure to quickly reengage with San Francisco, has an opportunity to repair some of his tattered image, particularly among progressives, and mend fences with the majority of the Board of Supervisors. It wouldn’t even require a dramatic or groundbreaking step — all he has to do is agree to sign legislation by Sup. John Avalos extending eviction protections to roughly 20,000 vulnerable San Francisco renters.

The Avalos legislation clears up a lingering loophole in the city’s rent-control ordinance, a leftover piece of a bad deal that tenants were forced to accept when the city first moved to limit rent hikes 20 years ago. Back in 1978, with greedy landlords taking advantage of a housing shortage to jack up rents by astronomical rates, the supervisors and then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein were under immense pressure to pass some kind of control. But the landlord-friendly mayor and at-large elected board were unwilling to do what Berkeley had done across the bay by setting permanent limits on how much landlords could raise prices. Instead, they approved a watered-down measure aimed largely at fending off a tenant initiative that would have gone further.

Comcast-NBC: Too Big to Merge

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freepresshead.jpg

Amazing!

In less than a week, we have changed the media’s view on the Comcast-NBC merger. At first, the Associated Press, New York Times, Reuters, NPR and CNN said that the deal was as good as done. Now, thanks to our relentless push, they’re saying it faces a tough battle ahead as Washington responds to the public outcry.

Even the free-market fundamentalists on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board are calling us “consumer-protection alarmists” for so effectively gumming up the process!

The tides are shifting, thanks to the tens of thousands of people who joined our call to action below. But we can’t ease off the public pressure until this deal is stopped. A Comcast-NBC monolith would control as much as 20 percent of the communications landscape in the United States. That’s just too big.

Please follow this link to support our call to action.

Thanks for all that you do,

Josh
Free Press Action Fund

Too Big to Merge

Cable and Internet giant Comcast has just announced that it’s merging with NBC Universal to form one of the most powerful media companies in the world.

Washington and Wall Street are already saying this mega-merger is a done deal. If we don’t act now to stop it, we’ll have even more corporate control of our media, higher prices and fewer choices — online and on TV.

It’s a marriage made in hell, and we need a citizens’ uprising to stop the merger.

Join the Uprising Against the Mega-Merger

Help us get 100,000 people to tell President Obama to make good on his campaign pledge to act “against the excessive concentration of [media] power in the hands of any one corporation, interest or small group.” It’s time for the president to keep his promise.

Meister: ‘Vetoes by silence’ hamper labor

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Labor Hampered by ‘Vetoes of Silence’

By Dick Meister

Nothing is more basic to our democratic society than the principle of majority rule. But what if the eligible voters who fail to cast ballots were automatically recorded as voting “no”?

Ridiculous as it sounds, that’s exactly what the country’s airline and railroad workers face when they vote on whether they want union representation.

Imagine if every election had such a rule. President Obama wouldn’t be president, since less than half the eligible voters turned out for last year’s presidential election. Most, if not all, congressional candidates would also have lost last year — or in any other election year — since voter turnout for congressional elections has typically been less than 40 percent.

FAIR: The press fails the midterms

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fair-header.jpg

Failing the Midterms: Press overplays election results

Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday; meanwhile, Democratic candidates won two special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York and California. But it was very clear which set of elections corporate media wanted to portray as sending an important message about national politics–that voters were discontented with the White House and wanted Democrats to move to the right.

“By seizing gubernatorial seats in Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans on Tuesday dispelled any notion of President Obama’s electoral invincibility,” declared the Los Angeles Times (11/4/09)–as if Obama had previously been confused with Superman. On NPR, Mara Liasson reported (11/4/09): “There’s already a feisty argument going on about what the election results tell us, but there’s no argument about the score. The Democrats got a slap in the face. The Republicans a much-needed victory.”

Solomon: The next phase of healthcare apartheid

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Rep. Nancy Pelosi did what she could to sabotage the single payer health care position of her own party in her own state

By Norman Solomon
(Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America.)

In Washington, “healthcare reform” has degenerated into a sick joke.

At this point, only spinners who’ve succumbed to their own vertigo could use the word “robust” to describe the public option in the healthcare bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor.

“A main argument was that a public plan would save people money,” the New York Times has noted. But the insurance industry — claiming to want a level playing field — has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze the plan. “After House Democratic leaders unveiled their health care bill [on October 29], the Congressional Budget Office said the public plan would cost more than private plans and only 6 million people would sign up.”

Editorial: The next Gavin Newsom

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Will Newsom emerge as an embittered, angry, and ultimately unsuccessful mayor committed to punishing his enemies or a serious leader who can live up to his own hype?

EDITORIAL It’s possible that Mayor Gavin Newsom took a long look at himself, his life, and his future last week and decided that politics — intense, 24/7/365 politics — wasn’t what he wanted right now. It’s possible (as Randy Shaw noted in Beyondchron.org) that Newsom "now joins longtime adversary Chris Daly in putting family relationships ahead of one’s political career." It’s possible that he never really wanted a future in electoral politics and was driven to run for governor less by personal ambition than by the desire of his advisors to see him in a higher political role.

In that case, Newsom has a responsibility to do the best job he can over the final two years of his term as mayor, then step away and find something else to do with his life.

The man who drove the Chronicle nuts

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Stephen Barnett, prominent UC-Berkeley law professor and noted First Amendment and antitrust scholar and activist, 1935-2009

barnett.jpg
Photo by Jim Block

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Special note: read Barnett’s scathing indictment of Examiner/Chronicle/JOA news coverage in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (9/31/1970)

Steve Barnett would have been highly amused with the way the Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle handled the obituary of his death on Oct. 13 of cardiac arrest. He was 73.

The AP and the Chronicle ran respectful obituaries of his illustrious career as a UC Berkeley law professor, prominent First Amendment advocate, critic of the California Supreme Court, a director of the California First Amendment Coalition, and widely published legal scholar on media, antitrust, and First Amendment law.

The Chronicle even tossed in a couple of paragraphs pointing out that Barnett was “a frequent commentator on the Newspaper Preservation Act, the 1970 federal law that allowed papers in the same market to cut costs by merging some of their operations.”

Meister: A warm day in Berlin

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Dick Meister describes the tense scene at the Berlin Wall shortly after it went up in 196l

By Dick Meister

It was 20 years ago this month that the Berlin Wall finally fell, one of the last vestiges of the Cold War. But though it’s long gone, I and I’m sure many others, have not forgotten that Soviet-erected barrier which had stood for 28 years as a nearly impenetrable divider between the Soviet East and the West.

I especially remember the first time I saw the wall, just after it went up in 1961. The atmosphere was incredibly tense, a tension I and other reporters had found almost too acute to describe.

West Berliners sat at sidewalk cafes downtown, chatting amiably but without gaiety. Genuine relaxation seemed impossible because of the newly-constructed wall that stood just a few miles away. Out there the crowds were greater, but almost no one was talking.

Akerlof and Stiglitz: Let A Hundred Theories Bloom

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George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize, served as Chairman of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Let A Hundred Theories Bloom is from Project Syndicate’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom series.

Let A Hundred Theories Bloom

By George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz

BUDAPEST – The economic and financial crisis has been a telling moment for the economics profession, for it has put many long-standing ideas to the test. If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.

But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics are two scholars whose life work explored alternative approaches. Economics has generated a wealth of ideas, many of which argue that markets are not necessarily either efficient or stable, or that the economy, and our society, is not well described by the standard models of competitive equilibrium used by a majority of economists.

Calvin Trillin: Obama’s China policy

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CHINA POLICY

1.

So why did President Obama

Decline to meet the Dalai Lama?

It’s said that he must curry favor

With Chiina. Yes, it has our waiver

To toss its people in the clink

For how they pray or what they think

And we’ve resolved that we won’t fret

About the way it rules Tibet.

2.

For going along when China’s rotten

It’s hard to think of what we’ve gotten.

Calvin Trillin, The Nation, ll/9/09

Health insurers: eliminate antitrust exemption

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Unlocking Competition: The Need to Eliminate the Antitrust Exemption for Health Insurers

By David Balt , Stephanie Gross

(The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all.)

View the full memo (pdf)

Competition is the lodestar of the marketplace. Where competition thrives, consumers benefit from numerous choices, low prices, superior service, and innovation. But where competition is absent, consumers pay more for less, have fewer choices, and are at the mercy of market participants with unbridled power. Bringing competition to health insurance markets is essential to achieve meaningful health care reform, and as a first step Congress should eliminate the antitrust exemption that prevents effective federal enforcement against health insurers.

It is becoming clear in the health care debate that health insurance markets are broken. A tsunami of health insurance mergers has led to high levels of concentration in practically every market to the point where there are only one or two dominant insurers in many states. New companies face substantial entry barriers, and so these local monopolies go unchallenged.

Jon Stewart: From here to net neutrality

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Josh Silver and the good people at the Free Press media reform group sent me a snapshot from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show (l0/26/09) that skewered the politicians who fought net neutrality for the big media conglomerates.
A masterful job and worth a dozen mainstream editorials, which of course were not and will not be written on the subject. B3

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
From Here to Neutrality
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Meister: A Halloween invasion from Mars!

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CBS radio on Halloween on Oct. 30, l938: “2X2L calling CQ, NewYork…Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone?”

By Dick Meister

“2X2L calling CQ … 2X2L calling CQ, New York …. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone?

Millions of Americans – panic-stricken, many of them – waited anxiously for a response to the message, delivered over the CBS radio network in slow flat, mournful tones on a crisp Halloween eve. It was Oct. 30, 1938.

“Isn’t … there … anyone?”

There wasn’t. Listeners heard only the slapping sounds of the Hudson River.

Many of New York’s residents were dead. The others had fled in panic from “five great machines,” as tall as the tallest of the city’s skyscrapers, that the radio announcer had described in the last words he would ever utter. The metallic monsters had crossed the Hudson “like a man wading a brook,” destroying all who stood in their way.

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