As the cost of higher education rises faster than wages, Americans are staring down $1 trillion in student loan debt—a daunting number that stunts personal economic prospects. But what’s worse is that, for the next set of students looking at college, the interest they’ll have to pay on student debt could double.
A 2007 bill which lowered the interest rate on student loans is set to expire on July 1, which would double the interest on federal student loans from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. The House and Senate need to act quickly—but Minnesota Republican Rep. John Kline, who heads the key committee in the House, claims it’s too expensive to extend the lower rates. (Kline’s concerns about cost must have been rough for him when he voted for the Paul Ryan budget that featured massive tax cuts for millionaires.)
If Congress waits too long, they’ll turn student loan interest into just another example of governance-by-unnecessary-emergency, the same silly process we’ve seen with the payroll tax cut, the debt ceiling, the highway bill and other issues. And refusing to extend lower rates would just shift more costs to young people who will be entering college this fall and beyond.
This deadline isn’t coming up out of the blue. Back in February, Alternet’s Sarah Jaffe noted that the interest-rate hike would add thousands of dollars to the cost of college.
Nobody should have to go to college to get a fair wage and a decent life—but nobody who wants to pursue higher education should be held back by cost. We talk to thousands of people across the country every week, and education is a constant concern—the hope that they or their kids can afford education, and that the cost won’t cripple their long-term prospects. An unnecessary, drastic hike in interest rates for student loans would punish people for pursuing their own advancement.
We’ll keep an eye on this important issue in the coming months. Will future college students win the fight—or will Rep. Kline?
The rollercoaster of the Wisconsin recall process continued Thursday when the schedule set by Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan confirmed that the state’s voter suppression law will not be in effect for the June 5 recall elections.
A review of the crazy timeline: The law, known as Act 23, had legal trouble from the start. Lawsuits from the civil rights groups NAACP and Voces de la Frontera resulted in a temporary injunction by Judge Flanagan, while a separate lawsuit resulted in a permanent injunction against the law by another Dane County Judge, Richard Niess.
That meant the law was not enforced for the April 3 municipal elections, but the big question was still whether or not the vote would be suppressed in the crucial May 8 primary and historic June 5 recall. Would the Supreme Court make the final call? Nope – Act 23 was bounced back to the circuit courts after the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to take up the case last week. (Whew. Now we’re dizzy.)
Flanagan has temporarily blocked the law from taking effect while he considers both arguments. A four-day trial wrapped up Thursday afternoon after Flanagan said he didn’t need to hear oral arguments. Flanagan, who will issue the verdict in the case, said he wants final positions outlined in briefs. He set a June 18 due date for the last set of filings.
This is good news for the thousands of Wisconsinites – including 177,000 Wisconsin seniors and nearly half of Wisconsin’s African-American and Hispanic citizens who don’t have photo ID – who would have been effectively barred from voting in the June election by Act 23. (Not to mention for those folks who wanted to get ID before election day, 26 percent of Wisconsin DMV’s are open one month a day or less, only one DMV has weekend hours, and Gov. Walker tried his best to close 10 DMV’s in heavily Democratic areas.)
It’s not great news for Gov. Walker and his Administration. His policies have been overwhelmingly harmful to Wisconsin working families, particularly students (cuts to higher education), seniors (cuts to Badgercare), and working class folks (cutting the state earned income tax credit, effectively a tax increase on the poor). Therefore, it’s in his interest that fewer of these voters are able to exercise their rights at the polls.
Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen says he is very concerned about voter fraud as six recall elections near, including one targeting fellow Republican, Gov. Scott Walker.
Again, Walker and his team are concerned about some things: keeping people from voting, tax breaks for big businesses, and the latest out-of-state fundraiser. They are much less concerned, judging by the policies they advocate, with the ability of anyone in Wisconsin to find work, go to school, save for retirement, or pay their medical bills. But hopefully, they’ll be in the private sector soon, where they won’t have to worry about anyone but themselves.
Today we launched the 2012 AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch site—now called CEO Pay and the 99%—which includes the most comprehensive data accessible on 2011 executive pay. All of the data available is searchable by industry, by state and by the top 100 highest-paid CEOs. Check it and help us share it widely.
CEO Pay and the 99% shows that a CEO of a company in the S&P 500 Index, on average, received $12.9 million in total compensation in 2011. That’s nearly a 14 percent raise over the previous year. And that’s on top of a 23 percent increase in 2010.
In stark contrast, the average wage for workers hovered at $34,000 in 2011. Median household income fell $3,700 over the past decade. And those who are employed received an average 2.8 percent raise—barely keeping up with inflation.
The new site also features data on:
Swelling corporate cash stockpiles. Corporations have a record $2.2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets, according to the Federal Reserve. But rather than reinvest this capital to grow our economy and create jobs, CEOs are not deploying these resources.
The widening gap between CEO-to-worker pay. Last year, this ratio of CEO-to-worker pay had widened to an astonishing 380 times. In 1980, CEOs of large U.S. companies made 42 times the average wages of workers.
Mutual funds’ votes on executive pay. Mutual funds wield enormous clout on CEO pay issues in part because of the new “say-on-pay” requirement that shareholders cast an advisory vote on CEO pay. In this new section, investors can look up how their mutual funds voted and ask their mutual funds to vote against runaway CEO pay levels.
You also can take action to rein in out-of-control CEO pay: Send an e-mail to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and urge it to implement the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act’s requirement that public companies disclose their ratio of CEO-to-worker pay.
The recession that started in 2007 slammed home values and retirement savings, shredded jobs and left us in a deep hole. And it hit state budgets in two ways—draining them of revenues while increasing the number of people who need services. What has that meant over the last few years? According to a new report, it’s meant devastating cuts in the services states provide.
The report, assembled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, shows that states have cut some $291 billion from their budgets over the last four years—coming out of the services their recession-scarred citizens needed the most:
• 23 states deeply cut K-12 and early-childhood education.
• 26 states cut higher education.
• 20 states cut health care programs.
That means fewer teachers in the classroom, less access to health care for working-class families and a hard hill to climb to get to college. It also means the loss of more than 600,000 jobs, a serious drag on our economy.
When a teacher or a public-safety employee loses their job, it has the same economic impact as anyone else losing a job: they have less money to spend in the community, they have a harder time staying in their home, and they are now competing for the small number of job openings in the same job market as anyone else. That’s in addition to what the community loses when there’s one less person to teach, put out fires or perform other public services.
Of course, this problem could have been helped if Congress had passed the American Jobs Act or the section of it that was introduced as Senate Bill 1723 last year. These bills would fund aid to state to hire teachers and public safety employees, paid for by a small surtax on income over $1 million a year. In the predictable pattern, these bills didn’t come up for a vote—they were killed by the filibuster.
And not to dredge up ancient history, but it’s worth noting that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February of 2009, could have done much more to alleviate this problem—except that Senators Ben Nelson and Susan Collins demanded an arbitrary cut as their price for voting for the bill, a cut that devastated state budgets. While it got ARRA the votes it needed to break a filibuster, this cut undermined ARRA’s capacity to help protect jobs and services at the state level.
We’re going to be watching state legislators closely to see where there priorities are. Will they keep piling the burden of balancing budgets on the most vulnerable people?
The election board’s decision came in response to a legal challenge from the Wisconsin Democratic Party and We Are Wisconsin. Jeremy Levinson, the attorney who brought the case, said that the six candidates “knowingly filed false information” by running as Democrats when they were nothing but. “The First Amendment does not require the government to ignore an admitted lie,” he said, “and that is what we have here.”
The six candidates, four for state senate and one for Governor and Lt. Governor, are admitted Republicans who are running the Democratic primary in an attempt to drain resources and allow the incumbents – the recall targets – more time to raise funds. The exact same tactic was used in the State Senate recalls in August 2011.
All this is being done with the full blessing of the Wisconsin Republican Party. State party spokesman Stephan Thompson said: “In an effort to ensure election fairness, the Republican Party has recruited protest candidates to run in all of the upcoming recall elections.”
(Thompson also dutifully repeated the untrue Scott Walker talking points that the “Democrats and union bosses are the ones who decided to force these baseless recalls on our state.” Thompson was sure to brush over the fact that it was actually over a million Wisconsin citizens – union, non-union, Democrat, Republican, and Independent alike – who signed petitions to trigger recall elections against Gov. Walker and his anti-worker allies.)
The problem, again, is that elections, even elections you call “fake” or “baseless,” are not free. The “fake Democrat” gambit comes at a time where Wisconsin’s cities and towns need every penny they can get their hands on for education and basic services. And yet, last year this Republican tactic costs cities and towns an extra $500,000 to administer the extra elections.
Maybe you can make the argument that Gov. Walker can’t control everything the state Republican Party does (although Walker has been silent on this particular issue). But even Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), a recall target himself, remarked to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Republican voters could vote in the Democratic primaries in order to trip up his opponents for the June 5 general. “There’s nothing to keep the Republicans from messing around,” Fitzgerald said.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Gov. Walker, Sen. Fitzgerald, and the whole gang cared even half as much about creating jobs as they did about monkeying with state elections? But jobs, education, basic services, town and city budgets, voting rights – these aren’t issues that have much concerned Walker and Co. for the past two years. We shouldn’t expect them to start now. But hopefully, before too long, they’ll have the opportunity to take their negligence and callousness to the private sector.
Earlier this year, it looked like a battle was brewing between Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and the Cleveland Teachers Union (CTU). Jackson’s school reform plan would have eliminated collective bargaining and a number of other workplace provisions for teachers.
But CTU leaders, Jackson and other education advocates worked together to find common ground. This collaboration has resulted in an agreement in which both sides made tough choices and kept their focus on the children. But in the end, says the Cleveland Plain Dealer in a recent editorial:
They did it. And they did it right….Each side gave a little to give students a lot.
CTU President David Quolke says that by working with Jackson, the teachers were able to make “bad legislation better for educators and,”
most importantly, to move forward with our most important priority of providing a quality education and safe environment for the children that we see each day.
The extremist American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has announced it is disbanding its task force that developed and pushed the rash of voter suppression and “stand your ground ” laws passed in recent years by Republican-controlled state legislatures. But don’t believe that ALEC is backing off its attacks on workers, their wages and their unions. Meanwhile, the group continues to lose key members, with two more major companies severing ties with the right-wing group.
Although groups have been fighting ALEC’s radical agenda for some, ALEC’s involvement with the “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida, now at the center of the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida, sharply focused the spotlight the ALEC. So far, 10 large corporations have dropped their ALEC memberships.
ALEC claims it is disbanding its Public Safety and Elections Task Force to concentrate on “free market” and economic issues. But writes The Nation’s John Nichols:
The disbanding of the “Public Safety and Elections” task force looks in every sense to be a desperate attempt to slow an exodus of high-profile corporations from the group’s membership roll. It cannot be seen as anything other than a response to the pressure the group has felt as high-profile corporate members have been quitting it on an almost daily basis.
Reed Elsevier, publisher of prestigious scientific journals like Cell and The Lancet, and the owner of Lexis Nexis, dropped its ALEC membership. The big time publisher was also on the 23-member, inner circle ALEC Private Enterprise Board. Also the Arizona firm American Traffic Solutions, the pioneer in electronic traffic enforcement products such as red light and speed cameras has left ALEC.
With financial and ideological links to the extremist Koch brothers, ALEC peddles fill-in-your-state’s-name model legislation to suppress voting rights and eliminate collective bargaining. Its model bills include anti-immigrant legislation, right-wing measures on education and tax breaks for corporations.
Last summer, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), along with The Nation, issued ALEC Exposed a report that includes the more than 800 ALEC-authored model bills that have been passed or introduced by state lawmakers.
Says CMD Executive Director Lisa Graves:
ALEC’s announcement is a partial victory for the power of grassroots citizen action, but for Americans concerned about brand-name corporations underwriting ALEC’s extreme agenda to make it more difficult for American citizens to vote and to protect armed vigilantes, ALEC’s PR maneuver to try to distance itself from its record of extremism is an empty gesture unless it and the corporations that have bankrolled its operations work to repeal ALEC-backed laws.
She says that ALEC’s focus on a so-called ‘jobs’ agenda is:
a thinly disguised effort to make it more difficult for American families to hold corporations accountable when their drugs or other products kill or injure their loved ones, to strip workers of their rights to organize or even get sick pay to help care for their children when they are ill, limit the ability of the government to protect the health and safety of American families.
