Missing Ingredient on Minimum Wage: A Motivated G.O.P.

Today's post was shared by The New York Times and comes from www.nytimes.com

Photo WASHINGTON — Each of the three previous presidents — two Republicans, one Democrat — signed an increase in the federal minimum wage. Given Mr. Obama’s emphasis on income inequality, and the popularity of an increase in opinion polls, you would think he would. But the story of recent increases underscores the indispensable ingredient he so far lacks: a Republican leader strongly motivated to make a deal over the party’s philosophical objections. In 1989, it was a new Republican in the White House. President George Bush, while campaigning to succeed Ronald Reagan, had promised “a kinder, gentler America.” The Democrats then controlling both houses of Congress set out to take him up on it. Mr. Bush drove a hard bargain on the minimum wage. He vetoed the first version Congress sent on grounds that it raised the wage by 30 cents an hour too much. But he eventually accepted a two-stage increase to $4.25 an hour on the condition that lawmakers include a lower “training wage” for teenagers. Photo President Bill Clinton and the Republican former Senate leader Trent Lott in 2009, 13 years after they forged agreement on a minimum-wage increase. In 1996, it was a new Republican Senate leader. Trent Lott took over after Bob Dole, then running for president against the incumbent Democrat, Bill Clinton, resigned his Senate seat. Mr. Clinton, who had battled fiercely with the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, and Mr. Dole,...

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Toni Atkins prepares for Assembly speakership

Today's post was shared by CAAA and comes from capitolweekly.net

Toni Atkins For Toni Atkins, a coal miner’s daughter and the first in her family to graduate from college, the road from Virginia coal country to San Diego to Speaker of the state Assembly has been long and winding. Atkins, a San Diego Democrat who said she can “really appreciate the depths and the breadth of the people who live in California,” was chosen the next speaker in a closed-door caucus of Democrats, who control the 80-member Assembly with a supermajority. She currently serves as the Assembly’s majority leader. She will succeed Speaker John Pérez, a former L.A.-area labor activist, who is termed out this year and is running for state controller. Atkins, like Pérez, is openly gay, although her sexual orientation has drawn relatively little notice in the Capitol. Pérez served as Atkins’ mentor, she said. “I feel really fortunate the speaker has given me the opportunity to be both the Majority Whip and the Majority Leader,” Atkins said. She’ll be leading the lower house despite concerns – at least in the north state – that an old tradition over equitable leadership distribution between Northern and Southern California. “For 40 years there has been an unspoken — and unbroken — rule that Southern California splits leadership of the Legislature with the Bay Area and greater Northern California. This year, Southern California leaders could seize complete control of the...

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Intimidation: Missouri Senate passes online database for workers' comp

Privacy is a basic premises of workers' compensation law and the State of Missouri is taking a major step to eliminate it and intimidate injure worker. Today's post is shared from therolladailynews.com An online database of workers' compensation claims would be created under legislation passed by the Missouri Senate. Under the measure, SB526, passed on Thursday, businesses could provide a potential employee's name and Social Security number to identify the date of workers' compensation claims and whether the claim is open or closed. Sponsoring Sen. Mike Cunningham, a Rogersville Republican, says the information is already available but only by written request. Supporters say the bill would help businesses control workers' compensation costs. A similar bill was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon last year. He cited privacy concerns and called it "an affront to the privacy of our citizens." Senators voted 26-7 to send the measure to the House.

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Rescinding the Cuts to Veteran's Pensions Was In the Cards From the Start

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

December's budget deal between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray included a bit of relief from the 2011 sequestration cuts, with the relief split evenly between domestic and military budgets. That even split was one of the guiding principles of the deal. But part of the military relief was paid for by $7 billion in cuts to veterans' pensions, something that immediately prompted a storm of protest and, eventually, a move to rescind the cuts. Jared Bernstein comments: True, that’s not huge bucks in the scheme of things. But the violation of this budget principle should not be taken lightly. A key point of the budget machinations that brought us to where we are today is that automatic spending cuts should be split between evenly between defense and non-defense (forget for a moment, that it’s not the discretionary side of the budget that’s responsible for our longer term fiscal challenges anyway). If Congress starts stealing from domestic programs to boost defense, it will unfairly and unwisely exacerbate already unsustainable pressures on domestic spending. I'd take a slightly different lesson from this: Democrats got snookered. Only a little bit, and they knew they were being played, but they still got snookered. It was obvious from the start that cuts to veterans' benefits would be unpopular and unlikely to stand, but Democrats agreed to them anyway in order to get the budget deal across the finish line. Maybe that was the right thing to do, but it was no...

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The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

The political posturing over raising the minimum wage sometimes obscures the huge and growing number of low-wage workers it would affect. An estimated 27.8 million people would earn more money under the Democratic proposal to lift the hourly minimum from $7.25 today to $10.10 by 2016. And most of them do not fit the low-wage stereotype of a teenager with a summer job. Their average age is 35; most work full time; more than one-fourth are parents; and, on average, they earn half of their families’ total income. None of that, however, has softened the hearts of opponents, including congressional Republicans and low-wage employers, notably restaurant owners and executives. This is not a new debate. The minimum wage is a battlefield in a larger political fight between Democrats and Republicans — dating back to the New Deal legislation that instituted the first minimum wage in 1938 — over government’s role in the economy, over raw versus regulated capitalism, over corporate power versus public needs. Interactive Feature More than 4.8 million workers now earn the lowest legal pay. This calculator shows the hard choices that have to be made living on the smallest paychecks. But the results of the wage debate are clear. Decades of research, facts and evidence show that increasing the minimum wage is vital to the economic security of tens of millions of Americans, and would be good for the weak economy. As Congress begins its own debate, here...

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New York State Is Set to Loosen Marijuana Laws

Changes in the delivery of medications in workers' compensation has become a hot issue recently. While employers and insurance companies attempt to restrict maintenance medications for pain especially, the use of medical marijuana is becoming widely adopted, and in Colorado it has been adopted for recreational use. See also the The Complex World of Workers' Compensation and Pharmaceutical Benefits. Today's post is shared from the nytimes.com.  ALBANY — Joining a growing group of states that have loosened restrictions on marijuana, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York plans this week to announce an executive action that would allow limited use of the drug by those with serious illnesses, state officials say. The shift by Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who had long resisted legalizing medical marijuana, comes as other states are taking increasingly liberal positions on it — most notably Colorado, where thousands have flocked to buy the drug for recreational use since it became legal on Jan. 1. Mr. Cuomo’s plan will be far more restrictive than the laws in Colorado or California, where medical marijuana is available to people with conditions as mild as backaches. It will allow just 20 hospitals across the state to prescribe marijuana to patients with cancer, glaucoma or other diseases that meet standards to be set by the New York State Department of Health. While Mr. Cuomo’s measure falls well short of full legalization, it nonetheless moves New York,...

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Extension of Benefits for Jobless Is Set to End

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — Unless Congress acts, during the last week of December an estimated 1.3 million people will lose access to an emergency program providing them with additional weeks of jobless benefits. A further 850,000 will be denied benefits in the first quarter of 2014. Congressional Democrats and the White House, pointing to the sluggish recovery and the still-high jobless rate, are pushing once again to extend the period covered by the unemployment insurance program. But with Congress still far from a budget deal and still struggling to find alternatives to the $1 trillion in long-term cuts known as sequestration, lawmakers say the chances of an extension before Congress adjourns in two weeks are slim. As a result, one of the largest stimulus measures passed during the recession is likely to come to an end, and jobless workers in many states are likely to receive considerably fewer weeks of benefits. In all, as many as 4.8 million people could be affected by expiring unemployment benefits through 2014, estimated Gene Sperling, President Obama’s top economic adviser. “Historically, there has not been a time where the unemployment rate has been this high where you have not extended it,” Mr. Sperling said in an interview. “Why would you not extend now, when you’re dealing with the nearly unprecedented levels of long-term unemployment coming off such a historic recession? This would be the wrong time to do it.” Democrats are pushing...

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Chris Christie's Failure Shows Just How Popular He Is

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Former New Jersey governor Tom Kean is apparently pretty annoyed with Chris Christie, partly for personal reasons and partly because Christie failed to help any other Republicans get elected to the state legislature. The full failure of Christie's "coattails" campaign is only now being known. Christie had wanted to win the state senate, cutting ads and campaigning for key candidates. None of his challengers unseated any Democrats. The total Republican gain in the Assembly appears to be... one. That's better than 2011, when Democrats gained a seat, but even if you factor in the gerrymander that protects Democrats, Kean and other Republicans are amazed that Christie could win by 21 points and carry almost nobody along with him. OK, but isn't there another way of looking at this? It shows just how popular Christie is personally even in a state that shows no sign whatsoever of warming up to Republicans in general. That's fairly remarkable. I'll admit this a slatepitchy kind of argument to make, and I don't know if I really even believe it. Weigel is certainly right that this leaves Christie in the unenviable position of having to scrape and compromise with Democrats for the next few years, something that's unlikely to help his presidential ambitions much. If his compromises succeed, he's a sellout. If they fail, he's a guy who can't get anything done. That kind of sucks. Still! His personal brand is obviously pretty sky high. That has to count for something.

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California state Sen. Ron Calderon accepted $88,000 in bribes, FBI affidavit alleges

California workers' compensation scandal headlines the news over medical treatment bribes.  Today's post is shared from sacbee.com

State Sen. Ron Calderon accepted about $88,000 in bribes from an undercover FBI agent posing as a film studio owner and a Southern California hospital executive during a wide-ranging probe into his conduct as a legislator, according to a 124-page affidavit published online Wednesday by cable news network Al Jazeera America. No charges have been filed against Calderon, a Democrat from Montebello. His attorney, Mark Geragos, did not return calls Wednesday. The federal affidavit, filed with the court under seal as the FBI sought a search warrant for Calderon’s office, alleges that he worked with interest groups in a pay-to-play fashion, accepting money in exchange for promises to carry or amend legislation to their benefit. It details an arrangement to funnel money for the Calderon family’s later use through a nonprofit organization run by his brother Tom Calderon. It describes an instance in which Calderon hired a female undercover agent as a staff member as a favor to another undercover agent despite her apparent lack of qualifications for the job. It says that as Calderon steered legislation, he asked those he thought would benefit to secure jobs for his children, Jessica and Zachary. “One way you could be a real help to (my daughter) is, you got any work?” Calderon said to an undercover agent posing as the film studio owner during a June 2012 dinner in Pico Rivera, according to the affidavit. “I told you, man, anything...

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