Below is the PolicyLink statement on the Senate Jobs Bill. For more information or to talk with our experts, please contact Dan Lavoie at dan@policylink.org.
“In passing the $15 billion jobs bill, the Senate’s bipartisan majority should be commended for heeding the voices of struggling Americans.
“But the road to a truly fair and sustainable economy is a long one. More must be done to get help to those hit first and worst by this recession, especially low-income communities and people of color.
“As we move forward in building an innovative, expansive, bipartisan recovery plan, we must make significant investments in job-training programs and a range of infrastructure projects – public transportation, schools, energy efficiency – that create jobs now and set our communities up for future success.
“This bill is a good first step. But America’s long-term resurgence requires that all of our communities are connected to opportunity and can contribute their full talents to our revival. We urge Congress to continue to advance a jobs agenda that lifts up all our communities.”
LIKE almost every other American architect who came to prominence in the recent gilded age, Michael Maltzan built his reputation with commissions for prestigious museums and luxurious private houses. In 2002 he garnered national attention for his graceful design for the temporary Museum of Modern Art in Queens. His most recent projects include a flying-saucer-like house for the artists Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and a far grander, 28,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion — part art gallery, part home — for the investor and former Hollywood über-agent Michael Ovitz.
Yet Mr. Maltzan may be the only American architect of his stature with significant experience in a far less glamorous field: providing shelter and other accommodations for his city’s poor. Over the past 16 years he has worked on several housing projects for the homeless and an arts complex for underprivileged children that are remarkable for their architectural sophistication and their spirit of public service.
WASHINGTON—The Senate voted to advance a $15 billion job-creation package Monday, showing a rare hint of bipartisanship as five Republicans voted to end debate on the Democratic bill, including newly elected Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts.
Associated Press Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, shown at his temporary office on Capitol Hill Monday, backed the jobs bill in one of his first Senate votes.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson laid out the timetable for regulating greenhouse gas emissions Monday, writing in a letter to lawmakers that she plans to start targeting large facilities such as power plants next year but won’t target small emitters before 2016.
The letter makes it clear the Obama administration will move ahead with curbing global warming pollution under the Clean Air Act unless Congress moves to stop it. Jackson emphasized that the administration was required to act under a 2007 Supreme Court decision that said greenhouse gases from motor vehicles qualified as a pollutant under the 40-year-old air-quality law. Jackson was responding to a letter several coal-state senators sent her late Friday.
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s proposed $3.8 trillion budget ran into immediate trouble in Congress on Monday among lawmakers who said it tries to do too much while cutting the deficit too little.
The quick response came as Obama sought to juggle his twin goals of creating jobs, which entails tax cuts and new spending, and cutting the deficit, which involves the opposite.
“States Restart Health-Care Push,” - The Wall Street Journal Tight Budgets May Limit Legislative Efforts to Lift Coverage as National Plan Stumbles
With the fate of a national health care overhaul unclear, state legislators are pushing their own bills aimed at expanding coverage, though tight budgets are likely to hinder many of these efforts.
Lawmakers in at least two states, California and Missouri, have introduced legislation for the current session to create government-backed coverage for state residents. In others, including Virginia and New Jersey, legislators are hoping to tweak existing state programs to include more people.
The first lady takes childhood obesity as her cause.
The White House Kitchen Garden is frozen under, but, this Black History Month, first lady Michelle Obama is once more using food to address the epidemic of childhood obesity that has gripped the country and, she said in a recent speech to the United States’ Conference on Mayors, “never fails to take my breath away.”
The following is a statement from PolicyLink CEO Angela Glover Blackwell in response to President Obama’s first State of the Union address:
“A recovery that merely recreates our inequitable pre-recession economy is no recovery at all. Throughout his first year and his first State of the Union address, President Obama has made it clear that all Americans deserve to live in opportunity-rich communities. He has listened to and learned from those closest to our nation’s challenges.
During his the first year of Obama’s tenure, PolicyLink and our allies have:
Of course, listening is just the first step. We must now put these ideas and innovations into practice. The path is clear…the president and all allies of equity in America must now walk that path with purpose. A true national recovery depends on it.”
Between them, Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey have worked on Wall Street, traveled the world and taught school from East Africa to Ecuador. Now they make lunch for a living.
Friends since they met in business school at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Richmond and Ms. Tobey founded Revolution Foods Inc. to ride a political and economic wave: surging support for healthier food in school cafeterias.
The name Felix Walker is not one you would recognize, but this 19th-century congressman inadvertently contributed a word to America’s political lexicon that you will recognize–a word that fairly well sums up a lot of what we’re getting these days from right-wing politicos and pundits.
In the 1820s, Walker was the U.S. representative for Buncombe County, North Carolina. In an age of great political orators, Walker was not one. He was a droner, a dull fellow known for expressing his dullness at great length on every topic. No matter what issue was up for debate in the House–no matter whether he had any real knowledge, facts, or insights to add–Walker would rise to speak, insisting that his constituents back home would want his voice heard. He would then launch into a wandering, wearisome, often-nonsensical discourse that he always called “a speech for Buncombe.”
WASHINGTON, Jan 21 (Reuters) - The Obama administration, key lawmakers and big trade groups want to include billions of dollars for transportation and infrastructure in pending legislation aimed at easing stubbornly high U.S. unemployment.
The move reflects cold calculations about what initiatives will take priority amid joblessness that is near a 26-year high at 10 percent and rapidly shifting political sands in Washington ahead of next November’s congressional elections.
The first year of the Obama Era has been defined by noise - voracious political pundits, screaming Tea Partiers, and cries of “too left” and “not left enough” from competing corners of political world. With the surprise election of Scott Brown yesterday following a loud and boisterous campaign built on voters’ anger at a still-stagnant economy, the noise isn’t likely to ebb soon.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will make it easier for cities and states to spend federal money on public transit projects, and particularly on the light-rail systems that have become popular in recent years, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Wednesday.
Administration officials said they were reversing guidelines put in place by the Bush administration that called for evaluating new transit projects largely by how much they cost and how much travel time they would save.
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s emergency spending measures last year saved up to 2 million U.S. jobs, the White House said on Wednesday, but it warned that the outlook for the economy remained uncertain.
Obama, anxious to reduce double-digit U.S. unemployment which has dented his popularity, has already called for additional government measures to boost jobs on top of the $787 billion stimulus package he signed in February 2009.
Americans are fat, but at least they’re not getting fatter.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans are overweight or obese, but that number hasn’t changed much in the last decade, according to a team of doctors Wednesday in two studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The South has become the first region in the country in which more than half of public school students are poor and more than half are minorities, according to a report by the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation.
The foundation found that African-American, Latino, Asian-Pacific Islander, American Indian and multi-racial children constituted a little more than half of all students attending public schools in the 15 states of the South by the end of the last school year.
Like Veterans Day or Memorial Day, the annual celebration of the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. has, over time, become just another three-day weekend for many Americans. Forty-two years after King’s assassination, the holiday presents us with an opportunity for reflection. How does our society compare to the one he fought for? Have we put an end to the discrimination and grinding poverty that King called upon us to heal? Are we capable of a mass movement equal to the millions who marched and practiced civil disobedience, reforming our country from within? Where is the Jewish community in modern struggles for justice and equality?
During the Civil Rights movement, another great lion of justice called the Jewish community to task. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel established a lasting friendship with King, one filled with mutual admiration and affection and based on shared purpose, values and experience. Both were survivors of systems that legalized discrimination and oppression: King in the segregated South, Heschel in pre-war Nazi Germany.
Despite being hit especially hard by the bad economy, job losses and the high rate of foreclosures, African Americans’ assessment of race relations and prospects for the future has surged more dramatically during the past two years than at any time in the past quarter-century, according to a new poll.
In a survey of American racial attitudes released Tuesday, researchers reported that the feeling of progress is driven in large part by the election of President Obama, along with a greater sense of local community satisfaction and a more positive outlook. The majority of African Americans say they are better off now than they were five years ago.
In the past three years, the government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the meat it buys for the National School Lunch Program “meets or exceeds standards in commercial products.”
That isn’t always the case. McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.
When a local advocacy group releases a report aimed at changing city policy, it’s often ready to expect immediate resistance from the target of critique, and then perhaps slow alterations made over time.
But when the nonprofit Children’s Rights released a report last month analyzing how long it takes for foster children to obtain a permanent home, the city agency involved – the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) – not only supported the release, but soon announced a related initiative aimed at shortening the length of time children remain in foster care.
This would be even more remarkable if the report hadn’t all but closed the case on what many in the city’s child welfare community have known for years: New York has one of the worst mechanisms for helping children move from foster care to permanent homes in the country. (It placed 44th among 47 states; see p. 71 of this state report.)
President Obama proposed a new set of job-creation proposals Tuesday designed to confront a stark problem: Even though the rate of job cuts in the economy has eased, the pace of hiring remains far below normal.
That issue – how to spur hiring – is the central one for policymakers considering how to bring down America’s unemployment rate in the next year.
Mr. Obama said his proposals have the best chance to succeed, delivering the “greatest number of jobs [at] the greatest value for our economy.”
Among the countless ways in which New York City is a superlative place, one is its high number of poor people – and the quantity of organizations in existence to help them.
The latter list just grew by one, with the establishment of the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy, Practice and Research at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. Launched last month, the new institute is aimed at collecting, developing and spreading best practices among those who serve the estimated 3 million of New York City’s 8.3 million residents who live on incomes under 200 percent of the federal poverty level, which comes to $36,620 for a family of three.
Half of American kids will live in households receiving food stamps before age 20, according to a study reported Monday in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Although one in five children rely on food stamps for years, many more live in families who turn to food stamps during a short-term crisis, says author Mark Rank of Washington University in St. Louis. He analyzed 30 years of data from the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics survey.
The White House switchboard lit up with calls from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s emissaries several weeks ago with a message that was polite but firm: The mayor is going to win re-election, they said. We think the president should stay out of the race.
Members of Mr. Bloomberg’s inner circle were especially worried because they knew President Obama planned to visit the region to campaign with Gov. Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey, and he would face pressure to support the Democratic candidate, William C. Thompson Jr., the city’s first black comptroller.
