Replies to post #206978 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[pro_se]

F6 - For me, one little gem in that piece causes me to think 'enforced consensus' rather than 'informed unanimity' is likely the rule of the day within Groundswell:

...Outreach has occurred to incorporate groups with extensive reach: Heritage, Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, AFP [Americans for Prosperity], FRC [Family Research Council] and the NRA, among others…Our country is in peril. This is a critical moment needing critical leadership. We want to protect the strategic collaboration occurring at Groundswell and build on it. Please be careful about bringing guests and clear them ahead of time.

i.e;...

Somebody's desperate...& accustomed to applying the knowledge/$$$$/influence needed to get what they want whenever they want it. Only one problem - the use of loaded dog-whistle phrasing indicates a simplistic condescension towards...& frustration with...those needed to complete the assigned tasks.

I wonder... Just WHO is that desperate?

[F6]

President Obama Speaks on the Economy

Published on Jul 24, 2013 by whitehouse

At Knox College, President Obama kicks off a series of speeches that will lay out his vision for rebuilding an economy that puts the middle class and those fighting to join it front and center. July 24, 2013.

[transcript next below]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzBA1UPdC8 [also at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Po4d0GHIs , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7UyBrpTMxs , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4i3N7m8qvE , and http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2013/07/24/president-obama-speaks-economy ]

*

Remarks by the President on the Economy -- Knox College, Galesburg, IL

July 24, 2013
12:13 P.M. CDT

THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Galesburg! (Applause.) Well, it’s good to be home in Illinois! (Applause.) It is good to be back. It’s good to be back. Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody. (Applause.) Thank you. Everybody, have a seat, have a seat. Well, it is good to be back.

I want to, first of all, thank Knox College -- (applause) -- I want to thank Knox College and your president, Teresa Amott, for having me here today. Give Teresa a big round of applause. (Applause.) I want to thank your Congresswoman, Cheri Bustos, who’s here. (Applause.) We've got Governor Quinn here. (Applause.) I'm told we've got your Lieutenant Governor, Sheila Simon, is here. (Applause.) There she is. Attorney General Lisa Madigan is here. (Applause.)

I see a bunch of my former colleagues, some folks who I haven't seen in years and I'm looking forward to saying hi to. One in particular I've got to mention, one of my favorites from the Illinois Senate -- John Sullivan is in the house. (Applause.) John was one of my earliest supporters when I was running for the U.S. Senate, and it came in really handy because he’s got, like, 10 brothers and sisters, and his wife has got 10 brothers and sisters -- (laughter) -- so they’ve got this entire precinct just in their family. (Laughter.) And they all look like John -- the brothers do -- so he doesn’t have to go to every event. He can just send one of his brothers out. (Laughter.) It is good to see him.

Dick Durbin couldn’t make it today, but he sends his best. And we love Dick. (Applause.) He’s doing a great job. And we’ve got one of my favorite neighbors, the Senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill, in the house, because we’re going to Missouri later this afternoon. (Applause.)

And all of you are here, and it’s great to see you. (Applause.) And I hope everybody is having a wonderful summer. The weather is perfect. Whoever was in charge of that, good job. (Laughter.)

So, eight years ago, I came here to deliver the commencement address for the class of 2005. Things were a little different back then. For example, I had no gray hair -- (laughter) -- or a motorcade. Didn’t even have a prompter. In fact, there was a problem in terms of printing out the speech because the printer didn’t work here and we had to drive it in from somewhere. (Laughter.) But it was my first big speech as your newest senator.

And on the way here I was telling Cheri and Claire about how important this area was, one of the areas that I spent the most time in outside of Chicago, and how much it represented what’s best in America and folks who were willing to work hard and do right by their families. And I came here to talk about what a changing economy was doing to the middle class -- and what we, as a country, needed to do to give every American a chance to get ahead in the 21st century.

See, I had just spent a year traveling the state and listening to your stories -- of proud Maytag workers losing their jobs when the plant moved down to Mexico. (Applause.) A lot of folks here remember that. Of teachers whose salaries weren’t keeping up with the rising cost of groceries. (Applause.) Of young people who had the drive and the energy, but not the money to afford a college education. (Applause.)

So these were stories of families who had worked hard, believed in the American Dream, but they felt like the odds were increasingly stacked against them. And they were right. Things had changed.

In the period after World War II, a growing middle class was the engine of our prosperity. Whether you owned a company, or swept its floors, or worked anywhere in between, this country offered you a basic bargain -- a sense that your hard work would be rewarded with fair wages and decent benefits, the chance to buy a home, to save for retirement, and most of all, a chance to hand down a better life for your kids.

But over time, that engine began to stall -- and a lot of folks here saw it -- that bargain began to fray. Technology made some jobs obsolete. Global competition sent a lot of jobs overseas. It became harder for unions to fight for the middle class. Washington doled out bigger tax cuts to the very wealthy and smaller minimum wage increases for the working poor.

And so what happened was that the link between higher productivity and people’s wages and salaries was broken. It used to be that, as companies did better, as profits went higher, workers also got a better deal. And that started changing. So the income of the top 1 percent nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 2007, but the typical family’s incomes barely budged.

And towards the end of those three decades, a housing bubble, credit cards, a churning financial sector was keeping the economy artificially juiced up, so sometimes it papered over some of these long-term trends. But by the time I took office in 2009 as your President, we all know the bubble had burst, and it cost millions of Americans their jobs, and their homes, and their savings. And I know a lot of folks in this area were hurt pretty bad. And the decades-long erosion that had been taking place -- the erosion of middle-class security -- was suddenly laid bare for everybody to see.

Now, today, five years after the start of that Great Recession, America has fought its way back. (Applause.) We fought our way back. Together, we saved the auto industry; took on a broken health care system. (Applause.) We invested in new American technologies to reverse our addiction to foreign oil. We doubled wind and solar power. (Applause.) Together, we put in place tough new rules on the big banks, and protections to crack down on the worst practices of mortgage lenders and credit card companies. (Applause.) We changed a tax code too skewed in favor of the wealthiest at the expense of working families -- so we changed that, and we locked in tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans, and we asked those at the top to pay a little bit more. (Applause.)

So you add it all up, and over the past 40 months, our businesses have created 7.2 million new jobs. This year, we’re off to our strongest private sector job growth since 1999.

And because we bet on this country, suddenly foreign companies are, too. Right now, more of Honda’s cars are made in America than anyplace else on Earth. (Applause.) Airbus, the European aircraft company, they’re building new planes in Alabama. (Applause.) And American companies like Ford are replacing outsourcing with insourcing -- they’re bringing jobs back home. (Applause.)

We sell more products made in America to the rest of the world than ever before. We produce more natural gas than any country on Earth. We’re about to produce more of our own oil than we buy from abroad for the first time in nearly 20 years. (Applause.) The cost of health care is growing at its slowest rate in 50 years. (Applause.) And our deficits are falling at the fastest rate in 60 years. (Applause.)

So thanks to the grit and resilience and determination of the American people -- of folks like you -- we’ve been able to clear away the rubble from the financial crisis. We started to lay a new foundation for stronger, more durable economic growth. And it's happening in our own personal lives as well, right? A lot of us tightened our belts, shed debt, maybe cut up a couple of credit cards, refocused on those things that really matter.

As a country, we’ve recovered faster and gone further than most other advanced nations in the world. With new American revolutions in energy and technology and manufacturing and health care, we're actually poised to reverse the forces that battered the middle class for so long, and start building an economy where everyone who works hard can get ahead.

But -- and here's the big “but” -- I’m here to tell you today that we're not there yet. We all know that. We're not there yet. We've got more work to do. Even though our businesses are creating new jobs and have broken record profits, nearly all the income gains of the past 10 years have continued to flow to the top 1 percent. The average CEO has gotten a raise of nearly 40 percent since 2009. The average American earns less than he or she did in 1999. And companies continue to hold back on hiring those who’ve been out of work for some time.

Today, more students are earning their degree, but soaring costs saddle them with unsustainable debt. Health care costs are slowing down, but a lot of working families haven’t seen any of those savings yet. The stock market rebound helped a lot of families get back much of what they had lost in their 401(k)s, but millions of Americans still have no idea how they’re going to be able to retire.

So in many ways, the trends that I spoke about here in 2005 -- eight years ago -- the trend of a winner-take-all economy where a few are doing better and better and better, while everybody else just treads water -- those trends have been made worse by the recession. And that's a problem.

This growing inequality not just of result, inequality of opportunity -- this growing inequality is not just morally wrong, it’s bad economics. Because when middle-class families have less to spend, guess what, businesses have fewer consumers. When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy. When the rungs on the ladder of opportunity grow farther and farther apart, it undermines the very essence of America -- that idea that if you work hard you can make it here.

And that’s why reversing these trends has to be Washington’s highest priority. (Applause.) It has to be Washington's highest priority. (Applause.) It’s certainly my highest priority. (Applause.)

Unfortunately, over the past couple of years, in particular, Washington hasn’t just ignored this problem; too often, Washington has made things worse. (Applause.)

And I have to say that -- because I'm looking around the room -- I've got some friends here not just who are Democrats, I've got some friends here who are Republicans -- (applause) -- and I worked with in the state legislature and they did great work. But right now, what we’ve got in Washington, we've seen a sizable group of Republican lawmakers suggest that they wouldn’t vote to pay the very bills that Congress rang up. And that fiasco harmed a fragile recovery in 2011 and we can't afford to repeat that.

Then, rather than reduce our deficits with a scalpel -- by cutting out programs we don’t need, fixing ones that we do need that maybe are in need of reform, making government more efficient -- instead of doing that, we've got folks who’ve insisted on leaving in place a meat cleaver called the sequester that's cost jobs. It's harmed growth. It's hurt our military. It's gutted investments in education and science and medical research. (Applause.)

Almost every credible economist will tell you it's been a huge drag on this recovery. And it means that we're underinvesting in the things that this country needs to make it a magnet for good jobs.

Then, over the last six months, this gridlock has gotten worse. I didn't think that was possible. (Laughter.) The good news is a growing number of Republican senators are looking to join their Democratic counterparts and try to get things done in the Senate. So that's good news. (Applause.) For example, they worked together on an immigration bill that economists say will boost our economy by more than a trillion dollars, strengthen border security, make the system work.

But you've got a faction of Republicans in the House who won’t even give that bill a vote. And that same group gutted a farm bill that America’s farmers depend on, but also America's most vulnerable children depend on.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Booo --

THE PRESIDENT: And if you ask some of these folks, some of these folks mostly in the House, about their economic agenda how it is that they'll strengthen the middle class, they’ll shift the topic to “out-of-control government spending” –- despite the fact that we've cut the deficit by nearly half as a share of the economy since I took office. (Applause.)

Or they’ll talk about government assistance for the poor, despite the fact that they’ve already cut early education for vulnerable kids. They've already cut insurance for people who’ve lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Or they’ll bring up Obamacare -- this is tried and true -- despite the fact that our businesses have created nearly twice as many jobs in this recovery as businesses had at the same point in the last recovery when there was no Obamacare. (Applause.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My daughter has insurance now!

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that. (Applause.) That’s what this is about. That’s what this is about. (Applause.) That’s what we've been fighting for.

But with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop. (Applause.) This needs to stop.

This moment does not require short-term thinking. It does not require having the same old stale debates. Our focus has to be on the basic economic issues that matter most to you, the people we represent. That’s what we have to spend our time on and our energy on and our focus on. (Applause.)

And as Washington prepares to enter another budget debate, the stakes for our middle class and everybody who is fighting to get into the middle class could not be higher. The countries that are passive in the face of a global economy, those countries will lose the competition for good jobs. They will lose the competition for high living standards. That’s why America has to make the investments necessary to promote long-term growth and shared prosperity -- rebuilding our manufacturing base, educating our workforce, upgrading our transportation systems, upgrading our information networks. (Applause.) That’s what we need to be talking about. That’s what Washington needs to be focused on.

And that’s why, over the next several weeks, in towns across this country, I will be engaging the American people in this debate. (Applause.) I'll lay out my ideas for how we build on the cornerstones of what it means to be middle class in America, and what it takes to work your way into the middle class in America: Job security, with good wages and durable industries. A good education. A home to call your own. Affordable health care when you get sick. (Applause.) A secure retirement even if you’re not rich. Reducing poverty. Reducing inequality. Growing opportunity. That’s what we need. (Applause.) That’s what we need. That’s what we need right now. That’s what we need to be focused on. (Applause.)

Now, some of these ideas I’ve talked about before. Some of the ideas I offer will be new. Some will require Congress. Some I will pursue on my own. (Applause.) Some ideas will benefit folks right away. Some will take years to fully implement. But the key is to break through the tendency in Washington to just bounce from crisis to crisis. What we need is not a three-month plan, or even a three-year plan; we need a long-term American strategy, based on steady, persistent effort, to reverse the forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades. That has to be our project. (Applause.)

Now, of course, we’ll keep pressing on other key priorities. I want to get this immigration bill done. We still need to work on reducing gun violence. (Applause.) We’ve got to continue to end the war in Afghanistan, rebalance our fight against al Qaeda. (Applause.) We need to combat climate change. We’ve got to standing up for civil rights. We’ve got to stand up for women’s rights. (Applause.)

So all those issues are important, and we’ll be fighting on every one of those issues. But if we don’t have a growing, thriving middle class then we won’t have the resources to solve a lot of these problems. We won’t have the resolve, the optimism, the sense of unity that we need to solve many of these other issues.

Now, in this effort, I will look to work with Republicans as well as Democrats wherever I can. And I sincerely believe that there are members of both parties who understand this moment, understand what’s at stake, and I will welcome ideas from anybody across the political spectrum. But I will not allow gridlock, or inaction, or willful indifference to get in our way. (Applause.)

That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it. (Applause.) Where I can’t act on my own and Congress isn’t cooperating, I’ll pick up the phone -- I’ll call CEOs; I’ll call philanthropists; I’ll call college presidents; I’ll call labor leaders. I’ll call anybody who can help -- and enlist them in our efforts. (Applause.)

Because the choices that we, the people, make right now will determine whether or not every American has a fighting chance in the 21st century. And it will lay the foundation for our children’s future, our grandchildren’s future, for all Americans.
So let me give you a quick preview of what I’ll be fighting for and why. The first cornerstone of a strong, growing middle class has to be, as I said before, an economy that generates more good jobs in durable, growing industries. That's how this area was built. That's how America prospered. Because anybody who was willing to work, they could go out there and they could find themselves a job, and they could build a life for themselves and their family.

Now, over the past four years, for the first time since the 1990s, the number of American manufacturing jobs has actually gone up instead of down. That's the good news. (Applause.) But we can do more. So I’m going to push new initiatives to help more manufacturers bring more jobs back to the United States. (Applause.) We’re going to continue to focus on strategies to make sure our tax code rewards companies that are not shipping jobs overseas, but creating jobs right here in the United States of America. (Applause.)

We want to make sure that -- we’re going to create strategies to make sure that good jobs in wind and solar and natural gas that are lowering costs and, at the same time, reducing dangerous carbon pollution happen right here in the United States. (Applause.)

And something that Cheri and I were talking about on the way over here -- I’m going to be pushing to open more manufacturing innovation institutes that turn regions left behind by global competition into global centers of cutting-edge jobs. So let’s tell the world that America is open for business. (Applause.) I know there’s an old site right here in Galesburg, over on Monmouth Boulevard -- let’s put some folks to work. (Applause.)

Tomorrow, I’ll also visit the Port of Jacksonville, Florida to offer new ideas for doing what America has always done best, which is building things. Pat and I were talking before I came -- backstage -- Pat Quinn -- he was talking about how I came over the Don Moffitt Bridge. (Applause.) But we’ve got work to do all across the country. We’ve got ports that aren’t ready for the new supertankers that are going to begin passing through the new Panama Canal in two years’ time. If we don’t get that done, those tankers are going to go someplace else. We’ve got more than 100,000 bridges that are old enough to qualify for Medicare. (Laughter and applause.)

Businesses depend on our transportation systems, on our power grids, on our communications networks. And rebuilding them creates good-paying jobs right now that can’t be outsourced. (Applause.)

And by the way, this isn’t a Democratic idea. Republicans built a lot of stuff. This is the Land of Lincoln. Lincoln was all about building stuff -- first Republican President. (Applause.) And yet, as a share of our economy, we invest less in our infrastructure than we did two decades ago. And that’s inefficient at a time when it’s as cheap as it’s been since the 1950s to build things. It’s inexcusable at a time when so many of the workers who build stuff for a living are sitting at home waiting for a call.

The longer we put this off, the more expensive it will be and the less competitive we will be. Businesses of tomorrow will not locate near old roads and outdated ports. They’ll relocate to places with high-speed Internet, and high-tech schools, and systems that move air and auto traffic faster, and not to mention will get parents home quicker from work because we’ll be eliminating some of these traffic jams. And we can watch all of that happen in other countries, and start falling behind, or we can choose to make it happen right here, in the United States. (Applause.)

In an age when jobs know no borders, companies are also going to seek out the countries that boast the most talented citizens, and they’ll reward folks who have the skills and the talents they need -- they’ll reward those folks with good pay.

The days when the wages for a worker with a high school degree could keep pace with the earnings of somebody who got some sort of higher education -- those days are over. Everybody here knows that. There are a whole bunch of folks here whose dads or grandpas worked at a plant, didn’t need a high school education. You could just go there. If you were willing to work hard, you might be able to get two jobs. And you could support your family, have a vacation, own your home. But technology and global competition, they’re not going away. Those old days aren’t coming back.

So we can either throw up our hands and resign ourselves to diminishing living standards, or we can do what America has always done, which is adapt, and pull together, and fight back, and win. That’s what we have to do. (Applause.)

And that brings me to the second cornerstone of a strong middle class -- and everybody here knows it -- an education that prepares our children and our workers for the global competition that they’re going to face. (Applause.) And if you think education is expensive, wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21st century. (Laughter and applause.)

If we don’t make this investment, we’re going to put our kids, our workers, and our country at a competitive disadvantage for decades. So we have to begin in the earliest years. And that’s why I’m going to keep pushing to make high-quality preschool available for every 4-year-old in America. (Applause.) Not just because we know it works for our kids, but because it provides a vital support system for working parents.

And I’m going to take action in the education area to spur innovation that don’t require Congress. (Applause.) So, today, for example, as we speak, federal agencies are moving on my plan to connect 99 percent of America’s students to high-speed Internet over the next five years. We’re making that happen right now. (Applause.) We’ve already begun meeting with business leaders and tech entrepreneurs and innovative educators to identify the best ideas for redesigning our high schools so that they teach the skills required for a high-tech economy.

And we’re also going to keep pushing new efforts to train workers for changing jobs. So here in Galesburg, for example, a lot of the workers that were laid off at Maytag chose to enroll in retraining programs like the one at Carl Sandburg College. (Applause.) And while it didn’t pay off for everyone, a lot of the folks who were retrained found jobs that suited them even better and paid even more than the ones they had lost.

And that’s why I’ve asked Congress to start a Community College to Career initiative, so that workers can earn the skills that high-tech jobs demand without leaving their hometown. (Applause.) And I’m going to challenge CEOs from some of America’s best companies to hire more Americans who’ve got what it takes to fill that job opening but have been laid off for so long that nobody is giving their résumé an honest look.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: More talent!

THE PRESIDENT: That, too.

I’m also going to use the power of my office over the next few months to highlight a topic that’s straining the budgets of just about every American family -- and that’s the soaring cost of higher education. (Applause.) Everybody is touched by this, including your President, who had a whole bunch of loans he had to pay off. (Laughter.)

Three years ago, I worked with Democrats to reform the student loan system so that taxpayer dollars stopped padding the pockets of big banks, and instead helped more kids afford college. (Applause.) Then, I capped loan repayments at 10 percent of monthly incomes for responsible borrowers, so that if somebody graduated and they decided to take a teaching job, for example, that didn’t pay a lot of money, they knew that they were never going to have to pay more than 10 percent of their income and they could afford to go into a profession that they loved. That’s in place right now. (Applause.) And this week, we’re working with both parties to reverse the doubling of student loan rates that happened a few weeks ago because of congressional inaction. (Applause.)

So this is all a good start -- but it isn’t enough. Families and taxpayers can’t just keep paying more and more and more into an undisciplined system where costs just keep on going up and up and up. We’ll never have enough loan money, we’ll never have enough grant money, to keep up with costs that are going up 5, 6, 7 percent a year. We’ve got to get more out of what we pay for.

Now, some colleges are testing new approaches to shorten the path to a degree, or blending teaching with online learning to help students master material and earn credits in less time. In some states, they’re testing new ways to fund college based not just on how many students enroll, but how many of them graduate, how well did they do.

So this afternoon, I’ll visit the University of Central Missouri to highlight their efforts to deliver more bang for the buck to their students. And in the coming months, I will lay out an aggressive strategy to shake up the system, tackle rising costs, and improve value for middle-class students and their families. It is critical that we make sure that college is affordable for every single American who’s willing to work for it. (Applause.)

Now, so you’ve got a good job; you get a good education -- those have always been the key stepping stones into the middle class. But a home of your own has always been the clearest expression of middle-class security. For most families, that’s your biggest asset. For most families, that’s where your life’s work has been invested. And that changed during the crisis, when we saw millions of middle-class families experience their home values plummeting. The good news is over the past four years, we’ve helped more responsible homeowners stay in their homes. And today, sales are up and prices are up, and fewer Americans see their homes underwater.

But we’re not done yet. The key now is to encourage homeownership that isn’t based on unrealistic bubbles, but instead is based on a solid foundation, where buyers and lenders play by the same set of rules, rules that are clear and transparent and fair.

So already, I’ve asked Congress to pass a really good, bipartisan idea -- one that was championed, by the way, by Mitt Romney’s economic advisor -- and this is the idea to give every homeowner the chance to refinance their mortgage while rates are still low so they can save thousands of dollars a year. (Applause.) It will be like a tax cut for families who can refinance.

I’m also acting on my own to cut red tape for responsible families who want to get a mortgage but the bank is saying no. We’ll work with both parties to turn the page on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and build a housing finance system that’s rock-solid for future generations.

So we’ve got more work to do to strengthen homeownership in this country. But along with homeownership, the fourth cornerstone of what it means to be middle class in this country is a secure retirement. (Applause.) I hear from too many people across the country, face to face or in letters that they send me, that they feel as if retirement is just receding from their grasp. It’s getting farther and farther away. They can't see it.

Now, today, a rising stock market has millions of retirement balances going up, and some of the losses that had taken place during the financial crisis have been recovered. But we still live with an upside-down system where those at the top, folks like me, get generous tax incentives to save, while tens of millions of hardworking Americans who are struggling, they get none of those breaks at all. So as we work to reform our tax code, we should find new ways to make it easier for workers to put away money, and free middle-class families from the fear that they won't be able to retire. (Applause.)

And if Congress is looking for a bipartisan place to get started, I should just say they don’t have to look far. We mentioned immigration reform before. Economists show that immigration reform makes undocumented workers pay their full share of taxes, and that actually shores up the Social Security system for years. So we should get that done. (Applause.)

Good job; good education for your kids; home of your own; secure retirement.

Fifth, I'm going to keep focusing on health care -- (applause) -- because middle-class families and small business owners deserve the security of knowing that neither an accident or an illness is going to threaten the dreams that you’ve worked a lifetime to build.

As we speak, we're well on our way to fully implementing the Affordable Care Act. (Applause.) We're going to implement it. Now, if you’re one of the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance either through the job or Medicare or Medicaid, you don’t have to do anything, but you do have new benefits and better protections than you did before. You may not know it, but you do. Free checkups, mammograms, discounted medicines if you're on Medicare -- that’s what the Affordable Care Act means. You're already getting a better deal. No lifetime limits.

If you don’t have health insurance, then starting on October 1st, private plans will actually compete for your business, and you'll be able to comparison-shop online. There will be a marketplace online, just like you’d buy a flat-screen TV or plane tickets or anything else you're doing online, and you'll be able to buy an insurance package that fits your budget and is right for you.

And if you're one of the up to half of all Americans who’ve been sick or have a preexisting condition -- if you look at this auditorium, about half of you probably have a preexisting condition that insurance companies could use to not give you insurance if you lost your job or lost your insurance -- well, this law means that beginning January 1st, insurance companies will finally have to cover you and charge you the same rates as everybody else, even if you have a preexisting condition. (Applause.) That’s what the Affordable Care Act does. That’s what it does. (Applause.)

Now, look, I know because I've been living it that there are folks out there who are actively working to make this law fail. And I don’t always understand exactly what their logic is here, why they think giving insurance to folks who don’t have it and making folks with insurance a little more secure, why they think that’s a bad thing. But despite the politically motivated misinformation campaign, the states that have committed themselves to making this law work are finding that competition and choice are actually pushing costs down.

So just last week, New York announced that premiums for consumers who buy their insurance in these online marketplaces will be at least 50 percent lower than what they're paying today -- 50 percent lower. (Applause.) So folks' premiums in the individual market will drop by 50 percent. And for them and for the millions of Americans who’ve been able to cover their sick kids for the first time -- like this gentlemen who just said his daughter has got health insurance -- or have been able to cover their employees more cheaply, or are able to have their kids who are younger than -- who are 25 or 26 stay on their parents' plan -- (applause) -- for all those folks, you'll have the security of knowing that everything you’ve worked hard for is no longer one illness away from being wiped out. (Applause.)

Finally, as we work to strengthen these cornerstones of middle-class security -- good job with decent wages and benefits, a good education, home of your own, retirement security, health care security -- I’m going to make the case for why we've got to rebuild ladders of opportunity for all those Americans who haven't quite made it yet -- who are working hard but are still suffering poverty wages, who are struggling to get full-time work. (Applause.)

There are a lot of folks who are still struggling out here, too many people in poverty. Here in America, we’ve never guaranteed success -- that's not what we do. More than some other countries, we expect people to be self-reliant. Nobody is going to do something for you. (Applause.) We've tolerated a little more inequality for the sake of a more dynamic, more adaptable economy. That's all for the good. But that idea has always been combined with a commitment to equality of opportunity to upward mobility -- the idea that no matter how poor you started, if you're willing to work hard and discipline yourself and defer gratification, you can make it, too. That's the American idea. (Applause.)

Unfortunately, opportunities for upward mobility in America have gotten harder to find over the past 30 years. And that’s a betrayal of the American idea. And that’s why we have to do a lot more to give every American the chance to work their way into the middle class.

The best defense against all of these forces -- global competition, economic polarization -- is the strength of the community. So we need a new push to rebuild rundown neighborhoods. (Applause.) We need new partnerships with some of the hardest-hit towns in America to get them back on their feet. And because no one who works full-time in America should have to live in poverty, I am going to keep making the case that we need to raise the minimum wage -- (applause) -- because it's lower right now than it was when Ronald Reagan took office. It's time for the minimum wage to go up. (Applause.)

We're not a people who allow chance of birth to decide life’s biggest winners or losers. And after years in which we’ve seen how easy it can be for any of us to fall on hard times -- folks in Galesburg, folks in the Quad Cities, you know there are good people who work hard and sometimes they get a bad break. A plant leaves. Somebody gets sick. Somebody loses a home. We've seen it in our family, in our friends and our neighbors. We've seen it happen. And that means we cannot turn our backs when bad breaks hit any of our fellow citizens.

So good jobs; a better bargain for the middle class and the folks who are working to get into the middle class; an economy that grows from the middle out, not the top down -- that's where I will focus my energies. (Applause.) That's where I will focus my energies not just for the next few months, but for the remainder of my presidency.

These are the plans that I'll lay out across this country. But I won’t be able to do it alone, so I'm going to be calling on all of us to take up this cause. We’ll need our businesses, who are some of the best in the world, to pressure Congress to invest in our future. And I’ll be asking our businesses to set an example by providing decent wages and salaries to their own employees. And I’m going to highlight the ones that do just that.

There are companies like Costco, which pays good wages and offers good benefits. (Applause.) Companies like -- there are companies like the Container Store, that prides itself on training its employees and on employee satisfaction -- because these companies prove that it’s not just good for the employees, it’s good for their businesses to treat workers well. It’s good for America. (Applause.)

So I’m going to be calling on the private sector to step up. I will be saying to Democrats we’ve got to question some of our old assumptions. We’ve got to be willing to redesign or get rid of programs that don't work as well as they should. (Applause.) We’ve got to be willing to -- we’ve got to embrace changes to cherished priorities so that they work better in this new age. We can't just -- Democrats can't just stand pat and just defend whatever government is doing. If we believe that government can give the middle class a fair shot in this new century -- and I believe that -- we’ve an obligation to prove it. And that means that we’ve got to be open to new ways of doing things.

And we’ll need Republicans in Congress to set aside short-term politics and work with me to find common ground. (Applause.)

It’s interesting, in the run-up to this speech, a lot of reporters say that, well, Mr. President, these are all good ideas, but some of you’ve said before; some of them sound great, but you can't get those through Congress. Republicans won’t agree with you. And I say, look, the fact is there are Republicans in Congress right now who privately agree with me on a lot of the ideas I’ll be proposing. I know because they’ve said so. But they worry they’ll face swift political retaliation for cooperating with me.

Now, there are others who will dismiss every idea I put forward either because they’re playing to their most strident supporters, or in some cases because, sincerely, they have a fundamentally different vision for America -- one that says inequality is both inevitable and just; one that says an unfettered free market without any restraints inevitably produces the best outcomes, regardless of the pain and uncertainty imposed on ordinary families; and government is the problem and we should just shrink it as small as we can.

In either case, I say to these members of Congress: I’m laying out my ideas to give the middle class a better shot. So now it’s time for you to lay out your ideas. (Applause.) You can't just be against something. You got to be for something. (Applause.)

Even if you think I’ve done everything wrong, the trends I just talked about were happening well before I took office. So it’s not enough for you just to oppose me. You got to be for something. What are your ideas? If you’re willing to work with me to strengthen American manufacturing and rebuild this country’s infrastructure, let’s go. If you’ve got better ideas to bring down the cost of college for working families, let’s hear them. If you think you have a better plan for making sure that every American has the security of quality, affordable health care, then stop taking meaningless repeal votes, and share your concrete ideas with the country. (Applause.)

Repealing Obamacare and cutting spending is not an economic plan. It’s not.

If you’re serious about a balanced, long-term fiscal plan that replaces the mindless cuts currently in place, or if you’re interested in tax reform that closes corporate loopholes and gives working families a better deal, I’m ready to work. (Applause.) But you should know that I will not accept deals that don’t meet the basic test of strengthening the prospects of hardworking families. This is the agenda we have to be working on. (Applause.)

We’ve come a long way since I first took office. (Applause.) As a country, we’re older and wiser. I don’t know if I’m wiser, but I’m certainly older. (Laughter.) And as long as Congress doesn’t manufacture another crisis -- as long as we don’t shut down the government just because I’m for keeping it open -- (laughter) -- as long as we don’t risk a U.S. default over paying bills that we’ve already racked up, something that we’ve never done -- we can probably muddle along without taking bold action. If we stand pat and we don’t do any of the things I talked about, our economy will grow, although slower than it should. New businesses will form. The unemployment rate will probably tick down a little bit. Just by virtue of our size and our natural resources and, most of all, because of the talent of our people, America will remain a world power, and the majority of us will figure out how to get by.

But you know what, that’s our choice. If we just stand by and do nothing in the face of immense change, understand that part of our character will be lost. Our founding precepts about wide-open opportunity, each generation doing better than the last -- that will be a myth, not reality. The position of the middle class will erode further. Inequality will continue to increase. Money’s power will distort our politics even more.

Social tensions will rise, as various groups fight to hold on to what they have, or start blaming somebody else for why their position isn’t improving. And the fundamental optimism that’s always propelled us forward will give way to cynicism or nostalgia.

And that’s not the vision I have for this country. It’s not the vision you have for this country. That’s not the America we know. That’s not the vision we should be settling for. That’s not a vision we should be passing on to our children.

I have now run my last campaign. I do not intend to wait until the next campaign or the next President before tackling the issues that matter. I care about one thing and one thing only, and that’s how to use every minute -- (applause) -- the only thing I care about is how to use every minute of the remaining 1,276 days of my term -- (laughter) -- to make this country work for working Americans again. (Applause.) That’s all I care about. I don’t have another election. (Applause.)

Because I’ll tell you, Galesburg, that’s where I believe America needs to go. I believe that’s where the American people want to go. And it may seem hard today, but if we’re willing to take a few bold steps -- if Washington will just shake off its complacency and set aside the kind of slash-and-burn partisanship that we’ve just seen for way too long -- if we just make some common-sense decisions, our economy will be stronger a year from now. It will be stronger five years from now. It will be stronger 10 years from now. (Applause.)

If we focus on what matters, then more Americans will know the pride of that first paycheck. More Americans will have the satisfaction of flipping the sign to “Open” on their own business. More Americans will have the joy of scratching the height of their kid on that door of their brand-new home. (Applause.)

And in the end, isn't that what makes us special? It's not the ability to generate incredible wealth for the few; it's our ability to give everybody a chance to pursue their own true measure of happiness. (Applause.) We haven’t just wanted success for ourselves -- we want it for our neighbors, too. (Applause.)

When we think about our own communities -- we're not a mean people; we're not a selfish people; we're not a people that just looks out for “number one.” Why should our politics reflect those kinds of values? That’s why we don’t call it John’s dream or Susie’s dream or Barack’s dream or Pat's dream -- we call it the American Dream. And that’s what makes this country special -- the idea that no matter who you are or what you look like or where you come from or who you love, you can make it if you try. (Applause.) That’s what we're fighting for.

So, yes, Congress is tough right now, but that’s not going to stop me. We're going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress, to make things happen. We're going to go on the road and talk to you, and you'll have ideas, and we want to see which ones we can implement. But we're going to focus on this thing that matters.

One of America’s greatest writers, Carl Sandburg, born right here in Galesburg over a century ago -- (applause) -- he saw the railroads bring the world to the prairie, and then the prairie sent out its bounty to the world. And he saw the advent of new industries, new technologies, and he watched populations shift. He saw fortunes made and lost. And he saw how change could be painful -- how a new age could unsettle long-held customs and ways of life. But he had that frontier optimism, and so he saw something more on the horizon. And he wrote, “I speak of new cities and new people. The past is a bucket of ashes. Yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west. There is only an ocean of tomorrows, a sky of tomorrows.”

Well, America, we’ve made it through the worst of yesterday’s winds. We just have to have the courage to keep moving forward. We've got to set our eyes on the horizon. We will find an ocean of tomorrows. We will find a sky of tomorrows for the American people and for this great country that we love.

So thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

END
1:17 P.M. CDT

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/24/remarks-president-economy-knox-college-galesburg-il


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Michele Bachmann: Obama 'Phony Scandals' Comment Is 'Insulting'
07/27/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/27/michele-bachmann-obama_n_3664305.html [with embedded video, and (over 5,000) comments]


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80 Percent Of U.S. Adults Face Near-Poverty, Unemployment: Survey



By HOPE YEN
07/28/13 09:37 PM ET EDT

WASHINGTON — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused – on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."

"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.

"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.
___

Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.

More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.

More than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.

Salyers' daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.

Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need."

"It's pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."
___

Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they're only a temporary snapshot that doesn't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.

In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number – 4 in 10 adults – falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.

The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.

Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.

By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.

By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.

"Poverty is no longer an issue of `them', it's an issue of `us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."

The numbers come from Rank's analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.

Among the findings:

- For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.

- Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.

- The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods – those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more – has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.

The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.

- Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.
___

Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.

The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.

Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites – defined as those lacking a college degree – remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.

Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for `the middle class' and `average Americans,'" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.

"They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.

"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.

AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County, Va., contributed to this report.

Online:

Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/poverty-unemployment-rates_n_3666594.html [with (over 28,000) comments]


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Interview With President Obama

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: July 27, 2013

Following is a transcript of an interview with President Obama conducted by Jackie Calmes and Michael D. Shear of The New York Times. The interview was conducted at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., on July 24, 2013.

NYT: So we’re here with you, already four years since the recession officially ended. And as your speech sort of laid out, you still have a situation where growth remains slow, income’s is unequal, and a lot of American -- unemployment high -- and a lot of Americans start to worry that this is the new normal. Your intentions aside like you stated them out there in the speech, why shouldn’t we expect that you’re going to leave behind an economy that’s fragile, continued income inequality, and a weakened middle class?

MR. OBAMA: Well, obviously, what Congress does matters. As I said in the speech, the economy is far stronger now than it was four and a half years ago. Most economists believe that growth will actually pick up next quarter and the second half of the year. And the one thing that could really screw things up would be if you have a manufactured crisis and Republicans choose to play brinksmanship all over again.

And I’m glad to see that there are folks in the Senate who I think have already indicated that that is not good policy. We can have debates about fiscal issues without precipitating a crisis. Certainly the idea that we wouldn’t pay our bills and plunge not just the United States but potentially the world into another financial crisis makes absolutely no sense.

But what I also said out there is true that if we stand pat, if we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise. Wages, incomes, savings rates for middle-class families will continue to be relatively flat. And that’s not a future that we should accept.

So the entire intention of the speech is to make sure that we are focused on the right thing. It doesn’t mean that I expect Republicans to agree with all my prescriptions, but it is to say that the central problem we face and the one that we faced now that the immediate crisis is over is how do we build a broad-based prosperity.

And I want to make sure that all of us in Washington are investing as much time, as much energy, as much debate on how we grow the economy and grow the middle class as we’ve spent over the last two to three years arguing about how we reduce the deficits.

NYT: But do you worry, Mr. President, that that description of that sort of standing pat, what happens if you stand pat and the sort of slower than expected -- do you worry that that could end up being your legacy simply because of the obstruction that -- and the gridlock that doesn’t seem to end?

MR. OBAMA: Well, let’s separate it from me for a second, because I think if I’m arguing for entirely different policies and Congress ends up pursuing policies that I think don’t make sense and we get a bad result, it’s hard to argue that’d be my legacy. And so I’ll worry about my legacy later or I’ll let historians worry about my legacy.

I do worry about what’s happening to ordinary families here is Galesburg and all across the country. When we know that rebuilding our infrastructure right now would put people back to work and it’s never been cheaper for us to do so, and this is all deferred maintenance that we’re going to have to do at some point anyway, I worry that we’re not moving faster to seize the moment. When we know that families are getting killed by college costs, for us not to take bold action -- which means that young people are graduating with massive debt, they can’t buy a home as soon as they want, they can’t start that business that they’ve got a great idea for -- that worries me.

So as I suggested in the speech, what I want to make sure everybody in Washington is obsessed with is how are we growing the economy, how are we increasing middle-class incomes and middle-class wages, and increasing middle-class security. And if we’re not talking about that, then we’re talking about the wrong thing. And if our debates around the budget don’t have that in mind, then we’ve got the wrong focus.

NYT: Well, you said it yourself in the speech that Washington has taken its eye off the ball. Do you have any -- are you culpable at all in that? Did you -- it’s six -- it’s July now, it’s almost August. Do you wish you were giving a speech like this earlier and done it more often?

MR. OBAMA: If you look over the last six months, we right away delivered on the promise to make sure that our tax code was more reflective of our values; that middle-class families locked in relief that they needed; folks like me, at the very top, paid a little bit more. That, by the way, was a fundamental shift that was a decade in the making. That was a big argument.

Immediately after that, obviously, we had the tragedy in Newtown and the need for a response. And my wish and hope had been that that was a quicker piece of business and that we had gone ahead and moved forward on that.

Immigration reform actually squarely fits into what I’m discussing right now. As I indicated before, we know the economy will grow faster if we get immigration reform done. We know that Social Security will be shored up if we get immigration reform done. And the Senate’s done the right thing by passing a strong bipartisan bill.

So what I will absolutely admit to is that I’ve been here – I’ve been in Washington long enough now to know that if once a week I’m not talking about jobs, the economy, and the middle class, then all manner of distraction fills the void.

NYT: Is there any part of your agenda moving forward that you think you are willing to move to the backburner so that you can spend more time on the economy?

MR. OBAMA: Well, immigration reform we’ve got to get done, and that right now is just a matter of the House Republicans recognizing that both the American people, businesses, labor, evangelicals -- there’s a broad consensus to go ahead and pass that bill, and if that bill was on the floor tomorrow it would pass.

Beyond that, though, we’re working on a range of other issues -- from climate change to reforming government to reducing the backlog in the VA. So there’s a bunch of stuff we’re going to be doing.

I will be spending my time over the next several weeks talking about the issues in more detail that I discussed today so that by the time Congress gets back in the fall, I want to make sure that the American people are paying attention and asking themselves, are we doing everything we can to boost middle-class incomes, ladders of opportunity, and middle-class security.

And if we’re doing that, then ultimately I think that we won’t get everything done that I want to see done, but we will have shifted away from what I think has been a bad – a damaging framework in Washington, which is to constantly think about is there more we can do to cut the deficit without asking are we making the right cuts, the smart cuts that actually help people in their own lives and help us grow over the long term.

NYT: Well, in contrast with the jobs plan that’s now what you’re reflecting today, it’s almost two years old now, and which would measurably add to employment the studies show.

MR. OBAMA: Right.

NYT: But in contrast with that, the policies that have been in place since the start of your second term, fiscal policies --

MR. OBAMA: Right, because of the sequester.

NYT: -- that you and Congress agreed to -- right -- and some of the laws -- the payroll tax cut, and the increase in upper-end taxes to some extent -- but all of those things are by any economist’s measure a drag on the economy. There’s not a day goes by I don’t get some analyst saying that -- and that the Fed is pursuing expansionary policies to offset that. How can you -- how are you going to -- what exactly can you do between now and the end of the year to overcome the Republicans’ opposition and change that, to end sequester?

MR. OBAMA: Well, let me back up, Jackie. First of all, as the economy got stronger during the course of my presidency, I had always committed to a responsible reduction in the deficit. I think that was the smart thing to do, the right thing to do, and good for our growth. And if we’re growing faster, if businesses and the markets have more confidence, then ultimately that benefits middle-class families as well. So I make no apologies for putting forward budgets consistently that, as I had promised, would gradually reduce the deficit.

Now, the sequester I did not want to be in place. When you say I agreed to it, what happened, as you will recall, in 2011 is, is that we had the prospect of either default or a willingness on the part of Republicans and Democrats to spend a year and a half trying to come up with a sensible way to reduce the deficit. The sequester was supposed to be something that was so damaging to the economy that both parties would want to avoid it. The fact that Republicans embraced the sequester as what they consider a win during the course of this year, despite all the damage that they said they wanted to avoid, for example, to our military, is different from me agreeing to the sequester. All right? So that’s point number one.

Point number two, every economist will tell you that if we are being smart about growth and we’re thinking about jobs and we’re thinking about the middle class, but we’re also thinking about fiscal responsibility, then what we should be doing is making sure that the drop-off in government spending on vital things like education and infrastructure don’t go down too fast, and that rather we look at what the real problem is, which is long-term health care costs.

Because of the Affordable Care Act and a lot of changes that are taking place out there among providers, we’re starting to see health care costs slow. That’s a positive. If we can build on that, then we can capture the same amount of savings that we’re capturing through the sequester and use those to make sure that we’re not cutting vital investments that I talked about today, and we can help middle-class families.

Now, I think there are probably going to be 15 different ways for you guys to ask me the same question, which is, “But there’s Congress.” (Laughter.) More specifically, “There’s the House Republicans, and what are you going to do about that?”

NYT: Who are still embracing sequestration and who are still willing to use the debt limit to go to the mat.

MR. OBAMA: Well, this is what they say. On the other hand, we also have a number of very thoughtful and sensible Republicans over in the Senate who have said that we should not play brinksmanship, that we should come up with a long-term plan. I met with a couple of House Republicans over the last several weeks who would like to see that happen. They’re not the loudest voices in the room at the moment.

And part of what I’d like to see over the next several weeks is, if we’re having a conversation that’s framed as how are we growing the economy, how are we strengthening the middle class, how are we putting people back to work, how are we making college more affordable, how are we bringing manufacturing back -- the answer to those questions I think force a different result than if we are constantly asking ourselves how can we cut the deficit more, faster, sooner.

NYT: Have you yielded anything from your outreach to Republicans? And do you still have hope for a 10-year deal by the end of the year?

MR. OBAMA: I think it’s still possible. There are certainly Republicans who are deeply concerned about the effects of sequester. It’s been interesting -- I’ve talked to a number of them who are from deeply red states, consider themselves very conservative, who say it doesn’t make sense for us to cut discretionary spending more; it doesn’t make sense for us to cut education further -- because they’re seeing the impacts in their districts. Certainly there are a bunch of Republicans who say for us to hollow out our military as steeply, drastically as we’re doing if sequester stays in place for next year makes no sense.

So if the American people have confidence that there’s a path that will grow the economy faster, put more people back to work, that doesn’t involve massive new federal spending programs, but instead just make sure that we’re investing in the right things, and if we’re being attentive to debt and deficits over a 20, 30-year time horizon, then potentially some of those Republicans start giving voice to their concerns a little more loudly than they’re doing right now.

But one of the challenges, as I said in the speech, is that there’s almost a kneejerk habit right now that if I’m for it, then they’ve got to be against it. And I think there are a lot of Republicans who are frustrated by that, because they want to be for something, not just against something. But they’ve got to work through that pattern that’s developed over the last couple of years.

NYT: A couple of slightly different topics. On the economy, the Fed is obviously an important player. You’ve got a big decision ahead of yourself in terms of the chairman. What are you looking for in a chairman? And there were reports yesterday that you are very close to naming Larry Summers as the new Fed chairman. True?

MR. OBAMA: I have not made a final decision. I’ve narrowed it down to some extraordinarily qualified candidates.

NYT: Do you want to say who?

MR. OBAMA: No. (Laughter.)

NYT: I tried.

MR. OBAMA: And what I’m looking for is somebody who understands the Fed has a dual mandate, that that’s not just lip service; that it is very important to keep inflation in check, to keep our dollar sound, and to ensure stability in the markets. But the idea is not just to promote those things in the abstract. The idea is to promote those things in service of the lives of ordinary Americans getting better.

And when unemployment is still too high, and long-term unemployment is still too high, and there’s still weak demand in a lot of industries, I want a Fed chairman that can step back and look at that objectively and say, let’s make sure that we’re growing the economy, but let’s also keep an eye on inflation, and if it starts heating up, if the markets start frothing up, let’s make sure that we’re not creating new bubbles.

NYT: And do you have a timeline in mind for announcing that?

MR. OBAMA: I think you can anticipate that over the next several months, an announcement will be made.

Ben Bernanke, by the way, has done a fine job as Fed chairman. And when you look at Ben Bernanke’s testimony, not just last week but over the last couple of years, what he’s consistently said is right now, our priority needs to be growing the economy faster and strengthening incomes for ordinary Americans. If we do that, our deficits come down because we’re bringing in more revenue. If we do that, it becomes easier for us to handle the long-term fiscal challenges.

And one of the interesting things that we don’t talk about enough is the contrast between what’s happened in the United States and what’s happened in a lot of other developed countries, Europe in particular. It's pretty rare where we have the chance to look at two policy approaches and follow them over several years and see which one worked. And the fact is there are a lot of European countries who followed the prescription that the House Republicans are calling for right now, and not only have they lagged well below where we've gone in terms of growth, in many cases their debt and their deficits have actually gone up because their economy is still effectively in recession. And although we haven’t been growing as fast as we would like, we have consistently outperformed those countries that followed the recipe that the House Republicans are offering right now.

Now, I’m more sympathetic to those European countries because they, in some cases, didn’t have a choice. They don’t have the dominant world currency. They don’t have people who want to invest in their countries the way folks around the world still want to invest in ours. But in some ways, we've got evidence here. This is not an abstract argument. We know what's needed to make our economy grow right now. And if we grow our economy, and middle-class families are doing better, and housing prices are stronger, and young people are starting families of their own and they’re jobs at good wages, that’s the thing that will bring deficits down the fastest.

NYT: A couple other quick subjects that are economic-related. Keystone pipeline -- Republicans especially talk about that as a big job creator. You've said that you would approve it only if you could be assured it would not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon in the atmosphere. Is there anything that Canada could do or the oil companies could do to offset that as a way of helping you to reach that decision?

MR. OBAMA: Well, first of all, Michael, Republicans have said that this would be a big jobs generator. There is no evidence that that’s true. And my hope would be that any reporter who is looking at the facts would take the time to confirm that the most realistic estimates are this might create maybe 2,000 jobs during the construction of the pipeline -- which might take a year or two -- and then after that we’re talking about somewhere between 50 and 100 [chuckles] jobs in a economy of 150 million working people.

NYT: Yet there are a number of unions who want you to approve this.

MR. OBAMA: Well, look, they might like to see 2,000 jobs initially. But that is a blip relative to the need.

So what we also know is, is that that oil is going to be piped down to the Gulf to be sold on the world oil markets, so it does not bring down gas prices here in the United States. In fact, it might actually cause some gas prices in the Midwest to go up where currently they can’t ship some of that oil to world markets.

Now, having said that, there is a potential benefit for us integrating further with a reliable ally to the north our energy supplies. But I meant what I said; I'm going to evaluate this based on whether or not this is going to significantly contribute to carbon in our atmosphere. And there is no doubt that Canada at the source in those tar sands could potentially be doing more to mitigate carbon release.

NYT: And if they did, could that offset the concerns about the pipeline itself?

MR. OBAMA: We haven't seen specific ideas or plans. But all of that will go into the mix in terms of John Kerry’s decision or recommendation on this issue.

NYT: And then -- I’ll let Jackie go -- but on the employer mandate, I don’t think you’ve been asked the question directly why you made the decision to delay it, and whether, given your criticism of President Bush over the years for potentially exceeding his executive authority, there’s been a lot of folks out there on the Republican side who claim that somehow you’ve exceeded your authority on this. Is there anything to that?

MR. OBAMA: Well, this was a very practical decision that actually doesn’t go to the heart of us implementing the Affordable Care Act. The majority of employers in this country provide health insurance to their employees. And the number of employers who are potentially subject to the employer mandate is relatively small.

The way the law was originally written, it did not take into account the fact that we don’t necessarily need to load up the vast majority of companies that are already doing the right thing with a bunch of additional paperwork; are there simpler ways for us to allow them to certify that they’re providing health insurance? And if they do that, then the purpose, the spirit of the law is met, and we can concentrate on the few bad actors who are unwilling to provide health insurance to their employees even though they can afford it, and they’re relatively large employers.

And businesses came to us and said, listen, we were supportive of providing health insurance to employees, in fact, we provide health insurance to our employees; we understand you want to get at the bad actors here, but are there ways to provide us some administrative relief? And what we said was, given that that is not critical to standing up the marketplaces where people are going to actually be able to buy lower-cost, high-quality insurance and get the tax credits that make it affordable for them, we thought it made sense to give another year not only for companies to prepare, but also for us to work with Treasury and others to see if there are just ways we can make this a little bit simpler for companies who are already doing the right thing.

This is the kind of routine modifications or tweaks to a large program that’s starting off that in normal times in a normal political atmosphere would draw a yawn from everybody. The fact that something like this generates a frenzy on Republicans is consistent with the fact that they've voted to repeal this thing 38 times without offering a alternative that is plausible. And from what I understand, based on recent reporting, they’ve just given up on offering an alternative.

So essentially -- their central economic plan that they’re currently presenting involves making sure that 50 million Americans cannot get health insurance; that people with preexisting conditions are potentially locked out of the market; that the rebates that people have received from insurance companies are sent back; that young people who are right now on their parents’ plan because they’re 26 or under, that they suddenly don’t have health insurance. I do not understand the argument that that somehow grows the economy or strengthens the middle class.

And during the course of implementation, are there going to be some glitches? Are there going to be some complaints from employers who are still trying to figure it out and may not know what subsidies are available to them? Absolutely. Are there some folks who may say, we're going to try to figure out ways not to provide health insurance to our employees? Yes. But that’s a small proportion of our overall economy, and the principle that everybody should be able to get health insurance is one that the vast majority of Americans agree with.

NYT: People questioned your legal and constitutional authority to do that unilaterally -- to delay the employer mandate. Did you consult with your lawyer?

MR. OBAMA: Jackie, if you heard me on stage today, what I said was that I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security --

NYT: No, but specifically –

MR. OBAMA: -- but where Congress is unwilling to act, I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people.

And if Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case. But there’s not an action that I take that you don't have some folks in Congress who say that I'm usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency. And I don't think that's a secret. But ultimately, I’m not concerned about their opinions -- very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.

I am concerned about the folks who I spoke to today who are working really hard, are trying to figure out how they can send their kids to college, are trying to make sure that they can save for their retirement. And if I can take steps on their behalf, then I’m going to do so. And I would hope that more and more of Congress will say, you know what, since that’s our primary focus, we’re willing to work with you to advance those ideals. But I’m not just going to sit back if the only message from some of these folks is no on everything, and sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.

NYT: Polls this week have shown your health care law has lost support. What are you going to be doing to build support?

MR. OBAMA: We’re going to implement it.

NYT: Are you going to be getting out on the road?

MR. OBAMA: Here is what will build support, given that we’ve been outspent four to one from the other side with all kinds of distortions about health care. Here is what we’re going to do to beat back that misinformation. On October 1st, people are going to be able to start signing up. And if right now they’re buying insurance on the individual market, they’re going to get on those computers or they’re going to make a phone call to one of these call centers and they’re going to find out that they can save 20 percent, 30 percent, or 50 percent on their premiums. And people who have not been able to get insurance before are going to be able to finally get insurance. And people who lose their jobs in the interim and find out that they’ve got a preexisting condition, it’s hard for them to get insurance or they can’t afford COBRA, they’re going to have a place to go.

And over the course of six months to a year, as people sign up, and it works, and lo and behold, the people who already have health insurance are not being impacted at all other than the fact that their insurance is more secure and they are getting free preventive care, and all the nightmare scenarios and the train wrecks and the “sky is falling” predictions that come from the other side do not happen, then health care will become more popular.

But until then, when we’re getting outspent four to one and people are just uncertain about what all this means for them, we’re going to continue to have some polls like that. And me just making more speeches explaining it in and of itself won’t do it. The test of this is going to be is it working. And if it works, it will be pretty darn popular.

NYT: March on Washington coming up soon. Are you going to do anything to mark it? Are you planning on being a part of the 50th anniversary?

MR. OBAMA: Absolutely. It’s obviously a historic, seminal event in the country. It’s part of my generation’s formative memory and it’s a good time for us to do some reflection. Obviously, after the Trayvon Martin case, a lot of people have been thinking about race, but I always remind people -- and, in fact, I have a copy of the original program in my office, framed -- that that was a march for jobs and justice; that there was a massive economic component to that.

When you think about the coalition that brought about civil rights, it wasn’t just folks who believed in racial equality; it was people who believed in working folks having a fair shot. It was Walter Reuther and the UAW coming down here because they understood that if there are some workers who are not getting a fair deal then ultimately that’s going to undercut their ability to get a fair deal. And if there’s one thing that I wanted to try to emphasize today in this speech, it is that America has always worked better when everybody has a chance to succeed.

I had a conversation a couple of weeks back with a guy named Robert Putnam, who I’ve known for a long time.

NYT: He was my professor actually at Harvard.

MR. OBAMA: Right. I actually knew Bob when I was a state senator and he had put together this seminar to just talk about some of the themes that he had written about in “Bowling Alone,” the weakening of the community fabric and the impact it’s having on people.

And the work he’s doing right now has to do with this issue of inequality. And it applies to a city like Galesburg, where 30 years ago, anybody in this town who wanted to find a job, they could go get a job. They could go get it at the Maytag plant. They could go get it with the railroad. It might be hard work, it might be tough work, but they could buy a house with it.

The kids here all went to the same school -- the banker’s kid and the guy working at the Maytag plant’s going to the same school. They've got the same social support. College is affordable for all of them. They don't have to take out $100,000 of debt to do it. And there was a sense of not upward mobility in the abstract; it was part and parcel of who we were as Americans. And that’s what’s been eroding over the last 20, 30 years, well before the financial crisis.

Now, the financial crisis made things a lot worse. And so I had to spend the first four years in my presidency getting us back to ground level. We had to make sure the banking system wasn't collapsing. We had to make sure the auto industry didn't collapse. We had to make sure that we put people back to work short term and boosted demand until the markets got going and consumers got more confident and housing started to recover.

And so here we are, having dealt with this massive crisis, but those trends -- that erosion of what a Galesburg or a [Port]* Clinton, Ohio, where Bob Putnam lived -- those trends have continued.

And that’s what people sense. That's why people are anxious. That's why people are frustrated. That's what they talk to me about and that's what they write to me about: “I'm doing okay right now, but what I've seen over the last 20 years and what I learned profoundly during this crisis is that the ground under my feet just isn't as secure, and that the work I'm doing may not be rewarded.” And everything that I am proposing and everything I will be proposing over the next three years goes right at that issue. And if that’s not what Washington’s talking about, then we will be missing the boat.

And racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot. If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested. Everybody feels as if we're rolling in the same direction. And so a lot of the other issues that we’re talking about -- whether it’s climate change or immigration, or how we manage our trade relations -- all those are eased if we’ve got our economic act together.

But that’s not what we talk about. And it's true that Congress moves at such a glacial pace these days that sometimes if you start a bill like immigration and you're thinking this should be done by now, it seems to take a year of folks just sitting around spinning their wheels, that can be frustrating. But we should be able to attend to some of these other issues even as we’re staying focused on this central issue. That’s at least what I’m going to be doing.

NYT: Thank you, Mr. President.

MR. OBAMA: Thanks, guys. Appreciate you.

*

Related

Obama Says Income Gap Is Fraying U.S. Social Fabric (July 28, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/us/politics/obama-says-income-gap-is-fraying-us-social-fabric.html

Obama Says He’ll Evaluate Pipeline Project Depending on Pollution (July 28, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/us/politics/obama-says-hell-evaluate-pipeline-project-depending-on-pollution.html

Obama Intends to Let Health Care Law Prove Critics Wrong by Succeeding (July 28, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/us/politics/obama-intends-to-let-health-care-law-prove-critics-wrong-by-succeeding.html

*

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/us/politics/interview-with-president-obama.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/us/politics/interview-with-president-obama.html?pagewanted=all ]


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Sequestration Cuts: More Americans Say Budget Issues Have Hurt Them, NBC News/WSJ Poll Reveals
07/28/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/sequestration-cuts_n_3667579.html [with related embedded video report, and comments]


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Status and Stress


Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch

By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF
July 27, 2013, 2:30 pm

Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills.

What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects.

That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood.

Even those who later ascend economically may show persistent effects of early-life hardship. Scientists find them more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age.

The British epidemiologist Michael Marmot calls the phenomenon “status syndrome [ http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/status-syndrome-michael-marmot/1100625927?ean=9780805078541 ].” He’s studied British civil servants who work in a rigid hierarchy for decades, and found that accounting for the usual suspects — smoking, diet and access to health care — won’t completely abolish the effect. There’s a direct relationship among health, well-being and one’s place in the greater scheme. “The higher you are in the social hierarchy,” he says, “the better your health.”

Dr. Marmot blames a particular type of stress. It’s not necessarily the strain of a chief executive facing a lengthy to-do list, or a well-to-do parent’s agonizing over a child’s prospects of acceptance to an elite school. Unlike those of lower rank, both the C.E.O. and the anxious parent have resources with which to address the problem. By definition, the poor have far fewer.

So the stress that kills, Dr. Marmot and others argue, is characterized by a lack of a sense of control over one’s fate. Psychologists who study animals call one result of this type of strain “learned helplessness.”

How they induce it is instructive. Indiscriminate electric shocks will send an animal into a kind of depression, blunting its ability to learn and remember. But if the animal has some control over how long the shocks last, it remains resilient. Pain and unpleasantness matter less than having some control over their duration.

Biologists explain the particulars as a fight-or-flight response — adrenaline pumping, heart rate elevated, blood pressure increased — that continues indefinitely. This reaction is necessary for escaping from lions, bears and muggers, but when activated chronically it wears the body ragged. And it’s especially unhealthy for children, whose nervous systems are, by evolutionary design, malleable.

Scientists can, in fact, see the imprint of early-life stress decades later: there are more markers of inflammation in those who have experienced such hardship. Chronic inflammation increases the risk of degenerative diseases like heart disease and diabetes. Indeed, telomeres — the tips of our chromosomes — appear to be shorter among those who have experienced early-life adversity, which might be an indicator of accelerated aging. And scientists have found links, independent of current income, between early-life poverty and a higher risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and arthritis in adulthood.

“Early-life stress and the scar tissue that it leaves, with every passing bit of aging, gets harder and harder to reverse,” says Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford. “You’re never out of luck in terms of interventions, but the longer you wait, the more work you’ve got on your hands.”

This research has cast new light on racial differences in longevity. In the United States, whites live longer on average by about five years than African-Americans. But a 2012 study by a Princeton researcher calculated that socioeconomic and demographic factors, not genetics, accounted for 70 to 80 percent of that difference. The single greatest contributor was income, which explained more than half the disparity. Other studies, meanwhile, suggest that the subjective experience of racism by African-Americans — a major stressor — appears to have effects on health. Reports of discrimination correlate with visceral fat accumulation in women, which increases the risk of metabolic syndrome (and thus the risk of heart disease and diabetes). In men, they correlate with high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.


Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch

Race aside, Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York, describes these relationships as one way that “poverty gets under the skin.” He and others talk about the “biological embedding” of social status. Your parents’ social standing and your stress level during early life change how your brain and body work, affecting your vulnerability to degenerative disease decades later. They may even alter your vulnerability to infection. In one study, scientists at Carnegie Mellon exposed volunteers to a common cold virus. Those who’d grown up poorer (measured by parental homeownership) not only resisted the virus less effectively, but also suffered more severe cold symptoms.

Peter Gianaros, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, is interested in heart disease. He found that college students who viewed their parents as having low social status reacted more strongly to images of angry faces, as measured by the reactivity of the amygdala — an almond-shaped area of the brain that coordinates the fear response. Over a lifetime, he suspects, a harder, faster response to threats may contribute to the formation of arterial plaques. Dr. Gianaros also found that, among a group of 48 women followed for about 20 years, higher reports of stress correlated with a reduction in the volume of the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory. In animals, chronic stress shrinks this area, and also hinders the ability to learn.

These associations raise profound questions about stress’s role in hindering life achievement. Educational attainment and school performance have long been linked to socioeconomic class, and a divergence in skills is evident quite early in life. One oft-cited study suggests that 3-year-olds from professional families have more than twice the vocabulary of children from families on welfare. The disparity may stem in part from different intensities of parental stimulation; poorer parents may simply speak less with their children.

But Martha Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has also noted differences not just in the words absorbed but in the abilities that may help youngsters learn. Among children, she’s found, socioeconomic status correlates with the ability to pay attention and ignore distractions. Others have observed differences in the function of the prefrontal cortex, a region associated with planning and self-control, in poorer children.

“You don’t need a neuroscientist to tell you that less stress, more education, more support of all types for young families are needed,” Dr. Farah told me in an e-mail. “But seeing an image of the brain with specific regions highlighted where financial disadvantage results in less growth reframes the problems of childhood poverty as a public health issue, not just an equal opportunity issue.”

Animal studies help dispel doubts that we’re really seeing sickly and anxiety-prone individuals filter to the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. In primate experiments females of low standing are more likely to develop heart disease compared with their counterparts of higher standing. When eating junk food, they more rapidly progress toward heart disease. The lower a macaque is in her troop, the higher her genes involved in inflammation are cranked. High-ranking males even heal faster than their lower-ranking counterparts. Behavioral tendencies change as well. Low-ranking males are more likely to choose cocaine over food than higher-ranking individuals.

All hope is not lost, however. Gene expression profiles can normalize when low-ranking adult individuals ascend in the troop. “There are likely contextual influences that are not necessarily immutable,” says Daniel Hackman, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. And yet, as with humans, the mark of early-life hardship persists in nervous systems wired slightly differently. A nurturing bond with a caregiver in a stimulating environment appears essential for proper brain development and healthy maturation of the stress response. That sounds easy enough, except that such bonds, and the broader social networks that support them, are precisely what poverty disrupts. If you’re an underpaid, overworked parent — worried, behind on rent, living in a crime-ridden neighborhood — your parental skills are more likely to be compromised. That’s worrisome given the trends in the United States. About one in five children now lives below the poverty line, a 35 percent increase in a decade. Unicef recently ranked the United States No. 26 in childhood well-being, out of 29 developed countries. When considering just childhood poverty, only Romania fares worse.

“We’re going in the wrong direction in terms of greater inequality creating more of these pressures,” says Nancy Adler, the director of the Center for Health and Community at the University of California, San Francisco. As income disparities have increased, class mobility has declined. By some measures, you now have a better chance of living the American dream in Canada or Western Europe than in the United States. And while Americans generally gained longevity during the late 20th century, those gains have gone disproportionately to the better-off. Those without a high school education haven’t experienced much improvement in life span since the middle of the 20th century. Poorly educated whites have lost a few years of longevity in recent decades.

A National Research Council report, meanwhile, found that Americans were generally sicker and had shorter life spans than people in 16 other wealthy nations. We rank No. 1 for diabetes in adults over age 20, and No. 2 for deaths from coronary artery disease and lung disease. The Japanese smoke more than Americans, but outlive us — as do the French and Germans, who drink more. The dismal ranking is surprising given that America spends nearly twice as much per capita on health care as the next biggest spender.

But an analysis by Elizabeth H. Bradley, an economist at the Yale School of Public Health, suggests that how you spend money matters. The higher the spending on social services relative to health care, she’s found, the greater the longevity dividends.

Some now argue that addressing health disparities and their causes is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one. It will save money in the long run. The University of Chicago economist James Heckman estimates that investing in poor children yields a yearly return of 7 to 10 percent thereafter to society.

Early-life stress and poverty aren’t a problem of only the poor. They cost everyone.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a science writer and the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases [ http://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergies-Autoimmune/dp/1439199388 ].”

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/status-and-stress/ [with comments]


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The Worst States to Be Unemployed
July 26, 2013
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2013/07/26/the-worst-states-to-be-unemployed/


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‘That’s as Bad as It Gets’
July 25, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/sports/lady-jaguars-thats-as-bad-as-it-gets.html

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Hannah’s Story
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/26/sports/hannahs-story-documentary.html

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‘It Ain’t About the Record’
April 14, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/sports/carroll-academy-basketball-it-aint-about-the-record.html


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Congress Budget Showdown Looms

07/28/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/congress-budget_n_3666377.html [with comments]


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Scott Rigell Calls To Cancel House's August Recess
07/27/2013
Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.) thinks it's "not wise" for Congress to go on August recess while "we are in a serious, serious financial condition."
[...]
The House will take the entire month of August off [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/house-calendar-september_n_3618775.html ], per that tradition. House leadership currently has just 9 work days penciled in for September.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/27/scott-rigell-recess_n_3664442.html


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Jack Lew: 'Congress Needs To Do Its Job,' Pass A Debt Limit

07/28/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/jack-lew-congress_n_3666957.html [with embedded video, and comments]


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Mike Lee Admits There Will Be No Government Shutdown Over Obamacare
07/28/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/mike-lee-obamacare_n_3667329.html [with embedded video, and comments]


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The GOP's Female Candidate Problem
July 26, 2013
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/26/the_gops_female_candidate_problem_119382.html [with comments]


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Sarah Palin: I Was 'Banned' From Talking About Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers During 2008 Campaign
07/27/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/27/sarah-palin-banned_n_3663953.html [with embedded video, and (over 7,000) comments]


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State GOP war on women undermines national American will

The Rachel Maddow Show
July 10, 2013

Rachel Maddow reports on the number women's health clinics that are threatened with closure by new laws from Republican state legislatures, and shows the effects of those laws on a national map to illustrate that what appears to be a series of local issues is actually a de facto national story for American women.

© 2013 NBCNews.com

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow-show/52446472 [the above YouTube of the segment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE8fOlnsKwQ ; show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/07/10/19404067-links-for-the-710-trms (with comments)]


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The Republicans of the future?
July 27, 2013
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/27/politics/young-republicans/index.html [with (over 3,500) comments]

*

Young Republicans: GOP Must Make Substantive Changes
07/28/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/young-republicans-gop_n_3666800.html [with comments]


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Bill Maher: O’Reilly, GOPers Don’t Listen To Obama On Race, They Just ‘Know He’s Thinking Kill Whitey!’

July 26th, 2013
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/bill-maher-oreilly-gopers-dont-listen-to-obama-on-race-they-just-know-hes-thinking-kill-whitey/ [with comments] [the above YouTube of the video of the segment embedded in this Mediaite story at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf2a25AjLHk , and also embedded at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/27/bill-maher-republican-racism_n_3663901.html (with comments)]


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[F6]

Supreme Court Ethics Act Proposed In Response To Controversial Behavior By Justices Scalia, Thomas

By Nick Wing
Posted: 08/01/2013 1:45 pm EDT | Updated: 08/01/2013 7:06 pm EDT

A group of congressional Democrats is set to introduce legislation Thursday that would apply stricter ethical standards to the Supreme Court, amid concerns that justices have been engaging in questionable behavior.

The proposed Supreme Court Ethics Act of 2013 would subject the justices to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges [ http://www.uscourts.gov/RulesAndPolicies/CodesOfConduct/CodeConductUnitedStatesJudges.aspx ], a set of standards that currently applies to all other federal judges. Those rules would have forced the justices to recuse themselves from certain cases or explicitly prohibited some high-profile activities that have attracted scrutiny and demand for reform in the past few years.

The controversy over Supreme Court ethics re-emerged late last month, when Mother Jones reported [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/groundswell-rightwing-group-ginni-thomas (the post to which this is a reply)] that Ginni Thomas -- a well-connected tea party consultant and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas -- held an integral role in Groundswell, a conservative coalition of journalists and activists that has been meeting privately to coordinate talking points and messaging on key political issues. The revelation led to a new round of questions [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/ginni-thomas-groundswell-conflict-interest ] about whether her brand of partisan activism should constitute a conflict of interest for her husband, who has been tasked with ruling on many of the issues that she is involved in.

Currently, the Supreme Court's system for dealing with conflicts of interest, or appearances of conflicts, is to leave it to each justice's own best judgment. In the past, justices have recused themselves from cases apparently because they held significant stock in a company before the court or when their adult offspring were professionally involved in the case. But Thomas took part in the Obamacare decision despite calls to recuse himself due to his wife's outspoken advocacy against the law.

Reform advocates have similarly noted that Justices Antonin Scalia and Thomas attended a Koch Industries fundraiser in 2010 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/scalia-thomas-koch-industries_n_769843.html ], just months after siding with the majority in the landmark Citizens United case, which effectively empowered the billionaire Koch brothers to spend millions of dollars in support of conservative political candidates.

The liberal Alliance for Justice has argued that the appearance of Scalia and Thomas as speakers at a 2011 dinner fundraiser for the conservative Federalist Society [ http://www.afj.org/connect-with-the-issues/supreme-court-ethics-reform/3%29%09http:/www.afj.org/connect-with-the-issues/supreme-court-ethics-reform/federalist-society-fundraiser.pdf ] is reason for a closer look at Supreme Court ethics. Legal experts also questioned Scalia's appearance at a 2012 fundraiser for Friends of Abe [ http://www.commonblog.com/2013/06/07/scalias-speech-to-secretive-hollywood-political-organization-raises-questions/ ], a group of Hollywood conservatives that has championed Republican causes and candidates.

The bill to be introduced Thursday -- by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) -- will be the latest move to impose binding ethics rules on the justices. Murphy introduced a similar effort in 2011 [ http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr862 ], when he was a congressman. Slaughter has been pressing the issue [ http://www.louise.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2907:supreme-court-accountability&catid=89:justice&Itemid=136 ] since 2011, when she and a group of 19 other representatives raised questions over apparent discrepancies in Thomas' income disclosure forms [ http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/22/nation/la-na-thomas-disclosure-20110122 ]. In 2012, a group of congressional lawmakers including Slaughter asked Chief Justice John Roberts [ http://www.louise.house.gov/images/stories/Report_Response_FINAL_3.7.124.pdf ] to voluntarily adopt the Judicial Code of Conduct. He declined [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2012/02/21/National-Politics/Graphics/Ltr_to_Chairman_Leahy.pdf ].

The initiative appears to have public support, as a petition at Credo [ http://org.credoaction.com/petitions/tell-supreme-court-justice-john-roberts-apply-a-code-of-conduct-to-the-supreme-court ] echoing the Supreme Court Ethics Act's call for reform has attracted more than 125,000 signatures.

The Supreme Court's traditional resistance to a binding code of conduct [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/05/chief-justice-john-roberts-supreme-court-ethics_n_1184780.html ] could make the bill difficult to implement if passed. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones noted [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/07/democrats-introduce-supreme-court-ethics-bill ] that the legislation could also open up a legal fight over the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/supreme-court-ethics-act_n_3689351.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Matt Shea, Washington Legislator, Tells Tea Party Group To Buy Ammunition To Prepare For Economic Collapse


Washington state Rep. Matt Shea said that residents should stock up on ammunition to prepare for an economic collapse.

By John Celock
Posted: 08/01/2013 12:15 pm EDT | Updated: 08/01/2013 7:04 pm EDT

A Republican state legislator in Washington told a group of tea party members and survivalists at a rally to buy thousands of rounds of ammunition to prepare for an economic collapse.

At an Idaho state park last weekend, State Rep. Matt Shea (R-Spokane Valley) said that preparation is the key to surviving what he said is an "inevitable collapse that is going to happen," the Coeur d'Alene Press reported [ http://www.cdapress.com/news/local_news/article_322c8855-9ea1-5ae1-a06e-1e69f3104eab.html ]. Shea was one of multiple speakers to bring up preparation; another speaker urged the creation of militias.

Shea, an Army veteran, told the crowd how to prepare, the Coeur d'Alene Press reports [id.]:

"When it happens, we need to look at this as a opportunity, not a crisis," he said. "Who's [sic] job is liberty? That's our job."

Shea urged the crowd to stock up on thousands of rounds of ammunition and to stay in shape, practice shooting, learn self defense and special tactics.

When he was in the military, Shea said one of his superiors told him something he will never forget.

"Be prepared at any given moment to give up your job to do what is right," he said. "You have to stand up for what is right - even if it means you have to stand up to your government."

Shea, a third-term lawmaker, was introduced to the crowd [ http://www.cdapress.com/news/local_news/article_322c8855-9ea1-5ae1-a06e-1e69f3104eab.html ] as one of the Southern Poverty Law Center's most hated politicians, a label Shea embraced at the rally. The SPLC's website [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/attacking-the-constitution-slli-and-the-anti-immigrant-movement/the-legislators ] describes Shea's belief that President Barack Obama is planning to take guns away from Americans and that the federal government is setting up concentration camps. The SPLC notes that Shea once told conservative talk show host Alex Jones that the federal government was behind the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and that Obama is running a secret army Shea described as "very sinister."

This year, Shea promoted legislation to bring more ammunition and gun-parts manufacturers to the state [ http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20130328/BLOG13/130329788/1036/NEWS05#Bill-aims-to-lure-ammunition-manufacturers-to-state ] to help residents who own guns.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported [ http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2013/07/30/rep-matt-shea-economy-is-going-to-collapse/ ] that Shea was in the news in recent years when his ex-wife accused him during their divorce of treating her as a "possession" and forcing her to walk on his left hand side since he could carry a sword on his right. In 2011, Shea was involved in an incident [ http://www.washblog.com/story/2012/10/27/195621/06 ] where he pointed a loaded gun at a driver who cut him off and then engaged the other vehicle in a high-speed chase.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/matt-shea-washington-ammunition_n_3689576.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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[fuagf]

FRC: “Man’s man” Jesus is coming back with AR-15 “Sandy Hook” assault rifle

2/20/2014 4:12pm by John Aravosis 65 Comments

In one of the more vulgar bastardizations of the word of Christ in recent times, one of the lead religious right groups, the Family Research Council, suggested that the Second Coming of the Lord will involve a testosterone-filled Jesus sporting an assault rifle.

And because Jesus’ blood lust apparently knows no bounds, he’s not just coming back with any assault rifle – the son of God’s apparent weapon of choice is the AR-15

[...]

Oh, and you might not be surprised to find out that Porno Jesus was actually
the architect of the Second Amendment. More from Boykin at a separate event:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/boykin-when-jesus-comes-back-hell-be-carrying-ar-15-assault-rifle

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The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 is says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A might warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe … I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies ’cause he’s coming back as a warrior carrying a sword.

And I believe now – I’ve checked this out – I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.
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He’s “checked this out.” Oh ok.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but Jesus is about as likely to arm himself with an assault rifle as would Dumbledore. When you’re almighty, you don’t need the weapons of man in order to make your point. Ergo, Noah’s flood. God could have bought a Glock, but instead he went with water. Same thing happened when it came time to deal with the Pharaoh in Egypt – you didn’t see Moses walking around with an Uzi (though it would have made for some beautiful anachronistic poetic justice). No, Moses and God did just fine with locusts and hail.

Oh, but there’s more:

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Rambo Jesus (Jesus’ face courtesy of Shutterstock.
Renata Sedmakova / Shutterstock.com)

Now I want you to think about this: where did the Second Amendment come from? … From the Founding Fathers, it’s in the Constitution. Well, yeah, I know that. But where did the whole concept come from? It came from Jesus when he said to his disciples ‘now, if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.’

I know, everybody says that was a metaphor. IT WAS NOT A METAPHOR! He was saying in building my kingdom, you’re going to have to fight at times. You won’t build my kingdom with a sword, but you’re going to have to defend yourself. And that was the beginning of the Second Amendment, that’s where the whole thing came from. I can’t prove that historically, and David [Barton] will counsel me when this is over, but I know that’s where it came from.

And the sword today is an AR-15, so if you don’t have one, go get one. You’re supposed to have one. It’s biblical.
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No, not biblical. Just nuts.

http://americablog.com/2014/02/frc-mans-man-jesus-coming-back-ar-15-sandy-hook-assault-rifle.html