The Senate on Thursday, in a real sense, filibustered the future. A Republican minority set themselves up as a roadblock against college students struggling to pay for their education and establish financial stability.

A narrow, 51-vote majority in the Senate supported legislation that would have kept student loan rates from increasing above 3.4 percent for the next two years, and would have covered the costs to the government by ending two tax breaks enjoyed by wealthy individuals and one used by oil companies. Nonetheless, in a Senate in which the filibuster has become routine, Republicans united to block debate and an up-or-down vote on the bill.

Since all it takes is 40 votes to keep a bill from getting a full airing on the Senate floor and then either approval or defeat by majority vote on its merits, Republicans can continue their scorched-earth obstruction. They could not get majority support for their own proposal on student loans – their bill that would have increased student loan rates to 3 percentage points above the 10-year Treasury rate, currently 1.75 percent, only received 40 votes – but they can keep Democrats from implementing popular, populist solutions that will better benefit students.

If anything, we should be going out of our way to make going to college as debt-free as possible. That’s why it is tragic that the best legislative solution to the college-debt crisis – Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bill that would take student loan rates down to 0.75 percent, the same rate as overnight loans to the big, money-center banks – did not even get a vote on Thursday.

Today, we’ve launched an updated petition demanding Congress approve that bill. We need to see who really stands with college students and the principle that we should be investing in them, not crushing them with debt.

The Senate should hear your disapproval right now.

Unless Congress acts, interest rates on student loans will double, to 6.8 percent, starting July 1. This is unacceptable at time when student loan debt exceeds $1 trillion – more than the nation’s credit-card debt – and when college graduates are facing either high unemployment or low wages at record levels. It’s also a travesty in the context of declining state financial support for college education in most of the country.

The overhang of student debt is a drag on the economy – college students are not buying houses, new cars, and other big-ticket items – and discourages graduates from going into professions, such as teaching or primary-care medicine, where they are desperately needed but the pay would not enable them to pay off their loans quickly.

The least we could have done was to keep the status quo in place for two years, perhaps enough time to shake the Congress out of its dysfunction so that it can go about the business of helping solve the nation’s economic crises. But instead the Republicans once again set themselves up as a roadblock, imperiling the futures of millions of college students while protecting the oil interests and millionaires from having to give up a single dime wrested through their manipulation of the tax code.

But we can do better, by giving the students who are the bedrock of our future the same break we give economic predators like Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Sign this petition to register your support for giving students the same interest rate we’re giving the big banks.

Yes, this is outrageous, but there is still hope. Last year around this time, Republicans were shamed into accepting a one-year freeze on student loan rates after they tried to push through legislation that would have increased rates. We can win again – but only with the same expression of grassroots outrage that humbled the obstructionists last year.

Today the Social Security trustees released their annual report, and regardless of what you might hear otherwise from the chattering class, the underlying message is that there is no need to consider cuts in Social Security or Medicare benefits. In fact, we can and should increase benefits by taking a couple of basic, straightforward steps.

The condition of the Social Security trust fund is essentially unchanged from last year. Thanks to a projected surplus in 2013 of $28 billion, bringing the accumulated Social Security trust fund surplus to about $2.8 trillion, Social Security can meet its obligations to retirees through the year 2033 under current law.

The state of the Medicare trust fund is modestly improved, with its solvency extended two years, to 2026.

“Today’s Social Security Trustees Report should give workers and their families renewed confidence,” said Nancy Altman of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign in a statement. “Social Security ran a surplus last year, is on track to run one this year, and has an accumulated surplus of $2.7 trillion. If Congress listens to the American people and requires millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share, the Report shows that all benefits can be paid for the next three quarters of a century and beyond. Indeed, the Report makes clear that our nation, the wealthiest in the world, can afford increased Social Security benefits, as a number of Senators and Representatives have wisely proposed.”

Altman’s statement is different from the tone of many of the news stories about the trustees’ report, but she is fundamentally correct. Social Security, as did the rest of the economy, took a hit during the 2008 recession, when millions of workers lost jobs and thus were no longer paying into the Social Security system. Its recovery is slow because the recovery of the economy is slow. If the country were in the midst of an aggressive program of getting people off the unemployment rolls and into good jobs, so that we could more quickly close the jobs gap created by the recession, that alone would boost the solvency of the trust funds.

More significantly, as Dean Baker points out in his analysis of the trustees’ report, “in the last three decades, the vast majority of wage growth has gone to those at the top end of the wage distribution” – in other words, to the very portion of wages that are exempt from Social Security payroll taxes.

As Altman and others have argued repeatedly, extending the payroll tax to incomes above the current ceiling of $113,700 would assure Social Security solvency at least through the 75-year projection of the trustees’ report, especially in the context of a growing economy.

Instead of reducing the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment through a “chained CPI,” which would mean a real cut in benefits over time, we could actually have the conversation we really should be having about increasing benefits, especially at a time when disappearing pensions and 401(k) plans vulnerable to the booms and busts of Wall Street have failed to provide for millions of seniors the economic security they need.

“The most important take-away from the 2013 Social Security Trustees Report is that, in good times and bad, our Social Security system works and it works well,” writes Eric Kingson, founding co-director of Social Security Works. “No institution does more to protect the financial security and dignity of Americans. No institution is more carefully monitored or more conservatively managed. No pension, housing or other form of savings, are nearly as well positioned to address the nation’s impending retirement income crisis. Fully affordable and structurally sound, Social security will meet all its obligations to the American people as far as the eye can see, with only a modest increase in revenues.”

On the menu this morning

MORNING MESSAGE: The Latest Lie – IRS Targeted Conservatives

The Bite of Apple: Worming Through Tax Loopholes

Homeowners Arrested; Say Bankers Should Have Been

Good Deficit News Bad News for Right

Latest Immigration Bill Twists

Breakfast Sides

MORNING MESSAGE: The Latest Lie – IRS Targeted Conservatives

http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130520/the-latest-lie-irs-targeted-conservatives “The corporate media is blasting out the story that the IRS “targeted conservative groups.” Some in the media say there was “IRS harassment of conservative groups.” Some of the media are going so far as claiming that conservative groups were “audited.” This story that is being repeated and treated as “true” is just not what happened at all. It is one more right-wing victimization fable, repeated endlessly until the public has no choice except to believe it.” Continue reading

The Bite of Apple: Worming Through Tax Loopholes

“Senate investigators find Apple employs elaborate tax avoidance scheme. Time: “The world’s most valuable company is holding overseas some $102 billion of its $145 billion in cash, and an Irish subsidiary that earned $22 billion in 2011 paid only $10 million in taxes … The strategies Apple uses are legal, and many other multinational corporations use similar tax techniques to avoid paying U.S. income taxes on profits they reap overseas. But Apple uses a unique twist … Apple capitalizes on a difference between U.S. and Irish rules regarding tax residency…”

Apple tax avoidance strategy “went beyond anything most experts had ever seen” reports NYT.

“Apple prepares for Washington onslaught” at hearing today, reports Politico: “Apple isn’t taking any chances with senators looking to embarrass CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday at a hearing on the tech giant’s offshore $100 billion stash … Apple has turned to a top Washington law firm for help, O’Melveny & Myers – veterans at trying to keep big companies out of trouble, like Enron, Ford and Goldman Sachs.”

Homeowners Arrested; Say Bankers Should Have Been

District and federal law enforcement officials arrested 17 people at the Justice Department Monday. The Washington Post: “About 100 protesters with groups called the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes marched on the building about 2 p.m. … ‘A couple months ago, Eric Holder said banks are too big to prosecute,” [Jason Collette, a protester,] said. “We think that is fundamentally wrong.’” …

Campaign for Fair Settlement launches “Week of Action” to pressure Justice Department to “prosecuting the bankers who destroyed our economy.

Foreclosure victims arrested in Justice Dept. protest. ThinkProgress: “…a group of activists and foreclosed homeowners marched on the Justice building in downtown Washington, D.C. … protesters moved past a police barricade and attempted to establish a sit-in, at which point police began arresting homeowners and activists.”

OurFuture.org’s Jas Sajjan talks to homeowners who showed up at the protest.

Good Deficit News Bad News for Right

The “deficit scolds” aren’t happy that the deficit is down, notes Paul Krugman: “You’re Bowles/Simpson, with a lucrative and ego-satisfying business of going around the country delivering ominous talks about The Deficit; you’re an employee of one of the many Pete Peterson front groups; and now, all of a sudden, the deficit is receding, and you had nothing to do with it. It’s a disaster!”

W. Post’s Jamelle Bouie reminds cutting the deficit never was what Republicans really wanted: “…Obama and Congress have already taken three major actions to deal with the deficit … [But] the GOP was never really interested in a ‘grand bargain’ to take debt and deficits off the table. Rather, as evidenced by the rhetoric of many Congressional Republican, the real goal was to dismantle the social safety net with aggressive cuts. At the moment, that hasn’t been successful.”

“Projected Medicare and Medicaid Spending Has Fallen by $900 Billion” notes CBPP.

Latest Immigration Bill Twists

Immigration deal with Sen. Orrin Hatch, favoring tech companies over labor concerns, may be near. NYT: “…behind-the-scenes negotiating and arm-twisting picked up in earnest, with Mr. Schumer’s office taking the lead in trying to work out an agreement with Mr. Hatch … By late Monday night, Senate aides said, Mr. Hatch was closing in on a deal with the bipartisan group, and was expected to offer his high-tech amendments on Tuesday.”

“Rubio breaks with Dems on immigration bill’s asylum, student visa provisions” reports The Hill: “Rubio was dismayed the Senate Judiciary Committee defeated an amendment sponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to halt proposed changes until a coordinated review detailing the intelligence and immigration failures [related to the Boston bomb attack] was submitted to Congress by the inspectors general of the relevant agencies … Rubio plans to address the issue after the Judiciary Committee’s markup.”

But bill is withstanding committee process. Time: “Slow but sure seems to be working for the supporters of the Senate’s immigration bill. With Washington distracted by scandals large and small, the Senate Judiciary Committee continued to chew its way through amendments to the bipartisan measure … The Judiciary Committee is hoping to wrap up its work as early as Wednesday night.”

Breakfast Sides

More seniors are living in poverty than previously thought. Politico reports on a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis: “The estimate, which takes into account health spending and regional cost of living, finds 1 in 7 seniors lives in poverty. It was previously thought that just 1 in 10 did. … under some proposals to reform Medicare, these poverty levels would keep climbing. “Under the supplemental poverty measure, which deducts health spending from income, poverty rates could increase if beneficiaries were required to pay higher cost sharing or premiums for Medicare,” the analysis states.”

Labor unions express unease with Obamacare implementation. The Hill: “A variety of unions are publicly balking at how the administration plans to implement the landmark law. … Many UFCW members have what are known as multi-employer or Taft-Hartley plans. According to the administration’s analysis of the Affordable Care Act, the law does not provide tax subsidies for the roughly 20 million people covered by the plans. Union officials argue that interpretation could force their members to change their insurance and accept more expensive and perhaps worse coverage in the state-run exchanges. … [S]ome employers won’t have the incentive to keep their workers’ multi-employer plans without tax subsidies.”

U.S.-China summit set for next month. NYT: “President Obama plans to meet President Xi Jinping of China next month for the first time since Mr. Xi’s installation as the leader of the world’s most populous nation, as the two leaders try to establish a working relationship on critical issues like North Korea, the global economy and allegations of state-sponsored cyber attacks…”

Gov. Chris Christie joins the climate change deniers. Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky: “It wasn’t so long ago that Christie spoke like a rational person on these matters … [But now, when Christie was asked should] New Jersey have prepared with climate change in mind? No, the governor said, ’cause I don’t think there’s been any proof thus far that Sandy was caused by climate change.’ It’s that ‘proof’ that’s the giveaway. No proof is what the science deniers say.”

OurFuture.org’s Roger Hickey and Richard Eskow explain during their appearance Sunday on “Pivot Point with Maya Rockeymoore” what it will take for progressives to win the fight against conservative austerity economic policies that are holding down the economy and preventing the job growth that we need.

“The great thing is that the idea of austerity has been debunked in recent months,” Hickey points out in the interview, citing the recent disclosure that an influential paper written by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that encouraged U.S. and European to support austerity measures contained mathematical errors that undercut its thesis. “It’s been very, very clear now that this medicine that’s been prescribed by these witch doctors has been bleeding our economy and yet the whole thing has been on automatic pilot, so we are continuing to see sequestration sap the strength of the economy.”

But Richard Eskow warns that while the intellectual underpinnings of austerity has been “completely discredited,” he goes on to say that “I would argue that this was never primarily an intellectual movement. It was a movement of economic self-interest on the part of certain parties that needed intellectual cover, so in that sense it is very much alive and very much dangerous.”

I got my first job while I was in high school through a small community organization run by Willie J. Hardy, a community activist (and later D.C. City Council member) who operated out of what legendary Washington Post writer William Raspberry described as a “tiny, hopelessly cluttered quonset hut” in the Deanwood section of Washington.

The work itself wasn’t particularly memorable, but the impact I will never forget. Instead of having to hang out at grocery stores and carry groceries for tips or go door-to-door scrounging for yard work or errands, I could earn steady money off the streets. For the first time, I had defined work hours, a timesheet to fill out, and in the end a check to cash. And that had an exponential impact on my dignity.

This summer too many teenagers will not have the opportunity I had to get a lift onto the first rung of the economic ladder. One reason is that organizations like Hardy’s that many youth could depend on for their first job long ago lost much of the federal support they need to provide these pivotal job opportunities. This year’s federal budget sequester worsens an already serious and continuing failure of Congress and the Obama administration to agree on a set of initiatives that would ensure an adequate supply of jobs to young people, particularly in communities where unemployment is highest.

It is making for a cold summer of discontent that will have a devastating impact on the lives of millions of young people and the economy as a whole.

Just in the past decade Congress has cut $1 billion from youth jobs programs, according to a report by the Center for American Progress. And that is at a time when even before the Great Recession youth unemployment was at chronic high levels: Average unemployment rates for youth between the ages of 16 and 19 had gone up from an average of 13 percent in 2000 to close to 16 percent in 2007, the year before the economy crashed. So far this year, unemployment rates in this age group are averaging 24 percent. The unemployment rate for 16-to-19-year-olds hasn’t been below 20 percent since October 2008.

There is currently a youth jobs deficit of 4.1 million; that is the number of jobs that the economy would have to produce to restore the job market to what it was in 2007, according to a Demos report on youth joblessness.

These unemployment rates remain historically high even as the labor force participation rate for teenagers has plummeted from around 50 percent in the early 2000s to an average of 34 percent in the past year. If it were not for that drop in labor force participation, the unemployment rate would have been far higher.

The same tragically high unemployment rates have rippled through the 20-to-24 age group. So far this year, unemployment rates in this age group have been averaging well over 13 percent. Their rates have been in the double-digits since May 2008. In 2007, this group was seeing rates hovering around 8 percent.

“Youth employment is at its lowest level since World War II; only about half of young people ages 16 to 24 held jobs in 2011,” notes a Youth and Work policy report by the Kids Count project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which calculates that at the end of 2012 6.5 million people ages 16 to 24 were both out of school and out of work.

The report paints a picture of a job market that pits young people, including college graduates, in a competition with adults for low-paid, entry-level service sector jobs. With so many more educated and more experienced workers willing to accept whatever job they can get, the hurdles for youth without at least a high-school education can be almost impossible to leap.

“At this rate, a generation will grow up with little early work experience, missing the chance to build knowledge and the job-readiness skills that come from holding part-time and starter jobs,” the report said.

At a time when the news is filled with whipped-up so-called “scandals,” one of the most serious real scandals in Washington right now is the failure of Congress and the Obama administration to come together on a jobs program – including a massive youth jobs corps program. Demos’ youth jobs report calculated that it would cost the government a net $85 billion to close the youth jobs gap through a variety of public sector initiatives, ranging from low-skilled maintenance work to higher-skilled jobs in areas from education to construction to health care. Imagine: Instead of an $85 billion sequester that is slowing down the economy and damaging lives, we could be investing $85 billion in repairing the economy and building the lives of young people through valuable work experiences that will have a lifelong impact.

It may be too late to do much for the teenagers who are now beginning to end their school years and will face a summer without serious job prospects. But Congress has still before it a fiscal 2014 budget. If House Republicans would end their stonewalling on negotiating with the Senate on the budget details, Democrats can insist that a robust youth jobs program be a priority for 2014.

This is not only a moral and economic imperative but a political one. Young people are going to remember who stood up for them and were their champions for economic opportunity, and who chose to respond to the youth jobs crisis by fighting government job-creation efforts and condemning young workers to a future of low wages and high debt.

On Thursday, House Republicans have scheduled a vote on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Haven’t they already done that, you ask? Yes, they have, in one form or another, 36 times since it has been enacted. This week’s vote would make 37.

It’s gotten to the point that today the director of the Congressional Budget Office, which is tasked with the job of informing Congress of the budgetary impact of the bills it is considering, said in a letter it didn’t have time to go through the exercise for the 37th time.

One reason, the letter noted, is that “there are hundreds of provisions in the ACA and those provisions are already in various stages of implementation.”

These provisions in effect now include the elimination of lifetime medical benefit limits, requirements that insurance companies cover children under 19 regardless of preexisting conditions, the ability of people up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ health plan, coverage for preventative care, the shrinkage of the notorious Medicare “doughnut hole,” and constraints on how high insurance premiums can increase relative to what they actually pay out in health care claims. In the works are the creation of health-care exchanges, which as early as October will allow people to compare and buy insurance plans online.

The latest CBO letter notes that the last time it did an analysis of the cost of repealing the Affordable Care Act last July, the costs to the federal government outweighed the savings by $100 billion. The raw numbers may have changed somewhat since then, but the bottom line hasn’t. A House Republican caucus obsessed with lowering the deficit keeps voting for a bill that would increase the deficit.

There is one thing that the House could do this week instead that so far the Republican leadership is refusing to touch: vote on a budget. The Senate passed its version of a fiscal 2013 federal budget on March 23, two days after the House passed its version. House and Senate leaders were next supposed to designate conferees to iron out the considerable differences between the two budgets. But it has been 53 days, and House Republicans have yet to move forward to appoint conferees so that budget discussions could begin.

The failure of Democrats to pass a budget on time was a favorite GOP talking point. Now that the Democrats have put forward its vision of the country’s priorities and how they should be paid for, House Republicans have shown no real interest in doing what it was elected to do: come to an agreement with Democrats on how the country can move forward. Their recent gambit is to insist on a “framework” for a budget deal before the actual dealing – but that’s not how the process should work. That negotiate-the-negotiation tactic is surely their way of refusing to engage with the Senate on the loophole-closings for high-income earners and corporations that are in the Senate bill. Much better to cast a meaningless vote to repeal Obamacare than to struggle to find agreement on the federal budget.

Two numbers to remember: 37 votes to repeal Obamacare, 53 days and counting without a House agreement to negotiate on the 2014 federal budget. That should tell you a lot about today’s House Republicans and the source of dysfunction in Washington.

Do you think that student loan debt is only a problem for college students and perhaps their parents? Think again.

The escalation of student loan debt in the past decade is a millstone around the neck of the entire economy, and you are touched by its effects. Especially if you or someone you know has had a hard time finding a job or selling a home, part of what you are experiencing is the effect that escalating college costs, combined with the weak employment and income prospects of college graduates, is having on the economy.

This is a key reason why it is important to support Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s legislation to lower student interest rates to 0.75 percent, the same rate that the nation’s largest banks and private lenders pay to borrow money from the government. Simply put, the economy will continue to stumble as long as college students are carrying a student-loan debt burden that does not allow them to invest in their futures and choose to start a family.

During 2012, the amount of outstanding student loan debt in the country topped $1 trillion threshold, exceeding all types of consumer debt but housing. Just since 2003, the percentage of 25-year-olds and over with student loan debt increased from 25 percent to 43 percent, and the average loan balances have increased by more than 90 percent in that time, to $20,326.

Two government reports in the past month have raised the alarm about what that student-loan debt burden is doing to the economy as a whole.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report that included some stunning details. One of the most startling: Home-ownership rates among 30-year-olds with college debt dropped twice as fast during the Great Recession and afterward as did those without student loans. As a consequence, today 30-year-olds without a student loan, including those who have not attended college, for the first time in at least a decade are more likely to have a mortgage than those who are carrying a student loan. The trend lines are similar for car buyers.

A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report released last week highlighted similar findings. “Generally, high student debt burdens limit borrowers’ ability to take on new financial obligations,” the report said. “Younger consumers have increasingly shied away from forming new households,” are finding themselves hindered in starting up new businesses, and are choosing to avoid such professions as teaching or primary care medicine, where pay is not high enough to enable them to pay down their loans.

This rising student loan debt is directly related to sharp increases in college tuition well in excess of inflation and a 25-year-low in state and local spending on college education. Robert Reich, former secretary of labor during the Clinton administration, recently compared student loan debt to the housing crisis, predicting that it is a bubble that will soon burst.

Similarly, economist Joseph E. Stiglitz described college debt as “a crisis that is about to break out” in a column in The New York Times posted Sunday night. “Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down — some to a point even lower than where they began,” he wrote.

College debt is the insult that adds to the injury that this economy is doing to people under 30. For 53 straight months the unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds has remained above 10 percent. Debt-ridden and either jobless or underemployed, too many of America’s youth are delaying once routine rites of passage: becoming first-time home buyers, getting married, saving for retirement and purchasing a car. In an economy where no one is spending, businesses have no incentive to invest and grow, reinforcing the downward cycle. It has prompted talk that for many people college no longer provides a positive return on investment. The only people profiting in the end are the lenders themselves, having used their political muscle to keep these loans from being refinanced or forgiven under certain circumstances.

Stiglitz points out that “America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education.” And he warns that the price the country will pay for not emulating countries that consider higher education a national investment rather than a personal privilege.

Without more help from the government, students and the economy will continue to flounder in the face of bleak opportunity. Warren’s bill to lock in the same rock-bottom interest rates – 0.75 percent – for students that big banks receive is only one slice of what has to be a comprehensive plan to rebuild the economy so that it works for all of the young people trying to grab onto and climb the economic ladder. But it is an eminently reasonable key step. Sign here to support her bill and lift this millstone that is burdening the economy.

Right-wing obstructionism reached another low today when Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee would not even show up to vote today on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to be director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The spectacle was the equivalent of the six-year-old, willful diva-to-be slamming the doll on the ground and stalking off in defiance of a reasonable request from an adult, screaming, “I don’t want to!”

The ostensible reason Sen. David Vitter, R-La., gave for the tantrum in an official committee statement was that committee Republicans “had not received answers to their questions” from McCarthy and that the EPA “stonewalled” on four out of “five very reasonable and basic requests” in conjunction with McCarthy’s nomination.

But committee Democrats were quick to point out that in fact McCarthy had answered some 1,000 questions posed to her. The real issue, the Republicans’ statements make clear, is that they did not like the answers McCarthy gave.

Some of the “basic requests” Republicans on the committee are insisting on go to the fundamental ways the EPA goes about doing its job of protecting the environment. For example, committee Republicans want to change how the agency assesses the economic impact of its regulations, so as to minimize the positive economic effects of an environmental regulation on the economy as a whole while emphasizing the burden of a regulation on a particular set of businesses. That would enable coal-producing power plants, for example, to justify refusing to use costly air-cleaning technology or switching to a cleaner fuel, even though the benefits to society as a whole would outweigh the costs to the owners of the plants.

The Republicans couch their actions as a call for greater EPA transparency and accountability. John Walke wrote today on the National Resources Defense Council’s blog that the EPA under the Obama administration does have a public transparency record that ranges from “fair” to “deplorable.” But, he adds, “These Republican Senators appear to be counting on the public and media accepting at face value their transparency talking points, while not looking past them to examine the actual ingredients that make up the Senators’ self-concocted transparency bromide.”

To understand what’s underneath what Senate Republicans are calling “lifting the veil of secrecy” at the EPA, it helps to remember that Vitter is inheriting the mantle passed to him from previous Republican ranking member and climate-change denier Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. (“Man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”) It also helps to remember what passes for environmental “fact” among Republicans in the House of Representatives: Back in 2011 Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, asserted at a congressional hearing that there were no “medical negatives” from having large amounts of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other particulates from fossil fuels in the air.

Take a deep breath.

This is the latest in a long-running pattern of obstruction undertaken by the Republican minority in the Senate that has, among other things, meant that 83 high-level Obama administration government appointees, including 29 judges and three Cabinet secretaries, have yet to be confirmed by the Senate.

George Washington University scholar Sarah Binder told Reuters that with the 1,000 questions that Republicans pummeled McCarthy with – an apparent record for an executive branch nominee – “part of the goal is to wear down and make untenable the nomination” of McCarthy.

And it’s not just McCarthy. Republicans in the Senate are also stalling the nomination of Thomas Perez as Labor secretary and Ernest Moniz as Energy secretary.

Having not been able to win control over both houses of Congress and the White House legitimately through the ballot box, or steal control through voter suppression, Republicans think they can get their way by standing in the way of the majority that wants to serve the interests of the people who elected them.

That’s the reason why Sen. Bernie Sanders is using the stonewalling of McCarthy to renew his call to reform the Senate filibuster. He is quoted in Politico as saying, “If we bring this nomination to the floor and there’s a request for 60 votes — which we are not going to get — I think it is time for the Democratic leadership to do what the American people want, and that is to have a majority rule in the United States Senate.”

The Republican refusal to even show up at McCarthy’s confirmation vote today – after all, if they didn’t think she was qualified for the job based on the answers to their 1,000 questions, they could have simply voted “no” – was worse than those scenes of crazed, not-to-be-reasoned-with divas on cheap reality cable shows. We’re not simply talking about mind-numbing entertainment. This is eroding our democracy and the ability of government, in the case of the EPA, to protect the right of the people to live in a clean, healthful environment. The right-wing obstruction drama is a reality show that needs to be taken off the air before it does any more damage.

Rick Perlstein, a former writer for the Campaign for America’s Future who now writes for The Nation, has a detailed and deeply troubling two-part examination (Part I and Part II) of President Obama’s nominee to be Commerce secretary, Penny Pritzker. We interviewed Perlstein earlier this week to get his views on the kinds of questions that members should be asking Pritzker during the confirmation process.

For several reasons, Perlstein writes, Pritzker’s nomination “should make for some interesting confirmation hearings.” She is a billionaire who runs her own private equity company; sits on the board of Hyatt Hotels, of which her father was a co-founder; was the past chairman of the credit reporting agency TransUnion, and was a part-owner of Superior Bank of Chicago.

In each of those roles there is much for senators to question, including the allegations of horrible working conditions imposed on low-wage workers at Hyatt hotels, TransUnion’s dismissive reaction to serious errors in its credit reports that resulted in credit denials and lost job opportunities, and the circumstances that led to the government seizure of Superior Bank in 2001 under Pritzker’s watch.

Perlstein corrects an assertion in my first question that Pritzker is “too close to Wall Street.” If she were close to Wall Street, Perlstein notes, “her companies, of which there are hundreds, would be publicly traded,” and thus open to at least some public scrutiny. “She’s worse that close to Wall Street,” he says,

To those who expected President Obama in his second term to be the robustly progressive leader that he felt he could not be in his first term, Perlstein says that “this seems to be” the real Obama. The nomination, he concludes, is “going to be a real black mark on his legacy” because it brings into his cabinet someone whose business dealings symbolize the factors that have furthered the decline of the middle class. “And it is going to make it real tough for him to call out his chips on something like immigration reform when all of us on the left are mad at him for rolling out the red carpet for a bottom-feeder like Penny Pritzker”.

The scheme that Apple cooked up this week to finance a $55 billion stock buyback for its shareholders was orchestrated to avoid paying $9.2 billion in taxes, Bloomberg reported Friday.

That $9.2 billion tax bill that Apple dodged would have been enough to make unnecessary all of the major budget cuts we’ve been writing about this week as part of our “Repeal the Sequester” campaign. With $9.2 billion, the federal government could have (based on lists compiled by The Washington Post’s Wonkblog and Think Progress):

• Paid for rescinding the furloughs of air traffic controllers without raiding $250 million from an airport improvement fund.
• Restored Head Start funding to avoid having to kick an estimated 70,000 people out of the program this year.
• Kept Meals on Wheels funding for seniors intact.
• Restored National Institutes of Health funding, so that research on cancer treatments and other diseases could continue uninterrupted.
• Rescinded cuts of up to 10.7 percent in unemployment checks to people who have been looking for work for more than six months without success.
• Kept paying for public housing assistance and housing vouchers for people who might otherwise be homeless or in substandard living conditions.
• Rescinded cuts in programs for children with special needs and learning disabilities.
• Kept already stretched Occupational Safety and Health inspectors on the job, doing the 1,200 workplace inspections that are being shelved by sequestration.
• Fully funded disaster relief programs, a particularly critical need now that a wildfire is currently causing serious damage in southern California.
• Restored $480 million now cut from the FBI’s operations.
• Kept intact the federal programs responsible for safeguarding our nuclear weapons.
• Avoided cutting $770 million in various State Department health and economic aid programs, plus another $650 million in funding for diplomatic activities.
• Fully funded NASA operations, which would have been a boon to central Florida and to Texas communities already hurting because of the end of the space shuttle program.

Apple was able to do this because of techniques it uses to keep its U.S.-made profits offshore, and because of provision in the tax code that allows it to deduct interest it pays on money it borrows. That’s a double whammy: It does not pay the taxes it should on the money it earns from all of those i-whatevers we buy (including the Macbook Pro I am using to type this post) and it gets money from the government when it borrows money from a big bank rather than using the money from its overseas stockpile.

Apple makes great products, but the obscenity of its use of the tax code to avoid paying its fair share for the functions of government that make its success possible is only exceeded by the tax code itself and the nexus of ideology and corporate greed that created it. This latest news from Apple underscores the need to end corporate tax evasion – not with lobbyist-written schemes like the “territorial tax” that would essentially engrave offshore tax dodging into the tax code but with fair, more progressive tax structures that require corporations to pay taxes on their earnings just as working people must by April 15 every year.