"Wall Street is...[t]aking control with borrowed money, stripping assets, slashing jobs and cashing out.

Taxpayer bailouts saved Wall Street from choking on its own greed. Now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, 'Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year...' [which is] more than the combined budgets of the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency. [...]

The government heavily subsidizes the megabanks, but it's the small banks that provide higher savings interest, lower fees, lower loan and credit card rates, and do much of the lending to small business, who in turn create most new jobs.

Behind their Main Street rhetoric, Congress and the Obama administration have so far been the change Wall Street can believe in. The administration and Federal Reserve are loaded with revolving door Wall Streeters and their proteges. Campaign donors and lobbyists are working Congress to minimize and distort reform."

Read the full article in the Athens Banner-Herald online.

"Liberal advocacy groups are getting behind a bill authored by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) that would keep the tax in place at a lower exemption rate for estates than would legislation favored by lobbyists for farmers and small businesses.

Lee Farris, the senior organizer for estate tax policy for United for a Fair Economy, said her group supports the McDermott bill. 

Farris said “it is a very different ballgame since Bush first came into the office.”

“We have just spent a huge amount bailing out Wall Street,” Farris said. “Now, it would be a lousy time to send even more money to the wealthy.” Other organizations, such as Citizens for Tax Justice and Results, an anti-poverty group, are also behind McDermott’s bill.

While the estate tax would lapse in 2010, it would return the following year to what it was before the Bush administration passed its first round of tax cuts in 2001 — a tax rate of 55 percent and an exemption for those with assets valued at $1 million or below at the time of their death. Current law has the tax rate at 45 percent and those with assets valued at or below $3.5 million earning an exemption.

If passed before Congress leaves this year, McDermott’s bill would permanently set up a $2 million exemption level and progressive tax rates for assets valued higher than that level. Farris believes the bill would yield the most government revenue, which could be used for healthcare reform and other federal programs."

Read the full article at The Hill online.

Read and article about the forum on advertisertalk.com.

Visit the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church website to learn more.

Davis Sponsors Estate Tax Measure, But With Low Profile

By Peter Cohn

Running for statewide office can often create nuanced positions, and the estate tax appears to be one of those issues for Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, who is running for governor.

On Friday, a bipartisan House coalition announced they had introduced legislation to gradually cut the estate tax from its current 45 percent rate to 35 percent, as well as phase in a higher exemption from the tax, to $5 million per person from the current $3.5 million.

Davis was among the original sponsors. But he declined to tout his involvement in a joint release issued by the bill's backers, which was not lost on Republicans.

"I am sure Davis' run for the governor's mansion in Alabama factored into his team's decision, but why he wouldn't want to promote bipartisan legislation that helps small businesses and farmers keep more of their money is beyond me," one GOP aide said.

The lead Democratic co-sponsor is Rep. Shelley Berkley of Nevada, a longtime opponent of the estate tax who has consistently supported its repeal. Republican co-sponsors are Reps. Kevin Brady of Texas and Devin Nunes of California.

The bill represents a compromise between estate tax foes who have long sought full repeal, and a permanent extension at the 2009 rate sought by President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress.

Davis has opposed efforts to repeal the tax in the past, and in 2006, he voted to strip a provision from a larger tax and minimum-wage bill that stopped short of full repeal but would have cut the estate tax more deeply than is now contemplated.

Recognizing that full repeal is a non-starter in Democratic-controlled Washington, longtime estate tax opponents such as the National Federation of Independent Business and American Farm Bureau Federation have thrown their weight behind the Berkley-Brady effort. The measure is similar to a bipartisan Senate proposal from Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Blanche Lincoln and Minority Whip Kyl.

But progressive groups and unions oppose the bill as a sop to the wealthy, and are urging Congress to let the estate tax go back to the pre-2001 rate of 55 percent, with an exemption of only $1 million, as scheduled in 2011. Even Obama's proposal to keep the current estate tax would cost $500 billion more over the 10 years beginning in 2011 than reverting back to the Clinton-era rate, said Lee Farris, senior organizer on estate tax policy at United for a Fair Economy.

Davis' spokeswoman Addie Whisenant said the lawmaker "has consistently supported reducing the estate tax burden that will hit certain families after 2011." She said Davis has opposed efforts to further cut the tax since they would have added too much to the deficit.

The new bipartisan bill, Whisenant said, "will prevent families who may have suffered substantial losses in the stock market and in their 401(k)s from the extra burden of a huge tax hike in the next few years." She added that Davis decided not to be on the joint release issued by Berkley, Brady and Nunes "because we wanted to focus our efforts on local press as opposed to national press."

Regardless of the group's efforts, they are not expected to get a vote on their bill. The House next week will take up a permanent extension of the estate tax at 2009 rates, at a $233.6 billion cost. The measure is expected to go straight to the floor without a vote in the Ways and Means Committee, on which Berkley, Davis, Brady and Nunes sit.

The Senate is not expected to pass the bill, however, and Democrats are likely to fall back later in the year on a simple one-year extension of the 2009 estate tax rate.

That outcome is fine with Farris, who noted that will punt the long-term question into next year, when Congress is faced with whether and how to extend all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. With lawmakers staring at a more-than-trillion-dollar deficit, at that point "the estate tax will look like a good place to raise revenue" and negotiate a higher rate and lower exemption than the 2009 estate tax, she said.

"It's not going to be a good time to pass a tax cut for a few super-wealthy families, and maybe we'll be able to get back to more broadly shared prosperity and begin to rebuild the middle class," Farris said, adding: "After Wall Street wrecked the economy and Washington bailed out the banks, it would be crazy to weaken the estate tax and give away all that money to the super-wealthy."

"Available for interview requests:

SARAH ANDERSON, who has spent the last 16 years analyzing CEO pay at the Institute for Policy Studies, said today: 'Mr. Feinberg had a narrow mandate, but he still could have played hardball. He could have told these firms they wouldn't get another taxpayer dime unless they renegotiated their executive pay pacts.'

CHUCK COLLINS, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, co-founder of Wealth for the Common Good and co-author of America's Bailout Barons, said: 'Feinberg has been spending his time trying to reach a 'consensus' on CEO pay with the firms that crashed our economy. He ought to be speaking to the average Americans our economy has crashed down upon.'

SAM PIZZIGATI, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, author of the online newsletter Too Much and co-author of America's Bailout Barons, said: 'Feinberg's preferred 'solution' to our executive pay problems, substituting stock for cash in executive pay packages, would have done little to prevent the subprime carnage if put in place 10 years ago.'

MIKE LAPHAM, project director of Responsible Wealth at United for a Fair Economy, said: 'The financial collapse and the government's response make it clear that the financial service sector is not just playing risky casino games with their own money - they're playing with everyone's money. When they bet the house and lose, we all lose. Extreme pay and short-term reward structures lead to risky behaviors. We need much stronger regulation and oversight of executive compensation.'"

View the full press release on CommonDreams.org

"There’s no mistaking what Washington’s seasonally adjusted, “official” unemployment numbers for September show; the recession is far from over at the level that most working class Americans feel it – jobs. The state’s “official” unemployment rate increased to an estimated 9.3 percent in September, up from a revised rate of 9 percent in August [...] Among Americans of color, who traditonaly experience higher unemployment rates in good times and bad, the current recession is particularly stressful."

Read the full article in the Sky Valley Chronicle.

"Some rich Germans have launched a web petition to call for the resumption of a wealth tax to help the country bounce back from an economic crisis, because, as one said, he had 'a lot of money I do not need.' [...] [Retired physician Dieter Lehmkuhl] got the idea when Berlin stumped up billions of euros to save banks and give the recession-hit economy a boost. Lehmkuhl said, 'It made me mad to think that we suddenly found all this money for the banks, money that we did not have before for urgent programmes like education and the environment.' [Dr. Lehmkuhl] would like Germany to have its own version of the the US group United for a Fair Economy."

Read the full article on The Local: Germany's News in English.

"Economic friendship is an invitation to begin living God's economy with the people closest to us. Because it is a tactic, no act of sharing is too small. Any of us can do it, even if all we have to offer is the truth about our debt. A tactical imagination teaches us to be faithful in small things - to know the truth both about our brokenness and about God's grace in relationship with fellow members of God's family. Nothing prevents these small acts of faithfulness from growing into bigger partnerships."

Read the full blog post by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove on Tikkun.org.

"Since the Clinton administration I have repeatedly warned about the triumph of Wall Street and the defeat of Main Street, the destruction of the Middle Class and the dismemberment of the poor; acts of economic terrorism that undermine the very foundations of our democracy - for no democracy can long stand when the ratio of executive to workers pay is 344 [to] 1 (source, 15th annual [Executive Excess report] issued by United for a Fair Economy)."

Read the full article by George Mitrovich on HuffingtonPost.com.

"There is ample evidence of the disproportionate impact of economic recession on Black and Latino communities. United for a Fair Economy (UFE) recently found that while the U.S. has been in a recession for more than a year, 'people of color have been in a recession for nearly five years and have entered a depression during the current economic crisis.' ... The foreclosure crisis has resulted in immense loss of wealth in Black and Latino communities, and it has been estimated that people of color may have lost as much as $213 billion due to subprime loans taken out between 2000 and 2008."

Read the full report (PDF) by the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy (RISEP), the Miami Workers' Center, and the Kirwan Institute.

View the press release on CommonDreams.org.

"According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2007, 37.3 million people, or 12.5 percent of the U.S. population, lived in poverty. Yet these numbers may do more to distort than clarify the presence of poverty. First, it is important to note that people of color represent a disproportionate percentage of people living in poverty. United for a Fair Economy, in their report "The Silent Depression: State of the Dream 2009," revealed that 10 percent of whites live in poverty, as compared to 24 percent of Blacks and 21 percent of Latinos."

Read this article by Katie Beran and Celine-Marie Pascale in Z Magazine.