Big business, big banks, Wall Street, and the CEOs of America’s top companies said that passing health care reform would amount to a “government takeover” of our nation’s health care system. The facts proved them wrong.

Now they’re saying that the financial reform bill currently discussed in Congress will entail a “government takeover” of our financial industry.

In other words, the same people whose shoddy financial practices led us to the worst economic crisis in a generation expect us to once again listen to their gloom and doom warnings.

If this was not enough, they’re doing all they can to stop reform. According to a report by Reuters:

“Securities and investment firms, commercial banks, insurers and others with a material stake in reform have spent over $286 million lobbying Congress since the financial reform debate began in earnest in the House of Representatives last summer.”

Fortunately, legislators are doing their job. The U.S. Senate passed legislation last week to rein-in Wall Street’s reckless behavior and a Senate-House conference committee will now negotiate the text of a final bill.

What would financial reform do for Americans?

Far from a government takeover, the bill would allow government to prevent the collapse of major financial institutions and, as we saw in 2008, threaten to drag down the nation’s economy. It would also create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to write and enforce new rules and protect consumers from deceptive financial practices like the ones that led to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Does that sound like a government takeover? Or does it sound like telling the financial industry we’ve had enough of them gambling away our pensions in the stock exchange or concocting risky investments and then expecting taxpayers to bail them out?

To America’s working families, the answer is clear. As the House-Senate panel hammers out the final version of the Wall Street overhaul, let’s make sure legislators see it our way too.

Throughout this week, Medicare beneficiaries across the country should be receiving copies of a brochure “Medicare and the New Health Law – What it Means for You” in their mailboxes. The mailing from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services outlines key provisions of the Affordable Care Act for people with Medicare as well as members of their families. The mailing is being sent in both English and Spanish.

Because Medicare is a trusted resource for beneficiaries and their family members, the mailing encourages them to log on to http://www.medicare.gov or call 1-800-MEDICARE to get their questions about Medicare or the Affordable Care Act answered and reminds them to be on the alert for possible scams.

The first benefit that many people with Medicare will receive as a result of the passage of the new law is a one-time check for $250 if they enter the Part D donut hole and are not eligible for Medicare Extra Help. Beginning next year, the Affordable Care Act ensures that Medicare beneficiaries will get free preventive care services like colorectal cancer screening and mammograms, in addition to a free annual wellness visit. The law also includes new tools to help fight fraud by helping Medicare crack down on criminals who are seeking to scam seniors and steal taxpayer dollars.

The brochures can also be downloaded from the Medicare website: English version and Spanish version.

A report issued by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office Tuesday shows that the Recovery Act, the centerpiece of President Obama’s economic recovery plan, is having an even greater impact than originally projected.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Through the first quarter of 2010, the stimulus boosted employment by an estimated 1.3 million to 2.8 million jobs, about a quarter or half million more than projected. Gross domestic product was 1.7 to 4.1 percentage points higher than it would have been without the stimulus, the nonpartisan budget office said.

In fact, the CBO projects that unemployment would be up to 1.5 percentage points higher without the stimulus, and anticipates that as many as “3.7 million American jobs could be attributed to the Recovery Act by the end of September.”

As Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen says, “There’s a word to describe a recovery effort like this: success.”

Yet Republicans, who fought the President at every turn to block the Recovery Act, continue to insist that it has been a failure. This video from Americans United for Change sums up the GOP opposition:

The bottom line? If Republicans had done things their way, 2.8 million more Americans would be unemployed.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post’s Plum Line has the scoop on a new ad from AFSCME in the Arkansas U.S. Senate contest between Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

It throws a whole fusillade of charges at Lincoln, even ridiculing her recent election-day snafu, in which her campaign forgot she’d requested an absentee ballot for herself.

Calling the spot “a very aggressive ad blasting Lincoln on multiple fronts,” Sargent reports the ad is backed by an an $855,000 buy and will run between now and the June 8th runoff.

Here’s the voiceover from the ad courtesy of MSNBC’s First Read:

When Blanche Lincoln moved her family full time to Washington, D.C., she quickly became part of the place. And that’s the problem.

She was on the move all right, cozying up to the lobbyists, their big money and influence — Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street banks, big insurance companies like Blue Cross, big oil insiders — BP, Texaco, Amoco and the like. She took their money, did their bidding, moved up — the Washington way. Then voted to send our good-paying Arkansas jobs to places like China and Mexico, used our money to bail out her Wall Street buddies.

The more Blanche Lincoln voted with the Washington insiders, the further she moved away from us. How far away? Just days ago, she didn’t cast a ballot in Arkansas because she’d already asked to vote absentee — in Virginia. Hmmpf.

Blanche Lincoln packed up and left us years ago. Maybe it’s time to send her packing for good.

More from Ben Smith at POLITICO.

This entry by AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee is cross-posted from Huffington Post and Firedoglake.

For more than a generation, America’s working families have been under a constant assault from the CEO’s and extraordinarily wealthy members of our society. While median incomes in the U.S. have stagnated since the mid-1970’s, incomes for those in the top five percent have more than doubled. Since the beginning of our new century — and aided by record-breaking tax cuts — incomes for the top 1 percent have tripled, while working families scrape by, working harder and longer and taking home less than they deserve in pay and benefits.

Last week, the very rich once again attacked the middle-class, this time in U.S. News and World Report. Billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman decided to use his magazine to publish a rabid attack on public employees, the men and women who provide the services that keep our communities safe, teach our children, keep our streets paved and our water clean.

In his piece, Zuckerman would have us believe that the hunt is over and we have found the culprits who trashed America’s financial health. It was our nation’s librarians, corrections officers, teachers, cops and fireman who drove our economy off the cliff. Wall Street and a compliant Federal Reserve had nothing to do with it. There’s really nothing more to see here; it’s time to move on. Zuckerman’s short-sighted assault on public employees appealed to the editors of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, who decided to republish it on their op-ed page. The billionaires are happy to amplify their anti-worker screeds in each other’s media empires.

Mort Zuckerman is one of the world’s wealthiest men. While never once mentioning the reprehensible behavior of the investment and banking community in causing an economic collapse that wiped out half a generation of retirement savings (including the home equity that many had counted on), nor acknowledging that wealthy Americans pay less in taxes than they did 60 years ago, Zuckerman launches a rant against public employee unions and the “extraordinary benefits” paid to workers that is long on hyperbole and short on facts.

AFSCME’s non-teaching public employee members earn, on average, $45,000 a year to protect the public and the most vulnerable members of our society. After a career of service, our members retire with modest pensions of about $19,000 per year. And, unlike most private sector workers, our members typically contribute towards this pension benefit. In fact, of the final pension benefit, taxpayers contribute just 25% of the cost. The fact that public employees have decent health benefits and pensions, now scarce in the private sector, is genuine cause for alarm. Zuckerman’s solution is for these benefits to be taken away from public employees. Of course, he has a net worth of over $2 billion, so he’s not much troubled by such a sacrifice.

Zuckerman claims the benefits earned by public employees are “galling” to private sector workers. How would he know? What is truly galling for private sector employees is the outright refusal of our political and economic elites to recognize and deal with stagnant wages and eroding retirement and health security. Our nation’s problem is not that public service workers have decent pensions, it is that so many other employees don’t.

The cause of our fiscal problems is declining revenues, pure and simple. The fact that state governments have cut almost half a trillion in spending over the last three budget cycles is ample evidence of this. Moreover, Zuckerman misrepresents the facts about public pension funds. The primary cause of our pension funding challenges is the failure of state governments to contribute required payments over many years. For example, the political leaders in New Jersey deliberately failed to make required contributions over a period of more than ten years. Of course, employees have been paying in full, year after year. The employees acted in good faith, the political leaders did not.

We have a genuine retirement security crisis in this nation — the average 401(k) balance is just $35,000 — yet we see nothing from Zuckerman or his billionaire buddies like Rupert Murdoch that would even remotely address the problem. Vilification of public employees may fit their anti-working-class agenda, but it won’t create good jobs in our economy. Nor will it solve the problems facing states that have failed to keep up with their pension obligations.

If members of the U.S. House of Representatives support creating jobs and putting Americans back to work, as they so often claim, they’ll vote this week for a bill that creates jobs and makes Wall Street pay, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Saying it’s “crunch time for putting Americans back to work,” Trumka tells lawmakers: “If you’re not for this bill, you’re not for jobs. Period.”

Join AFSCME and the AFL-CIO in pushing hard for passage of the jobs bill and take action now. Use our click-to-call form to urge your representative to vote for H.R. 4213 to create and save jobs and make Wall Street pay. Tell your representative a vote against the bill is a vote against jobs.

President Trumka’s full statement on this critical vote:

It’s crunch time for putting Americans back to work. Members of Congress often talk about jobs: Now they have a chance to back up their rhetoric with action.

This week Congress intends to vote on a jobs bill that cracks down on tax loopholes for millionaire hedge fund managers and on corporations that ship our jobs overseas. This jobs bill will put Americans back to work by repairing our crumbling infrastructure; stemming public sector layoffs in the states; encouraging more bank loans to small business; extending unemployment benefits and health benefits for the unemployed through the end of this year; and providing over 300,000 summer jobs for unemployed youth.

If you’re not for this bill, you’re not for jobs. Period.

And please, no more excuses about the budget deficit—unless and until you’re willing to make Wall Street pay its fair share to bring down the deficit. The people who are always saying “no” to jobs because of the deficit are often the same people who voted to squander our hard-earned budget surpluses so they could shower undeserved tax breaks on rich people during the Bush years. Apparently, spending money on rich people is perfectly okay, but investing in jobs for working class Americans sets off alarm bells.

It’s time for members of Congress to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Vote for jobs. Now.

It’s no mystery that some lawmakers are completely oblivious to the problems faced by working Americans. Take, for example, the three county commissioners in Pueblo County, Colo. Not content with enacting furloughs for county employees, they recently produced a video poking fun at the situation.

As KRDO News reports:

“A video of county commissioners working in an empty county building and making fun of furloughs has county employees upset. In the more than 4 and 1/2 minute YouTube video all three county commissioners are seen doing various tasks around the county building.”

Watch the full story:

It’s tempting to tell the Pueblo County commissioners that when it comes to creating comedy videos, they should keep their day jobs. The problem is, they don’t seem to be faring too well on that front either.

According to an AFSCME Council 76 report, the furloughs amount “to approximately a 4.6 percent across-the-board pay cut to Pueblo County employees.” This, in spite of the fact that Pueblo County workers receive on average a full 15 percent less in salary than similar employees in other jurisdictions.

The video was originally shown at a southern Colorado Press Association event. It also includes “jokes” about how commissioners are trying to find a way to extend furloughs to 365 days a year.

Pueblo County commissioner Anthony Nunez has claimed that the video was misconstrued and that it wasn’t intended to make light of the difficulties faced by county employees. Perhaps the misunderstanding could have been avoided if the commissioners had devoted their energy to finding solutions for Pueblo’s budget crisis. After all, it’s the community and workers who are bearing the brunt of these misguided measures. No matter how you look at it, that’s not funny.

This entry by AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee is cross-posted from Huffington Post and Firedoglake.

Almost two years have passed since the taxpayers of America gave the titans of Wall Street more than $700 billion to keep the world’s economic system from plunging into another world-wide Great Depression. Yet, the big banks, the Wall Street investment houses, the hedge funds and the CEOs of America’s top companies still have not taken the steps needed to tighten up the shoddy practices that led our economy right to the edge of the cliff.

Even worse, they are fighting common sense reforms being debated in the Senate that would end the insider games that put millions of Americans out of work, stole billions from our retirement plans, and left states and cities with huge amounts of unsustainable debt. They are spending millions of dollars on lobbying to prevent the Senate from enacting tough new rules to prevent another financial crisis and give investors and the public the kind of protection that has been missing for far too long in our economy.

Four years after the stock market crash of 1929, President Roosevelt and New Deal Democrats enacted important reforms to held Wall Street accountable. Those rules kept the financial system operating on an even keel for more than 50 years. But, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the New Deal regulations were undermined, giving Wall Street unfettered freedom to turn our financial markets into a casino, where the homes and retirement security of middle class Americans became little more than chips to the traders and the CEOs.

While most Americans think of stocks and bonds as the investment instruments we purchase, Wall Street was busy creating new, risky and unregulated products like “collateralized debt obligations,” and “credit default swaps.” The lack of oversight and accountability in the trading of these new products led to the meltdown of 2008 and economic catastrophe. That is a major reason why we need new rules to regulate transactions of new and complex financial instruments.

All across the country, cities and towns, school districts and even sewer systems have been hit hard by these Wall Street products. Sellers misrepresented these instruments as a way to help reduce the financing costs for public projects, but hidden features were included that ultimately are costing taxpayers billions, if not trillions, in added costs. In Alabama, for instance, Jefferson County sought Wall Street financing for a $250 million sewer system. After purchasing a wide variety of “tools” from Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, the taxpayers of Jefferson County now owe more than $1 billion, just in interest and fees on their debt.

In every region of the country, Wall Street has sold derivatives that essentially bet on municipalities defaulting on their loans. Using “municipal swaps,” the banks give investors a way to sell short – or bet against – countless cities, towns and states, including California, Michigan and New York. This is nothing short of a potential time-bomb for taxpayers, giving investors an opportunity to make millions while taxpayers might be forced to pay billions to paying off Wall Street gambling bets.

The financial reform bill being debated in the Senate would regulate the derivatives market and provide much-needed transparency to these risky deals. The Senate needs to resist the efforts of Wall Street and their Republican allies and pass this legislation immediately. The debate in the Senate has gone on long enough. It is time to get the job done and ensure that American people are not left paying billions of dollars because of the unregulated greed of Wall Street and the big banks. It’s time for Congress to send a clear message that they will side with Main Street and not cave in to the power and money of Wall Street. It is time to close the casino.

Calling all union activists age 35 and younger. Your parents’ labor movement will soon be yours. Are you ready to lead?

On June 10-13, young workers from across the country will gather in Washington, DC, for the first-ever Young Workers Summit. It’s your chance to share your concerns, skills and ideas for growing the union movement. During these four days, you will hear from various speakers, attend workshops, gather knowledge and tools and network with your peers.

Last year, AFSCME’s Next Wave – young activists who are stepping up to the plate and making a difference – met in Chicago to engage each other about leading AFSCME into the future. They are also building a tool kit which provides the resources and connections needed to get young members actively involved.

The Young Workers Summit is another opportunity to build our union’s strength and vitality by bringing the next generation of union leaders to Washington.

Get the word out. Register now and join the conversation.

2010 National Police Week (Courtesy of The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund)

President John F. Kennedy signed a proclamation in 1962 designating May 9 to 15 as National Police Week and May 15 as Peace Officers Memorial Day. Since then, the nation has formally honored those who lost their lives to protect us all.

This year, there’s something more that we can do for these courageous women and men: Encourage members of Congress to give public safety officers a federally protected right to bargain collectively.

AFSCME – which represents nearly 125,000 public safety officers nationwide (including nearly 30,000 police officers) – is urging Congress to pass the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act of 2009 (H.R. 413/S. 3194). The legislation establishes minimum state collective bargaining standards for corrections officers, police, emergency medical technicians and firefighters.

Also high on AFSCME’s legislative agenda for public safety officers is increasing federal funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Program, which provides grants to hire police officers, improve law enforcement communications technology, and other initiatives.

Additional funding for COPS will help local law enforcement agencies across the country whose budgets are being cut or threatened with shortfalls, compromising public safety.

Too many law enforcement officers have lost their lives on the job. Let’s support the living while we honor the dead.

Learn more about AFSCME-represented law enforcement officers here. Also, check out the latest AFSCME research on law enforcement here.