Good:
http://now.msn.com/...
Russia's anti-gay propaganda laws have some concerned about how homosexual athletes will be treated at next year's Winter Olympics in Sochi. Now, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore) plans to introduce a Senate resolution that will call on the International Olympic Committee to oppose the laws and receive guarantees that competitors and spectators will not be discriminated against during the Games. The resolution, the Senate's first formal statement about the Russian laws, is yet to be finalized and isn't expected to be introduced until the Senate returns from its August recess. - MSN, 8/2/13
Here's a little background info:
http://www.usatoday.com/...
Russia will enforce a new law cracking down on gay rights activism when it hosts international athletes and fans during the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, the country's sports minister said Thursday, appearing to contradict assurances to the contrary from the International Olympic Committee.
Russia's contentious law was signed by President Vladimir Putin in late June, imposing fines on individuals accused of spreading "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" to minors, and even proposing penalties for those who express these views online or in the news media. Gay pride rallies also are banned.
"An athlete of nontraditional sexual orientation isn't banned from coming to Sochi," Vitaly Mutko said in an interview with R-Sport, the sports newswire of state news agency RIA Novosti. "But if he goes out into the streets and starts to propagandize, then of course he will be held accountable."
Mutko emphasized that the law wasn't designed to punish anyone for being gay or lesbian. But like the Russian lawmakers who authored the bill, Mutko said athletes would be punished only for propaganda, a word that remains ambiguous under the new law. - USA Today, 8/1/13
Here's a little info on Merkley's resolution:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
The resolution will ask the IOC both to oppose the law itself and to receive a guarantee that athletes and spectators will not be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity at the Sochi Winter Olympics, Merkley spokesman Jamal Raad said. The language is still being finalized, however, and he said the resolution will not be introduced formally until the Senate returns from its August recess.
The resolution would be the Senate’s first formal statement regarding the Russian law, which was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in June.
The Human Rights Campaign praised Merkley — also the lead sponsor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would ban anti-LGBT discrimination in employment in the U.S. — for the move.
“With increasing attention being paid to Russia’s deplorable treatment of LGBT people, we applaud Senator Merkley and efforts in Congress to shine a spotlight on this issue and the cloud that hangs over the Sochi Olympic Games,” Human Rights Campaign spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz told BuzzFeed. - BuzzFeed, 8/2/13
More below the fold.
Merkley's been pretty outspoken about Russia's anti-gay propaganda law:
http://www.politico.com/...
The controversial Russian law is designed to stop “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations around minors.” While the International Olympic Committee and some Russian officials have said the law would not be a problem during the games, contradictory statements by other Russian lawmakers have raised concern.
Linking to one such report that the law will be enforced against foreigners during the games, Merkley tweeted on Thursday, “Outrageous. Olympic discrimination against LGBT athletes and spectators is 100% unacceptable.”
The move comes amid rising tensions with Russia over its granting of NSA leaker Edward Snowden temporary asylum in the country, ignoring U.S. calls for extradition. Lawmakers have called for possibly boycotting the 2014 games, or other meetings in Russia, in response. - Politico, 8/2/13
Glad to see Merkley take the lead on this issue. Since it's Friday, I'll treat you all with some more Merkley-related news. Merkley's been focusing on tax reform:
http://www.albanytribune.com/...
Today, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley sent a letter to the Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee outlining his priorities in a potential reform of the tax code. In the letter, Senator Merkley made clear that our tax code should help rebuild and strengthen the middle class.
“Tax reform cannot solve all of the challenges facing the middle class, but it must do what it can to reverse the damaging economic trends that are increasingly putting the American Dream out of reach of millions of Americans,” Senator Merkley wrote. “The question that should underlie all of our economic policies, including how we shape the tax code, is simple: what policy choices will lead to more Americans seeing their incomes rise, now and in the future? America’s success cannot be measured by corporate profits or government deficits or income growth of the top 1 percent. We succeed when the broad majority of Americans have the chance to get ahead and their hard work results in higher incomes.” - Albany Tribune, 7/31/13
You can read all of Merkley's letter in the link above. Merkley's also been getting praise for his support for immigration reform:
http://portlandtribune.com/...
By voting “yes” on S.744, Oregon Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden heeded both economic and human rights concerns and brought America a step closer to concrete solutions. They acted with the prosperity and the humanity of their constituents in mind.
They could vote as they did knowing that the Congressional Budget Office calculates that the bill would reduce federal budget deficits by more than $200 billion for a decade. They also could take heart in the fact that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has issued a report on how immigrant entrepreneurs are strengthening the economy and creating jobs. And yet another set of facts is on their side: Immigration Policy Center researchers have found that immigrant entrepreneurs and consumers already add billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs to Oregon’s economy.
The data was on the side of S.744. So much so that senators, like Merkley and Wyden, were able to reach across the aisle to their Republican counterparts and shake on a solution. - Portland Tribune, 8/1/13
Merkley, along with Senator Sherrod Brown (D. OH), have also been calling out the big banks influence on the prices of oil, natural gas and other commodities through their increasing ownership of oil tankers, electric transmission rights, pipelines and warehouses:
http://www.platts.com/...
"It appears that this is manipulation, at the very least abuse," said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat-Ohio, said at a Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on Wall Street reforms.
The panel last week held a first hearing into the issue of banks and financial institutions owning or controlling physical commodities and how such control is affecting prices for everything from gasoline to aluminum.
Testifying at Tuesday's hearing, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said that while there is "clear authority" to go after potential market manipulation and conflicts of interest, there are practical considerations, including limited enforcement budgets, an adverse court ruling and regulatory leeway for hedging activities that make enforcement difficult.
"A grain elevator operator, a farmer and rancher may know something about their crop and want to hedge that," Gensler said. "We would not want to diminish that farmer, rancher or grain elevator operator to be able to hedge that risk even though, in a sense, they might be the only one to know that their crop is not yielding as well as they thought or yielding better than they thought."
What concerns Brown and Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat-Oregon, is that banks have numerous physical commodity holdings as well as the means to deliver those commodities, including oil tankers, transmission rights and pipelines, while they at the same time trade on energy prices in futures and swaps markets.
Big banks can buy "vast quantities" of commodities and pipelines, tankers and warehouses, said Merkley. This gives them "a huge amount of market information that's very advantageous in trading" and gives them a "thumb on the scale in the terms of supply and demand and being able to have some influence over the price," he said.
"If you're simultaneously allowed to bet on the price and you're allowed to have your thumb on the scale in reflecting the price it's a huge conflict of interest," he said. - Platts, 7/30/13
It also looks like coalition of organizations known as the Americans for Workplace Opportunity will be launching a $2 million campaign targeting senators in 11 states to get 60 votes in the Senate to pass ENDA over the summer recess:
http://www.metroweekly.com/...
"With the tremendously successful mark-up of ENDA earlier this month, we have strong momentum as we build to reach 60 votes on the Senate floor," said the coalition's campaign manager, Matt McTighe, who successfully led the marriage-equality campaign in Maine last November. "We will use all of our resources including grassroots action and strong corporate support to make it clear that the American people want action on this bill."
The steering committee of the coalition consists of the American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of Teachers, American Unity Fund, Human Rights Campaign, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Center for Transgender Equality, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and the Service Employees International Union.
According to McTighe, the coalition is "about trying to capture a model that we’ve seen work for marriage in so many states."
ENDA, which would prohibit employers from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, saw its first major movement in more than a decade on July 10 when the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee voted 15-7 to report the bill to the full Senate. Now, with ENDA boasting 54 co-sponsors and growing Republican support after Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) joined Mark Kirk (Ill.) in voting for the bill in committee, advocates are focusing on driving the bill over the finish line.
ENDA cannot pass the Senate without bipartisan support, and while a focus will remain on growing Republican support, three of the states the coalition will focus on are those of the only three Senate Democrats to not sign on as co-sponsors of the legislation — Sens. Bill Nelson (Fla.), Joe Manchin (W.V.) and Mark Pryor (Ark.). - Metro Weekly, 7/31/13
Senator Bill Nelson (D. FL) is holding out on supporting ENDA because "It involves the question of insurance with regard to transgender, it involves the question of bathrooms on transgender, and so forth." There's also the debate over religious exemption which would allow religious organizations to make certain hiring and firing decisions based on religious beliefs. The coalition believes they can get Senator Joe Manchin (D. WV) to get on board after admitting back in April that he was wrong about skipping the vote to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell. Manchin says that if he could do it all over again, he would've voted for the repeal. The Human Rights Campaign has been successful in getting Senators Lisa Murkowski (R. AK) and Orrin Hatch (R. UT) to vote in favor of ENDA. Merkley and his colleagues, Senators Tom Harkin (D. IA), Tammy Baldwin (D. WI), Mark Kirk (R. IL) and Susan Collins (R. ME) have been meeting with other Senators still on the fence and Merkley said he feels encouraged by the conversations he's been having with his undecided colleagues.
Also, if Larry Summers moves forward for being considered to become the new Fed Chairman, Merkley's going to be ready to grill him:
http://www.businessweek.com/...
In 1998 Summers, then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin blocked efforts by Brooksley Born, then-chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to regulate the derivatives market. It later expanded to include the toxic instruments that led to the 2008 financial market crisis.
Summers also sought repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking.
“I start from a position of being extraordinarily skeptical that his background is appropriate for the role of the head of the Fed,” Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat on the Banking Committee who signed the letter, said yesterday in an interview.
“If you nominate someone who is a life-committed deregulator to be in a regulatory position and if you believe regulation is necessary to prevent fraud, abuse, manipulation and so forth, then there’s a lot of questions to be asked: Why is this person appropriate?” Merkley said.
Summers spokeswoman Kelly Friendly declined to comment. - Bloomberg Buisnessweek, 7/30/13
Merkley and many of his Senate colleagues have written to President Obama in support of Janet Yellen to become the new chairwoman of the Federal Reserve. She's certainly highly qualified for the position. Merkley could always use Summers' own words to make the argument for Yellen:
http://www.bloomberg.com/...
As a Treasury Department official in 1994, Lawrence Summers was an “enthusiastic” supporter of putting Janet Yellen on the Federal Reserve Board, said Brad DeLong, who worked with him at the time.
Summers and Yellen have a lot more in common than the public debate might suggest. Long-time Democrats, they both first made their mark in academia. Yellen is a professor emeritus at Berkeley, while Summers was president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006.
“They are from the same tradition,” said Robert Solow, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 1987 and professor emeritus at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “They understand macroeconomics in approximately the same way.”
Their public comments reflect the same diagnosis about what ails the economy now -- insufficient demand and too-high unemployment -- and they agree it’s not the time to tighten the federal budget. Both were early to sound the alarm about dangers in overheated housing and financial markets before the bust of 2007.
In January of that year, Summers warned investors at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that they were underestimating risks to the world economy. “Complacency can be a self-denying prophecy,” he said then. Yellen warned in May 2007 that home prices might fall instead of stabilizing as the Fed staff was forecasting, according to Fed minutes.
Such similarities explain Summers’s early support of Yellen. DeLong said she was “at the top of all our lists” when Treasury officials discussed whom then-President Bill Clinton should nominate to be a Fed governor. “Larry was enthusiastic about her,” he said.
Summers again backed Yellen when the job of chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers came open in 1997. After serving 2 1/2 years in that position, Yellen returned to Berkeley before taking over as president of the San Francisco Fed in 2004. - Bloomberg, 8/1/13
I'm sure Merkley will keep up the pressure in support of Yellen. Lets thank Merkley for all is hard work by making sure voters send him back to the Senate next year. You can click here to donate or get involved with Merkley's campaign:
http://www.jeffmerkley.com/