Just a reminder, this is what a real populist looks like:
Congressional Democrats are hoping to include a rescue in the end-of-the-year spending package for several large union-based pensions that fund managers say are running out of money.
Sen. Sherrod Brown introduced a bill aimed at preventing what he called 30-50 percent cuts in pension payments, which could affect as many as 1 million teamsters, miners, bakers, and carpenters.
His bill is named the “Butch Lewis Act,” after a Cincinnati-area Teamster who carried on the fight to save his pension fund but died in 2015.
“This legislation is not a bailout,” Brown says. “This legislation, which will be bipartisan as we move it through the Senate and the House., we’ll make sure that people’s pensions –which they’ve earned, they’ve worked 30-40 years for these pensions – will in fact be restored and will be made whole.”
Brown likens the bill to the non-partisan effort signed earlier this year to save health care for retired miners. This time, it would employ low interest loans to shore up the pensions.
If Trump loves coal miners so much, then where is he on this?
The next potential sleeper cause of a government shutdown? Pensions.
Congress barely averted a shutdown last year amid a fight over miners’ health care. Now the looming collapse of pension plans for the miners — as well as thousands of Teamster truck drivers and food service workers — is fueling another, even more expensive, round of brinkmanship.
Key Democrats are vowing to fight for a fix as part of any forthcoming deal to fund the government. And they warn that if Congress doesn’t step in soon to forestall the insolvency of several key pension plans — including the massive Central States plan, which covers an estimated 400,000 union workers and retirees — taxpayers risk ending up on the hook for an even bigger multibillion-dollar rescue for the government’s pension guarantee agency.
But it’s far from clear the workers will get their rescue. Conservative Republicans will be loath to provide anything that looks like a bailout, particularly for union workers. And one of the Senate’s leading Democratic advocates for relief, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, is one of the GOP’s top targets ahead of his reelection campaign next year.
Brown said in a Monday interview that he sees the pensions fix as a “moral appeal” for action, along the lines of the Democrats’ push to help the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.
“There are tens of thousands of Teamsters and mine workers and bakery and confectionery workers and carpenters that will see huge cuts in their pensions, and they start pretty soon” if a long-term solution isn’t reached, Brown said. “It’s not just fixing it and getting it done because the economics and the math get worse and worse. It’s because of what it does to families.”
We know where Senate Democrats were on this last year:
Last year retired union miners fought to protect their health benefits and pensions which were both at risk due to the coal industry’s decline and a wave of bankruptcies. They won protection for health benefits but not pensions, after the issues were split off in a compromise measure to fund health benefits.
A bill championed by West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to extend protection to the miner’s pension plans attracted some bipartisan support but not enough traction to win passage.
Now Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has attracted support of Democratic leadership to make a broader push for pensions for a number of other teetering pension plans.
At a Capitol Hill rally Brown said Congress found time to pass major tax cuts for corporations and now it’s time to shore up pensions.
“Wall Street squandered your pension money,” he said. “Now this body, the House and Senate, have a responsibility to keep the promise to protect the pension that you earned and to do it before it’s too late.”
Brown said Congress has a responsibility to keep the promise of pensions to the millions of workers who depend on them. He’s introduced the Butch Lewis Act, named after a Teamsters union member who died two years ago while working on the issue.
The bill would establish a new office called the Pension Rehabilitation Administration. Pension plans would be able to borrow what they need to remain solvent through this new arm of the Treasury Department.
Brown is pushing the Butch Lewis Act again and here’s what you need to know:
The Butch Lewis Act would create a new federal agency, called the Pension Rehabilitation Administration, or PRA, to sell Treasury-issued bonds to private investors such as financial firms. It would use the proceeds to issue low-interest, 30-year loans, giving the money to troubled multi-employer pension funds that could demonstrate a longterm plan to avoid insolvency.
The pension funds would put much of the money in safe investments such as bonds and similar fixed-income investments to start rebuilding their reserves. They also would use some of the money to make good on current pension payments, if needed.
For the first 29 years, the pension funds would only have to pay interest on the loans. The principal would come due in year 30.
This would not totally alleviate the need for additional help, Brown and others including Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur say. The federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., or PBGC, which assures limited payments for private pension plans that go broke, might have to be tapped occasionally, too.
The PBGC gets its money from premiums paid by employers. It has its own, separate fund to help out multi-employer pension plans -- but that fund also has financial challenges, because too many multi-employer pension plans are going to want to tap into it. In fact, the PBGC projects its multi-employer fund will run out of money by the end of 2025.
In other words, the very government pool that's supposed to rescue the troubled multi-employer plans is in trouble.
Brown's bill could relieve that pressure on the PBGC, supporters say. They say that under this plan, there would be no run on the PBGC as it is currently strucured.
How?
First, the bill would require that any money paid from the PBGC to cover these multi-employer plan obligations come from Congress -- through spending bills -- rather than from the current, employer-provided PBGC premiums and reserves.
And between the loans provided by the new government agency (so pension plans could both invest and pay their retirees) and the occasional appropriations (for the PBGC so it doesn't have to pay its existing funds to the point of going broke), the PBGC could stay solvent.
Multi-employer plans represent about a fifth of all workers with a pension, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statisics says. Of those, 114 multi-employer plans, covering 1.3 million workers, project insolvency within 20 years.
Brown's plan could prevent that, said Gene Kalwarski, the founder and CEO of Cheiron, an actuarial and consulting firm anayzing the finances of a number of pension plans and the proposals to keep them solvent. The firm's clients include the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
"We think it could save all of them," Kalwarski said.
Brown and Manchin have been working together to build support for the Butch Lewis Act:
Mike Walden is a member of the Teamsters union in Ohio. He said shoring up pensions should not be a partisan issue.
“This war on the elderly and unions here in the United States of America is only about party lines and aisles not saving lives, not the economy, not letting someone keep what they earned but wanting to take it away for personal gain or power,” he said.
Walden wants to see work across the aisles in Congress. That would depend on a trio of lawmakers from the Ohio Valley finding common ground in a partisan atmosphere.
Democrats Brown and Manchin have picked up some bipartisan support for pension protection. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, has said that he prefers to address troubled pension plans as part of a broader pension reform effort.
UMW spokesperson Phil Smith said the situation is urgent, and that the union’s pension plan could become insolvent in less than five years if there’s a further downturn in the coal market.
“Any more bankruptcies in the coal industry would have significant effect on our plan,” he said. “It would essentially lead to all of the remaining employers who are making contributions to the plan to being let out of that obligation by a bankruptcy court.
With a deadline looming, some Democrats are threatening a government shutdown if a pension fix is not included in the end-of-the-year spending bill.
Whereas Trump has been doing everything to break his own promises to look out for coal miners. For example, his tax plan doesn’t make Coal Barrons happy:
The CEO of one of the nation’s largest coal companies ripped the Senate tax-reform bill, saying late changes to the bill would “wipe out” coal mining jobs.
Robert Murray, founder and CEO of Murray Energy, said Tuesday that the tax hike on coal mining firms that would result from the changes would cancel out progress that President Trump has made on reviving the coal industry, according to CNN.
“We won’t have enough cash flow to exist,” Murray told CNNMoney. “This wipes out everything that President Trump has done for coal.”
The Senate amended its version of the bill last Friday to keep the alternative minimum tax for businesses in order to pay for other changes to the bill — including a more generous deduction for pass-through businesses and the allowance of a property tax deduction for individuals of up to $10,000.
But keeping the alternative minimum tax, and the imposition of new limits on the interest deductions that businesses can mark off, would cost Murray Energy $60 million in taxes, Murray told CNN.
Of course, greedy fuckers like Murray want even more from Trump:
Here’s the rest of Murray’s wish list:
- Eliminate the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime rule, which dictates that most workers receive at least time-and-a-half pay for working more than 40 hours a week.
- Overturn or modify the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution rule, which requires states to reduce power-plant emissions that contribute to smog and soot in other states downwind.
- Revise the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s Coal Dust Rule, which protects miners from black lung disease. Murray argues that it’s “arbitrary” and “provides no health benefit.”
- Pass legislation to fund medical care and pensions for retired members of the United Mine Workers of America union.
Also, Trump has given very few fucks for coal miners’ health and safety:
During his presidential campaign, Trump reached out to coal miners, telling them that he would bring jobs back to their communities, despite widespread consensus that coal will continue to decline. In return, the miners have put a lot of faith in Trump to fulfill his promise.
Coal jobs — not worker safety and health protections — have been a major theme of the first 11 months of Trump’s presidency. The administration’s indication that it will review a rule that could prevent thousands of black lung cases shows that Trump’s support for coal miners goes only so far.
For example, in his first month in office, Trump signed legislation to overturn the Stream Protection Rule, which sought to protect waterways near surface coal mining operations like mountaintop-removal mines. The rule helped to make sure people who live in coal communities, including miners, have access to clean water. But Trump framed the rule as a jobs-killer, rather than a regulation that would protect coal miners and their families.
“This rule we’re eliminating it’s a major threat to your jobs, and we’re going to get rid of that threat immediately. We’re going to fight for you like I promised I would in the campaign. And you were very good to me, and I’m going to be even better to you, I promise you that,” Trump said in remarks on February 16, directed at coal miners, as he signed the legislation overturning the rule.
Weakening the coal dust rule also would have direct effects on residents of coal country. The first phase of the MSHA rule, implemented by the Obama administration, restricted allowable coal dust exposure levels for coal miners. The MSHA said 99 percent of mines had complied as of August 2015. In February 2016, another phase took effect, mandating that miners wear dust monitors. The final phase, with another stepdown in the dust exposure level, took effect in August 2016. The coal industry challenged the MSHA rule under, but it was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2016.
The coal industry argued that parts of the dust rule stand “to cripple the industry.” Murray Energy, headed by Robert Murray, a major supporter of Trump, told S&P Global News that the rule, “along with the multitude of other anti-coal regulations promulgated by the Obama administration,” continue to have a “severely negative impact on the United States coal industry.”
Joseph Main, MSHA chief under President Barack Obama, emphasized that cases of black lung are “widespread and underreported.” Main was a major figure in getting the new dust rule past the finish line, stating in 2014 that the rule “fulfills a longstanding commitment that I made on my first day with MSHA.”
In September, Trump nominated David Zatezalo, a former chief executive of a major coal company with a checkered safety history, to head MSHA. Democratic senators questioned Zatezalo’s record in the industry, citing safety issues at mines he oversaw in West Virginia and Kentucky. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a strong supporter of the coal industry, opposed his nomination. However, the Republican-controlled Senate ultimately confirmed Zatezalo, who was sworn in as MSHA chief on November 30.
Evan Smith, an attorney at the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, based in Kentucky, said it’s too early to know whether the Trump administration will make any revisions to MSHA’s coal dust rule. A retrospective review of the rule “isn’t inherently problematic,” he said.
By the way, here’s another example of Democrats like Brown looking out for the little guy unlike that fake Populists we have in the White House:
Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Sherrod Brown (OH) on Friday slammed President Donald Trump’s top financial regulator Mick Mulvaney after evidence surfaced that as a Congressman he raked in campaign contributions from payday lenders just days before he pressured government officials to back off predatory lending regulations.
Warren — a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate — suggested the $55,000 worth of campaign donations from payday lenders was a reward from the financial industry to Mulvaney for defending their interests. Brown said Mulvaney, who is now the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has a clear conflict of interest that disqualifies him from permanently serving in that role. The two lawmakers serve on the powerful Senate Banking Committee that oversees the CFPB.
The statements from the two senior banking committee lawmakers were prompted by a Friday morning IBT report that published 268 pages of correspondence between then-Congressman Mulvaney and the agency he now runs. The documents show Mulvaney twice wrote or signed letters pressuring financial regulators to help payday lenders. One of the letters, which was signed by Mulvaney and 11 House colleagues on Sept. 29, 2016, came after Mulvaney had received $18,400 in campaign donations from payday lenders and their trade associations over the previous three weeks.
In November, Trump appointed Mulvaney acting director of the CFPB, despite objections by Democrats who argued the law creating the CFPB mandated the agency’s deputy director, Leandra English, be automatically promoted to acting director in the event the position became vacant. English has since challenged Mulvaney’s appointment in court.
“Mr. Mulvaney spent his years in Congress trying to gut consumer protections and undermine the CFPB — and he racked up big donations from payday lenders and banks for his efforts,” Warren told IBT in an emailed statement. “His illegal appointment to lead the consumer agency is a slap in the face for working families who’ve been cheated.”
The revelations about Mulvaney’s letters followed an earlier IBT report documenting how Mulvaney’s former top aide is now lobbying for Santander, a megabank that, until Mulvaney took over, had faced a potential CFPB enforcement action.
Brown, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said that taken together, he believes Mulvaney needs to be removed.
“Mick Mulvaney has sided with the payday industry over and over, and called the CFPB a ‘sick, sad joke’ before he was put in charge of it,” Brown said in a statement. “His conflicts of interest with Santander, payday lenders, and other bad actors, as well as his full time job at OMB [Office of Management and Budget] should disqualify him as acting CFPB Director, even if he had been lawfully appointed. The White House needs to swiftly nominate a CFPB Director who will close payday industry loopholes and protect consumers.”
Coal miners and all working people in unions and pensions should remember that guys like Brown and Manchin are the ones who have their backs. Let’s make sure we have their’s next year. Click below to donate and get involved with Brown and/or Manchin’s re-election campaigns:
Sherrod Brown
Joe Manchin