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Yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took part in a Senate Banking Committee hearing titled “Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections.”

Warren asked the committee — consisting of bank regulators from the federal government — about the “last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial.” Not a single witness was able to bring up anAi??occurrenceAi??of the government actually taking a big bank to trial in recent times. This is how Warren followed up on that shocking response from federal regulators:

WARREN:Anyone else want to tell me about the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? [silence] I just want to note on this, there are district attorneys and U.S. Attorneys who are out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example as they put it. I’m really concerned that too big too fail has become too big to jail. That just seems wrong to me. [applause from audience]

Watch it (relevant section at 03:26):

What if American workers were actually paid for increases in productivity?

Activists are mobilizing around President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage to $9.00, and polling shows that Americans across the political spectrum agree with such a policy.

But here’s an interesting fact about what the minimum wage could be instead. The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s John Dewitt looked at what the minimum wage would be if it simply rose with productivity — that is, if workers were actually paid for the increasing amount of output — since 1968, and found that it would be almost 3 times what it is now:

Since 1968, however, productivity growth has far outpaced the minimum wage. If the minimum wage had continued to move with average productivity after1968, it would have reached $21.72 per hour in 2012 ai??i?? a rate well above the average production worker wage. If minimum-wage workers received only half of the productivity gains over the period, the federal minimum would be $15.34.

Even Obama’s modest plan to raise the minimum wage is expected to face intense opposition from Big Business and its lobbyists.

A Quinnipac University poll released last week finds that 92 percent of Americans support President Obama’s proposal for universal background checks for gun purchases (seven percent oppose). Yet most Republican lawmakers in Congress have yet to voice support for such a policy, and continue to side with the fringe of American public opinion.

Opposition to background checks is represents such a small portion of Americans that there are actually more Americans who believe that Elvis is alive — eight percent of respondents to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll thought that the King of Rock n’Roll may be living it up somewhere.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan.

(Photo credit: Flickr user psd)

Last night, President Obama made the proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour and then to index it to inflation. This would be a wage increase for workers in every single state except Washington.

While Republicans have already stated their intention to obstruct this proposal, they should know that raising the minimum wage is actually wildly popular. Polling conducted by Lake Research in February 2012 found that voters actually want a proposal even more progressive than Obama’s suggestion.

Their poll found that 73 percent of voters want to see the minimum wage raised to $10 an hour by 2014. This includes 50 percent of Republicans.

Some Members of Congress want to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits. President Obama has indicated he is still open to cutting Social Security benefits with a so-called “Chained CPI.”

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is organizing to stop these benefit cuts. He’s circulating a letter among his colleagues that states the following:

We will vote against any and every cut to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security benefits — including raising the retirement age or cutting the cost of living adjustments that our constituents earned and need.

But he needs your help for the letter to gain momentum. With our friends at Democracy for America, CREDO Action, Ai??Social Security Works, Working Families Party, Move On, and Rebuild The Dream, we’re working on getting citizen co-sponsors of Grayson’s letter. Click here to sign on.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) wants to raise the Medicare age. He says he wants to do this to save money, but he opposes letting Medicare negotiate for drug prices — meaning he would rather seniors bear the burden with benefit cuts than cut into Big Pharma’s profits.

Today, several lobbyists who represent the industry will be throwing him a fundraising lunch in Washington, D.C. The lunch will be held at Charlie Palmer Steak, a popular fundraising spot, and individuals can attend for $500 or host for $1,000. Meanwhile, political action committees can attend for $1,000 and host for $2,500. Here are the lobbyists who represent the industry who will be hosting:

John Herzog: Herzog represents Salix Pharmaceuticals, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, Astellas Pharmas USA, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Allergan Inc., Novartis AG, and other Big Pharma clients. He also happens to be a former aide to Alexander.
Jeff Kimbell: Kimbell works for the same firm as Herzog and has a similiar Big Pharma client list.
Mathew Lapinksi: Lapinski represents AmerisourceBergen Corporation.
Katie Openheim: Openheim had a single client in 2012, Japanese drugmaker Eisai.
Jennifer Swenson: Swenson’s only 2012 client was Pfizer.
Rachel Mack: Mack’s only client in 2012 was Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

There will doubtlessly be additional industry lobbyists at the event, but weak disclosure laws mean it will take months for us to learn their identities.

Click here to join our Take Back Democracy campaign to help stop the influence of money in our politics.

Click hereAi??to pledge to hold any Democrat who agrees to a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits accountable.

State Senator Bill Jackson (R)

Yesterday, Georgia state senator Bill Jackson (R) addressed his colleagues by attacking sensible gun regulations. During the climax of his speech, Jackson implied that frying pans and hammers are as dangerous or more dangerous than guns:

JACKSON: In the meantime, the gentleman from the 22nd, my colleague he’s worried about guns, and you know insinuating guns. They killin’ people with frying pans. They killing people with hammers. There’s more murders with hammers last years than there was shotguns, pistols, and ak-47’s. Let’s help the people that need the help. That’s the end of this story. Thank you very much.

Watch video of Jackson provided by Better Georgia:

For the record, 496 people were killed by hammers and clubs in 2011. There were 9,146 firearm deaths.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week announced that he is recommending Congress limit military pay increases to 1 percent in 2014. In comparison, the pay increase in 2013 was 1.7 percent.

To put this in perspective, this is the smallest pay increase since 1962, when there was no pay increase. Despite the country’s involvement in protracted wars, pay increases for men and women in uniform have continued to decline. In 1978, when the country wasn’t even at war, the military’s pay increased by 6.2 percent.

The U.S. spends more on its military than almost the rest of the world combined, and the budget is rife with waste. But there is no evidence that the meager salaries of most members of the armed services is a major contributor to this waste. Polling shows that while Americans favor reducing waste in the Pentagon budget, they oppose major reductions in military pay.

It is a frequent conservative mantra that government taxation and regulation prevent economic growth. EconomistsAi??Atif Mian and Amir Sufi looked at this claim for a new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Using survey data from the National Federation of Independent Business, the two researchers found that when businesses complained most of lack of sales and demand, unemployment was highest. The research also showed that “there was almost no correlation between job growth in a state from 2008 to 2011 and the increase in the percentage of businesses citing regulation and taxes as their primary concern. In fact, if anything, the correlation is positive.”

This new research, which again relies on the complaints of businesses themselves, seems to undermine this conservative mantra.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) just announced that he will hold up President Obama’s nominees to head the Pentagon and CIA until he gets more information about the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

Graham’s justification is puzzling because Obama’s nominees have nothing to do with this issue. But what if the Senator is holding up the nominees — specifically, Chuck Hagel — for another reason?

As we’ve noted before, Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel is a critic of the Pentagon’s spending, calling it “bloated” and demanding that it must be “pared down.” Graham has been a critic of Pentagon cuts, categorically opposing themAi??in a speech this past December.

The Senator is widely considered to be vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right, so he has needed to amass aAi??sizableAi??campaign warchest. To do this, he’s been courting defense industry donors. In this cycle, Boeing is his seventh-largest donor, and Lockheed Martin is his eleventh (together they’ve given $45,100).

Additionally, his second-largest donor is Nelson, Mullins et al, a lobbying firm, giving him $74,084 between its political action committee and employees. The firm has a number of corporate clients, but one of its major ones in 2012 was defense contractor General Dynamics, which paid it $120,000.

Its certainly possible that Graham has ideological objections to Hagel or any of the other Obama nominees he has opposed. But his influx of defense contractor cash creates another possibility.

Click here to join our Take Back Democracy campaign to help stop the influence of money in our politics.