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Senate Democrats Approve Big Biden Deal; House To Vote Next

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The estimated $740 billion package heads next to the House, where lawmakers are poised to deliver on President Biden’s priorities.

Democrats pushed their election-year economic package to Senate passage Sunday, a hard-fought compromise less ambitious than President Joe Biden’s original domestic vision but one that still meets deep-rooted party goals of slowing global warming, moderating pharmaceutical costs and taxing immense corporations.

The estimated $740 billion package heads next to the House, where lawmakers are poised to deliver on President Biden’s priorities, a stunning turnaround of what had seemed a lost and doomed effort that suddenly roared back to political life. Democrats held united, 51-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.

“It’s been a long, tough and winding road, but at last, at last we have arrived,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer ahead of final votes.

“The Senate is making history. I am confident the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining legislative measures of the 21st century.”

Senators engaged in a round-the-clock marathon of voting that began Saturday and stretched late into Sunday afternoon. Democrats swatted down some three dozen Republican amendments designed to torpedo the legislation. Confronting unanimous GOP opposition, Democratic unity in the 50-50 chamber held, keeping the party on track for a morale-boosting victory three months from elections when congressional control is at stake.

“I think it’s gonna pass,” President Biden told reporters as he left the White House early Sunday to go to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, ending his COVID-19 isolation. The House seemed likely to provide final congressional approval when it returns briefly from summer recess on Friday.

The bill ran into trouble midday over objections to the new 15% corporate minimum tax that private equity firms and other industries disliked, forcing last-minute changes.

Despite the momentary setback, the “Inflation Reduction Act” gives Democrats a c ampaign-season showcase for action on coveted goals. It includes the largest-ever federal effort on climate change — close to $400 billion — caps out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors on Medicare to $2,000 a year and extends expiring subsidies that help 13 million people afford health insurance. By raising corporate taxes, the whole package is paid for, with some $300 billion extra revenue for deficit reduction.

Barely more than one-tenth the size of President Biden’s initial 10-year, $3.5 trillion rainbow of progressive aspirations in his Build Back Better initiative, the new package abandons earlier proposals for universal preschool, paid family leave and expanded child care aid. That plan collapsed after conservative Sen. Joe. Manchin opposed it, saying it was too costly and would fuel inflation.

Nonpartisan analysts have said the “Inflation Reduction Act” would have a minor effect on surging consumer prices.

Republicans said the measure would undermine an economy that policymakers are struggling to keep from plummeting into recession. They said the bill’s business taxes would hurt job creation and force prices skyward, making it harder for people to cope with the nation’s worst inflation since the 1980s.

“Democrats have already robbed American families once through inflation, and now their solution is to rob American families a second time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued. He said spending and tax increases in the legislation would eliminate jobs while having insignificant impact on inflation and climate change.

In an ordeal imposed on all budget bills like this one, the Senate had to endure an overnight “vote-a-rama” of rapid-fire amendments. Each tested Democrats’ ability to hold together a compromise negotiated by Schumer, progressives, Manchin and the inscrutable centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., offered amendments to further expand the legislation’s health benefits, and those efforts were defeated. Most votes were forced by Republicans and many were designed to make Democrats look soft on U.S.-Mexico border security and gasoline and energy costs, and like bullies for wanting to strengthen IRS tax law enforcement.

Before debate began Saturday, the bill’s prescription drug price curbs were diluted by the Senate’s nonpartisan parliamentarian. Elizabeth MacDonough, who referees questions about the chamber’s procedures, said a provision should fall that would impose costly penalties on drug makers whose price increases for private insurers exceed inflation.

It was the bill’s chief protection for the 180 million people with private health coverage they get through work or purchase themselves. Under special procedures that will let Democrats pass their bill by simple majority without the usual 60-vote margin, its provisions must be focused more on dollar-and-cents budget numbers than policy changes.

But the thrust of their pharmaceutical price language remained. That included letting Medicare negotiate what it pays for drugs for its 64 million elderly recipients, penalizing manufacturers for exceeding inflation for pharmaceuticals sold to Medicare and limiting beneficiaries out-of-pocket drug costs to $2,000 annually.

The bill also caps Medicare patients’ costs for insulin, the expensive diabetes medication, at $35 monthly. Democrats wanted to extend the $35 cap to private insurers but it ran afoul of Senate rules. Most Republicans voted to strip it from the package, though in a sign of the political potency of health costs seven GOP senators joined Democrats trying to preserve it.

The measure’s final costs were being recalculated to reflect late changes, but overall it would raise more than $700 billion over a decade. The money would come from a 15% minimum tax on a handful of corporations with yearly profits above $1 billion, a 1% tax on companies that repurchase their own stock, bolstered IRS tax collections and government savings from lower drug costs.

Sinema forced Democrats to drop a plan to prevent wealthy hedge fund managers from paying less than individual income tax rates for their earnings. She also joined with other Western senators to win $4 billion to combat the region’s drought.

Several Democratic senators joined the GOP-led effort to exclude some firms from the new corporate minimum tax.

The package keeps to President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000 a year.

It was on the energy and environment side that compromise was most evident between progressives and Manchin, a champion of fossil fuels and his state’s coal industry.

Clean energy would be fostered with tax credits for buying electric vehicles and manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines. There would be home energy rebates, funds for constructing factories building clean energy technology and money to promote climate-friendly farm practices and reduce pollution in minority communities.

Manchin won billions to help power plants lower carbon emissions plus language requiring more government auctions for oil drilling on federal land and waters. Party leaders also promised to push separate legislation this fall to accelerate permits for energy projects, which Manchin wants to include a nearly completed natural gas pipeline in his state.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Filed Under: POLITICS, TRENDING, US Tagged With: Aid, Associated Press, Auctions, Benefits, Bernie Sanders, budget, Bullies, Business, Child Care, Chuck Schumer, Climate change, Coal, Communities, Corporate Taxes, Corporations, COVID-19, Delaware, Democrats, Diabetes, Drought, Drugs, earnings, Economy, Elderly, Elections, Energy, Environment, Family, Fossil fuels, Gas, Global Warming, Government, Health, Health insurance, History, Income, Income Tax, Industries, Industry, Inflation, Insurance, Jobs, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Language, Law, Marathon, Medicare, Money, Natural Gas, Next, Oil, PAID, Plants, Policy, Pollution, Private Equity, Recession, Republicans, Savings, Senate, Seniors, State, Summer, Tax, taxes, technology, Wind

Dems Push Biden Climate, Health Priorities Toward Senate OK

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Democrats intend to combat inflation, prescription drug costs and fight climate change with their their election-year economic package.

Democrats drove their election-year economic package toward Senate approval early Sunday, debating a measure with less ambition than President Joe Biden’s original domestic vision but that touches deep-rooted party dreams of slowing global warming, moderating pharmaceutical costs and taxing immense corporations.

Debate began Saturday and by early Sunday morning, Democrats had swatted down over a dozen Republican amendments designed to torpedo the legislation or create campaign ads attacking Democratic senators. Despite unanimous GOP opposition, Democratic unity in the 50-50 chamber — buttressed by Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote — suggested the party was on track for a morale-boosting victory three months from elections when congressional control is at stake.

“I think it’s gonna pass,” President Biden told reporters as he left the White House early Sunday to go to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, ending his COVID-19 isolation. The House seemed on track to provide final congressional approval when it returns briefly from summer recess on Friday.

“It will reduce inflation. It will lower prescription drug costs. It will fight climate change. It will close tax loopholes and it will reduce the deficit,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, said of the package. “It will help every citizen in this country and make America a much better place.”

Republicans said the measure would undermine an economy that policymakers are struggling to keep from plummeting into recession. They said the bill’s business taxes would hurt job creation and force prices skyward, making it harder for people to cope with the nation’s worst inflation since the 1980s.

“Democrats have already robbed American families once through inflation, and now their solution is to rob American families a second time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., argued. He said spending and tax increases in the legislation would eliminate jobs while having insignificant impact on inflation and climate change.

Nonpartisan analysts have said Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act” would have a minor effect on surging consumer prices. The bill is barely more than one-tenth the size of President Biden’s initial 10-year, $3.5 trillion rainbow of progressive aspirations and abandons its proposals for universal preschool, paid family leave and expanded child care aid.

Even so, the new measure gives Democrats a campaign-season showcase for action on coveted goals. It includes the largest ever federal effort on climate change — close to $400 billion — hands Medicare the power to negotiate pharmaceutical prices and extends expiring subsidies that help 13 million people afford health insurance.

President Biden’s original measure collapsed after conservative Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., opposed it, saying it was too costly and would fuel inflation.

In an ordeal imposed on all budget bills like this one, the Senate had to endure an overnight “vote-a-rama” of rapid-fire amendments. Each tested Democrats’ ability to hold together a compromise negotiated by Schumer, progressives, Manchin and the inscrutable centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.

Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., offered amendments to further expand the legislation’s health benefits, and those efforts were defeated. Most votes were forced by Republicans and many were designed to make Democrats look soft on U.S.-Mexico border security and gasoline and energy costs, and like bullies for wanting to strengthen IRS tax law enforcement.

Before debate began Saturday, the bill’s prescription drug price curbs were diluted by the Senate’s nonpartisan parliamentarian. Elizabeth MacDonough, who referees questions about the chamber’s procedures, said a provision should fall that would impose costly penalties on drug makers whose price increases for private insurers exceed inflation.

It was the bill’s chief protection for the 180 million people with private health coverage they get through work or purchase themselves. Under special procedures that will let Democrats pass their bill by simple majority without the usual 60-vote margin, its provisions must be focused more on dollar-and-cents budget numbers than policy changes.

But the thrust of their pharmaceutical price language remained. That included letting Medicare negotiate what it pays for drugs for its 64 million elderly recipients, penalizing manufacturers for exceeding inflation for pharmaceuticals sold to Medicare and limiting beneficiaries out-of-pocket drug costs to $2,000 annually.

The bill also caps patients’ costs for insulin, the expensive diabetes medication, at $35 monthly.

The measure’s final costs were being recalculated to reflect late changes, but overall it would raise more than $700 billion over a decade. The money would come from a 15% minimum tax on a handful of corporations with yearly profits above $1 billion, a 1% tax on companies that repurchase their own stock, bolstered IRS tax collections and government savings from lower drug costs.

Sinema forced Democrats to drop a plan to prevent wealthy hedge fund managers from paying less than individual income tax rates for their earnings. She also joined with other Western senators to win $4 billion to combat the region’s drought.

It was on the energy and environment side that compromise was most evident between progressives and Manchin, a champion of fossil fuels and his state’s coal industry.

Clean energy would be fostered with tax credits for buying electric vehicles and manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines. There would be home energy rebates, funds for constructing factories building clean energy technology and money to promote climate-friendly farm practices and reduce pollution in minority communities.

Manchin won billions to help power plants lower carbon emissions plus language requiring more government auctions for oil drilling on federal land and waters. Party leaders also promised to push separate legislation this fall to accelerate permits for energy projects, which Manchin wants to include a nearly completed natural gas pipeline in his state.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Filed Under: POLITICS, TRENDING, US Tagged With: Aid, Associated Press, Auctions, Benefits, Bernie Sanders, budget, Bullies, Business, Child Care, Chuck Schumer, Climate change, Coal, Communities, Corporations, COVID-19, Delaware, Democrats, Diabetes, Drought, Drugs, earnings, Economy, Elderly, Elections, Energy, Environment, Family, Fossil fuels, Gas, Global Warming, Government, Health, Health insurance, Income, Income Tax, Industry, Inflation, Insurance, Jobs, Joe Biden, Joe Manchin, Kamala Harris, Language, Law, Medicare, Money, Natural Gas, Oil, PAID, Plants, Policy, Pollution, Recession, Republicans, Savings, Senate, State, Summer, Tax, taxes, technology, Wind

It’s the Media’s ‘Mean-Too’ Moment. Stop Yelling and Go to Human Resources.

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Perhaps even worse, Ms. Cooper remarked early on that she’d never heard of Brian Lehrer, the beloved WNYC morning host whose gently probing, public-spirited interviews embody the station’s appeal, and that she didn’t “get” why he was popular. She has since come to the view that “Brian is the soul of the station and, in many ways, the city itself,” a WNYC spokeswoman, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, said in an email.

In fact, Ms. Cooper’s mission was to jump-start the station’s lagging digital transformation, something she had done with unusual success in San Francisco and that requires a willingness to make enemies. She has ambitious plans to hire 15 to 20 more reporters — but first she had the near-impossible assignment of bringing together a group of traditional radio journalists, used to working for days and occasionally weeks on colorful local features, with the reporters at Gothamist, the scrappy local blog that WNYC bailed out in 2018. Ms. Cooper sought to professionalize Gothamist away from its bloggy and irreverent roots, telling reporters to be less openly hostile to the New York Police Department in their reporting, two reporters said. Ms. Roussel suggested that Ms. Cooper was trying to rein in Gothamist’s habit of adding “an element of editorializing to its coverage that can be interpreted as bias.”

And Ms. Cooper started pushing the radio journalists to pick up their pace and to file stories for the web. That seemed like a reasonable request, but it led to another stumble in early February, when an 18-year veteran of the radio side, Fred Mogul, filed a story with one paragraph printed in a different font. The editor realized it was Associated Press copy; Ms. Cooper promptly fired Mr. Mogul (who declined through his union to be interviewed) for plagiarism without a review of whether he’d ever done it before.

Ms. Cooper declined to speak to me about Mr. Mogul’s termination. But one thing I learned this week about public radio is that no matter what is happening, someone is always recording it. And that was true when Ms. Cooper called a virtual meeting Feb. 5 over Zoom to inform the full newsroom of her decision to fire Mr. Mogul. According to a copy of the recording provided to me by an attendee, Ms. Cooper told the staffers, “It’s totally OK to be sad.” But then several stunned radio reporters questioned the move, explaining that they regularly incorporated A.P. copy into stories on air and had imported the practice to WNYC’s little-read website, crediting The A.P. at the bottom of the story.

“Go through every single one of our articles and fire all of us, because that is exactly what we have all done,” one host, Rebeca Ibarra, told her.

On Feb. 10, more than 60 employees — including Mr. Lehrer — signed a letter asking Ms. Cooper to reconsider and calling the firing a “troubling precedent.”

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Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: "On the Media"(Radio Program), Associated Press, Bullies, Bullying, Cooper, Audrey (1977- ), Garfield, Bob, Gladstone, Brooke, Hiring and Promotion, New York, News and News Media, Police, Public Broadcasting, Race and Ethnicity, Radio, San Francisco, Sexual harassment, Sheikholeslami, Goli, The Takeaway (Radio Program), Vega, Tanzina, WNYC

WNYC Fires Bob Garfield, Co-Host of ‘On the Media’

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Bob Garfield, a longtime co-host of WNYC’s popular program “On the Media,” has been fired after two separate investigations found he had violated an anti-bullying policy, New York Public Radio, which owns WNYC, said on Monday.

Mr. Garfield’s employment was terminated “as a result of a pattern of behavior that violated N.Y.P.R.’s anti-bullying policy,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.

“This decision was made following a recent investigation conducted by an outside investigator that found that he had violated the policy,” she said. He had been disciplined and warned after an investigation in 2020, “which also found that he had violated the policy,” she added.

In an email on Monday, Mr. Garfield said he was not yet able to speak fully about the circumstances surrounding his firing but defended his behavior as yelling.

an investigation into the workplace culture at New York Public Radio and WNYC was conducted after a series of misconduct accusations against on-air personalities. While it did not identify “systemic” harassment, the investigation found that incidents of bullying and harassment were not reported to senior management out of fear of reprisals and a lack of faith in the system.

In December 2017, two longtime hosts, Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz, were fired after complaints of inappropriate behavior, and a former host of “The Takeaway,” John Hockenberry, was accused of sexual harassment. The handling of the allegations contributed to the downfall of Laura R. Walker, the longtime president and chief executive of New York Public Radio, who stepped down in March 2019.

Mr. Garfield co-hosted “On the Media” for 20 years. He also wrote a column for Advertising Age for 25 years until 2010 and hosts the Audible podcast “The Genius Dialogues.”

“I was fired not for ‘bullying’ per se but for yelling at two meetings,” he wrote in the email. “In both cases, as will be clear eventually, the provocation was extraordinary and simply shocking.”

He said last year’s investigation was in regard to yelling that “involved gross insubordination under production pressure.”

“In time, the full story will emerge … and it is really scary,” Mr. Garfield said. “This is tragic.”

“On the Media” examines how the news media operates and what impact the news has. It won a Peabody Award in 2004 and now airs to millions of listeners across 421 public radio stations.

WNYC’s chief content officer, Andrew Golis, told the staff in an email on Monday that the show would continue with Brooke Gladstone, Mr. Garfield’s co-host and the managing editor of the show, at the helm.

“I know this is significant news for our N.Y.P.R. community,” Mr. Golis said in the email, which was viewed by The New York Times. “Bob has been a part of the organization for two decades, and ‘On the Media’ is an invaluable companion to listeners around the country both on-air and online. It’s a show we’re proud to support, and a team we’re proud to have as colleagues.”

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Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: Advertising, Bullies, Bullying, Garfield, Bob, Media, New York, New York Public Radio, New York Times, Policy, Production, Radio, Sexual harassment, WNYC

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