Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation

Some policy questions are difficult. Here are a few easy ones: Should people who handle food for a living have to work while contagious? Should sick kids be stuck at school because their parents are stuck at work? Should coming down with something cost you your job?

Most Americans say: No, no and no. Politicians are catching up with them, but not fast enough.

As I noted last winter, 2011 was the biggest year yet for paid sick leave, a common sense reform requiring employers to provide a minimum number of sick days, so low-wage workers can stay home sick without losing their pay or their jobs.  After years of savvy, tenacious organizing, last year Seattle joined San Francisco and DC to become the nation’s third paid sick leave city, and Connecticut’s became the nation’s first statewide law (Milwaukee passed a bill in 2009 but Scott Walker has overridden it). 

Paid sick leave is the kind of pro-family policy that we should be able to take for granted in a civilized democracy. By averting senseless firings, it reduces unemployment. By letting sick people stay home, it advances public health. In San Francisco, which in 2006 became the first city to mandate paid leave, even critics have changed their tune. In 2010, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which had decried the bill as a job killer, told Bloomberg Businessweek that it had turned out to be “the best public policy for the least cost. Do you want your server coughing over your food?”

The research backs him up. Rather than lagging behind after passing its paid leave law, San Francisco outpaced surrounding five counties in job and business growth over the next three years.

And yet as advocates in other cities push for their own paid sick laws, the cry wolf anti-regulation crowd is going to bat to defend the status quo. What they lack in evidence, they try to make up for with corporate cash. This year’s marquee showdown is in New York City, where a veto-proof majority of the City Council backs paid sick leave. Democratic Council Speaker Christine Quinn prevented a previous bill from coming to a vote in 2010, and the big business lobby is counting on her to do it again.

Quinn is favored to become the first woman mayor of the nation’s largest city in next year’s election. This month, she’s hearing from women who expect her to do the right thing first. Last week, the New York Times reported on a letter to Quinn headlined by Gloria Steinem, the feminist giant. “I’ve seen women lose their jobs, lose their apartments, and spend two years getting their kids back from foster care—all starting with a sick child,” Steinem told the Times. The letter was signed by 200 other prominent women, from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to novelist Jhumpa Lahiri.

Some of those women were in attendance last Wednesday, at a City Hall rally launching the Women for Paid Sick Days Initiative. Author and activist Deanna Zandt reminded the crowd that paid sick leave is just the latest in a long line of reforms that supposedly “would have destroyed business as we knew it…Abolition of slavery. Women voting. Child labor laws. The forty-hour work week. Birth control pills. Marriage equality, for race and for sexuality. You get my point. It’s time to be on the side of history and the side of women’s rights.”

Indeed. At a moment when too many low-wage and unemployed Americans are struggling—like the three New Yorkers profiled by the Times on Saturday—it’s frankly shameful to see politicians drag their feet on such a common sense reform.

Of course, popular measures like paid sick days would be harder to stonewall if the media paid more attention to them. Last week, Yahoo made news by naming Marissa Mayer as its first pregnant CEO. Legitimate news, and a sign of progress to be sure. But as Bryce Covert argued, “it’s far from the change we need for women’s workplace equality.” And media coverage of Mayer’s ascension—like the debate surrounding Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic story on “having it all”—seemed almost willfully blind to the challenges facing the millions of working women without a day of paid leave. While Mayer says she’ll choose to take a very short maternity leave (and to keep working throughout), millions of working moms have no choice but to rush back to work to pay the bills, and have no easy access to childcare when they do. Amid the talk about whether women at the top can have it all, what about the women who fear losing everything?

It’s great that pregnancy didn’t prevent Mayer from getting her historic promotion. But it’s absurd that sickness still costs other women their jobs. That’s a story that deserves more attention, and a cause that deserves more support—and more urgency.

TAKE ACTION: Paid Sick Days for All

It would be easy to miss. Midway through an otherwise worthy report on debates over manufacturing within the White House, a brief but troubling blemish: unexamined, un-rebutted spin. “Romney and Republicans,” wrote the Washington Post, “say there is already an example of Obama’s manufacturing program at work—the ‘green jobs’ program that benefited political donors and lobbyists, such as the backers of the failed solar energy company Solyndra.” A Martian reading the article would come away imagining that Solyndra was a Grade A scandal, and “green jobs” itself was a discredited hoax. Unfortunately, by now the average US news consumer may have that impression too. And Republicans are counting on it.

Reeling from the controversy over his “retroactive” Bain resignation, this week Mitt Romney is mounting a counter-attack. Rather than his own vulture capitalist credentials, Romney wants to talk about the supposed “crony capitalism” of the president, with Solyndra as Exhibit A. Yesterday, the campaign debuted a new ad warning that, “Obama is giving taxpayer dollars to big donors and then watching them lose it.” GOP Senator Ron Johnson went further, comparing green energy investment to Soviet communism, “the lessons of the Soviet Union.” In December, the conservative writer Conn Carroll posited that this election will be about “Bain vs Solyndra.” Wishful thinking? Too soon to tell.

In the right-wing telling—shamefully reinforced by much of the mainstream reporting—Solyndra is the perfect scandal: tree-hugging environmentalists, liberal millionaire hypocrites and big government central planning. If it didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it. In fact, they basically did.

Some facts are in order. As the indispensable David Roberts noted last fall at Grist, “One sign of Republicans’ success in hyping the Solyndra scandal is that they’ve got everybody calling it a scandal. Despite the turgid atmospherics, though, there still hasn’t been any official wrongdoing established or even charged.” Continuing a process begun under President Bush, the Obama Energy Department guaranteed a $535 million loan to Solyndra; the solar start-up failed. That loan was 3 percent of the loan guarantee program. Congress budgeted more than enough money for some of the start-ups to fail, as some start-ups do. Republican outrage rides on the insistence that Solyndra got the loan as political payback. But after a year of hearings, twenty-six witnesses and 187,000 documents from the White House, all Republicans have to show for it are some context-less quotes and a lot of baseless assertions.

By March, Congressman and Solyndra Grand Inquisitor Darrell Issa, was reduced to telling <, “Was there criminal activity? Perhaps not. Is there policial influence and connections? Perhaps not. Did they bend the rules for an agenda not covered within the statute? Absolutely.”

As a Bloomberg Government analysis found, “The focus on Solyndra is not proportional to its impact.” Meanwhile, truly disturbing stories—from the rampant corruption at the Bush Minerals Management Service to Keystone XL’s coziness with the Obama State Department—drew comparatively paltry attention. Chalk up another win for the Republican outrage machine.

Despite the evidence, Romney wants to convince Americans that a bad bet on Solyndra is more significant than decades of outsourcing and downsizing. There’s a real risk that reporters—hungry for scandal and hypnotized by false equivalence—will let him get away with it. At stake is more than an electoral football. Like Reagan’s fabled Cadillac-driving “welfare queen” or much-hyped claims of voter fraud or food stamp abuse, this right-wing myth-making has dire policy consequences. As Solyndra becomes shorthand for scandal, the well gets poisoned for future progress.

We can’t afford for that to happen. As former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones—no stranger to right-wing faux outrage machine—reminds us, green jobs are at the hearts of some of our deepest challenges: Building a better, broader politics. Forging a true industrial policy and an economy that works for the 99 percent. Averting environmental calamity.

The attacks on Solyndra are more than just attacks on Obama—they’re attacks on the notion of government as a place where we can come together to take on big challenges, drive economic innovation and advance our common interests while securing a sustainable future. The Solyndra scolds don’t just want to take down Obama—they want to hold back our politics. Let’s not let them.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE HEALTHCARE BATTLE? This week’s issue of The Nation looks at the battle over healthcare in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As we argue in the lead editorial, the fight is only just beginning. As many as eight Republican governors are already refusing to implement the law’s expansion of Medicaid that would help cover America’s poorest. In Texas, where 25 percent of the population is uninsured—the highest in the nation—Governor Rick Perry’s refusal leaves the 1.8 million living below the poverty line without coverage. Nation legal affairs correspondent David Cole hails the Supreme Court’s decision as a near total victory for liberals, but expresses concern over the fact that five justices were nearly willing to strike it down. Former healthcare industry whistleblower Wendell Potter warns of the health insurance industry’s propaganda campaign to convince us that the new law will actually increase the cost of healthcare, while they continue to insist that the Affordable Care Act is just another example of a government takeover by the Obama administration. And Nation columnist Katha Pollitt applauds President Obama for successfully standing up to America’s loudest religious institutions—admittedly a huge political risk—for women’s health and rights. She looks at nine ways the ACA will help women. Read that here.

THE GOP’S 2012 TWIN PILLAR STRATEGY. “Voters out, money in,” writes Nation columnist Ilyse Hogue of the GOP’s 2012 election strategy. While Republicans already enjoy a clear fundraising advantage with Super-PAC funneled money from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and others, “victory requires dominating the system at both ends,” she explains. Poisoning the election process with money and influence is not enough—Republicans are waging a war on voting through voter roll purges, hyping negligible threats of voter fraud and pushing voter ID laws in over two dozen states—all of which disproportionately impact Democratic leaning voters: low-income citizens, college students, women, the elderly and people of color. “While it’s the money they flaunt, it’s the people they fear,” concludes Hogue. The people may very well be our own “not-so-secret weapon.”

ROMNEY DONORS SHARE LOVE OF OFFSHORE TAX HAVENS. Mitt Romney may not be forthcoming about the money he may be hiding in offshore tax havens, but it’s no secret that his top donors share his love of using tax loopholes to shelter earnings overseas. A Nation analysis by Washington reporter George Zornick revealed this week that of the top eleven contributors to the Romney campaign, seven are financial firms with significant offshore tax haven activity. Of the four that do not have havens themselves, two are accounting firms that do prolific business in helping set them up. The following info-graphic offers a look at Romney’s donors and their offshore tax haven activities. Zornick joined the MSNBC’s The Ed Show Wednesday night to discuss these findings and more. Watch that here.

THE GOP WAR ON VOTING. Nation contributing writer Ari Berman has been front and center on the GOP’s efforts to undermine voting rights across the country. As he reported this week, the Justice Department is fighting the state of Texas in federal court over its voter ID law—one of the strictest in the country—which could effectively disenfranchise nearly 1.4 million black and Hispanic voters in the state. Ari joined MSNBC’s NOW with Alex Wagner this week to explain why neither the facts nor the arguments are on Texas’s side. And on Monday, Berman joined Democracy Now! to explain how the Republicans are pursuing voter ID laws as a way to disenfranchise minority voters and effectively tip the election in their favor. In the case of Pennsylvania’s voter ID law, reports Berman, the number of people without proper IDs needed to vote will exceed Obama’s margin of victory in 2008.

GEORGE LOIS IN THE NATION. We’re proud to welcome one of the advertising industry’s original ‘Mad Men’ to the pages of The Nation. George Lois, the creative force behind a lengthy series of provocative Esquire covers and notable ad campaigns, says of The Nation, “I haven’t missed reading an issue of The Nation since I came home from the Korean War in 1952. The Nation is about the only reading that has kept me sane through the continuing disastrous Republican attacks on a humanistic, civilized democracy.” Look for Lois in the upcoming issue.

BEST REPORTING ON DETENTION AND RENDITION. Head over to ProPublica.com where Cora Currier and Suevon Lee have compiled a must-read list of “The Best Reporting on Detention and Rendition Under Obama.” National security correspondent Jeremy Scahill’s investigative report on “The CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia” and Anna Louie Sussman’s 2010 Nation report, “Naji Hamdan’s Nightmare” are among the list of some of the most groundbreaking investigative reporting on the topic.

What were some of your favorite stories from the week?

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

“Banksters,” the cover of The Economist magazine charges, depicting a gaggle of bankers dressed as extras off the “Goodfellas” lot. The editors were reacting to Libor-gate, the collusion among traders of major banks to fix the London interbank offered lending rate, the most recent, most obscure and the most explosive revelation from what seems a bottomless pit of corruption in global banks.

Once more the big banks are exposed in systematic fraudulent activity. When Barclays agreed to a $450 million fine for trying to rig the Libor, its CEO offered the classic excuse: Everyone does it. Once more the question remains: Will CEOs and CFOs, as well as traders, be prosecuted? Or will they depart with their multimillion-dollar rewards intact, leaving shareholders to pay the tab for the hundreds of millions in fines?

The Barclays settlement exposed that traders colluded to try to fix the Libor rate. This is the rate used as the basis for exotic derivatives as well as mortgages, credit card and personal loan rates. Almost everyone is affected. Fixing the rate even a few hundreds of a percentage point could make Barclays millions on any single day—money taken out of the pockets of consumers and investors. Once more the banks were rigging the rules; once more their customers were their mark.

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.