NWLP-2-20-09:NWLP
2/17/09
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MEETING NOTICES
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Volume 110
Number 4
February 20, 2009
Portland, Oregon
Congress passes
stimulus package
Another day at the office
Mike McCoy of Iron Workers Local 29 welds on the 16th floor of the First and Main Building under
construction in downtown Portland. The union “raising gang” topped out the environmentally friendly,
346,500 square-foot office building on Feb. 16. General contractor Hoffman Construction threw a
recognition party for the entire crew Feb. 4. Weather has played a factor on the project as snow storms
in late December and high winds in January forced workers off the job for more than a month and a
half. The developer is San Francisco-based Shorenstein Properties.
Elections Division looking at Sizemore
It appears Oregon’s newly-installed
Secretary of State Kate Brown will use
the power of her office to make sure
election laws are complied with —
even by longtime scofflaw and union
foe Bill Sizemore.
On Feb. 12, the Oregon Elections
Division, which Brown oversees,
opened an investigation to determine
whether Sizemore violated campaign
finance laws last year in waging several
ballot initiative campaigns. Sizemore
fielded four ballot measures in Novem-
ber that were opposed by unions and
rejected by voters. Oregon law requires
political campaigns to disclose who
their funders are. But a Dec. 1 judge’s
ruling in a long-running teachers union
lawsuit against Sizemore highlighted
evidence that he moved money around
in ways that may have violated the law.
Five organizations set up or con-
trolled by Sizemore — CBS Consult-
ing, Initiative Resource Management,
American Tax Research Foundation
(ATRF), the Initiative Preservation In-
stitute, and Democracy Direct — re-
ceived or spent money from Sizemore’s
millionaire financial backers, Loren
Parks and Richard Wendt, or from
groups they control.
The investigation will seek to find
out whether those five groups should
have registered as political action com-
mittees and whether the official ballot
measure committees run by Sizemore
failed to report in-kind contributions
from the groups.
ATRF, for example, received
$913,000 from Loren Parks, his com-
pany, and his charitable foundation over
a two-year period, much of which was
paid directly or indirectly to Sizemore,
who was working to get measures on
the ballot.
Sizemore has been given a deadline
of March 16 to provide details about
the purposes and activities of the
groups, and to make all financial
records for the groups available to an
Elections Division compliance special-
ist.
If Sizemore is shown to have failed
to report political campaign contribu-
tions, he could face civil penalties of up
to $10,000 for every transaction he
failed to report.
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
To respond to the biggest economic
crisis in at least a generation, Congress
in mid-February passed its biggest stim-
ulus package ever, the American Re-
covery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The act’s $787 billion in new federal
spending and tax cuts will cushion the
plight of the jobless and put some peo-
ple back to work.
Will it bring about recovery? Time
will tell. The package may end up cre-
ating as many as 700,000 jobs in con-
struction, for example, but there are al-
ready 1.7 million unemployed construc-
tion workers, and Americans lost
598,000 jobs overall last month alone.
The Obama Administration says 3.5
million jobs will be created or saved
over the next two years (estimating
44,000 jobs in Oregon and 75,000 jobs
in Washington), with over 90 percent in
the private sector.
The final bill signed by President
Barack Obama on Feb. 17 was very dif-
ferent from the version the U.S. House
passed two weeks earlier — tax cuts
were increased, infrastructure spending
was decreased, and state governments
got a lot less aid. The U.S. Senate made
change after change to accommodate its
Republican minority, which then voted
against it anyway. Leaders of both
chambers then met to work out differ-
ences in their versions, and presented a
final bill for approval in the House and
Senate.
“I feel like we had a bipartisan pack-
age,” said U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-
Ore.) at a Feb. 16 Portland press confer-
ence explaining the bill. “We did not
have a bipartisan vote.”
In the Senate, the final version
passed 60 to 38, with Republicans pro-
viding all the “no” votes and just three
of the “yes” votes. In the House, where
it passed 246 to 183, not a single Re-
publican voted for it, while all but seven
Democrats voted for it.
“You’ll have to ask those across the
aisle why they chose to go a different di-
rection,” Merkley said. “I think they’ve
stated fairly clearly what they’re doing.
They hope to take the mess they’ve cre-
ated over the last eight years and turn it
into President Obama’s mess.”
Since late last year, unions have
fought hard in Washington, D.C., for a
federal economic rescue bill that would
emphasize spending on infrastructure
— so-called “shovel ready” projects
that could immediately employ work-
ers. But infrastructure investments
ended up being less than 10 percent of
the American Recovery and Reinvest-
mentAct, while tax cuts were four times
that amount. The package is projected
to cost $787 billion; $461 billion of that
is new spending, and $326 billion (41
percent) is tax cuts.
Tax cuts are a diluted way to stimu-
late an economy compared with direct
spending, critics like U.S. Rep. Peter
DeFazio (D-Ore.) argued. DeFazio was
one of the seven Democrats to vote
against the stimulus bill, after infra-
structure spending was greatly reduced.
The biggest of the tax cuts — the
Making Work Pay tax credit —
amounts to just under $8 a week for an
individual.
Unlike the multiple rounds of tax
cuts approved during the Bush Admin-
istration, this set of cuts does not give
the biggest benefit to the richest payers.
The Making Work Pay tax credit was
proposed by President Obama in order
to fulfill a campaign promise that 95
percent of American workers would see
lower taxes. The credit will be $400 for
individuals and $800 for couples and it
will appear immediately on paychecks,
thanks to a change in the withholding
formula. It applies to wage earners mak-
ing up to $75,000 ($150,000 for a cou-
ple), and fades out gradually above that
amount. It will cost the U.S. Treasury
$20 billion this year, $66 billion next
year, and $30 billion the year after. Then
business tax cuts in the bill amount to
$76 billion over the next two years. And
another $70 billion is the cost of a one-
year “patch” to limit the Alternative
Minimum Tax. It’s hard to see how that
could be considered a stimulus: Con-
gress has passed a similar measure
every year since 2001.
For the most part, the tax cuts will
generate relatively little economic ac-
tivity. But the spending parts of the
stimulus package will put money in the
hands of unemployed and low-income
workers, and put some back to work.
The summary of the stimulus package’s
(Turn to Page 8)